Funny old weather

Today it is bitterly cold but the sun is shining.  We had a couple of very wet days followed by a dry and warmer day now it is very cold and sunny and tomorrow is going to be even colder.

My husband is doing OK.  He keeps getting feverish but it comes and goes.  They told him to take Tylenol to help.  We go back on Wednesday for a post op checkup and a visit with his cardiologist.

We set up the monitor which supposedly transmits at night when he is sleeping.  The loop recorder was implanted at the same time as the ablation procedures were done. Haven't heard that it isn't working so am assuming it is.

He isn't feeling quite as good as he first was and I have noticed his nice pink colour has gone and his lips are bluey again.  Hope it is only temporary.  They say it takes 3 months for the scar tissue to build up which should stop the errant signals causing the afib and atrial flutter.

Going to watch a couple of American football games today, these will decide who goes to the Superbowl.  I am hoping the KC Chiefs go through. Go Chiefs!

January is always a bit of a blah month for me.  I need a project.  I have been resurrecting my darning skills and darning some socks but it isn't my favourite task.  My neighbour's grandson and his wife are expecting a baby so I have been checking out yarn online.  Walmart has reduced it's stock of yarn so not much choice there.

Timer to start preparing lunch so off I go.  Stay warm everyone!

My husband's heart procedures were done yesterday

He was on the operating table for four hours. The doctor spoke with me after and said it went well but it takes 3 months before they can tell if it has worked. They implanted a loop monitor in his chest which monitors his heart all the time and records any anomalies and transmits them and an EKG every evening. Pretty nifty in my opinion.

He started with a temperature last night so he has to stay in again tonight and they will review again in the morning. He is sleeping a lot but has eaten today. Yesterday he didn't eat at all.  I can stay in the room with him, there is a chair that folds down into a bed, not the most comfortable but I am grateful to be able to stay with him.

Hoping his temperature goes down so we can leave tomorrow as the weather turns nasty on Friday and I don't want to drive the 150 miles home in the freezing rain and snow.

I have played an awful lot of practise scrabble games in the past two days.

Differing views on retirement

This is a bit of a reflective post and may not be of interest to anyone else but I wanted to get it out of my head and onto paper so I won't keep worrying about it.

My husband and I have differing views on retirement.  Both come from our upbringing.  My husband's family had a lot of farmer's in it.  To his mind you work until you drop dead as did many of his ancestor's.  My husband never went into farming but he has had several businesses over they years.  When we moved here 15 years ago there was a lot to do to reclaim the land etc. and although we have dabbled in enterprises our main focus was on our place.

My family all worked in paid employment for a living where they worked until you were 65 then retired and enjoyed what was left of their life.  I always had paid employment, never my own business except I did used to prepare tax returns for payment in tax season on top of being employed.  When we moved here I worked for about a year then retired. I was 56.

My husband was first diagnosed with heart problems shortly after moving here, he was 60 and had 3 stents placed to open up his blocked arteries.  He had already been diagnosed with central and obstructive sleep apnea and neuropathy and after that he was diagnosed with auto immune disease and diabetes.  He had two of the stents clog up again and was restented then had another stent inserted.  He got sepsis and recovered. Now over the past couple of years these other heart issues have manifested.

All in all, he is not a well man.  But will he retire as such.......No!  Even though he can not do much physically he is writing books to self publish in a bid to make some money.  He has written books before but never published them, some of them are in manuscript form and some are on floppy discs which we may never be able to recover. 

I help as much as I can by reading and reviewing and some editing but he is doing most of it.

For me, taking care of him, the dog and the house takes up pretty much most of my time and I have no will to try and earn money on top of that.  We eke out our money, pay all our bills and eat pretty well.  Actually, keeping my husband fed is almost a full time job. 😀 For all his illnesses he rarely loses his appetite.  He likes his three meals a day and usually two of them are cooked.

I doubt he will ever stop trying to earn money or work on fixing the place up and I worry that he will be like many of his ancestors and work until he drops dead.  He is 75 now and as such doesn't have a lifetime left but will he ever retire?  I doubt it.

All done and dusted

Well, that is not quite literal as no dusting has been done yet but all the Christmas stuff has been taken down and put away.  I took the time this year to reorganise my totes as things had got quite mixed up.  Now I have outside lights and the big outside ornaments plus inside lights in one, stuff that I really don't bring out anymore is in another, what I used this year for the tree is in another and all surplus tree ornaments in another in case I ever get a bigger tree. These are back in the workshop.  I have a tote full of handmade ornaments and my new nativity set which will be stored indoors.  The tree stays indoors too, it has been taken apart, wrapped in clingfilm to keep it nice and tight so it could go back in the box.

I had made much more effort this year and really enjoyed having the Christmas tree and lights etc. up. Hopefully I will feel up to it again next Christmas.

We went last week to the VA hospital for my husband to have the cardioversion (heart shocked under anaesthetic). It took 2 shocks to get his heart back into normal rhythm but alas it didn't last.  He went right back into atrial flutter the same night.

He goes for the 2 ablations on the 14th, it will be several months after before we know if it has worked because the scar tissue has to build up in his atrial chambers for it to stop the misfiring of his heart.  It isn't guaranteed but hopefully it will work.

Meanwhile, we plod on and are grateful that it is winter and the grass doesn't grow because he could not do much outside right now.  I think last year was his last hurrah for doing manual work.  He accomplished so much getting the work done on the house and landscaping.  That might have been the cause. He has had arrhythmia for quite some time but it certainly escalated last autumn (Fall) to the point that he gets so out of breath all the time now with the slightest exertion.  His sleep is interrupted with it too. He really isn't very well right now

I can do a lot of the mowing but I am not able to do any hard physical stuff as my knee gets so sore.

We are debating on putting the house up for sale again, we will know better after he has his heart procedures.

Oh the irony!

Yesterday, New Year's Eve, I made myself a treat.  Scotch eggs.  Now for my British blogger friends these are easily available in the shops and therefore probably not deemed to be anything special but here in the US you have to make them if you want them.

The first time I made them here was in October 2017 when we purchased an air fryer, it was the first thing I made in it.  The second time I made them was yesterday and the darned air fryer gave up the goat.  It made some weird noise and then quit, right in the middle of them cooking!

The irony is, Scotch eggs were the first and last thing cooked in it.

I did finish them off in the oven and they were delicious.  I made three, one for yesterday, one for today and one for tomorrow.  They should get me by for another year or so.

I will not be replacing it, it was quite big and took up a lot of worktop space.  We have since purchased a microwave combi type oven that has a convection cooking setting so I will use that in future.