It's February

[monkey5s]

And my retirement status is still "pending."

I'm having grouchy-making itchy and painful health issues- nothing life-threatening, just enough to keep me preoccupied. I find I just do not want to do any of the things I need to do, or get up at all some days. Or, you know, get dressed if I do get up.

And today, when I did make it up the steps for a shower, I realized that the chronic problem I'm having with muscle strain in my right upper arm is a little worse. Since I have to pull myself up the steps on the handrail (which is on the right side of the stairs) this makes things even more difficult. Wish I had a shower in the half-bath downstairs.

The cats are all having problems with the fleas- STILL- and Bright Eyes is not quite halfway though her greatly-despised antibiotic for a bladder infection. She's been resisting with extreme prejudice, and I have the claw marks to prove it. Attempts to disguise the medicine have failed, so I really do have to pin her down and jam the syringe into her mouth and dispense the 2 ml of ghastly pink liquid as quickly as possible. Twice a day. In between times the cats all keep chewing at the fleas, which I can rarely find (so they're probably over-sensitized now). This leaves them all looking a bit moth-eaten, with patchy fur on their legs and bellies.

The weather is cold and snowy, and I am happy about not having to go out into it. Except for how I really needed to go out sometime in the past few days to get more cat litter, and I am almost out of tissues. So the past four days now, I've been trying to tell myself I really HAVE TO GET OUT THERE. Hasn't worked yet, but the cat litters are going to have very little left in them once I scoop them tonight. So yeah, tomorrow I will have to shovel my way out to the car and go.

Also? Shoveling snow while using a walker is still tricky. You would think I'd had enough practice by now to be getting better, but no.

Comments

[lavendertook]

Shoveling with a walker should be a Cirque du Soleil routine. How the hell could that NOT be tricky?

Poor kitties and poor you! Bleh. *hugs*

[monkey5s]

I bet they'd make it look glamorous, though. And I bailed on shoveling, just scuffed my way through the 2-3" that had fallen.

[giglet]

Is there any chance you could get help with either the kitties or the shoveling? (In my town, high school kids get community service hours for shoveling retired folks' walks and driveways. And since they can't graduate without several dozen hours... it works out well for everyone.)

[monkey5s]

Our high school kids have one class that requires community service hours, but it has to be through a monitored program (the library utilized many, many student hours volunteering). I'm too young to qualify for Council for Older Americans assistance, and even after my retirement kicks in, I will still be slightly over the official federal poverty level, so I don't qualify for low-income assistance. I have had one young adult from down the block come by when the snow was deeper, a couple of times now, to shovel the way from my kitchen door to the car. He's also the one who has mowed my yard this past summer- FOR CHEAP. He's getting a degree in social work and will be moving out of his mom's tiny house before too long, and I will definitely miss him.

Fortunately my area of town is pretty casual about snow removal (I have a public walk along the front of the property, but no walk along the side street, and I rarely get the front walk shoveled)- and we don't usually have all that much snow here where I live. It's just frustrating, since I used to kind of enjoy shoveling, for the workout, you know?

As for the cats, they scatter and hide when anyone comes around, and trying to catch them while I'm having to use the walker is far more impossible than limping along as we are [pun intended]. The vet's wife already offered to come by every three days to give Bright Eyes her medicine as an injection. I had to tell her that it would be much more difficult to get Bright Eyes into the carrier to wait for the visit, than it is to wait for her to be where I can nab her and lug her to the counter by the refrigerator to wrap her in the towel I am keeping there. Only SIX MORE DAYS of medicine to go!