NEW MOTTO...WINE, THEN WORK

After our trip to Napa Valley, it was back to the grind.  A full week of work for me (since I don't usually work Fridays, but decided to see patients yesterday), and four days for Ray.  Ray was smart to take Monday off.  There is no way he could have returned home at midnight and then woken up at three am for a day of work.  I had maybe seven hours of sleep but with the time change, I was dragging.  I didn't let my patients know though!

A week passes, I meet a friend/patient of mine for twenty plus years for lunch to talk about and compare our notes from our vacations to Napa, go to the grocery store, try to get dinner at a restaurant but our order wasn't put in in a timely fashion so we had quick subs, and all of this to prepare for today.  A Saturday drive to a winery in Front Royal.  The owner of this new business/winery is the son of the woman that videotaped our wedding twenty-five years ago.  He grows a few grapes on her acreage at her Lake Anna house in Bumpass, VA (where we also own a house) and more grapes in PA.  We felt we should take the drive to Front Royal and support the grand opening.  And of course, taste more wines.  Four tastings and a full glass later (full glass for me since Ray was driving), we bought two reds (I happened to really enjoy Miller Winery red wines, and it seems my tastebuds are changing.) to take home with us.  We stopped for a greasy burger, greasy chicken sandwich, greasy fries and frozen custard.  We also stopped at The Apple House (a Front Royal icon since 1963 located in Linden, VA that is a huge gift shop and restaurant near Skyline Drive and the Shenandoah Mountains) for warm apple donuts.  (I have lost two pounds of the eight I gained on vacation so far haha)

Once home, I delivered a gift to our neighbor (a fourth grader that brings our mail in while we are on vacation), and here is when Ray put me to work.  Time to prune those shrubs.  Ugh.  Rose bushes.  Every rose has a stinking thorn.  Ten days ago I was at "The Stinking Rose" for dinner in San Francisco.  Today, I was getting stuck and poked by my rose bushes (why I kept them when we re-landscaped three years ago, I haven't a clue except for that I didn't want to just kill them).  Ray got the worst of it, since he wasn't wearing gloves.  But alas, the end result will be that pruning needs to be done now.  Fall season is here--my favorite (and I will miss it).  Then winter comes (and I will not miss the cold).  Next up is Spring. Then the For Sale sign goes up.

Warm apple donuts

The Apple House

Only the best meal with tons of garlic from this restaurant!

Poked and stabbed by all of these thorns

RATIONAL THINKING? WHAT ARE WE THINKING IN THE FIRST PLACE!

With it being the day before we take off on vacation to Napa Valley, Ray and I decided to pay Carly a visit and take her to lunch.  It has been a beautifully, sunny day with temperatures in the seventies.  When we left the house at ten am, it was just about sixty degrees with a brilliant blue sky and some big, white, puffy clouds (cumulus clouds from what I remember).

Wish I had taken my own pictures since we drove on some beautiful country roads today.

We put the convertible top down and set off on an hour long "Sunday" drive.  With fall being around the corner and the brisk temperatures arriving yesterday (after a week of ninety degree temps), I made the comment to Ray that in his mind and if he has his way, this could be his last experience of Virginia's fall season.  I told him that while I know rationally what we should do if the house sells next summer, I cannot predict what will actually happen and won't think about it just yet.  I told him that I will, of course, go along with what makes sense and what seems like the right thing to do.  But I also told him that I cannot say I know the answer to what we will do when the house sells which is why I always start my sentence off with "in your mind" or "if you have it your way".  His smart aleck response was the reason I really think this way must be because he is the rational one.  Whatever. Moving/retiring to Panama is rational?  Haha.

 I will just enjoy as many fall days in Virginia as I can get, and when I am chilly in a restaurant or wearing flannel pajamas in the winter with my heating blanket on, I will think about the warmth and tropics of Panama.  And my visits to Virginia can always be during the rainiest time of the year in Panama (being the fall season here).   I think this is quite rational of me.

TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF EXERCISING AND BREAKING IN NEW SHOES WITHOUT BREAKING ANY BONES

Walking.  Simple enough.  Thursday night I arrived at the lake house before dusk and decided I would hit the road for a walk breaking in new walking shoes.  We are going to Napa in a week, and I would like to think that after tasting and really drinking lots of wine, I will walk around the block a few times at our resort.  So I bought some lightweight shoes that won't be too bulky to pack or to wear on the plane.  I need to break them in first though.  Being that yesterday I was off from work and the next three Fridays I am either working or on vacation, I decided to drive to the lake house Thursday night.  I have not arrived to the lake house and stayed the night by myself in many months--it was super quiet!  Gorgeous weather outside, too!  I dropped off the groceries, put on my walking shorts and new shoes.  I grabbed my phone so I could "map my walk", and off I went.  I noticed that walking downhill I was getting a blister on the back of my right foot and on tops of a few toes, but I still had pep in my step.  When I approached the chain that keeps cars that don't pay community dues or belong in the neighborhood from driving up to the pier, I decided to take that pep in my step and hop over the chain.  I should have just walked around it.  My new shoe got caught on the chain, and down to the ground I went.  Fortunately, I landed in the grass area and not on the rocks.  I managed to hold my phone upright so as not to shatter the front but landed on my elbow (one knot there).  I braced my fall with my left hand since my right was holding my phone and my elbow dug into my chest (second knot on my hand and bruise on my chest).  While falling and hitting the ground, I found my right elbow hitting into my right thigh (bruise there) and my mouth hitting my phone.  NO BROKEN TOOTH--whew.  Just a swollen upper lip.  My left knee took a big hit (third knot there) and my right chin bone landed on a small rock (bruise).  I fell, and yes, I could get up.  Walking back with my knee bleeding, my blisters aching, and my lip feeling swollen was not as invigorating as the walk had started out to be!  But there was one task I still wanted to do while daylight, and that was to rake up some old leaves from a tree that has been losing its leaves for about a month.  This lasted fifteen minutes, and I threw in the towel.  Once in the house and showered, I iced my elbow, lip and knee.  I am hoping my knee doesn't get a new bony protuberance like I have on the other side of it (from a fall in Sweden).

Yesterday morning was brisk.  I was in no rush to get outside to walk by 7:30 am.  I had made the decision to go for a walk in Lake Anna State Park (I am a glutton for punishment) but knew that I could go a little bit later in the morning.  Lake Anna State Park is a state park that was initially the site of the Goodwin Gold Mine (gold was discovered at the site in 1829).  Later, the land was host to Lake Anna which was a reservoir created to serve as a coolant for Dominion Power's nearby nuclear power plant (the park is twelve miles from the power plant).  The lake was formed in 1972 by damming up the North Anna River, and the state park opened in 1983.

I had some sore muscles (bruises) and still some knots.  I put together some wheatberry salad for a cookout that Ray and I were going to at the end of the day.  It was 65 degrees when I ventured out to the park.  It is a twelve mile drive.  I turned it into a forty-five minute trip by taking a wrong turn and then passing the turnoff for the park.  Oh well, a beautifully sunny day with the top down, and I wasn't in a hurry to walk in the new shoes again.  I finally arrived to the park, and using an honor system at the gate, I put four dollars into an envelope, took a parking pass, and dropped my money into a slot.

 I knew the trail I wanted to walk (Sawtooth Trail--2.5 miles, and it looked as if it would drop me off close to the beach), but I couldn't find the entrance to the trail.  I walked over to the office, the girl looked up from her IPhone after a few minutes (hated to bother her with my mundane question), and she had to take out the trail map to help me.  Oh dear.  She told me to park in a different lot (she sent me towards the campgrounds, but I figured out after another wrong turn that I wanted to drive towards the cabins), and the trail would be right there.  Which it was.  Off I went.

I should have dropped some gingerbread crumbs.

Just me and the trees (and one sweaty jogger)

 I had bandaged up my toes and heels, put on bug repellent, wore a hat to prevent ticks from falling into my hair and had my sunscreen on.  I dodged horse manure, tree stumps and overgrown roots.  Ray asked me to be careful.  I didn't stop at any of the fitness marks (I didn't want to do chin ups, sit ups or walk on the balance beam--pictures below), there was a bench that looked promising, but I kept moving on.

This piece of wood was for some sort of stretch or toe lifts and hamstring something or other one can do prior to a good workout.

Balance beam

Calf and Hamstring stretches

Another calf stretch

Sit ups

In middle school I could hang and do the chin ups for quite a while, but I could never do those pull ups

More my liking, just raise your arms and stretch (I did this while walking)

Is the park looking for the gymnast in me?

Jump.  Jump.  Jump.

This is an elbow squeeze (this could also be done while walking)

Rest after all that fitness!

 My bandage on my heel came off.  My shoe was rubbing my blister.  After two miles of walking a moderately hilly trail, I literally limped and hobbled my way out of the woods.  But where was my car?  If I had kept it parked in the first spot (before being told to move it), it would have been right  there.  Nope.  I took my right shoe off and walked down the road.   A little concerned that my two plus mile walk was going to turn into a three hour tour.  About five minutes of walking more, I found my car right where I had left it.  I had just come out of the woods a little farther down the trail than I should have (do to the hobbling, I lost my sense of direction haha).

It was just this close to the start of the trail.

Me coming in from the street.

 Still such a beautiful day, I decided to find the beach.  I have been to this park one other time with Ray and my Lake Anna roommates five years ago.  Ahhhh.

Found the beach, sat in the sand, drank my water and headed back to the safety of my home.  It took me under twenty minutes to find my way home.  I raked more, pulled weeds and decided I really just needed to rest a bit and have some lunch.  Exercising is so overrated.  I had to get some energy back for the cookout we were going to.  And of course, my neighbors across the water brought up Panama.  And quite surprisingly, this group was very eager to hear our stories and have us tell them what we have learned in the eighteen months we have been researching our retirement to Panama.  I wonder if they play cornhole in Panama?

At the start of my walk, I felt determined and strong and that I could be all that I could be (like this tree just making its way how it wants to be

At the end of the walk, hobbling along broken until I found the beach!

WHAT NOTS

Taking our realtor's advice, Ray and I rearranged some furniture in the house this past week.  We did it now mostly because the painters are coming and will need a little more access to one room (the office was becoming a pig pen where everything got thrown off to), but also because we need to fill up the living room a bit.  I think I have written before that my parents had collectibles that my sister and I no longer have a clue as to where they came from (and did we ever?).  Perhaps from my dad's travels.  Neither one of us share his love for the Orient, but we now have many artifacts from the Far East.  When moving a shelving unit (that also looks like it is Asian) with all of these big and small "what nots" stored on it, I told Ray there were a few things I had to bring to Panama.  These are the things, especially the turtles,  I remember my dad straightening out in the shadow boxes and on the shelves (with his undiagnosed OCD disorder, but we teased him about it stating he passed it on to me haha).  These are just a few of things that I remember my mom complaining about with all the dusting she had to do (maybe she maybe them crooked on purpose).  My dad was a meticulous straightener.  He was not a duster.

The blue bottles are a totally different memory.  I was in fifth grade, and my school was having a fundraiser around the holidays.  My mom, the previous summer, had been injured in a car accident and was not having a good year at all.  We had just moved into a new house, and my parents had the main level half bathroom decorated in a red, white and blue scheme.  I wanted to buy the blue bottles for fifty cents, and my dad criticized me for it.  Why would I want to spend my $5 on fifty cent blue bottles?  I wanted to help decorate the bathroom for my mom (I was nine years old).  So I bought them and gave them to her for a Christmas gift.  They, too, collected dust on a glass shelf that was mounted over the toilet in the bathroom.  For years and years, they sat there.  The tiny polka-dotted wallpaper came down eventually, but the blue bottles still stayed on the shelf (I forget what the new color scheme was).  Then one day, when I was away at college, my mom called me to tell me that while my dad was, I think, changing the innards of the toilet (or trying to fix it somehow), he lifted his head up and bumped it into the glass shelf.  A bottle came down and broke.  After years of him straightening the bottles, and after years of my mom dusting them, he broke one tall one and the lid of a short one.  He was devastated.  We had, for years, talked about how he admonished me for wanting to spend my money on blue bottles.  And yet those bottles were the best gift ever!  They came with a great story and a great memory. And when he broke one, he was so sad.  So he moved the bottles to the ledges of the window in the kitchen.  It made sense.  The kitchen was now red, white and blue, and the bottles caught the light of the sun.  And dad didn't straighten them as much, but he could see them everyday.   So those blue bottles go with me to Panama, too.

Another thing we found in the office was the empty box to my laptop.  The blue bottles might be too wide for the box, but you can bet there will be another box just for them.  This is where I will bundle up these small figurines, pack them tightly with bubble wrap, and hope they make it to Panama safe in my suitcase.

The shelving unit which now looks like it would make a great tv stand.

The "what nots"

Infamous blue bottles with a missing lid

MY TURN

I have been keeping a close eye on my Monday schedule waiting for someone to fall off of  it right after our lunch hour.  I have blocked time off to get my fingerprints done in two weeks, but I was hoping to get them done sooner (since Ray just completed this task last week).  A co-worker told me that she "lost" her two pm patient (meaning the patient canceled), so we slid my patient over to her column and blocked my two pm slot with an "event".  This way I could slip out of the office right after my one pm patient and get to the courthouse.  Easy enough.  I knew the routine since Ray had just been through it. I left my cell phone in the car, and without my asking, the Sheriff announced to me that fingerprints were still being done.  I just needed to go around the corner and take a seat on the bench.  I rounded the corner at 1:45 pm, and there was the line up.  Actually (whew), there was a woman and her two children in front of me, and I don't think the children were getting their prints done.  Once she went behind the closed door with the police officer, another woman came up to me from the wrong bench and sat next to me.  I thought long and hard about letting her go next, but she said she wasn't in any hurry and was just happy that the Sheriff was now directing people where to go.  When she arrived, no one said a word to her, and this is why she sat on the wrong bench.

Once I was behind the closed door, the Sheriff mentioned to me that Stafford County would finally be going "electronic" with its fingerprinting.  This way our prints would be locked into the system and easy to look up when necessary.  He asked about where I would be working.  I forgot that people would be going to have their prints taken for new jobs.  I told him I wasn't there for a job.  I was there for an FBI background check.  I told him Panama required this if I wanted to try and obtain a Residency Visa there once I retired there.  He said, "Panama."  He told me to live in a quiet part of Panama, and he also told me that if there was any shaking up going on there, "to just come home".   I found that last sentence very interesting, because while the US will always be home to me, I hope that I can be comfortable enough in Panama eventually to call it home, too.

NEXT. STILL GETTING OUR DUCKS IN A ROW.

In Stafford County, fingerprints are taken at the Stafford County Courthouse on Mondays only from 1-3 pm. Ray drove to the courthouse today, walked up to the building but half way up he remembered "no cell phones", walked back to the car and then back to the building, walked through the metal detector, and was directed to sit on a bench.  He was number three in line (no wonder with all of that back and forth!) to get his fingerprints taken.  A Sheriff stepped out into the hallway asking who had the card filled out.  Ray asked if he could get two of the cards, and walked back to the car for his glasses to be able to fill in the blanks (name, social security number, birthday, address, place of employment, height and weight).  Once he had done his exercising for the day (remember he just had gallbladder surgery, and this was a bit taxing haha), he reported that it only took minutes, and he had two cards filled out with his fingerprints.  He picked up two cards for me so that I could leave work at lunchtime one Monday in September to get my fingerprints taken.
The Sheriff told him to have me use moisturizer daily before having the prints taken, since we have read that healthcare professionals tend not to get the greatest prints due to the constant washing of hands.  Our hands are more dry, so moisturizer helps with getting the ink to stick for better prints.  For our Residency Visa, we now have our pension for life letter and the start of our fingerprints.  Keep checking the list twice and scratching the "To Do" items off one at a time.

Ray's prints.

CHOLECYSTECTOMY

In other words, that cholecystectomy word in the title means the surgical removal of the gallbladder.  The gallbladder being a small organ that aids in fat digestion and, also, concentrates bile that is produced by the liver.  We can tolerate having or not having our gallbladder.  This morning,  Ray lost his.  He has no problem with this since he has had about eight gallbladder attacks since January.  He had a mild one late yesterday afternoon, so today's surgery couldn't get here any faster.  We were lucky enough to have the surgery scheduled at Stafford Hospital which is brand new and about fifteen minutes from our house.  There was a five car accident on I-95 North this morning which didn't get in our way at all, thank goodness!

With the short commute, we arrived to the hospital early, as usual, checked in at 5:30 am, got Ray prepped using two nurses (one was being trained on the how to's of this hospital), an OR nurse, an anesthesiologist, a nurse anesthetist and the surgeon.   The double and triple check with Ray occurred with questions being asked such as what he was having done, who he was, why he was there, etc.  At 7:30, they wheeled him away, and at 7:45 the OR Nurse put the call into the front desk nurse to tell me that it was "knife to skin time" in the OR--let the games begin.  I had a light breakfast sitting at a table for two in the sunlight downstairs, headed back upstairs just in time for the "he is in recovery" call, and then the surgeon came out to me and said "it all went great".  Within thirty minutes, we were being given Ray's discharge information (mostly what pain meds to take and when).  Once home, I dumped Ray on the couch (okay, I placed him there), he passed out, and I ran to get the prescriptions filled (the people in his mom's hometown of Tazewell, VA would love bartering with him over that Oxycontin!) and onward quickly to shop for the things people after coming out of general anesthesia need to eat (jello, soups, bread--we have no toaster since I gave that to Carly on Sunday, and Sprite).  Basically, he will be eating all normal things once the anesthesia wears off completely.

Then my daughter came over.  Well, she drove the hour it takes to get here, and we purged through all of her "classroom stuff".  The stuff had been put into boxes and totes and bins earlier this summer.  These are the things she wants to fill her sixth grade classroom with next week.  The two of us took many trips to her car to get it loaded up (Ray can't lift more than ten pounds for the next six weeks, can't swim in the lake for the same amount of time, and he is off work for two weeks), and off she went about five hours later.  For me, it was a great day!

Now while I was sitting in the surgical waiting room for about ten minutes (after my enjoyable peaceful breakfast in the warm sunlight), I was, of course, thinking about Panama and picturing myself in a waiting room there.  I thought about hospitalizations.  And illnesses.  I was thinking about our friends, Clyde and Terry (www.Alongthegringotrail.blogspot.com), and the medical conditions and circumstances they have been through with their retirement in Panama.  She had a hysterectomy performed in Panama City, and he broke his toe on the cruise ship while in Columbia and had to have surgery there.  I had a slight panic attack thinking about the surgeon coming out to me wanting to speak Spanish and realized that the doctors in Panama City are, many times, US-educated (and many speak English!).  Or so I have read and been told this by a number of people who have already retired there.  Then, I straightened myself out, went back to my happy place of sitting in the sun reading my Kindle a few minutes earlier, thinking about how Ray was in great hands here in Stafford and how much better he will feel now that the small organ is gone.  And I also thought (now my big girl pants have been put on) that if Ray and I find out that we need any surgeries or procedures performed when in Panama, we would do our research like we always do, ask people questions, ask doctors questions and proceed from there.  Like with everything (this two plus year plan for retirement comes to mind!).

 I can't predict what will happen tomorrow much less what will happen when we get to Panama, but I do know that I need to take this one day at a time, one big girl step at a time.  For now, Hakuna Matata (no worries).  Time to dispense those pain meds!

Just a tiny little organ.