Refiner

Nearly two years ago I started a break from driving to look after my aging father. At the time he was somewhere between Stage 1 and Stage 2 (according to the chart at Alzheimer's dot org). He crossed over that threshold somewhere around 15 months ago, and entered Stage 3 around December to January. The trials associated with caring for a parent with memory issues never get any easier, and they eat up a caregiver's time. Especially one who was never trained as a caregiver in the first place. At first it wasn't so hard, as I could still leave to get groceries and do errands without worrying about him having a crisis. But as of 6-7 months ago, I couldn't leave him by himself. And even longer than that I couldn't leave him alone with his own dog, Bogey. Since Bogey is a Beagle-mix with all-Beagle behavior, he will get easily bored and will go "hunting" for something to do or someone to visit if he's left unattended. Bogey would usually go to a particular neighbor's place

I finally got Core and have been looking around. As yet, I haven't seen many difference yet, although I have uploaded an author tag. I had started a pool for Core years ago, but nothing much came of it (3 points). I know I haven't contributed much either, but then again I wasn't taking pictures of stuff I wanted to share with the community, or I thought they weren't very interesting for sharing here. I guess I thought wrong. When I uploaded photos of places I stopped at, I started getting responses. Then I had difficulty with the mobile upload process, so I stopped uploading regularly, and would add a few once in a while when I was stopped for enough time to set up my computer (which is a different story). Meanwhile, I hope to utilize the Core features.

I've spent the past 6 months mostly sorting and organizing, cataloguing and storing, and otherwise going through the vast collection of my Mom's. There was a bunch of my stuff I took off the truck to sort through as well, but much of it was finding what mom had gathered over the years, and figuring out how to display or store much of the stuff I've gone through. Before I could start going through mom's collection I had to get the beads out of the way. My bead collection had grown from a two or three 1.5 cu ft boxes to a few stacks of sterilte bins - the ones with handles on them that Wal*mart used to have and no longer carries. :-( At least when I had the chance to get them, I got lots. They fit perfectly in the truck and came in handy for so many things. And when I offloaded a bunch of stuff, I took them, bins and all, and stacked them up somewhere I had access to store them. Then I bought more bins and filled them up. Eventually I would empty a bunch of bins and refill