I warn you now: this is going to be a boring post.
It's early morning, Joisey time. Jet lag keeps waking me at 6:30-ish every day. Which really isn't so bad as it will make it easier going back to Paris if I'm not sleeping until 2pm Paris time.
My mother is doing remarkably well. With a major surgery, like knee replacements (doubles!), it's impossible to predict in advance how well a patient will handle the pain, discomfort and difficulties, and my mother is a retired RN and sometimes medical people make the worst patients. But I'm really proud of her because I know she's sometimes in a lot of pain but she's doing what she needs to do anyway. Like daily exercises on her own, several times a day. This week (starting today) she has a new home physical therapist coming and I think that will accelerate her recovery even more. She needs more strength in her legs before it's safe to give up the walker -- although yesterday she walked from her bedroom all the way down the hall WITHOUT IT, just bracing her hand along the wall as she walked, and she didn't even realize what she'd done until I screeched: "WHERE IS YOUR WALKER?" The look on her face was comical and just showed that she is starting to get stronger. But she's not ready to dance the lambada quite yet so she needs to be more prudent. There is also a home health aide coming, a very nice woman, twice a week to help her with taking a shower and she does some light cleaning as well.
My roles in all this are as follows: chauffeur (for two doctor appointments this week), errand-runner, food-shopper, lottery-ticket-buyer, medication-picker-upper, laundry-doer, meal-preparer, pill-supervisor, and also the entertainment committee. I had a little time yesterday to go out and do some clothes shopping while the health aide was here, and Thursday I plan to visit a good friend who is recovering from breast cancer surgery. But as busy as all that sounds, it actually doesn't seem to take up all that much time, really. And so... I've been bored.
But there are times when being bored is a good thing. I've been leveraging my boredom to really immerse myself in my Secret Summer Project in my business and it's going VERY well so far, although there is still so much to be done and I just can't seem to get it all done fast enough! I suspect that if I were back in Paris I would not be making such good progress so I want to take full advantage of being virtually trapped in North Jersey to crank out as much quality material as I can (you'll thank me later -- if the SSP ends up being of interest to you, I mean).
Therefore I'm rather grateful for the boredom. I seem to have really kicked the American TV addiction during my time in France, and I'm watching only marginally more TV here than I do there -- for one thing, every channel seems to be talking about Michael Jackson and to be honest, while I enjoyed his music when I was younger, I didn't feel that "bond" that so many people seemed to feel (he was just too bizarre for me, I guess) and I'm just over it already. I do feel badly for his children and I hope they'll be well with their grandmother. But the world moves on and life goes on and I've got better things to do with my time than sit glued to the over-saturated American TV media.
So it's just about filling the downtime with my work. And because I'm excited about the project, it doesn't feel like "work" at all. Bring on the boredom! The more, the better!
And now... time to make the morning coffee.
