Google Reader

After Foot Surgery

Well, my visit to the podiatrist yesterday was a good one! He removed the pin from my fourth toe and told me to try walking in a regular shoe next week. Yeah, I can drive again next Thursday! The first thing I will do is go out to dinner for Debbie and Jill's birthdays. Maybe we can even talk Mary Ann into coming with us. We are going to Johnny Carino's.
On Friday I will spend all day picking out paint and carpet so I can be ready for the painters. Hopefully, I will get in before Friday, but Friday will be decision day. Carpet, drapes, paint for the living room and three bedrooms. I intend to get rid of as much stuff as possible before July when our Sandro comes. I want closets cleaned out and a ton of stuff gotten rid of. I think I will feel lighter not having so much stuff to take care of!

Google Reader

Bridge Placement Day. Yeah!
Last October I lost two more teeth on the upper left side of my mouth. The doctor placed implants the same day he pulled the teeth. He made a flipper (false teeth that can hook to the other teeth in your mouth) to cover the empty place where the implants are. Implants are painful to begin with, but they are wonderful after the bone grows around and through them and then the teeth can be hooked onto the implants. Now all my upper teeth look beautiful. All one color and all nicely aligned. I just have to relearn how to talk again, after having had a flipper for so long. I have to try not to lisp or spit when I talk to anyone. All I can say is it certainly beats Dentures.
The foot is healing, itching like crazy. I think I walked around Costco too much today. All the riding carts were taken, so I had to walk. Hope I didn't overdo it. Will head to Pocatello tomorrow to have the stitches out. Hopefully I haven't ruined the work he did by walking too much.
Going to try and get a bid on painting my upstairs rooms because I want to get new carpet in most of the upstairs rooms. Wish I had one of those designers who will sit down with you and look at your favorite things and help you plan a color scheme. But I guess I am the only designer I'll have. Any ideas?

Foot Surgery

Foot Surgery Feb 4, 2011

We went to Pocatello on Friday morning and I had the bunion, the hammer toe and the broken toe repaired on my right foot. I walked out of the surgery center, but by the time I got home I was ready to use a crutch to keep some of the weight off my foot. I am wearing a shoe with a thick heel, but not much on the front of the shoe so I can't put any weight on the forefoot. Putting all your weight on your heel takes a little adjustment. When I went to stand up after sitting for a while after we got home I had a terrible charlie horse in my ankle--it left me sore for two days! That's when I decided to use the crutches for a while. Yesterday, Tuesday, we went back up to Idaho Falls for a follow up with Dr. Howard. He took off the bandages and some of the tape. It all looked pretty ugly to me, but he said it looked good. After driving and having my foot down, it was pretty swollen, but it didn't feel too bad. Compared to a knee replacement, foot surgery is small potatoes. The ladies in our Relief Society have been feeding us everyday, and it hasn't been too much work for Lynn. I have been able to put the crutches away and am just walking on the shoe, but if I am sitting with my foot up or when I am in bed, I take the shoe off. I hope the surgery will work as well as the Dr. says it will. It will be nice to walk without pain. It's funny how you can hurt yourself so much and not even know it. The Dr. said that I had broken the metatarsal in my 4th toe sometime in the past year. Apparently I tore the joint capsule at the same time and that was what had been giving me the most discomfort in my foot. That has also been the most painful part of my foot during the recovery, but it really hasn't been nearly as painful as I thought it might be. I really only had a local for the surgery, so am not suffering the after effects of general anesthesia. The only real downer is that I can't drive for at least a month because of the shoe.

I will be substituting in Seminary on Friday and Monday and the enforced sitting with my foot up has given me ample opportunity to read my lesson and think about how to present it. I will be teaching Section 93 of the Doctrine and Covenants. It is a really thought provoking section and I hope I will be able to present it to the kids in a way that they will be able to understand. Our time is so short, I hope I can give them enough to understand it.

Lynn has gone to Salt Lake City this afternoon to take Timmy to the Jazz game. Tickets were Tim's Christmas gift and Lynn promised to take him in the Camero. Tim was pretty excited. They had a gift card to Applebee's and Tim had some money to buy souvenirs. I don't think Lynn was quite as excited as Tim, but I think he was looking forward to it too.

Thanksgiving Weekend

I am so glad that we finished the basement. It makes it so nice when everyone comes home. We have lots of room to spread out in and the kids have so much fun together. The grownups can visit while the kids play and we aren't on top of each other any more. I just wasn't very well organized this year. I didn't get the turkey in soon enough and so it wasn't quite as done as we would have liked it to be. I forgot to buy frozen white grape juice to use to baste the turkey like I usually do and I decided to just use a brown in bag. Oh, well, I'll do better next time. Annalise rolled out "90 billion" rolls and every single one was eaten by the time Saturday came around. I still have a little stuffing left, guess I'll add the last of the turkey and gravy to it and call it dinner tomorrow or on Tuesday when Brian and Kattie's kids are here.

The kids were all so much fun! Winnie and Ashlyn just played and played. I need to add to my dress up clothes, they just love dressing up. I need to add boy dress up clothes too. Aidan wore the cave man costume though. Too bad the elephant ears headband is broken. The big boys played Wii and DS games to their hearts content. There were even a few pool games played. I guess it is time to refurbish the pool table and get a couple of new cues. I think that you could say that a "good time was had by all". We really missed Kris and Kristi and their family. They couldn't come because they were all sick for several days. We watched Toy Story 3 and went to Burley for the new 3-D movie, Tangled. Such darling movies, very cleverly done!

Johanna and Annalise went home on Saturday, thank goodness, because I-84 is closed today and may not open for a day or so. Jenni left today after Lynn used the snow blower to clear out the road. Once she got to the freeway, her drive wasn't too bad.

Vegetable Garden

My vegetable garden was a true disaster this year. I don't think I have ever had such a bad garden. True, it did freeze hard on May 7th and then it rained for almost the next two weeks and I couldn't even plant until the second week of June, but I just was not a dedicated gardener this year. I usually get up about the same time as the guys go out to move water and work for a couple of hours every morning. I just seemed to have a really hard time doing that this year and consequently my garden is a big mess. The weeds have truly taken over. I went out today and raked up all the fallen apples and believe me there are bushels of them. We picked all the golden delicious apples, but the earliblaze just dropped most of the apples before they were ripe enough to use. Now I have a big stinky pile of them to dispose of. As if that weren't enough, because I let the weeds go so much, it is hard to rake up the apples and I am planting weed seeds with every pass of the rake.

I decided that everyday this week I would try to dig up 5 square feet of my asparagus bed. It has become completely over run with quack grass. Have you ever seen quack grass roots--they become a thick mass of roots that spread for several feet and about every 6 inches they sprout blades of grass. Between the quack grass and the dog digging it up, I don't have too much asparagus left. I'm tempted to just spray the whole mess with Round-up and start over! It's just that it takes so long for asparagus to really start producing and have enough to really eat. Now I know why my mom didn't have much of it in her garden. My dad made a 2x4 frame and nailed wire to it and we would sift all the dirt in the garden if there was any quack grass in it. We kids thought it was all fun and games to put that dirt through the sifter, but I'm sure now it must have been to get those darn roots out. Of course, my mom would never have let the weeds go like I did this year unless she absolutely couldn't work in the garden. I think of the raspberries she grew and I know there were never weeds in them. She somehow managed to keep them in orderly rows too. I'm not sure how she did it. When I married Lynn, his mom had raspberries and they were always weedy and unruly just like mine are. I wish my mom were here so I could ask her.

I was only able to can one five gallon bucket of tomatoes this year and bushels of them froze just when they were really beginning to come on. Lynn said that he would just till the whole garden up and I can start over next year. Sounds like a plan to me!

Memorable Weekend

I have to be the world's dumbest blogger! I haven't a clue as to how to do all the fun things people do on their blogs. Since I have such a small readership, I guess that doesn't matter much. I can barely find the site to post my blog on, let alone put fun things on it.

We made a flying trip to Annalise's on Saturday night. I have a terrible cold, but went anyway, just hoping none of the Utah family gets the cold too. Of course, they had all been thoroughly exposed by Nikoli on Friday and Saturday. On our way down, I decided to floss some apple peel from between my front teeth and suddenly pulled out the filling in one of my teeth. So I went all weekend with a gaping, SHARP hole in my tooth. Needless to say I have a sore tongue today. When I went to have it repaired today, the dentist numbed my mouth and now I have chewed a small hole in my lower right lip. He said the deadening would wear off in about 45 minutes and it is now 4 hours later and it is just barely wearing off. You don't realize what a crucial role your lips and cheeks play in chewing your food!

Sunday was a little hectic. Went to church at 9 a.m. It was the annual Primary Program. Annalise was the accompanist and Liam accompanied one song, "Follow the Prophet". All Annalise's children had short speaking parts. Little Aidan did his very well, as did all the others. Liam was sustained to become a Deacon and we all went to his ordination at noon. There were so many of us present for the ordination that we met in the Relief Society room and made the next ward start their Gospel Doctrine class late. Annalise has a really nice Bishop though. We were impressed by his spirituality. We returned to Annalise's and had lasagne and garlic bread. Jo made a carrot cake for Jenni's birthday and we waited patiently for it to bake. What we thought would take 35 minutes took 55. So a cake that would take 35 minutes in a 9 inch round takes almost an hour if baked in a 9 x 11 inch pan. I think that's because of it being a carrot cake, they are much denser than a regular cake. Live and learn. We ate our cake and sent Jenni off in the rain to drive back to Payette around 3:30. Lynn and I left about 4:30 and drove through the rain as well. It is fun to have the XMRadio and listen to fun music all the way home wherever we are. When we hit the I-84, I-86 interchange the rain was just pouring down. We had to really slow down. The rain eased up a little the further west we went. The wind was still blowing when we got home and it was raining still, but nothing like it had been. Brian and Kattie were an hour or so behind us and they hit the downpour at the Utah, Idaho border.

I took a lot of Sudafed and made it through the weekend without too much problem. Today I don't have much of a voice, but don't feel too badly. Jenni, I really hope you don't get sick before your training next week. Keep taking that calcium and zinc, get lots of sleep and drink plenty of fluids.

I finally threw out the basket of plants from Grandma Carlquist's funeral. They had finally reached the absolute end of their lives. Now I have to figure out what to put in their place. If I leave the window bare, people put newspapers and pile magazines and stuff in the window and that really looks bad! As bad as the plants were looking, they still looked better than piles of stuff!

Too many things to do outside at this time of year. I hate pulling out the petunias, they have looked really pretty this year. I still have about 100 bulbs to plant and I have already planted a couple of hundred bulbs. Leaves are piling up and need raked, grass needs mowed one last time. All the fallen apples need picked up and the garden needs cleared up. Lynn has about 14 acres of beets left to dig. Maybe tomorrow if it doesn't rain tonight. Right now the sun is shining. Lots of fall work on the farm too. Already the Christmas rush begins. Tonight is the first meeting of the Valley Community Helpers and it's time to plan for our Christmas Open House. Yikes! I guess I had better get busy.

My Yahoo!

October 4th, 2010

Spent the day cleaning bathrooms and doing laundry. Washed all Lynn's hunting gear, including some large canvas bags he has to put the meat in to bring it off the mountain. He hosed them off thoroughly outside before I had to take them in and wash them, but they were still a little gross. He made the mistake of leaving the antlers in the garage overnight-----eww!! The garage didn't smell too good this morning. They had a really good time hunting and being together. It really has been several years since Lynn, Mark and Neil were able to go on a hunt together.

It has been rainy and overcast for most of the day, but it is a welcome change from the hot, dusty air that we have had for the past couple of weeks. I am enjoying the coolness. The leaves on the green ash trees are starting to turn yellow and fall off, now if only they will all fall off before it snows! We have had heavy wet snows for the past two years early in October. I still have the apples to pick from the Golden Delicious tree. They are surprisingly good and worm free even though they were not sprayed at all this year. The Early Blaze tree is all done dropping its apples, I picked a few and made several apple desserts and a few quarts of applesauce, but I wasn't feeling well enough to pick them before most of them dropped on the ground.