Wednesday April 1 2009

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR DEBBIE

Today is Debbie's Birthday, and hope she has a great day. She does a lot of nice things for other people - volunteering and just offering her help - and here she is painting the closet in Betty's "Dog Room" a couple of years ago. It was always hard to have her birthday on April Fool's Day. But it was a special day for me when she was born and special to celebrate that.

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An April Fool that None of Us Know.

This is the unfinished pastel of a cow and calf moose.
Still need to finish the foreground, and tweak the anatomy of the moose.

This morning I went to the Wednesday painting group that always meets at Rendezvous Pointe. Vicky had just baked cookies and there was coffee. First we watched a video that I took about Maynard Dixon and they seemed to enjoy it. The usually watch a lesson on video but this was a documentary about his life and artwork. We had watched it at Mixed Media a while ago. Then we worked on our artwork for a while.

I was going to meet Joe at Rendezvous Pointe for lunch, but had just gotten sicker and sicker, so when the meeting was over at noon, I found him in the dining room and told him I couldn't eat and was just going to go home. He had lunch there.

The problem probably was that yesterday I started on some new and stronger pain medicine. You might remember I told about getting it prescribed several months ago when I was having so much pain from the port, just before they took it out, and being afraid of the side affects so never started taking it. Well, I've been having more and more pain likely from the "arthritis?" I've been having for some time and thought since I was going back to Dr. Meno on Friday that I'd go ahead and try this pain medicine so I could tell him if it worked or not. I took it Monday night and Tuesday morning and night, and again this morning. And this morning I didn't have any food with it, or for whatever the reason, and got pretty dizzy (which it can do - another thing they told me is YOU CAN STOP BREATHING!!) and I just came home and went to bed. All I had to eat was two of Vicky's cookies all day. When I got up to cook Joe some dinner about 5 p.m., I tossed my cookies (HA!). So had Joe finish up his dinner and went back to bed. I also began to itch all over but didn't get any rash. The nurses said I might have dizziness and perhaps some other side effects but that I'd get used to it. I'm not sure I want to try it any more, although it sure did get rid of the pain and I was good on it for a day - Tuesday went to Melita's and was out of pain. So Friday I'll tell Dr. Meno about it and see what he says. In the meantime I'm not taking any more of it. Just kept sleeping all afternoon and all night.

When I got to feeling better about 9 p.m. I called Debbie to wish her happy birthday and we talked for a while. They are getting the plumbing laid in their new house now, and the cement foundation should be poured next week so positive things are happening there. They are waaaay behind getting it started to what they had planned.

'Life isn't about how to survive the storm, but how to dance in the rain.

April brings us Dog Appreciation Month, Pets Are Wonderful Month, Holy Humor Month (for lighthearted worshippers), National Kite Month and National Poetry Month, Knuckles Down Month (for marbles players), and International Twit Award Month giving the Most Tiresome Wit [sic] of the Year title to some unwilling (but deserving) celebrity. US income taxes are due in April.