Tricia's Musings

This lady has way more energy that I do!

Tricia — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:53:24 +0000

This elderly lady sure had a lot more energy than I do lately! I can only hope that if I reach her age I’ll be able to do a stretch like that! LOL Or at least be somewhat active!

This picture also reminds me that I should look into wrinkle treatments as I age if I want to be a decent looking old lady. wink.

I’ve been overtired for about a month now and being on Benadryl for the last five or so days didn’t help! I had an allergic reaction to yet another new medication – hives, itching and other unpleasant side effects .. so I spent the last several days with a bobbing head as I tried to stay awake.

Then, early this morning I woke up from a strange dream and I couldn’t get back to sleep for a long time. So even though I’m not taking allergy meds anymore I’m still overtired. Sigh.

The way things have been going for me lately I doubt I’ll be as spry as that little old lady in the photo if I ever reach her age! Do you ever have weeks or months were you just feel worn out?

We’re thinking about going to New York City in the Spring

Tricia — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:32:00 +0000

My husband and I seem to watch a lot of TV shows that are filmed in New York city and without fail … every time my husband sees a shot of the city he starts talking about visiting New York.

He’s been there once before, back when he was in college they had a weekend trip to New York and he loved it. However, I’ve never been there – although I’ve always wanted to go.

So … we decided that maybe next spring, if we’re doing a little better on the financial front, maybe we’ll go to New York for a long weekend or perhaps even a week. I’ll do some searches for new york cheap hotel and hopefully find other inexpensive things that we can do while we’re there.

For those of you who live in or near New York or who’ve been there a few times – do you have any suggestions as to places we should see or things we should do while we are there? Keeping in mind of course that we probably won’t have much money to spend so free or cheap ideas are best.

I’ve got to scramble to get ready for a party this weekend

Tricia — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:01:46 +0000

I just realized that we’re going to a wedding this weekend. I’ve been in such a fog lately that I thought it was next weekend … but I was wrong … just three more days to prepare!

It’s a very formal wedding and I still haven’t decided what I’m going to wear. I’d better get busy! Chris on the other hand is wearing a black tuxedo with a purple patterned tuxedo vest. It looks good on him.

I’m jealous. It’s so easy for men to look good. Through on a suit and ta da – they’re done. Nothing like the work we women have to do to prepare for a big event. LOL

I am looking forward to getting out for the evening. I haven’t done much lately, so it will be nice.

I’m about to give up on our DLP TV

Tricia — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:58:59 +0000

I think some time in the near future we’re going to have to look into getting a new TV. Not that we can afford one!

Why? Well, about five years ago we bought a DLP TV. It has a great picture, but it has this special light that shines on this spinning disc in order to make the picture. Trouble is that, oh about once a year or year and a half, the light starts to burn out and it costs about $150 to replace it!

When we bought the TV DLP’s were fairly new and we were told the cost of the light would go down but it doesn’t seem to have reduced in price at all. So it’s an expensive TV to maintain. Oh and last year we had to replace the color wheel!

If and when we do get a new TV I think we’ll look into an LCD TV or one of those new LED TV’s.

Anyone else have a DLP TV?

I don’t think naps are good for me

Tricia — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:47:26 +0000

I’m so groggy! I’ve been tired for weeks, excessively tired, and I finally gave in this afternoon and lay down for a sleep. Trouble is I didn’t fall asleep until after 6 pm, and then only woke up when my husband came home from work at 8 pm.

I had a massive headache from Sunday afternoon until sometime early this morning … perhaps that’s why I finally gave into the tiredness.

Unfortunately I have to go out to the store to pick something up. I’m so groggy that I’ll probably need a gps to get there. LOL

Are you really groggy when you wake up from a nap? It’s awful isn’t it? I’m never this foggy when I wake up in the morning.

My dog hurt her feet – all of them!

Tricia — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:13:43 +0000

We had a little scare earlier today.

My husband had taken our dog, Midnight, to a beach here in Toronto where you can let your dog off leash and where they can swim in the lake. It’s called Cherry beach.

We’ve taken her there several times, and being a Labrador Retriever, she just loves the water. She plays with other dogs, steals their toys and pretty much stays in the water until we beg her to come out.

I didn’t go today, but it sounds like it went much as it usually does with Midnight playing in the water and mingling with other dogs. After she’d been in the water for about two hours my husband started calling her to come in, but she wouldn’t. Usually she’s not to bad about coming to us if she’s had a good amount of time to swim and play so this was unusual.

Finally she came to shore and started limping right away. Perhaps she’d stayed in the water longer because she already knew that she’d hurt her feet?

My husband noticed that her feet were bleeding. He thought it was only two of her feet that we injured at first, but it turns out ALL of them were injured! He used the Cell to call me at home as he tried to get Midnight to the car. He’d already looked at the feet that he thought were hurt and determined that she didn’t have glass in them, but being covered with sand from the beach he couldn’t tell exactly what the problem was.

Being a nurse I started assembling things at home to try to take care of my dog once she got home. I grabbed a magnifying lens so that I could look at her feet closely for any glass, some gauze 4 by 4 squares, a sterile bottle of saline solution and some cotton balls. I had it all out on the coffee table for when they arrived. My plan was to wash her feet off with the saline solution and then take a look at them to see if there was any glass or sand embedded in her wounds.

I also called our vets office. They had just closed, but the doctor was willing to stick around until I’d taken a look at Midnights feet in case we needed to bring her in.

When Chris got home I ran out to the car. he’d put some towels on the back seat and they had blood spots all over them. Midnight limped with me into the house and I finally got to look at her feet.

Somehow she’d shaved off all of her toenails on all four feet. Right down to the nub. So they were bleeding and I’m sure there was some nerve pain. otherwise the pads of her feet looked ok. So I called the vet to tell him what had happened and depending upon how her feet look in the morning we might see him tomorrow. Nice of the vet to stick around for us though!

I don’t know what happened to her. Chris said he took her where we always take her and she’s never hurt herself before. Maybe the city put more rocks into the water in that area since we were last there? That’s all I can think of is that she scraped her nails repeatedly on rocks that were underwater.

Her nails were too long and I was planning on cutting them this week. Perhaps that made he nails more vulnerable to getting hurt in the first place? But still, even if her nails were short prior to her beach visit they’re now down to bare nubs.

We applied pressure to all of her feet to help stop the bleeding. That must of hurt a bit because she was shivering. Poor thing. This is the first time she’s really been hurt since we got her two years ago. Once the bleeding stopped I cleaned her nail nubs by putting some sterile saline solution on a gauze pad and dabbed at her nails.

Luckily she’s always sleepy after a good romp at the beach, perhaps more sleepy after the anxiety of being hurt – so she’s been sleeping quite a bit for the last two hours.

That’s fine by me because if she’s sleeping she won’t be licking her paws!

So we’re just sitting around watching TV and trying not to move around too much because we want her to rest and stay off her feet. We don’t usually watch TV on Sunday afternoons! There sure is a lot of commercials for acne treatments and fitness products!

Anyway … have any of you dealt with something like this with your dog or another type of pet? Any suggestions? I think if we can keep the nail nubs clean they’ll heal just fine. Hopefully they don’t get infected!

I’m just trying to figure out how to keep her from licking her feet constantly. She’s awake right now and all she’s doing is licking. Sigh.

Trying to decide what to make for dinner – chicken or pasta?

Tricia — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:01:19 +0000

I’m trying to figure out what to make for dinner tonight. I’m still really tired although it’s better than last week! Last week I could have slept all day, day in and day out. This week it just feels like it’s late in the evening even in the middle of the day. It’s either a bug that I’m fighting very slowly or a side effect of my medications that were increased about a month ago.

Anyway … back to dinner. Do I make something with the boneless chicken breasts that are thawing in the fridge or do I wait and heat up the frozen veggie lasagna that’s in the freezer?

What I’d really like to do, if I can sum up the energy, is cut u the chicken into bite sized pieces and saute it in a frying pan. While the chicken is cooking I usually make a home made tomato sauce and pasta (Fussili or Penne). Once the sauce is done and the chicken is cooked I pour the sauce into the pan with the chicken and let it simmer for about five minutes. I sometimes also steam some broccoli or another veggie to add to the pasta dish. Once everything is done I serve the pasta and top it with steamed veggies and the the chicken and sauce mixture.

It’s a great meal … if a little messy. I always seem to have to clean the glass tiles near the stove after making the sauce. This mixture seems to splatter more than when I make other dinners with tomato sauce. Why I don’t know!

If we had spinach I’d make this herbed pasta with spinach – yummy!

As good as that dinner sounds I’m not sure that I have the energy for it right now … maybe I’ll go on the hunt for some other tasty and easy recipes and see if there’s anything else I can whip up for dinner tonight. Any suggestions?

Autumn blooms in my garden

Tricia — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:56:04 +0000

Join

Well it looks like Autumn is here and it won’t be long until winter arrives and the ground is covered in snow. I know … depressing isn’t it?

It’s been such a cold rainy summer and now fall that I’m not looking forward to winter at all! So I’ll look back on our fleeting summer and show you some of the beauties that will get me through winter …

This is a lovely small rose called Lavender Dreams. It blooms regularly throughout summer, but it’s one of the few roses that I grow, that I think, looks best in the fall. It’s colours deepen and it’s beauty just shines through once the cool weather arrives:

I can’t say farewell to summer without showing you a photo of a true summer flower! I always grow sunflowers in the planted boulevard in front of my house. In fact that’s often how people visiting our house for the first time find it … we say just look for the sunflowers and you’ll find our house.

One rose that I know will keep blooming into December is “Bonica”. This pretty little rose is one of my best bloomers. it blooms from June through until it’s covered in snow. What a trooper!

Do you have a garden? Is it starting to shut down now that we’re well into Autumn? Are any of your flowers still blooming?

It was a great weekend to get some gardening done

Tricia — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:01:25 +0000

We got a little bit of gardening done this weekend. It had been raining on and off most of the week, but it stopped on Saturday so we took advantage of that and decided to get outside to do a little bit of our “garden shut down” chores.

A week or so ago I was outside cleaning up the plants – getting rid of ones that had died off due to the cool weather and pruning some of the rose bushes. So this time around I didn’t have too much to do in the garden itself. That’s a good thing because I really need new work gloves – they sure take a beating when you have tons of roses!

Yesterday we took out all of our solar lights. I think we could leave them out during the winter, but I don’t like taking a chance that they’d be damaged by the heavy snow and moisture. Besides … we wouldn’t be able to see them come January or so anyway as they’d be covered in snow.

We also put away the garden torches. Each year we put some torches in the garden that we use to light up the garden and create atmosphere when we are entertaining at night. We fill them with a mixture of kerosene and Citronella oil to help keep the bugs away. Of course, we didn’t use the torches all that much this summer since it was so cool and rainy, so for much of the last week we had the torches burning in the garden to burn off the rest of the oil.

Other than tidying up a few planted containers that was pretty much our gardening chores for the weekend. All we need to do now is wait for more leaves to fall and then put them on the garden beds for the winter. The leaves help protect the plants. We even gather some of our neighbors leaves bags so that we can have extra leaves for the garden beds.

Did you do any gardening this weekend or were you busy doing Halloween stuff?

We passed on Halloween this year. We usually decorate the front of the house and give out candy to the kids, but we just couldn’t afford to buy all that candy this year. (it’s expensive!). Plus our dog seems to have turned into a barker and we figured that she’d be barking her head off every time some kids came to the door (probably scaring them). Maybe next year. Did you do Halloween?

Looks like we were right about our new neighbors

Tricia — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:01:45 +0000

My husband and I have been leary of our new neighbors ever since they moved in – in mid-September.

Oh, they seem nice enough when we talk to them, but then they do the opposite of what they told us.

For example … the night that they were moving in, the new guy came over to our backyard for a few minutes to talk to us and he warned us about this guy who lives just down the street from us … telling us that he breaks into houses and that he’s a crack dealer. Ok … good to know … but ever since the new neighbors moved in we’ve seen them going to that house about three times a day!

My husband who likes just about everyone he meets decided almost immediately that he didn’t like the new neighbors. I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt since they seemed nicer than the last renter next door whom I called the Redneck Neighbors. But I guess our gut instincts were correct.

Last night Chris and I took our dog out for a walk. Normally Chris takes her alone when he comes home from work in the evening, but he asked me if I wanted to walk down to the East York Civic Center (only a few blocks from us) to see the huge crowds lining up for the H1N1 flu vaccinations. We didn’t plan to wait in line ourselves as we’ve decided to wait a couple of weeks and see if people start having bad reactions to the injection as it hasn’t had much testing yet … and well if you read my last post I’ve been having a lot of reactions to medications and even foods this year so I don’t want to take any chances. Anyway … going for a walk would give me a chance to break in my new Naot shoes right?

So we’re walking along and a car goes by honking at Chris. Chris waved and said that it was a guy he knew from work. We decided to take a side street and as we walked along the car came back and pulled up beside us. The guy said that he’d been hoping to talk to my husband for weeks as he wanted to tell us about our new neighbors but didn’t want to come to our house and be seen by them.

He told us that he’d lived in the same building as our new renter neighbors – hereby to be know as the Skanky neighbors. Well before they were kicked out for not paying their rent!

He told us that the guy had just got out of jail three months ago and that he didn’t work for the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) as he’d told the people that own the home next door. His wife who said she was a social worker hasn’t worked for about two years either. What do they do then … rob houses and do drugs. Yep.

The guy is so low that he robbed his parents house while they were on vacation .. I think that’s what landed him in jail but I could be mistaken. he also broke into his own sister’s house!

Apparently, when not breaking into houses, they sit around their house doing drugs day and night. Everything from crack to cocaine to percocets and oxycontin. He’s apparently into the oxycontin and she does 15 to 20 percs a day.

Now I don’t know if all of this information is true, but Chris knows the guy well that passed it on to us and he has no reason to lie as far as we can tell. Plus as far as I can tell they aren’t working. I stay up late at night because of my pain and I see their lights on as long as ours are. Sometimes when I’m up particularly late, say 4 or 5 in the morning their lights are still on even as I’m heading for bed. People who work don’t stay up to all hours day in and day out. I have no idea how they cope with caring for their three kids!

Obviously the home owners didn’t check out their renters references. If they had he would have found out that they didn’t work where they said they did – or at all, and that would have been enough to decide not to rent to them.

Now we’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. We want to tell the home owners what we know about their new renters (and that they’ll likely default on rental and bill payments as we were told that that’s what they do too), but the home owners are sooooo stupid that they’ll probably tell the renters everything we tell them and tell them that they got that info from us!

What would you do?

For now we’ve decided to just wait and see what happens. If everything the guy told us is true they probably won’t be able to pay the rent soon and that will get them kicked out. That’s what we’re hoping for now anyway.

In the meantime we’re making sure our doors are always locked and that’s it’s clear to anyone looking at our house that someone is home. I mean – if the guy is so low that he’d rob his own parents and sister I’d bet that he’d rob his neighbors too if he thought the house was empty for a while.

Tricia's Musings

This lady has way more energy that I do!

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