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, however, if anyone stopped their vehicle on the road and happened to open their door, in he'd go before they could stop him.

I was in a conundrum. No easy way out of this one. Then it happened, Dad decided one day to take his frustration out on me in an aggressive way. A few days later he had no recollection of the incident and wondered why I wouldn't even talk to him. Of course I can't just leave his place, not unless he also leaves and goes to a care facility - which he would never allow to happen. So with some conversations with his financial advisor and with a care giving agency, I was able to hire some caregivers to come out and look after him so I could do the regular things that needed to be done. Things like, paying bills, buying consumables, groceries, horse and dog amenities, etc.

Finally after a couple months, I have nearly a filled schedule of caregivers for Dad. This gives me the opportunity to tend to self-care, vehicle maintenance, and all the background things that still have to be done. In the meantime, Dad has a companion to keep him preoccupied, entertained, and otherwise distracted throughout the day. And by the time the end of his day comes, he's really tired in a good way. He loves being outdoors and doing things, and the caregivers have been out there with him, and doing things for him.

One care giver loves to garden and putters away at the landscaping to keep the place pretty and maintained. And since he likes doing it, I have no problems with him helping out with it as long as he makes certain he is getting plenty of rest himself. The other caregivers are all women and they all enjoy talking with Dad, even if Dad has problems forming his thoughts into coherent words and conversations now.

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 them, and add more bins before I went home again. So I now needed a space for these beads. I'd stacked the bins behind the sewing room door, and that worked, but was becoming awkward because the bins were getting taller and taking up more floor space.

So last July, I tried putting up shelves. That came down rather quickly and I devised another plan -- A freestanding unit. But it couldn't be just like any of my previous shelving units. It had to have shelves no more than 6" wide and still stand upright under the weight of the beads. I had a corner to work with, so I built a corner unit, or rather two units. They interconnect in such a way as to support each other and the weight of the beads. As I was planning my shelf units in August, Dad approached the situation and showed me his lumber room. Oh dear, he had milled and dried a whole lot of 1" shelving for Mom. Now it was available for me. I selected a few pieces to work with. I already had some shelves cut and ready, just needed to notch them for the interconnection. So his boards became my uprights, top, and bottom shelves. Little did I know exactly what kind of wood he had used - until I started working with it. It was heavy, and hard, and the screws didn't want to go into it, even when I gave them a starting hole. The boards I found to be just right were mostly maple! It's one of the hardest woods we have available on the place, and the other wood was apple, another hard wood. I did manage to get them assembled and hauled from the living room floor back to the sewing room and set up. They are not going anywhere, and the corner looks amazing! Beads sorted and shelves filled, I could turn to Mom's collection.

First there the huge doll collection! And she had a lot of them. I was hoping she'd cleared out some over the years, but it appears that she just boxed, reorganized and kept much of her collection. I do know she had traded and sold off some, particularly some Cabbage Patch Kids, BUT I found some of them AND a bunch of their clothes. Oh dear! I pulled every box out of the sewing room closet and went through it. Sorted out the sewing supplies for easier access and set them aside in a couple stacks. I'll deal with them when I have regained more floor space from all the other boxes. Then the dolls.

Removed each doll from the boxes, catalogued and took pictures, then reboxed into a particular size I found to fit better in the closet space. I removed the closet shelf as well. The boards can be used elsewhere and fit so very nicely in the blue room (my old room). The new boxes fit 2x2 across the width of the closet and 5 or 6 of these stacks about 6 high, then the trim that held the shelves in prevents 2 boxes to sit side by side. So I have a larger box to put plushies in (she had a lot of that as well), then 2 more of my standard boxes above. A few thin boxes fit nicely above these and there is very little wasted space. The last spot is left available for something else so I can remove and replace the boxes easily as needed. Every box is labeled as to what is in it. There are a lot of 18" girl and boy dolls and they didn't fit in the boxes she was using, but fit perfectly in my new ones. Then the 20-22" ladies that didn't fit in mine either, so I got a few special boxes that were double the largest dimension so one would sit on top of two lengthwise and still fit side by side with the others and stack the same heights.

As I neared the end of refilling the closet, I tackled two trunks she had filled, her deacon's bench, and two glass display cabinets from her mom. The first trunk was scary as it had a bunch of small china and porcelain dolls on the tray, but after I bit the bullet and dug into the tray, the rest of the trunk had larger dolls. The second large trunk started out looking like it had the same kind of dolls too, but I soon found it to have lots of raggedy Anns and Andys, many of which were 20-24" tall. One of my cousins was very interested in the trunks, so I happily unloaded the trunks and gave them to her for their next adventures.

A smaller trunk was more interesting to me and it fit nicely under the shelving I put up along one wall of the blue room. That shelving, or rather set of shelf units, has traveled from Florida to Washington, and has been set up in 4 places before I finally put it along this wall. In fact, it had been there in a different format when I set it up the 2nd time. Now it will stay. I have adjusted all the shelf lengths so that it spans the entire wall leaving no space at either end. It is really my first two shelf units, with a set of shelves attached between them to make a triple unit using only the original uprights.

I have since cleared the blue room, finished filling the yellow closet, and reboxing all the American Girl doll clothes into the new boxes. The American Girls have two shelves and the top of a dresser in the sewing room and the porcelain Native American dolls I picked up over the years while I was driving have some shelf space there as well. I had to grab many items from Mom's Workshop and bring them in the house so they wouldn't continue to become more musty smelling. The Workshop was one of the buildings I did some offloading when I was home. I could sort it when I was home, then add more stuff, lock it and leave it. Even the Tack Room has been a major project that I've only scratched the surface on. More on those later.

For the last couple months, I've mostly taken a break from the sorting and cataloguing to take on a few of my little craft projects. As I tackle the first deep cleaning of the Wall of Horses has seen in years, I am getting eager to dig back into that hobby and make more of my own harness, and even some wagons. But all of those will be topics of future journal entries.