"I can gain weight just listening to dinner music." - Ron Dentinger

Not much at all happened around here today and we needed this Sabbath.

We left Seattle a little after 2 p.m. yesterday with the folks both safely tucked away in their chairs ready for some much needed rest. About two hours earlier we'd brought mom home from Northwest Hospital with a new pacemaker that promises to solve some of the pretty serious problems she's had for the last six months or so. A pulse that consistently drops into the 30's...not such a good thing.

But the journey that began at dinner last Wednesday five hours after our arrival, moved from there to the E.R., and concluded with her discharge Saturday was emotionally and physically challenging for all four of us. For mom and dad, both 93, it will take more than one day to recover.

I think the most remarkable part of the four days was the divine providence clearly evident. We'd planned this trip weeks ago, not realizing it coincided with my brother & his wife's trip to Mexico, meaning the folks would normally have been without family within 300 miles. We got there at noon Wednesday and at dinner saw she was clearly in distress. We drove her to the hospital where they kept her overnight for observation, that allowed them to see her heart rate fluctuating wildly, and a treatment plan was put in place. As we prepared to bring her home and return to ours the doctor determined that plan wasn't going to do the job and she needed a pacemaker, which required another night in the hospital. We extended our stay, the pacemaker was installed, we got her settled back at their place, and then headed to ours, about seven hours before Mark & Mimi returned from Mexico.
Yeah, the timing for everything was Perfect.

Since our return...

• I found the remaining Buff Orpington dead on the floor of the coop. We weren't at all surprised, and six hens instead of eight will still give us more than enough eggs. The coroner placed time of death somewhere between 2 and 4 p.m. Friday.
• I see no more evidence of the carpenter ants! I haven't been up in Fred's loft, but the steady fall of detritus that was coming down onto the floor below has stopped. I'll crawl up in the loft tomorrow and poke around. 
• This afternoon I brought the 12 boxes of my books home from the storage unit. Tomorrow I'll measure them to find out how many feet of bookshelves I need, and Tuesday we'll drive 90 minutes up to Aurora to buy used barn wood for the shelves. This place looks really cool, and I'm a little afraid of what will happen when Pam sees what they have. Check out some of these photos. I'll also get the wood to enlarge the weathered glue-lam that will be my desk. 

Add together Donald's and Hillary's "unfavorable" ratings and you get 121%. (Trump's are 2% higher.) That's the highest number for the two nominees since they started tracking this. By a wide margin. 

Bob Dylan turns 75 Tuesday. Go ahead, sing Happy Birthday to him. You'll sound at least as good as he would. 

"Don't take (name of drug) if you're allergic to (name of drug)...."

And how are you supposed to know???

If you were paying attention you noticed that fetching those books was the only thing of consequence I did all day. We didn't even go to church this morning. (Gasp!)

I've got to get it back in gear tomorrow.