Lots of stuff has been happening around the homestead.
Both the saplings made honor roll at their respective schools, yay!
Then the Firebird suffered a concussion during basketball practice. He told me when he arrived home he had taken a crack from a team mate's head that bloodied his nose. I was distracted and didn't think it too serious so I told him to grab a bag of frozen veggies to apply to his nose. An hour later he didn't respond to the dinner call, and I went to check on him.
He complained of being exhausted and his head hurting and I quickly grabbed a flashlight to check his pupil response. His right pupil was not contracting in response to the light and spun eerily trying to avoid the light.
Everything stopped and I took him into the ER. We weren't treated with much priority there, but the doc recommended a ct scan to be on the safe side. The scan came back normal, so we went home with instructions to watch for anymore symptoms. (headache, slurred speech, vision trouble, etc)
The Firebird was adamant about attending school the next day, (and wanting to play in a far away game the next evening)so I put him on the bus and called the high school. The athletic director told me the school's sports injury specialist would take a look at him and would have to clear him to play again.
Word came back via the Firebird later that he couldn't play, but he was going to the game on the bench. When he was examined, he had experienced dizziness when tippping his head back, so he was still exhibiting signs of a concussion.
He felt pretty miserable after sitting through the loud game. I kept him quiet for the weekend, and again he insisted on attending school on Monday. No practice or game after school, so he rode the bus home, or to the bus stop.
He sent me a text from the bus asking me to make sure I was at the stop on time. When he got off the bus, he started crying; his head hurt so badly. Everything stopped, and I rushed him into the ER.
I managed to get him into a wheelchair, and when intake saw that he had been in a few days before, they rushed us right through- way down the back of the ER, where all was quiet except for the nearby bleep of monitors. I was getting a little scared.
He was sent off for another CT scan. I was told that sometimes bleeding in the brain can take several days to appear. The CT scan came back normal. He was diagnosed with post concussion syndrome, given a pill for nausea, some Ibuprofen and some Benydryl, and I was told to take him to his PCP for followup.
In the meantime, the Willow had developed a horrible cough. She had been fighting off a bug for awhile and it had obviously settled in her lungs, so I took her to the clinic the next morning for a script of Amoxycillin and kept the Firebird quiet at home. He had an appointment the next day.
His PCP laid down the law and told the Firebird to take the rest of the week off from school and sports, and the following week of vacation, and see how he felt after the New Year. He was pretty cooperative the first week but got pretty restless by the second week, texting back and forth with his coach (he was sorely missed by the team) trying to con me into at least letting him go WATCH the practices, but I held firm and howled about it being doctor's order's and I wasn't the bad guy...while wondering if I really wanted to let him go back to play at all.
Willow didn't get better on the Amoxycillin. She had been given capsules and can't swallow a pill. So we were dumping the powder in chocolate pudding. Her cough got worse. The script was changed to one of the cephalexans in liquid form and she thought that was yummy tasting so that went pretty well. She finished the course and still has a little congestion. Overall, she seems her old self again, yay.
The Firebird was cleared to gradually return to basketball. He had some minutes in the last game. He has fallen out of condition with two weeks off and been tired and trying to catch up on his work, too. He is on the student concil and had to been @ school before 7 this morning, and then attend school; finally a late practice tonight from 7-8:30.
Of course it is now my turn. I was laid low for three days with fever and sore throat and sinus pain. Then my ear filled up and I frantically swallowed Advil and Benydryl one after another until the pain subsided. All day yesterday I had the signs of a ruptured eardrum, so i finally went to the clinic this morning.
The Doc took one look inside the ear in question, quickly recoiled, and pronounced I had returned to my second childhood and had an inner ear infection. He handed me a ten day supply of Amoxycillin.
Welome January. :)
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Happy New Year!
Still here after all these years! Wishing everyone a safe and Happy and wonderful 2012!
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Hallowe'en has been moved to wintertime
We are forecast to have snow tonight and tomorrow, with thunder. Heavy wet snow. over a foot of snow. I am not ready!
Trick or treat?
Trick or treat?
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Hang on to your Hats
First the chicadees disappeared. Then it was the snapping turtle in the driveway. The bullfrog so intent on fleeing the marsh it jumped on and over the cat. The colors were ten days late. Bumper Pine Cone crop. One light frost here so far. Paper wasp nests twenty feet up in trees. Toads excavating soft clay like gophers. Red and grey squirrels engaged in a massive turf war. A murder of crows. My neighbor of fifteen years posted their waterfront for the first time.
We are going to get a bunch of snow and major spring floods. My prediction for 2011/2012.
We are going to get a bunch of snow and major spring floods. My prediction for 2011/2012.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Everbody's business
October is marching along. Every morning it is a bit darker as the days shorten. Night chores have to be finished earlier and earlier.
The foliage finally took the hint and we had a blaze of color about a week later than normal. Things were looking pretty good and then we had a couple days of wind and rain. The maples have dropped their leaves-the oaks are still mostly green and the beech are changing to bronze.
We have had one frost on our homestead so far.
I made a trip to a southern Maine island with the falafel mastermind to look at a piece of business equipment.
Twenty plus years ago I had a room mate that had grown up on one of the islands and I had made several trips to the big one, so I was looking forward to the ride on the ferry.
I was relieved when I instinctively recalled where the ferry terminal was located, and we pulled in line as the ferry was loading. FM rushed in to get tickets. An obvious gap in my island knowledge was quickly revealed.
"We can't take the boat on the ferry," FM said as he exited the building.
"You have to make a special appointment and can only go when the tide is at a certain height."
Well this island was a bit different than my memory of the big one, I supposed.
We had to quickly decide a course of action. The people selling the equipment had yet to return our most recent calls. The last instructions had been to call the wife when we got off the ferry and she would give us directions from there.
The island was only 2 miles long, and I quickly calculated that we could walk from one end to the other and still have an hour to look at the equipment before having to catch the return ferry. So we put the car in the parking garage and bought passenger tickets.
The ferry at our gate was being loaded with some cargo, and I dug in my memory if we could go on the ferry at will or had to wait for the boarding call. We decided to try and board, and were quickly shooed off the loading ramp back on to the dock and a rope was strung across the ramp to discourage us pushy flatlanders.
The fellow had enough time to walk back down the ramp to the boat and the boarding call went out and he turned around and came back and dropped the rope. We could tell this ferry line was a stickler for regulations.
FM handed over our tickets and waited for half a ticket back like you do in the movie line.
"Oh, we don't take tickets on the return trip," he said.
FM and I exchanged amused glances and had some fun making jokes about that once we found our seats.
I led him up to the top deck front row for the trip out Casco Bay. An enormous cruise ship was in port, and the size of it dwarfed the city. We went by the old fort, lighthouses, islands. The ferry was underway and FM could only get a busy signal from the wife. Vague memories of how things worked on the islands started to come back to me.
"Don't worry, she will probably meet us down at the dock when we get there. She is most likely on the island grapevine telling everyone that she has company coming."
A couple minutes later FM's call went through and sure enough, she was going to meet us down at the dock when the ferry arrived.
We stopped at several islands and finally arrived at our destination.
"FM?"
Our hostess was waiting for us and we piled in a battered Ford wagon with Arizona plates.
"Don't mind my island beater," she said.
I smiled recalling my room mates car and how cool it was that island folks don't have to register and inspect the cars they use on the island. Because the island is two miles long and everyone knows your car. Where are you going to go? Remember now, you don't need a return ticket and you have to make an appointment to get a car on the ferry !
FM decided to buy the equipment, and once he handed her the money her attitude blossomed. She got on the phone to hubby who was working on the mainland to have him make arrangements to get the equipment off island. The island grapevine is so fast that she knew before we got there that we had tried to get a car on island.
I chuckled again thinking about how that would give the islanders some good chatter for a few days about the flatlanders trying to get a CAR on their island without first making arrangements! We were spared making (or trying to make)those arrangements; things were soon arranged so that hubby would deal with the ferry guys and get it on the boat and FM would get a call to tell him it would be at the port.
We had business completed in plenty of time for the ferry, and it was just a short walk from her house to the dock.
"I will give you a tour of the island while you are waiting for the ferry, hop in, " she said.
So we climbed back in the beat Ford wagon with Arizona plates and had a lovely guided tour of the island, which first began with a soliloquy by our hostess on pondering why the ferry boat which brought us was not the usual boat-it was the MAIL boat, and that Never came on this ferry run.
Then we drove by some men that had been on the ferry looking at plans. I remembered them because I am a bit of an architecture fan and I had wondered what was on those blueprints they were looking at on the ferry!?! and so I had also looked at the two men closely as I walked by them.
Our hostess quickly volunteered the island scoop.
"If a property on the island changes hand, even inside the family from an inheritance, the septic system has to be brought up to code. They are not 'grandfathered anymore'. ( most shoreline homes were originally built to dump their sewage directly into the water.)
A friend of our hostess had given (sold/traded-we were not privy to the technicalities)a piece of land so that several homes could unite in the septic system-most likely a holding tank and some form of leach field. And they had to hire the men to design it, and it was costing $20,000 just for the design.
Wow that was a fun bit of gossip.
We drove by the island store, now closed for the season, but the one gas pump still working at over $5 a gallon. I had noted no gasoline in any container may be brought on the ferry, so talk about a monopoly!
We learned that the island was once a refueling station for warships, and there were huge storage tanks buried on the interior of the island. So the island interior was not inhabited. We had earlier peeked inside a large abandoned cinder block building that turned out to house two enormous motors. They were the motors for pumping millions of gallon of fuel on and off the island back in WW2.
We learned that the island had a deer and Lyme disease problem. Our hostess estimated that there were over 200 deer on the island. She blamed the enactment of a leash law on the deer problem. Because the deer swim to the island and have no natural predators. The dogs used to chase them right off the island.
The island also had a resident beaver population.
We were shown storm damage aggravated by logging. Once big trees are thinned out the rest of the stand becomes susceptible to high winds, creating piles of blow downs.
Our hostess pulled down to the dock just as the ferry was pulling in. Islanders seem to have an innate instinct about the comings and goings of their link to the mainland.
We settled ourselves on the back of the boat out of the wind for the return trip. A nice woman boarded at the next island and sat down next to us.
"I've never seen this boat on this run before," she said.
We nodded our heads in agreement. Our brief stay on the island had found us entwined in the island grapevine.
The foliage finally took the hint and we had a blaze of color about a week later than normal. Things were looking pretty good and then we had a couple days of wind and rain. The maples have dropped their leaves-the oaks are still mostly green and the beech are changing to bronze.
We have had one frost on our homestead so far.
I made a trip to a southern Maine island with the falafel mastermind to look at a piece of business equipment.
Twenty plus years ago I had a room mate that had grown up on one of the islands and I had made several trips to the big one, so I was looking forward to the ride on the ferry.
I was relieved when I instinctively recalled where the ferry terminal was located, and we pulled in line as the ferry was loading. FM rushed in to get tickets. An obvious gap in my island knowledge was quickly revealed.
"We can't take the boat on the ferry," FM said as he exited the building.
"You have to make a special appointment and can only go when the tide is at a certain height."
Well this island was a bit different than my memory of the big one, I supposed.
We had to quickly decide a course of action. The people selling the equipment had yet to return our most recent calls. The last instructions had been to call the wife when we got off the ferry and she would give us directions from there.
The island was only 2 miles long, and I quickly calculated that we could walk from one end to the other and still have an hour to look at the equipment before having to catch the return ferry. So we put the car in the parking garage and bought passenger tickets.
The ferry at our gate was being loaded with some cargo, and I dug in my memory if we could go on the ferry at will or had to wait for the boarding call. We decided to try and board, and were quickly shooed off the loading ramp back on to the dock and a rope was strung across the ramp to discourage us pushy flatlanders.
The fellow had enough time to walk back down the ramp to the boat and the boarding call went out and he turned around and came back and dropped the rope. We could tell this ferry line was a stickler for regulations.
FM handed over our tickets and waited for half a ticket back like you do in the movie line.
"Oh, we don't take tickets on the return trip," he said.
FM and I exchanged amused glances and had some fun making jokes about that once we found our seats.
I led him up to the top deck front row for the trip out Casco Bay. An enormous cruise ship was in port, and the size of it dwarfed the city. We went by the old fort, lighthouses, islands. The ferry was underway and FM could only get a busy signal from the wife. Vague memories of how things worked on the islands started to come back to me.
"Don't worry, she will probably meet us down at the dock when we get there. She is most likely on the island grapevine telling everyone that she has company coming."
A couple minutes later FM's call went through and sure enough, she was going to meet us down at the dock when the ferry arrived.
We stopped at several islands and finally arrived at our destination.
"FM?"
Our hostess was waiting for us and we piled in a battered Ford wagon with Arizona plates.
"Don't mind my island beater," she said.
I smiled recalling my room mates car and how cool it was that island folks don't have to register and inspect the cars they use on the island. Because the island is two miles long and everyone knows your car. Where are you going to go? Remember now, you don't need a return ticket and you have to make an appointment to get a car on the ferry !
FM decided to buy the equipment, and once he handed her the money her attitude blossomed. She got on the phone to hubby who was working on the mainland to have him make arrangements to get the equipment off island. The island grapevine is so fast that she knew before we got there that we had tried to get a car on island.
I chuckled again thinking about how that would give the islanders some good chatter for a few days about the flatlanders trying to get a CAR on their island without first making arrangements! We were spared making (or trying to make)those arrangements; things were soon arranged so that hubby would deal with the ferry guys and get it on the boat and FM would get a call to tell him it would be at the port.
We had business completed in plenty of time for the ferry, and it was just a short walk from her house to the dock.
"I will give you a tour of the island while you are waiting for the ferry, hop in, " she said.
So we climbed back in the beat Ford wagon with Arizona plates and had a lovely guided tour of the island, which first began with a soliloquy by our hostess on pondering why the ferry boat which brought us was not the usual boat-it was the MAIL boat, and that Never came on this ferry run.
Then we drove by some men that had been on the ferry looking at plans. I remembered them because I am a bit of an architecture fan and I had wondered what was on those blueprints they were looking at on the ferry!?! and so I had also looked at the two men closely as I walked by them.
Our hostess quickly volunteered the island scoop.
"If a property on the island changes hand, even inside the family from an inheritance, the septic system has to be brought up to code. They are not 'grandfathered anymore'. ( most shoreline homes were originally built to dump their sewage directly into the water.)
A friend of our hostess had given (sold/traded-we were not privy to the technicalities)a piece of land so that several homes could unite in the septic system-most likely a holding tank and some form of leach field. And they had to hire the men to design it, and it was costing $20,000 just for the design.
Wow that was a fun bit of gossip.
We drove by the island store, now closed for the season, but the one gas pump still working at over $5 a gallon. I had noted no gasoline in any container may be brought on the ferry, so talk about a monopoly!
We learned that the island was once a refueling station for warships, and there were huge storage tanks buried on the interior of the island. So the island interior was not inhabited. We had earlier peeked inside a large abandoned cinder block building that turned out to house two enormous motors. They were the motors for pumping millions of gallon of fuel on and off the island back in WW2.
We learned that the island had a deer and Lyme disease problem. Our hostess estimated that there were over 200 deer on the island. She blamed the enactment of a leash law on the deer problem. Because the deer swim to the island and have no natural predators. The dogs used to chase them right off the island.
The island also had a resident beaver population.
We were shown storm damage aggravated by logging. Once big trees are thinned out the rest of the stand becomes susceptible to high winds, creating piles of blow downs.
Our hostess pulled down to the dock just as the ferry was pulling in. Islanders seem to have an innate instinct about the comings and goings of their link to the mainland.
We settled ourselves on the back of the boat out of the wind for the return trip. A nice woman boarded at the next island and sat down next to us.
"I've never seen this boat on this run before," she said.
We nodded our heads in agreement. Our brief stay on the island had found us entwined in the island grapevine.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Friday
Thanks for your comments Tonia and Dave. :)
My thyroid saga has been reduced to one pill six times a week. I was just a tad hyper my last visit so I get to skip Sunday's pill. Then labs in three months to see how that is working.
At my last visit the doc went through the big list of symptoms I had last December and I answered NO to almost all of them. I told him I was glad I went through the treatment because one pill a day is much better than 5 pills 5 times a day and still feeling like crap. lol.
I still have some real thryroid left, and hopefully that behaves itself and doesn't start overproducing thyroid hormone again. That happens rarely-and usually in severe cases like mine. I think that is one reason I was so aggravated it took so long to get to see the specialist after I was diagnosed- because my thyroid raged on for months. There is some rule that objects in motion want to stay in motion...one of Newton's laws?
****
We had our first frost on the lawn this morning. BRRRRR so cold. We didn't get one yesterday, but other places did. One farm had their front and back field cloaked in frost and I thought that looked like a cold place to live!
Our foliage is a disaster. For the last 14 years the Firebird's birthday has been the absolute peak of foliage here, the height of early color of maples and ash. This year everywhere but the swamps is still green.
We did have periods of wind and rain, and my sugar maples have dropped a lot of leaves before they changed.
I am not the only one to notice, I have seen the foliage story carried on AP the last few days. Many hypothesis abound as to what is going on with the foliage. I don't really have a strong opinion myself-I am puzzled.
The change of fall color is attributed to shorter day length-the leaves stop producing chlorophyll and what remains is the actual color of the leaf. As far as I know the day's length is shortening as it usually does.
As far as weather and temperature, we have not been much different from the norm-we get rain and drought and wind on a regular basis but the the leaves still change every year about the same time.
Fungus is getting blamed-well I hope they find out which one! I heard through the farmer's grapevine that potatoes diseased with late blight have been getting dumped along the shore, and then the moist air coming off the ocean is carrying the blight inland and really destroyed everyone's tomatoe crop here. So perhaps that is what is causing the leaves to drop and not change?
Or maybe those big solar flares triggered the trees to keep growing for a bit longer?
I do know that the Firebird's birthday seemed a little less festive with the autumn colors still in hiding.
My thyroid saga has been reduced to one pill six times a week. I was just a tad hyper my last visit so I get to skip Sunday's pill. Then labs in three months to see how that is working.
At my last visit the doc went through the big list of symptoms I had last December and I answered NO to almost all of them. I told him I was glad I went through the treatment because one pill a day is much better than 5 pills 5 times a day and still feeling like crap. lol.
I still have some real thryroid left, and hopefully that behaves itself and doesn't start overproducing thyroid hormone again. That happens rarely-and usually in severe cases like mine. I think that is one reason I was so aggravated it took so long to get to see the specialist after I was diagnosed- because my thyroid raged on for months. There is some rule that objects in motion want to stay in motion...one of Newton's laws?
****
We had our first frost on the lawn this morning. BRRRRR so cold. We didn't get one yesterday, but other places did. One farm had their front and back field cloaked in frost and I thought that looked like a cold place to live!
Our foliage is a disaster. For the last 14 years the Firebird's birthday has been the absolute peak of foliage here, the height of early color of maples and ash. This year everywhere but the swamps is still green.
We did have periods of wind and rain, and my sugar maples have dropped a lot of leaves before they changed.
I am not the only one to notice, I have seen the foliage story carried on AP the last few days. Many hypothesis abound as to what is going on with the foliage. I don't really have a strong opinion myself-I am puzzled.
The change of fall color is attributed to shorter day length-the leaves stop producing chlorophyll and what remains is the actual color of the leaf. As far as I know the day's length is shortening as it usually does.
As far as weather and temperature, we have not been much different from the norm-we get rain and drought and wind on a regular basis but the the leaves still change every year about the same time.
Fungus is getting blamed-well I hope they find out which one! I heard through the farmer's grapevine that potatoes diseased with late blight have been getting dumped along the shore, and then the moist air coming off the ocean is carrying the blight inland and really destroyed everyone's tomatoe crop here. So perhaps that is what is causing the leaves to drop and not change?
Or maybe those big solar flares triggered the trees to keep growing for a bit longer?
I do know that the Firebird's birthday seemed a little less festive with the autumn colors still in hiding.
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