5/30/24

 Thursday, May 30, 2024

I was in bed a little after 9 p.m. but was back up at midnight, realizing that again, as every night, I had forgotten to take my 10 mg. prednisone pill with dinner.  I got back up and took it, along with a vanilla muffin.  And as again as usual, I was pretty much wide awake in the middle of the night, neither sleepy nor tired.  I read two articles in The Atlantic, one by Charlie Sykes about DJT's Truth Social postings during the 'hush money' trial, and one by Zoë Schlanger about the mystery of cloud formation, structure, and dynamics.  By 1:30, I returned to the bedroom, not sure of my ability to fall back to sleep.  PSs at 3:40, 4:22, and up at 5:17, tired, to let Lilly out.  An unrestful night.  Prednisone? 

My overnight steel-cut oatmeal cooked for about 8 hours on "low" but was still good, with the delicious raspberries,  blueberries, and vanilla yogurt.

At 6:39 a.m., as I unsuccessfully tried to nod off, the train moving through Bayside sounded its loud warning and I thought of Hank Williams:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill / He sounds too blue to fly

The midnight train is whining low / I'm so lonesome I could cry

I've never seen a night so long / When time goes crawling by

The moon just went behind the clouds / To hide its face and cry

Did you ever see a robin weep / When leaves begin to die

That means he's lost the will to live / I'm so lonesome I could cry

The silence of a falling star /Lights up a purple sky

And as I wonder where you are / I'm so lonesome I could cry.

It reminds me that I want to watch again Ken Burn's documentary on Country Music, which I enjoyed so much on first viewing.  It reminds me also how much I enjoyed listening to my Country Women playlist as I started painting again the other day: Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris, Roseann Cash, Martina McBride, LeAnn Rimes, . . .  A month ago I was wishing I were dead, this morning I'm thinking of Dolly Parton's Why'd You Come In Here Lookin' Like That and smiling.  Why'd you come in here looking like that? / In your cowboy boots and your painted-on jeans / All decked out like a cowgirl's dream / Why'd you come in here looking like that? Thinking of Patsy Cline singing Willie Nelson's Crazy, two great artists. He wrote it but she owned it, like Kris Kristofferson's Me and Bobby McGee sung by Janis Joplin.  KK wrote it, Roger Miller recorded it, but Janis owned it. The lyric "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" reminds us of the dual nature of relationships.  They tie us down and restrict our freedom of action but how empty life is without them.  Andrew Lloyd Weber, Love Changes Everything. Funny the things one thinks about just from hearing an early morning train whistle.

Prednisone, day 18.  Sleep problem, voracious appetite, some stiffness and discomfort in both shoulders, but good ROM.

Geri's knee surgery is today.  She says she is not nervous about it, and it appears she has slept well through the night,  but I of course am nervous about it, as I am about any surgery, especially one with a general anesthetic and especially one on any 80-year-old patient.  The drop-off time at the Orthopedic Hospital is 11:30. . . . I went to pick her up at about 4:30 with all apparently having gone well.  We got dinner at McDonalds and pick up a proscription at Walgreen's on the way home.  I have to pick up another one at at 8 p.m.  She is using a walker.  Deo gratias.

LTMW  I see a neighbor on his bicycle running his dog alongside him and I wonder whether that much running is good for the dog.  On my shepherd's crook, I see a brilliant yellow male goldfinch and his female partner still collecting cotton for nesting material while goldfinches, house finches, chickadees, and a song sparrow are enjoying breakfast on the tube feeder.  How interesting the two feeding styles of the birds are.  The chickadees fly onto the feeder like a flash, nab one seed, and dash off to open it and get at the meaty kernel.  The goldfinches linger on the feeder until they have eaten their fill, at least temporarily, one seed after another.  They aren't easily scared away by the arrival of most other birds or by nearby distractions.  A downy woodpecker munches on the diminishing suet cake.  Our beautiful little flying dinosaurs are fascinating.

I watch what I initially thought was perhaps a mating ritual between two house finches, the apparent female, briskly frisking her wings, accepting a seed from the male.  Now it seems like this apparent female may just be a fledgling being fed by its two parents.

At 8:30, a group of 4 adult walkers stroll by on Wakefield, one of the men pushing a stroller.  It's 53° and sunny, I should get out with Judy or Rachel, but I'm pooped.  I want to snooze.  It's approaching 9 o'clock and Geri is still sleeping.   We will leave for the hospital in 2 hours.  More walkers with their strollers and their dogs.

Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts.