Hello whoever you are!
It seems as good of a time as any for another random blog post describing random aspects of your one random-wheelchair friend's life! There can only be one by the way, if you happen to have another wheelchair friend there's a decent chance I'll have to behead them someday, it's just the way the legend works.Anyway, the good news is the updates I have today are mostly good news! Also, saying "good news" twice in one sentence wasn't nearly as much fun as I thought it'd be, oh well.
Tess' Health
If you've read my past few blogs or talked much with us in the past 2 years you've likely heard about Tess not feeling well. As a brief recap, last year if Tess even vacuumed the house it would leave her sore for days. We've seen a bunch of doctors and haven't ever really found a specific condition or catalyst.Tess has been taking the supplements suggested by Dr Herzog (the doctor from the end of my last blog) and we're having good results! The best evidence is how much yard work Tess has been able to do these last few weeks. Last week she unloaded a full trailer of mulch-compost stuff and spread it in the flower garden by herself in like 3 days! Last year at this time doing like a hour of that work would have destroyed her for a week. She was still sore this year mind you, but it sounds close enough to regular amounts of sore to me.
Tess does still have phantom days where it's bad, or her stomach feels very wrong, or her head hurts with no seeming solution. So we're still trying things and continuing a healing journey. We're happy to be in your prayers still :). But overall I'd say she is a lot more functional than before.
Yard Projects
As mentioned above, we've been doing a handful of yard projects. And it's been fun! Which part of me thought was odd. I remember even a few years ago when I'd ask neighbors what they do with their free time, and they'd say stuff like "yard work", and I'd say "no, your free time, what do you do for fun?" and they'd say "I don't really have any of that" and I'd feel sad for them. Well, Tess and I have all sorts of things we do for fun, one of which is play video games together. But it's funny because most of the games we play together are things where we can work on projects and improve our game environment together. Take Stardew Valley for example, a game where you inherit your grandpa's farm, and work to build it up. I think I enjoy games like that because it's fun to work with my wife to improve our circumstances, even digitally, even recognizing it's meaningless improvement. If I could actually go weed with Tess in our actual yard, that would be sweet! I can totally see the appeal! So doing yard work can totally count as what you do "for fun" in my book now. Even when neighbors or family come help do the work I'm useless to do currently, I still get the same sense of satisfaction at my space being improved. So as a side note, thanks neighbors and family that come help with random stuff!Anyway, our improvements thus far this year can be divided into three main categories. Patio, Edging, and Grow Boxes.
Patio
We had First Mountain Construction pour a path and concrete patio in our yard. So rather than having an awkward L shaped grass yard, we now have a rectangle of grass, and a big concrete patio that's shaded by our house during the evening. We're excited to use it more! Although social is a little harder during quarantime.I took the week off work when the patio was getting poured. I posted a handful of progress pics on Facebook, but basically we turned this
Into this!
We've learned a lot about doing such a project, and hopefully it's knowledge we won't need for decades since we have no intention of moving basically ever. But we love our patio! And our ramp outside the side door so I can easily go outside!
Grow Boxes
This project I don't have as much to write about since it's just getting started now. But you can see in my patio photo that above the patio is piles of dirt on black stuff, it's the start of our grow boxes! That black stuff is landfill quality weed barrier that you have to cut with wire cutters. It's like the plastic mats in your car, no joke. Our awesome ministering brother made his nice looking grow boxes, and wants to help us make our own! One of the things that excited Tess about owning a home is being able to garden. When we first moved out it was a little too deep into the season. Last Summer Tess extra felt crappy. This Summer we needed to tear out the old boxes to make room for these projects. So hopefully next Summer nothing crazy comes up and Tess will be able to get into it for real!If you zoom in on the picture you can see a bunch of pipes coming out of the ground, we had sprinkler work done so we can have 7 separate 8-foot long grow boxes with their own watering lines. The piles of dirt are because 5 of the 7 grow boxes will be 2 feet tall, so they are easier to weed. We're keeping 2 of the boxes short so we can plant tall things like corn. We'll probable fill the space between the boxes with sand. it's going to look great when we're done.
Edging
The last project this Summer, edging! The owner of our home before us didn't take particularly good care of the yard, and last year we weren't really able to even keep up with the weeding. At this point, the grass has really grown outside of make-sensical bounds such that it's literally right up against tree trunks or deep under overhanging bushes or growing into flowers or what not. It's a pain to mow, and looks messy. So Tess has pulled the grass back a bunch, put 8 inch tall plastic spacers into the dirt to prevent the grass from spreading even underground, and added a paver edging. It looks so nice! Here's an example of a small area out front before
and after
Tess has finished about a third of the yard. This project also has a sub project of "ok, but if grass isn't there, weeds will just grow in, right?" To which Tess has tackled the research project of finding appropriate low maintenance ground cover plants that she likes the look of that will actually grow in the different areas we're clearing out. She seems to like it.
Corby's Health
It's important to support your spouse in what they are doing right? So recently decided to support Tess in her health issues by having health issues of my own! Mostly bladder stuff. I tend to get a bad urinary tract infection (UTI) about once a quarter. I specify a "bad UTI" because even more frequently than that I seem to get the types of symptoms that UTIs cause, and I'll take supplements or sleep extra or drink apple cider vinegar or what-have-you and seemingly fight it off for a week or two. But once a quarter or so I seem to get one that we can't knock except with antibiotics.
We don't like using antibiotics if we can help it because the bacteria builds up a resistance to them, so you have to take stronger antibiotics, which the bacteria also builds up a resistance to, and so on. It starts an arms race of sorts and the bacteria always wins in the end. For most people this isn't a terribly big deal. Because say you can only take antibiotics 100 times in your lifetime before the bacteria becomes immune to our petty medical since and murders you. Most people will have a deep sickness or surgery or some random thing like every 5 years at most, and so you'll take antibiotics around 20 times in your lifetime, and ultimately something else will kill you before bacteria gets a chance. Me however, if I start today with 100 remaining chances, and I take antibiotics 4 times a year, that means I'll die before I hit 60. Tess already has nightmares about me dying and her being a widow, and every time I get sick she gets deeply sad.
Toward the end of last year I had a UTI which they said is resistant to antibiotics and had to prescribe something harder. If I'm already at such a point, that's extra no good! My urologist still seems to think using an antibiotic every time is no big deal. We've searched for new urologists but of course all the ones that we want to see are out of network for my insurance. Dr Herzog, who helped Tess, suggested we get an Ozone machine, which hasn't made it through FDA approval in America but seems to be having great success outside of the country. We did a few treatments with Dr Herzog and it seems to help, and one doesn't build up a resistance or anything. It's amazingly difficult to purchase a can of oxygen to use with the ozone machine, but we've hopefully overcome all the hurtles, and we're going to try that.
Besides that I'm generally happy and healthy! I'm just more light headed than I'd like to be, but that's been a problem the whole time I've been Gimpman. It'd be another great thing to solve.
Quarantine
Not many people have heard about this, but I guess there's this strain of virus going around called Covid-19, and health guidelines have been generally to social distance. Weird right?Ok, even living under a rock, I'm sure you've been affected by the pandemic. Because rocks don't wear masks, silly rocks. I know the economy is struggling, and people are dying, and freedoms may be being taken away, and political opinions are getting super inflamed and diving people... But at a personal level, Tess and I kind of love quarantine!
Social
The hardest part has been people obviously. We cancelled most of our caregiver help because we didn't want to be the intersection where 10 different families all infect each other, so we reduced it down to just the 3 guys who help with my bowel care. This means we haven't got to see the other 7 families and connect with them weekly, and it's sad.Also, we used to average inviting a couple over once a week to play games or have dinner, and we haven't been doing that either. Also sad, because there are so many great people in our lives. Even pre-quarantine I already felt like we basically invite people over once and then never have them over again even though we'd love to, because we're having some other couple over for the first time. So now that we've taken 4 months off without inviting literally anyone over, it feels extra like we don't see friends as often as we'd like.
However, this stuff does have positive sides!
1- Tess and I have a bunch of different things we enjoy doing together. So it hasn't been painful at all to fill our usually social evening with more together time.
2- We've been able to connect with different people better during our strolls, more on that next section.
3- We feel more like a true married couple than we ever have before. Since day one when we got married I had people coming in to get me in/out of bed so Tess didn't have to. This is something we do love, but it does have the slight downside of making our schedule really rigid. By having help, I'm already asking someone else to interrupt their life at 9:30 to come be of service to me. If it's 9:20 and we're 20 minutes from finishing a board game, I generally don't want to call and delay the help, we just finish the remaining 10 minutes the following day. But now that Tess is putting me in bed, we can just stay up and finish! It's a silly thing, but it's really magical. So to an extent we really like it.
Church
I know some people hate Elders Quorum and relief society, or going to church in general. Tess and I are weird I guess because as long as there isn't some particularly painful teacher that week, we generally enjoy church. Two hour church has been great, but I do slightly miss having the EQ connection every week. But church during quarantine has been great! We generally wake up at 9, but stay in bed and snuggle while we listen to conference talks or Come Follow Me videos. Sometime after getting up I'll read the Come Follow Me manual to Tess and we'll discuss (note, we read the chapters generally after dinner during the week). Then Tess will play the piano while I sing a church solo, or we'll do a hymn. Then I'll bless and we'll partake of the sacrament. So the amount of church listening/reading/discussing we do any given Sunday varies from like 60 to 150 minutes, but it's personalized and includes snuggling and is all around great!We've made a habit of going for a stroll (Tess strides, I roll) every day, usually shortly after dinner. We did these last year too, but this year whenever we see people outside their homes we stop and talk. We make sure to go to different areas in our ward boundaries so we have chances to run into different people, and it's been great! I feel like we are connected better with a bunch of people now than we were when we only saw them at church. Part of that is because at church there's only like 3 minutes between sacrament and the next meeting to say hi. Or even if it's after church people have their kids nagging them to go home. When we visit at the home though, nagging kids can just go play, and there's no time cutoff to chat! We average talking to about 2 different families per walk, and our previously 20-minute walks now take like 60-90 minutes, but it's been a great social supplement.
So yeah we kind of miss church, but having the flexibility of time, and the personalization of the discussions, and the added reason to connect outside of church has been nice. Note we do recognize that most of these good points can continue even when the quarantine is over :D.
Temple
Ever since like a month after we got married Tess and I have served at the Oquirrh Mountain Temple on Saturday afternoons. With the temples closing, it's actually been a little magical for us too, because it meant we have that 6 hours of Saturday time back. It's essentially turned every Saturday into a holiday for us! Since the only time in our married life we've ever had a full day with no work and no church and no obligations has been on random holidays. But now, it's every weekend! We do try to generally do some family history or something productive on Saturdays still, but whatever we do doesn't take nearly as much time, and doesn't mean we can't sleep in :).We of course miss the temple, I still strongly believe that my life is blessed as result of our service there, and we always feel happier after being there. When given the opportunity to go back we'll happily resume. But have you ever had someone ask for a bunch of your time, but then later they cancel for whatever reason and you're off the hook, and someone says "well, you're still blessed for being willing!". It's like that! I still feel like we're blessed for the time we did spend, and because the Lord knows we'd be there if it's open. But it's like we're double blessed because we also get to have the time back anyway!
Also, we feel like we may be still be experiencing what we call "the temple effect". Last year, when Tess was extra unhealthy, some mornings before the temple she felt awful and wasn't sure she'd be able to go. Or I'd feel light headed for whatever reason and be skeptical I can serve well. We would always go anyway, and invariably we would always feel super healthy at the temple, to the point where sometimes we'd even start making plans for what we were going to do after the temple while feeling this good. But then we'd leave the temple and go back to feeling more or less how we felt that morning. So basically the temple effect is a healing boost we feel while serving in the temple. With us not being there, Tess has really felt like it's still been active for her, and that's why she's been able to keep up getting me in and out of bed so often. We do plan to ask for help again once the pandemic dies down, but we've been blessed to be ok during anyway.
Misc
Quarantine really has been fun for us. We've been able to make a bunch of progress in our yard, we've been able to connect with different people in new ways, and we've had a bunch of fun in general. I guess I never mentioned that I'm of course able to work from home. Vivint's revenue is mostly monthly subscription based, so while we did have our share of layoffs, and work has stayed more intense this Summer than it usually does, (we're trying to recover lost ground), I've been able to keep my job, and I'm grateful for it.I also was able to refinance my home from a 30-yr 3.75% down to 25-yr 2.875% loan, so my monthly payment shifted like $6/mo, but I took 5 years off of my mortgage and overall I'll have spent $51,000 less on interest.
Tess and I have been keeping track of how many 1v1 board games we've won against each other since the quarantine started. At one point she was up 7-15! But I've caught up and currently it's 28 me 27 her. We always assumed we were pretty evenly matched, since it felt for the most part like we go 50/50ish, and it's fun to have this small sample set proving it.
Tess has made a bunch of progress on her book "My Husband Is Lame" and I'm excited for one day when we actually can share it, but that's probably over a year out.
Also we had the crazy idea to make a board game! I'm sure almost none of you have ever played the board game "Arabian Nights", it's like a "choose your own adventure" book but in board game form. It's not strategic at all and it's more about just making choices and seeing what the outcome is, and it's a lot of fun. We've decided to make a medieval fantasy themed version of the same concept, and it's a fun project! But also I'm sure won't see the light of day for at least a year.
Anyway that was quite a life dump! Thanks for reading!
