Omens

We're back from London.  We went for a week long trip (10 days actually counting going to Los Angeles from Albuquerque and back again.)  I am exhausted, I lost 2 pounds along the way (now I just have to continue losing.)  I've got lots of photos - over 300 just from the London New Year's Day parade that my granddaughter, marched in - She was part of the All American Cheerleading Team (1000 cheerleaders - mostly girls but a few guys as well.)  The parade lasted 3+ hours in 30+ degree weather (but it was clear with very little wind and no rain like the day before.  I'll be posting about the trip as I get pictures sorted out and put the house back together. But for a while, it seemed as if the fates were telling us not to go.

For two months we had things go wrong - first John (my husband) started fainting - no reason that could be medically determined - he'd get a cold sweat, feel nauseous and then faint. After numerous blood tests and EKG's nothing was determined. He quit taking his blood pressure medicine and has been testing it at least once a day since and it's been reading good. If it goes up, he takes half a BP pill.  We finally got the go ahead to go to London one week before we had to leave for LAX to catch the flight the next day to London (we flew to London on Dec 26 so we flew to LAX Christmas day.)  That was just the start of the drama.  Two days after he gets the okay he tells me he has a tooth going bad. Very bad timing as we had to be in at 9 am  Santa Fe to get the filter put in the car that the dealership had to order back in November plus finish the last minute shopping.  John called the dentist at 8, they said they’d have to see if they could move appointments around and call us back. They called just as we were about to walk out the door (and I was on the phone with my TOPS co-leader.) They gave us an appointment at 1:10. We got to the dealership at 8:59 and we’d been told it would take 2 hours.  Pressure building.

Now our shopping wasn’t a one-stop deal.  We had to go to WalMart, drop off eye-glasses at Eye Associates for donation and go to the Boot Barn to get John some new jeans. 

Luckily it took just under an hour to get the filter replaced.  Then it was run to WalMart. Finished there fast then down to Santa Fe Place (a mall.) I parked near the entrance I wanted and left John in the car – the temperatures outside weren’t even in the 30’s and John’s arthritis was making his walking slow and painful.  When I got in I discovered that Eye Associates wasn’t there anymore.  But, I saw that Boot Barn was. So I trudged back to the car tossing the glasses in a trash bin on my way out (I’d been on a major declutter binge getting ready to have my father for Christmas Dinner on Saturday and I wasn’t going to bring the clutter back into my house!)  So I got John and went back into Boot Barn, where, at first it looked like they didn’t have any his size, even the floor staff couldn’t find any. But John persevered and found two pairs miss-filed – either someone had been playing games or the stocker was dyslectic.   So mission accomplished – we got the jeans and avoided another stop along the way.

We made it to Wendy’s just after they did the turn for lunch and got back home in time for John to brush his teeth, let the dog out for a few minutes, then cage her again so we could go to the dentist.

At the dentist we found out that he had a tooth where the nerve was dying.  That meant a root canal. But we were in luck – an endodontist  was in town that day would see John at 4:30.  So it was back home.  Then I mentioned to John that we ought to go shopping today because I didn’t know if we’d have to go back to Santa Fe on Friday to get the tooth worked on and we already had an appointment at 9 to get our dog, Peaches, her bordatella vaccine.  We were home long enough to let the dog out and put her back in her cage.  We did our grocery shopping went home, released the hound, put away groceries and rested for about 30 minutes before we had to leave for the second dentist appointment of the day.

We locked up the dog for the last time that day and went back up to Los Alamos (we live in White Rock a “bedroom community” on the mesa below Los Alamos proper.)  They took John in fairly quickly and then he was there a long time.  When he came out he told me that Dr. Kahn had done half the root canal, he’d drilled a hole in the side of the tooth, drained it and left it open.  He gave John pain pills and antibiotics and we made an appointment for the 10^th of January. Later that evening, John thought he might be having a reaction to the penicillin as he had an upset stomach.  I asked him how much water he'd drunk when he took the pills.  He told me a few sips.  I told him he needed to drink a full eight ounces with the pills and made him drink some more water.  Eventually he felt better and never had any more problems. Whew!

I had to go back either Friday or Saturday to the grocery store and I gave our favorite checker his card on my way in.  I’d been teasing him ever since the last Christmas by telling him how many months were left until Christmas starting on Jan 25. (I really like to see people’s expression when I tell them that there’s only X-number of months before Christimas – and that checker used to groan and say “Don’t tell me that!”.)  In July I started making Christmas cards so he was then hearing how many cards I’d made that week.  Somewhere along September or October, I told him he was getting one of my cards.  But when it came time to give him one I found  I’d given away all my fancy ones, so I checked my supply of cards and found a Happy New Year’s Day card and gave that to him with a note inside saying I bet he thought he was getting a Christmas card.  When I came back through his line to check out, I asked if he’d opened it and he said I’d “got” him.  He expected a Christmas card but was fooled with the New Years card.  Mission accomplished.

We had a nice dinner with my father on Saturday and, like a very good girl, I cleaned everything up and washed all the dishes before we went to bed.

Sunday morning I got up at my usual 4:30 a.m..  After feeding the cats, getting my day’s pills together, and fixing my coffee, I started a load of clothes.  I was washing more than usual because I wanted to get things clean that had been sitting in either a drawer or hanging in the closet for a year or more.  Then John came out.  [We’d been noticing a wet spot in our dining room carpet that came and went periodically.  I thought it was either a cat or dog “accident”. I’d noticed it was wet again this morning and put some paper towels down. ]  John started feeling around closer to the “wall” of the breakfast bar and found moisture – 15-20 feet of it. And it reached the bookcase at one end and seemed to be going under the book case.  You know what that meant – we had to empty the bookcase (which is actually two book cases.)  It only took about two hours to empty the bookcases and with, emptying two of Mother’s photo albums onto the bed in the guest room, we were able to come up with 13 book boxes (1.5 cubic feet) and one larger box that was as wide but twice as long as the book boxes. So the equivalent of 15 book boxes is now stacked in my clean dining room full of paper and hardcover books.  We moved the top bookcase on to the big buffet and pulled out the large book case.  It was wet only part way under an antenna wire had been run to the bedroom by the former owners (over 27 years ago) but wasn’t connected to anything.  Apparently the bookcase pressing on the antenna wire allowed the water to seep under it through the carpet.

John pulled up a strip of carpeting about 18 inches wide the length of the wet spot and down to our bedroom.  Then he had to cut out an additional chunk, another 12 x 18 inches, where the water stain  we’d been seeing for a while was.  He dried the area and told me I could wash one more load.  I gathered the colored clothes that we absolutely needed cleaned and ran them on a small load.  No leaking. 

I washed dishes by hand, didn't use the disposer and we took a bath that night and again, no leaking.

But omens kept coming.  Monday morning (Christmas Eve) I wanted to check the weather – there was supposed to be a storm coming in that might give us some snow. I wanted to see if we should make hotel reservations and go down to Albuquerque early to catch our 12:40 pm flight the next day. So I turned on the TV to our usual station.  The weather was still kind of iffy.  Then I went on with my usual routine and also packed up the pills I’d need to take with me. That’s when I noticed the TV wasn’t on and I hadn’t heard it in a while.  I didn’t remember turning it off, but I grabbed the remote and turned it off and on again.  Then I noticed the burned electronics smell.  Yep!  The main TV was kaput!

When John got up I told him about the TV (it wasn’t too big of a catastrophe for me but I told him we WEREN’T going to get a new one when we took the animals (the dog and two cats) down to Pet Suites to be boarded.)  I wanted to leave by 8:15 to get the animals down there so we could come back and pack (avoiding most of the cats hiding ‘cause they KNEW what was going to happen if we started packing before we crated them.)  But John, in the meantime, moved the TV we used in the computer room to record video tapes of shows that come on at nine pm (my bedtime) or later or are on opposite something else we like to watch to the living room and needed my help to lift the burned out one down and the computer room one up to the place where the other had been. Neither one of those suckers is LIGHT-WEIGHT! Then John had fun trying to get the wiring right to get it working.  But he had to wait until we’d taken the animals down.  .  [Note: both of those TVs had sparked before letting us know something was wrong.  The big one in the living room got hit with a nearby lightning bolt and the other just decided that it wouldn’t change channels using the remote.  It will change channels with the remote now because the cable goes through the DVD player not the TV. But we have had fair warning that it is not in pristine condition.]

We had to make another stop at WalMart and then back through Santa Fe (not using the by-pass because it would come out beyond the only bookstore in town and I wanted something to read while flying) to Hastings to get some books and check for dressy trousers for me.  Got three books for me and one for John, didn’t find the trousers but I wasn’t worried, I had something else that would work.

We stopped for gas when we got to White Rock then home to a very empty house. It’s amazing how much presence our animals have in our house.  We did get snow on Christmas Eve but not enough to be a hazard for us.

Thus ends the saga of omens trying to convince us not to go to London (except for the hour and a half delay for a check-in engine light that wouldn't go off to be fixed on the 747 out of LAX to Heathrow. Don't really want that show up when we're half way across the Atlantic Ocean so I'm glad they fixed it.  As it was we were only 1/2 hour late in landing at Heathrow.)