This week has been an up in a few ways. Since Fall, Joe has been down physically and therefore down mentally too. His ongoing disease EMS has been joined by high blood pressure, borderline diabetes, diverticulosis, and other polysyllables. Then he injured himself in December doing his stretching exercises and has two slipped disks (which is why I was so please with Jose's link to Jerry Colker's website, since Jerry had two slipped disks and has evidently overcome the problem quite well--I am going to write to him).
About a month ago he got back into the daily stretching exercises with hopes of adding the half-hour walk once the weather clears up a bit. He has tried to exercise in the morning when I'm at work--so my ears don't burn with all the cursing--and do housework before I get home. It's a push, and he is aching everywhere and cramping all through the evening, but the sense of accomplishment keeps him smiling through it.
Every few days there is a down day, like today, when he cannot push beyond it and lies down most of the day, but they are few any more. Wednesday, my day off, we put the den back together:
In September we replaced the sliding glass door in the back with a really nifty one by Pella. We rolled up the rugs, moved the furniture, and all that stuff before the guy did the installation. And we had never put the room back together. Wednesday we did. And Joe is a neat freak, remember. He vacuumed several times, mopped the floor with the Swiffer three times, and then we marked the floor for the rug. We had decided to move it closer to the fireplace, which involves, for him, triple measuring, putting down masking tape to mark the rug and couch placement, rolling out the pad, getting the bumps out, rolling out the rug, getting the bumps out, and vacuuming of the rug. No small task with an 11"5x 16' Karastan oriental.
Of course, once we got done and were exhausted, Joe decided it would be better to move the couches closer to the fireplace. Oy! [Or as we say in Esperanto: Oj!]
But the good news is that the den looks like a den again, and Joe is smiling, and I am smiling. It is really becoming rough, because even with the disease, he refinished our floors in the other house and painted all the rooms among other things, and now he just doesn't have the energy that he did.
