Rusty's Armory

Re-awakening

Posted on September 22, 2022

The political silly season is upon us again, and partisans on both sides are getting more strident in their posts and comments.  I have resigned from the discourse.  My mind is made up and I need no further rhetoric.  With me, it is easier to thread a camel through a needle than it is to refrain from politics, and comment on religion, to use a religious metaphor.

Well, there is the weather.  In Texas, we have gone from an unbearably hot summer to a miserably hot Autumn. But recent rains have broken the drought, and the verdant weeds on my one acre of paradise are mocking me, daring me to mow them down.  They will soon be abused of that insolence.  No, really.  Soon.  Maybe in the next day or two.  Maybe three.

Ill health is another.  Quite frankly, I am feeling much better than I did for the preceding five years.  So good that the cardiologist is sending me to cardiac rehab, where they put you on an exercise machine and try to kill you.  If they fail to do that, the next time they speed the machine up.

Snookums had both mini-strokes and a major stroke and is on the long road to recovery.  A speech therapist has been working with her, and now she is reading some, and seems to be much better at complex tasks.  Monday, she goes in for a full cognitive assessment that will take four hours.  I am anxious about that.

But her recovery from the point she left the hospital until now has been remarkable.  I admit that the day I brought her home, I was so discouraged.  She constantly inquired about things that she asked just moments earlier.  She could only hold about five words in her mind.  I wasn’t sure that she was going to improve.  The speech therapist got her to reading her Kindle again, and how to enlarge the type and turn it to landscape mode.  Snooks hates the work she must do, but I see small improvement after each session.  So perhaps she will be moved back from senility to functioning. 

This week I think my niece and her are going to try and make challah bread for Shabbat.  Snooks was doing that when she had her stroke and ended up crying with burned fingers and burned bread.  She went to the hospital later.  If this works, it will be a milestone in her recovery.

And the days go by in my geezerhood.  Once you earn the title of geezer, there is only one title left to earn. RIP.

So as I consider my lack of better alternatives and relearn to write again, I bid you a pleasant good morning.