Conquering Naniland

I'm going to blog more often again when I can organize myself to be able to use my computer again. I finally have the padding figured out to be able to stay in the current wheelchair without pain. There is a support post for the back of the chair that hits my tailbone in a way that pushes it in and up. Remember, I use a wheelchair because I have little to no movement in my legs and hips, so moving around to relieve the pressure is not an effective "easy fix." Add to that it took a while to identify what point in my body the pain was coming from and what part of the chair was responsible for the pressure.

So now that I know what kind of padding and where I need it, I can spend the day in my chair. Now I have a new problem to solve. The mechanical base necessary to make the chair do what it does makes it too high to fit under a table. That doesn't just mean I'm challenged setting up a computer working area but sitting at a table to sort through papers or bills without things dropping all over the floor or eating a meal present obstacles. I also don't go out much. As much as the chair is supposed to give freedom and mobility, I don't like going places alone anymore. Sitting at a table in a restaurant when I must tilt the chair forward to reach the plate is pretty embarrassing. The humiliation is still there, but it's easier to deal with if I'm not alone.

I started physical therapy on my legs. In the over a year to get the chair including 5 months that I couldn't sit in the old chair that caused my out-turning hips, my legs and hips have become too weak to use a slide board or to stand and pivot. I just started in-home PT with the therapist showing David and the 4 aides that are here most often the exercises so I can do them every day. My immediate goal in the next few months is to be able to use a grab bar to stand for just a little.


Television

I love the ad for the Volkswagen Atlas! It's set to The Birds and The Bees and starts with the Beetle rocking with steamy windows and the young couple upgrading as their family grows after seeing the new cars "rocking." They show you the source of the rocking in the Atlas; a family of five with a dog and squealing happy kids. I think the ad is incredibly sweet.



I've read articles criticizing the use of innuendo or nitpicking that innuendo. Oh please! It's a cute way to show 5 different models of different sizes selling the largest one as a family car. Is it risqué? Um, considering that drugs for erectile dysfunction are on TV in all their "you know you want it" glory and the Go Daddy girls, no, not risqué at all. And as far as nitpicking "logical sense," it's a commercial not a drama. -eye roll-



The Handmaid's Tale

I decided not to put my book reviews on The Chronicles of Nani. I still post my few lines of non-spoiler thoughts with my rating at Good Reads. I'll link to those reviews here if you'd like to read them.

I just finished The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwell. I gave it 5 of 5 stars. You can see my review here: my review



That's a little bit of what's going on in Naniland, a world I must conquer daily. But I do conquer it!

Here’s A Chair For You

Hi! Thanks for visiting my cyber coffee shop! Please have a cup of your favorite beverage and cuddle in for a few paragraphs!

I wanted to mention my cyber-recipes. Usually if I post something tasty you can make at home I’ll either include the recipe (look for “Davlicious” in the key words at the bottom) or I’ll include a link to a recipe page if it’s a recipe I find on the web. Most of the time when I offer up a piece of black forest cake, or recently tiramisu, it’s cyber-cake; completely calorie free, but not something you can replicate at home. This is an ages old Naniism. Time for a “Little Nani Story.” In this case two.

For the beginning of the story, let me offer you a comfy chair in my cyber coffee shop.

Here’s a couch for a couple of guests

And maybe we have someone joining us who’d prefer a kitschy chair!

I have always loved pretend imagery. One of the first TV shows I loved when I was a child was “The Friendly Giant,” one of a few CBC kids’ shows I watched with my mom. One of the spoils of being a border-baby is that, even before cable, we got CBC in from Windsor, Ontario, Canada; great kid’s shows and Hockey Night in Canada! Mom always watched a few episodes of any shows I watched. I guess I figured out when I was an aunt to very young girls that she did that as a responsible parent to make sure she knew the content of the shows I watched, but I remember it as just getting to pick the show that we were watching together. Parents watching the shows the kids are watching at least a little is important. I even remember my dad complaining that “they should be learning Italian, not Spanish” on Sesame Street. Of course my dad was still only about 10 years in this country and wanting a little of his roots to make him feel a little more welcomed. (It was only a year or two after we started watching Sesame Street before he chose to become a citizen and stopped complaining about the Spanish segments on Sesame Street.)

But back to The Friendly Giant. It was basic kids content. Friendly was a giant who had animal friends; a puppet was one and watching a clip on YouTube I remembered the giraffe that visited his window. The thing is I remembered those characters watching a clip from the show. What I didn’t need a clip to remember a few years shy of a half century later was the beginning of the show when he set up the little living room for us.

He invited the viewers into his castle and set out chairs in the little living room so we had a seat while we visited. That imagery and use of imagination has always been part of me. So when you choose a chair, imagine you're really relaxing with your coffee for the read!

Now that you see where my brain learned how to get comfy in a pretend chair, the next “Little Nani Story” will explain the “scratch ingredients” that go into making cyber-cake!

My brother, Dave, and I were pretty normal kids in that we often had to be nagged about cleaning our rooms and occasionally mom came in with the big garbage bag and “helped” us clean our rooms. One of the list of things she didn’t know or understand until I was an adult was why, more than once, she was throwing away a cardboard sheet or box with pictures of food taped on it.

Well, Star Trek came out the same year I did, in 1966, and my mom was a huge Trekkie. That meant Star Trek was one of the shows we watched together that she picked. One of the things I played often was that my closet was a space ship or shuttle and I was the captain. I had a control panel that mom never wondered about because it looked like a spaceship panel a kid would draw. But those boards with the pictures of food on them were my replicator. Thinking back they were sort of a cross between a vending machine and a replicator because if I touched the picture it created the food I touched, well, I pretended it did. If I wanted something that I couldn’t find a picture of in the grocery sales papers from the newspaper, I’d ask for it. I imagined the taste and looking at the picture enjoyed my meal on the spaceship.

So, now I serve all-grown-up replicated desserts, or cyber-food, in my cyber coffee shop. As an adult I can still pretend the wonderful flavors but I appreciate the calorie-free more.

Have some black forest cake…and don’t ever let you inner child grow up!

First World Problem?

Tonight it’s quiet. Oh, there is the sound of lots of rain outside and a little thunder rumble here and there, but inside is the sound of the poker game on David’s computer and me clicking on the keyboard. The Reds and Pirates are in a rain delay but the Reds are ahead 9-2 in the 7th. I know this because Buddy Bat, my iPad, tells me so on the mlb app and he’s been making the sound that there is news every time the Reds score. But there is no sound in the room that would give any idea that there had been a ball game of interest going on in Pittsburgh. For the average American home, this is a quiet house.

There is a home in Toledo where there is no television to make the sounds of announcers telling of the rain delay. I happen to live in that home. Let me go back a few days to tell the tale.

On June 14, David taped and I posted on Facebook this video:

Post by Davonna Lividini Patch.

Marco has been going insane when the chipmunk is right on the window ledge! You notice that the TV is on the chest and he is jumping behind it like a madcat. We’d been chuckling at this behavior for a couple of days. It was in the area where the cat stands, hammocks and scratching posts are. What harm could he do?

Well Monday I turned on the TV to watch Investigation Discovery at lunch. The television showed snow. My first thought is to make sure the set is on channel 3. It was. Then I checked for a loose cable and lo and behold I found the cord for the cable wasn’t connected to the TV. Marco’s shenanigans from the morning must have knocked it out. I turned the TV and moved the cable to the area where the connector for it sticks out of the back. I pulled the metal ended cable back quick when there was a spark! Marco didn’t knock the cable out; he broke the entire connector off! I was moving toward putting the cable into an open socket in the back of the TV.

Now it is a very old TV. We just don’t watch enough TV to have ever made replacing it a priority. We’ve talked about it but since we’ve talked about a new TV we’ve had the basement waterproofed, a new roof and we’ve both gotten new computers. I’ve gotten 2 eReaders and a tablet in that time too.

David moved the TV Tuesday morning to try to find the connector that broke off in case it can be put back on. See our TV really is NOT a priority; if a little duct tape could have put it back in place… But the connector was nowhere to be found. During the searching process the old fat-designed television was put on the love seat so it wouldn’t get knocked off the chest David was searching under. We’re not totally sure what happened to the loveseat, but it got jarred and the TV tumbled onto the floor. David saw a broken plastic frame on the front and I’m sure I heard a muffled tingle of broken internal glass. The time for TV talking is over.

So I took myself to school that morning to find out what we needed to look for in one of those new-fangled TVs. It was actually fun research. I hadn’t looked for a TV in a very long time. I remember when….let me pull the gray hairs to the front so I look the part that statement fits. I remember when I worked at the production house that produced the very first commercial in HDTV. Serious, the first TV ad ever produced in high definition was edited at the production house where I worked. Now most of the TVs in stores have high definition capability.

I learned about the fact that my antiquated notion that the lines of resolution are important is no more. All TVs have greater resolution than they did the last time I shopped for an analog TV or monitor. The refresh rate is the thing now. How many times does the picture completely rebuild itself in a second? The basic-quality ones do it 60 times in a second! I wrote down all my technical notes and how many inputs of what kinds we might need. With as often as we watch DVDs, we could get a TV with the connector to watch a DVD in one of our computers and not have to buy a new DVD player. We have the information we need to ask the right questions when we shop for our new TV.

Before we get the TV we have to have an electrician come in to bring our 1950s house up to safe grounded 3-prong outlets. We’ll also need to reorganize the living room so I can have a desk there instead of the dining room so I can see the TV where we’ll put it. It’ll be flat but a bigger screen than Old Broken and besides, we want to have it away from the ledge outside the big window where the chipmunk plays! Then once the TV is selected and placed, we’ll need to switch to the fancy cable stuff, so the cable guys will need to come in and set us up.

It’s going to be a few weeks, months, before we have TV again. But when we do have it again we’ll be part of the American 21st century! We’ll have been without it for long enough that we might just sit and watch a show or two. Nah, I want to see a Reds or Tigers game on the fancy schamcy new TV first. Or maybe I’ll just watch an episode of Blood Relatives on ID.