When my alarm goes off Thursday morning, no cats are in bed with me. James did wake me up briefly when I was almost asleep last night, but other than that, they were good. I get up and get signed in and drag myself through the morning routine. My meetings start at 10, but right before 11, the 11:00 meeting gets canceled! So I spend that time resetting the downstairs, proofreading and posting yesterday’s lj entry, and eating my bento box. When I’m done with that, I join my 12:00 meeting and when that’s over, I get changed and go out for a walk. I do my regular route plus go to Kroger to get carrots and berries for the next round of bento boxes.
When I get home, I cool down, sign back in, and get a late shower. I eat my pretzel bites and then I start looking at something for work and get sucked into an actual work problem, where the vendor inexplicably made a bad update to over 14,000 records… but it was like two years ago! Lori and I spend the rest of the workday trying to figure out why. And in between that, my mom sends updates on my dad, who was discharged today… but is still convinced that militia attacks are imminent. He’s glad they made it out of the hospital without the men with machine guns getting to them. He says those men were watching his roommate almost the whole time, so he only went for walks when they weren’t there. Also, they stole his prescription card because they have a scheme where they steal money from Marc’s using people’s prescription cards.
So then my mom showed him their prescription cards in their wallets, and he was confused about how “they” scanned them and put them back so quickly.
He’s also wearing a diaper still but doesn’t seem to know that, and thinks he has an external catheter?! Basically he’s delirious, and my work issue is super confusing, and I’m just back and forth between the two issues. Lori and I do make some headway, but then I have to stop right at 4:30 to eat and get ready to go to Nate’s golf match.
It’s a 45-minute drive to the golf course, and I get there a little before the match is supposed to start. My sister had said we would walk the course, but it turns out they’re requiring each golfer to have a cart (driven by an adult) because this course is much more spread out than a normal golf course. The way they play is weird—Nate’s team is split up into teams of 3, and they play against three players from the other team. They start at a randomly-assigned hole, and other golfers start at other holes, and they work their way around the course in order from wherever they start. So we start at hole 5, and it’s so far away that we have to take the cart there. So Sherri, Nate, Ryan, and I all pile in their golf cart, and Sherri arranges for Nick to ride with Michael (another golfer in Nate’s group of 3) and his dad.
As far as playing, each kid hits a ball, and then they pick the best shot of those three, and then all three kids move their balls to that spot… and repeat. So you really only need one good kid, and the other two kids are just there for fun. The good kid on Nate’s team is Michael. A few times, they use Nate’s shot on some of the putts. And a few times, they use the girl’s shots for really long drives. But most of the time, Michael’s shots are the best.
Then for scoring, they don’t actually keep a running score. Instead, they track total strokes on the individual hole and whichever team does better gets the point. The holes are grouped into groups of 3, and if you win two of the three holes, then you get the “flag”. And the only thing that counts are “flags”. So the whole thing is very strange… and also, we are the only group that doesn’t fit easily on a golf cart, so Sherri, Nick, and I are walking. I’d planned on walking, but I thought we’d be walking with the golfers and we’d all be going at the same pace. But instead, everybody is riding the carts and then the three of us are practically jogging to get from one hole to the next, and even just to get from the tee box down to the green. Also, the entire golf course is full of steep hills, up and down like crazy. So this is way more exercise than I’d ever imagined!! I’m definitely getting sweaty and I’m definitely going to have to shower again! But it is nice to be able to watch Nate play, and it turns out that they're planning on staying an extra day down here. Like, the whole team is staying in a nearby hotel tonight, so they’re going back to the hotel to have pizza and hang out and stuff. They possibly might do something as a team tomorrow during the day. But then Sherri and family are also planning on staying the next night, probably closer to Columbus. They want to come see the cats at some point. I say for sure, and the only other thing I have planned is that I told Rebekah I’d help her with the kids sometime over the weekend… but I don’t have a specific date or time for that yet either. I joke, “so, it’s whoever gets to me first!”
Really, I’ll try to work something out so I can see both of them… but with my sister’s plans not set yet, I can’t very well try to schedule Rebekah around her now, so I will just have to wait and see.
The match ends around 8:30 and we perhaps take the long way back to the front, because if there’s any sort of ceremony or declaration of a winner, we miss it. Sherri takes some pictures of us on the putting green (which is at the top of a hill with all kinds of trees and a beautiful sunset; it really is a pretty course) and then they want to rush to leave so they can get back to the hotel and not miss the team gathering there, so we just say goodbye and I head back.
I get to the exit for my house around 9:30, and there’s a Target right off this exit. (This is not the direction I normally come from.) I still need to get more of a gift for Sophie before Monday, so I decide to just run in and see if I can find a cute Snoopy/pokemon/cat/Lego outfit or toy. I spend kind of a long time looking all over the baby/toddler section, but I find nothing! I’m really not even sure what I’m going to do! I guess maybe I’ll try Kohl’s on my lunchtime walk tomorrow.
By the time I make it home, it’s like 10 pm, and I still need another shower, plus I’m actually super hungry! Like sometimes my evening snack is reflexive, but this time I legit worked up an appetite running all over that golf course. I got about 20,000 steps for the day, and did the equivalent of 55 flights of stairs!
Once I’m done eating, I go out and grab my final wecard, just to help my blood sugar a little bit. Then I go up to get my shower. I skip the toenail meds after this shower. I go back downstairs and start the dishwasher and then I realize that I needed to hard boil eggs for tomorrow’s bento box… but it’s already after 11. There’s no way I’m doing that tonight. I have a 9 am meeting tomorrow for that same stupid project, so I’m going to have to get up and get moving in time to hard boil them before that meeting.
I go into the evening routine then, and I start working on the day’s lj entry, but when I’m writing about my dad, I get re-worried about my dad, so I end up googling delirium after a hospital stay… and I guess hospital-induced delirium is a thing. The good news is that sources seem to say it’s temporary, and now that he’s home, it should improve dramatically within a few days or weeks. The bad news is that sources also say it’s like a horrible indicator of things to come?? Like people who get hospital-induced delirium are more likely to be plagued by problems forever until they just die, basically. Which kind of seems to be the route he’s on, from the transplant to the encephalitis to the hip fracture to now this… so that’s overall very depressing.
At midnight, Susy replies to Rebekah and me, the text I sent Wednesday about my dad: “Is he doing better?”
I reply, “He got to go home today but he’s absolutely insane and my mom doesn’t know what she’s going to do if he doesn’t get more mentally with it”
“Like he can’t remember to take off his pants to use the bathroom and he’s telling her how the whole time he was in the hospital, armed men were shooting at him”
Susy replies, “Oh goodness”
And Rebekah says nothing, not even to rationalize how those armed men might exist in another dimension.
I feel bad about having been away from the cats all evening, and I’m also a little sad about my dad, so I decide to try letting the babies sleep with me again tonight. But by the time I’m going to sleep at 1:45 am (with my lj entry not quite finished), only Jessie has made it up to my bedroom, and she just stood and pawed at the bed frame for a minute or two, I reached down and pet her, and then she seemingly wandered off.