Category: just life

more of the same: half of the time spent holding onto all the threads at work and the rest just trying to get things done at the in-laws. new hearing aids, bathroom renovations, dentures stuff, physiotherapy appointments, pressure washing the cement floor outside so that it’s not so slippery… the list is endless. the more time one spends there, the more things there are to do and fix.

things are finally settling down with the boy’s father at the nursing home, as the medical staff there found some old-school medication that helps him sleep at night without making him drowsy during the day. apparently it’s something they haven’t used in years and years, and everyone was happily surprised that it seems to work so well for him. i’m just grateful they didn’t give up — and that they had the resources and the patience to keep trying new things. we were so lucky with the place we ended up picking… i don’t take any of this for granted. our senior is still a little lost, but he’s in good spirits, clean and safe and talking about planting potatoes and beans on the gardens outside.

we watched one battle after another, and i finished listening to the correspondent, which was unexpectedly touching. i swam a few times in the municipal pool and took the kid to her swimming lessons too. the last time we were there she threw a huge tantrum over a band-aid that needed to stay on a scraped knee at all costs… but after awhile (and with the help of a really nice cleaning lady, who fetched us a new band-aid), we were back on the water with the class. 😅

and then the sun started shining again and it felt like heaven. i think maybe we had forgotten what blue skies looked like! the whole country feels radioactively green and blue now — and warm, almost impossibly spring-like in what is still the middle of winter. it feels like hope!

but i saved the best news of all for last: WE’RE BACK HOME! it’s for a short period of time only, but i missed all of this so much these past 2 months — the brightness, the birds, my heated blanket, the salt ponds, my bike, the almond blossoms, our favorite restaurants, the local cine-theatre… and most of all, the quietness of life when it’s just the two of us. <3 words cannot describe it, it’s like the world is right again.

another couple of weeks of minding seniors, trying to find solutions for old problems and a way to move onwards. for a while, things were looking up: one of them is recovering ok from the femur operation and the other was kind of stable for a few days… and then suddenly he was very much not stable, with lots of nighttime agitation, delirium, etc.

while trying to change meds to calm things down, we found out he probably has “Lewy Body Dementia”, a type of dementia that reacts badly to most anti-psychotic meds… which explains why we’ve been in the emergency room 3x in the past 2 weeks, all after trying new meds to ease his crisis. everything just seemed to make it worse, and we were at our wits’ end, sleep deprived and pulling hairs — at least now we understand what is going on. now things seem a bit more stable and we have registered him in an old people’s home — let’s see if he gets a spot soon.

it’s been a bit surreal these past few weeks… like a parallel life that we’ve been dropped into. i’m tired and achy and my blood pressure is shot from being on fight-or-flight mode all the time. i can’t sleep because i keep hearing noises and am constantly on high alert, waiting for yet another crisis to unfold. focusing and getting work done feels impossible in the middle of all this — even staying focused for 15 minutes is a challenge.

i keep telling myself this is all temporary and we’ll get through it —  we can endure difficult things for a season of life. but boy, if this hasn’t been a hard one.

a nothing-special week, spent mostly working at home. i went back to the gym a couple of times — mostly just to cycle or walk slowly on the treadmill, to try to give the shoulder a chance to heal. i did a few days of stronger painkillers and it seems to have helped a bit, but now i have some kind of tendinitis in the other arm…? *sigh*.

designed and ordered some christmas postcards, late as is tradition. we saw bugonia in the cinema with a friend and it was so out there that i don’t know what to think of it. we also watched yesterday, which was more of a cozy evening vibe. almost done reading a letter to the luminous deep and read the little wooden robot and the log princess as well, for a bit of a break (it was sweet).

we went to altura to see the european leg of the great world race. the runners were running 7 marathons, in 7 continents, in 7 days… which sounds crazy or maybe just superhuman. portugal’s was their 5th leg after having run in antarctica, africa, australia and asia. whoa.

no pictures this week, so i checked out what we were doing in this day in previous years.

17 years ago, we were checking out a yoko ono’s retrospective exhibition in shanghai (meh).

13 years ago, we were eating chimney cakes in budapest!

11 years ago, i was looking at my messy desk in berlin:

9 years ago was a wednesday and we visited the lighthouse in vila real de s. antónio:

5 years ago, we planted our bamboo in the garden.

3 years ago, we bought a children’s book about a king who wanted to build a wall…

it’s kind of funny to look back on the archive like this. maybe i’ll turn it into a regular thing, a throwback photo post of sorts. :)