January 17

$12 Fast Food

$0 Fuel 

Dinner:  Chickpea Tikka Masala (Instant Pot)

January 17th = UGH!

It was such a typical 2018/2019/2020 day for me.  What sums up these years is infinite disasters and emergencies, all very up/down, but usually nothing much comes of it.  

I made a comment to MH a few weeks ago, "It's a wonder that our parents can take care of themselves at all, any more."  Which I think sums it up pretty well.

Oh but first I do have to back up.  It was probably the best day I had in *years*.  It was so calm and peaceful.  The start of the day, anyway.  I took a very long nap (smart) and tackled some very long put off chores. 

In the morning I tried a new pancake recipe which came out great.  This was motivated when cleaning off the table and finding some syrup packets from some to-go dinner probably 10 months ago.  The pancakes were great and the syrup is gone.  Phew!

Just as I was gearing up post-nap for round 2 of chores my mom called to say she was at the hospital.  Which is horrifying by itself, but during a pandemic with mostly no ICU capacity...  This was just probably some of the worst news I could imagine.  My Dad had to wait for this week of all weeks, to end up in the hospital.

But I was probably more concerned about my mom, who is diabetic and is also not comfortable with driving (nor should she be driving).  She was stuck in the hospital parking lot.  I suppose I could have found someone (or she could have) to drive her home.  But I didn't know if I my Dad would end up hospitalized, so we dropped everything to get my mom taken care of and to give her some emotional support.  Is a 2-hour drive from my city to their city.

I had recently burned off the old gas in the hybrid and only put two new gallons in the car.  We quickly decided to just take the electric car.  Would get us there faster (no stops to fuel) and there would probably be some "Waiting around" anyway.  Figured MH could charge up the car while I took care of my mom.

In the end, my Dad got released about the time we got to their city (and was fine to drive).  Plan A was probably going to be to visit with my parents while MH charged the car. 

It took us about 20 minutes to get to my parents' house, after getting the news my Dad was free, which gave MH and I some time to talk it out and clear our heads.  My Dad just had been in a COVID-filled hospital, my mom must be exhuasted, and they are literally getting their vaccines in DAYS...  I decided not to go into their house at all.  Obviously drove all that way and visited with them briefly.  Just didn't stay long or go inside their house.

We left, grabbed some fast food and stopped at a charger we have stopped at before.  This time it was free if we just reserved ahead.   We needed to eat and I appreciated the pause and time out.  It was 9pm at that point and we got home around 11pm.

I don't really know what is going on with my Dad.  He has heart problems and so overall nothing new.  They resolved pretty quickly (about 6 hours) with meds. 

{Dinner side note: MH had been in the middle of cooking dinner, so handed off to the kids to finish preparing}.

We had some other dramas on this day that made it very 2018/2019/2020. & we had many more days like this in 2019.  It's just been a little more calm on this front (2020) with my Dad home 24/7 and my mom needing less assistance from me.  MH and I have been bonding over this because in 2019 we had often been traveling together to take care of our parents.  Or when I was too buried with work stuff, MH would just go take care of all of them.  If he was helping his parents with stuff, might as well check on my parents too.  We were talking about it recently (it's a wonder they can survive on their own) because his parents were being particularly needy a few weeks ago.