Déjà vu

The nursing home is now permitting friends and family to visit the residents with some restrictions: maximum of 2 people, visits take place outside under the canopy for drop-offs, 6-feet apart, masks, 20-minute limit.

Before everything changed, I visited 2 people in the nursing home on Sunday after church. One is a man, a member of the church. At first he was in the assisted living section, and then the Parkinson disease that put him there got worse and he was moved “upstairs” to the nursing home facility.

I met Louise by accident. I had gone to visit a woman who is the mother-in-law of the daughter of a woman at church (did I get that right? Yes). She was there short-term to recuperate from a problem. Louise was her roommate and was reading a book from a stack of books that the activities director had got for her from the library. So I stopped to visit with her a bit about the book she was reading.

The next week I went back to see the “mother-in-law,” but she had been discharged home. Louise was still there. I had won a drawing for a book give-away from the library and had finished reading those books. I wasn’t interested in keeping them, so I took them to Louise to read. And that was the beginning of what I see as a lovely friendship.

Then the pandemic hit. The nursing home locked down, and no visitors were allowed. The library closed, so there were no books coming to the nursing home from the library. Louise was climbing the walls with boredom.

So I collected books for Louise that I thought she might like from my own bookcases and dropped them off at the nursing home for the activities director to give to her to read. My friend Judy, who owned a used book store, also collected books from her storehouse to give her.

I made an appointment to see Louise, and they wheeled her out, with the aide carrying the last sack of books I had given her to read. I was so glad to see her.

We started to visit and to try to catch up, and about that time, a man on a tractor began roaring back and forth with mulch in the bucket that he was putting around the trees in the front of the nursing home. The noise made it a little hard to visit, but I did enjoy seeing her; 20 minutes was not long enough.

Then Saturday morning, I met Judy for coffee at the small plaza-park across from the pizza restaurant in downtown. The plaza is sandwiched between two 3-story buildings, and it is well shaded in the morning. And then whadda know: a man on a large lawn mower came roaring up to cut the grass of the park part. We had to suspend conversation while he did this…

As Yogi Berra said, “It's like déjà vu all over again.”

A pat on the back

Some years ago, a publishing company invited me to be a copyeditor for a new journal they had acquired. I got the invitation because I had done a good job on a previous journal for them, so I knew going in that I was "good enough."

I accepted.

Their customer, a very important major medical association, is incredibly fussy, and the negative feedback began pouring in. 

Usually, I was being gigged (gigged? A large fork hunters use to impale frogs, fish, etc) for minor things, but the criticism was pretty devastating nonetheless. Seemed like no matter how hard I tried, there was always something wrong. 

Once in a while I would get a "Good job" remark, but not often.

I cried a lot. Richard put signs in my office to encourage me. About once a week I vowed I was going to quit, but I didn’t. 

I got an e-mail from them yesterday:

It’s very rare that I work on a post-edit review and don’t have a single correction to make to it. I just worked on an article that was so perfect that I said “Beautiful!” and had to know the copyeditor—it was you… I just wanted to thank you for your great work…

Well, I just about cried again, but for a different reason. And today there is a lovely essay on this very topic on Pocket…

You really can make someone's day happier by offering a bit of praise.

Time for Plan B

The score is in for round 1 of the contest between a determined...

and very clever animal... 

and the human (me) who is attempting to outwit it. 

Animal: 1, human: 0. 

First, it climbed the tree and pulled down on the cable, which caused the feeder to slide down next to the tree and it could get to the sunflower seeds,

I put a stop to that by putting a clothespin on the cable to keep the feeder in place.

Then, it did an upside down tightrope act down the cable to get to it.

I thought I had fixed that when I strung the cable through the empty soda bottles. Silly me.

Today, the raccoon destroyed the bird feeder I was attempting to protect. True, it was already somewhat damaged, but I had fixed it enough so that I could still hang it.

Now it is beyond repair.

I am very tired of the game, and tomorrow I am setting up the live animal trap when we get home from church. Since it is out now in broad daylight, I hope to catch it early in the afternoon.

I can only hope that it is not so clever that it figures out what will happen when it goes in for the food.