Magnolia, you sweet thing

I did a double take when I walked past the internal garage door late this afternoon. The reason for this is that my next door neighbor finally lost patience with having to sweep out his garage every morning. You see, he operates a sign writing business from his garage & the detritus from his Magnolia tree is not very conducive to attaching decal type signs to vehicles, which 90% of his trade is.

To be honest, I'm not really upset about losing the tree. Yes, Magnolia's are beautiful, but only if they are in the middle of a field, some considerable distance from the nearest house. When you have a 50 footer that is not much more than 10 feet away from 2 houses, its a pain. The branches, until I pruned them have rubbed the paint off a substantial part of my garage roof. The leaves don't exactly help when they clog the guttering up most of the time either. So, I'm not sad to see it go. I won't have to sweep the courtyard so often either. What I will have to do though is split up a whole heap of firewood, because I scored the trunk. Whats even better is that its cut to convenient length & has been stacked on my side of the fence nice & close to my wood bin. I don't know how good it will be, but I have plenty of Pin Oak & kiln dried pine to mix it with, so it should be fine. It will all keep Jude warm for the winter anyway, which is all that really matters to me.

We are now giving Jude 2 different tablets for different reasons via her peg tube. One lot we dissolve & put through at the start of her morning meal. The other, Amitryptelene, we give her as she goes to bed at night. The early one is no problem as it all gets flushed through with her feed, but the evening one has taken a bit of sorting. See, the Amytrip doesn't dissolve all that readily, so we have taken to putting it into about half a syringe full of water at least an hour previous to her bed time. If you draw air in as well, it allows you to give it a vigorous shake to dissolve it properly when you are ready to administer it. The other thing that I figured out today & did for the first time tonight, is put enough air into the syringe to flush all the liquid through the PEG tube. Common sense I know, but it took me a few days of worrying about her not getting a full dose to come up with it.

I'm glad it's not just me. I have been really worried about a lack of energy & a general lethargy for the last week or so. I've wondered at it's cause. Depression, the weather, altered medication have all crossed my mind. It's been really bad. All I have wanted to do is sleep. So I have. Nothing has changed but at least I'm not alone. Jude's caregiver told us that she feels the same way as well. If I can summon the will power & actually drag myself to do something, I'm OK, but it is really difficult to even summon the energy to take the dog for a walk in the mornings. That I do grit my teeth & do. She gets really disappointed if I don't & it's good for my health as well. Or so the Doctor tells me anyway.