This week has been pretty much all about Mom. She is not doing well. She has finished up her course of antibiotics, but she hasn’t so far returned to the same level where she was before she got sick. She’s still paranoid, reclusive, talking to the mirror constantly, not eating much, has lost quite a bit of weight, and not showering. Beth and I have been very concerned lately that she’s not getting the care she needs where she is, and that she needs to move to memory care. It all came to a head when she started throwing things at the nurses and not letting them in her apartment. At that point, they made the call to get a doctor’s authorization to send her to a behavioral health clinic for Alzheimers/dementia patients, which came right away. Tuesday night, the same night they were having family night at Lake City Place, when the place was absolutely packed full of family members for Thanksgiving dinner, an ambulance arrived to take her to the hospital in Fort Wayne. I went to her room with the medics in case she was difficult, which she was. She was refusing to go, very paranoid. Saying things like “because you know what you did” when asked why she won’t go. Talking and talking but making no sense. She refused for a long time, which had the medics at a loss because she couldn’t legally refuse to go, but they didn’t want to force her either. Eventually she did, not sure what finally got her to agree to go with the medics, but she left with them via the side door so as not to disrupt dinner, climbed into the ambulance, and rode away with them. I stayed behind, because I was afraid she would refuse to go into the hospital or cause a scene that my being there would make worse. If she was going to be difficult, it seemed better that it be all left to the medical professionals. So I stayed behind and let her go. They were waiting for her at the ER, so she got right in, I heard. I was informed that she had arrived, got checked in, and was acting pretty calm. First thing they did was check for that UTI, but there was no indication of it. After work on Wednesday I drove to the clinic to visit and see how she was doing. She was up and walking around, again talking and talking but making no sense. We sat in her room for a while, she talked about how the Germans had built the building she was in and it was a real shame about those kids and how she and her cousin Carole were trying to go to that other building to get the cheese. And lots of other things. There was something of a floor show, with some teenage dancers putting on a show followed by karaoke by one of the staff. She sat in the common area and watched the show, after which I went back home without a good idea how long she would be there or how she was. Laura drove in Thursday, got there at around 3. I had already gone to visit Mom again and brought a few pieces of clothing and some toiletries. We visited with her for a couple hours, she mostly just sat. We did the big Thanksgiving dinner at my house on Friday instead since Laura had been traveling and visiting all day; neither one of us really wanted to go visit Mom again on Friday, so we didn’t. We all went to see "Justice League" instead. Laura left again on Saturday, we both drove to FW and visited Mom again for a while. Again she just sat most of the time. But after Laura and I left, around 4, Mom got all agitated again. Went and got her coat on and tried to leave. The nurses called me because she wanted to talk to me. She didn’t know why she was there or how she was supposed to get to where she needed to go. Insisting that there was nowhere for her to stay there and that she had never been there before. I couldn’t calm her down, and I kept trying to get her to give the phone back to a nurse, but she said there wasn’t anyone else there where she was, and she didn’t need a nurse, and that it was stupid. She finally hung up, so I could call them back and tell them that I wasn’t going to come back. It was almost dinner time so I was hoping that dinner would get her back on track. I didn’t hear back from them again. At least they got to see what she’s been like lately. And then after I got home Beth and I and the kids went to see "Thor: Ragnorak," which I may confuse with "Justice League" later on.

This week was mostly all about taking care of unfinished business. Laura and I have been going round and round with the MVD in Arizona to get the title for Mom and Dad’s Prius, and they have been spectacularly unhelpful. The last straws were last week when our agent in Phoenix (Mary from the estate sale managers) couldn’t get a replacement title for the car because you can’t use a POA to designate another POA. Then Mom wouldn’t sign a specific POA document for them. So we were left with the only option being one of us has to go. Laura couldn’t go until the week of Thanksgiving, so I went. Even though I was not positive that MVD wouldn’t pull another fast one on us when I was actually there. Anyway Monday night I made the reservations for a Tuesday afternoon flight. Laura overnighted a package to a UPS Store with a notarized letter saying she couldn’t go to help pass the POA responsibility to me. I brought the original POA and death certificate, as well as a copy of Mom’s diagnosis; neither Laura nor I could think of anything else we should need. Tuesday afternoon I headed down to Indy and caught a flight (and by the way, I had kept Dad’s American Airlines credit card open just in case I might find the air points useful, in just such a situation, but I found out they are not transferrable except to another AA points member, and only if the other account has been open for more than 30 days. So it seems they deliberately set the rules of the air points program to hose me) to Phoenix. I stopped and changed planes in Las Vegas, which by appearances does not have an airport so much as a casino with flights. I got to Sky Harbor around 8:30, picked up the cheapest rental car I could find (Payless…I got a teensy Ford Fiesta in which I kept closing my foot in the door when I got in) and headed to an AirBnB. First time for that. I joined when I booked the flight, and found a spare room in someone’s house that I could stay in for about 30 bucks a night. Close to the airport and everything. (It did feel weird just walking into someone’s house though. After one of the guys met me when I arrived, I just let myself in when I got there for the rest of the time, whether they were there or not. I didn’t know if I should knock, or just go in. I just went in.) Wednesday morning I was ready and waiting at the UPS Store so I could pounce as soon as their morning shipments came in, so I had Laura’s package by 10:00 and headed from there to the MVD in Tempe. The lady checking people in was all set to tell me why I couldn’t do that, but I had an answer to everything so she just sent me to a line. After that it was anticlimactic. I had the title within 20 minutes of arriving at the MVD. I did have to go back through the line again to get the title re-issued in my name so I could just sign the thing and make the transfer cleaner, but I had that done, the title signed and notarized, and handed off to Mary within an hour. And with that, I was done with what needed to be done in Phoenix. So, I spent the next couple hours driving around anywhere I could think of something that needed to be done. I went to the BBVA branch and closed the checking account. I went to the State Farm office and cancelled the Prius insurance. I drove by Mom and Dad’s house, not sure why. Got lunch at Manuel’s, a Mexican place Mom and Dad liked. Then killed the afternoon geocaching in South Mountain Park, using the entrance by the house Mom and Dad used to live in. I even ran into another couple of guys who were geocachers. They spotted me pulling an ammo box out from behind some rocks from atop the next hill over and found it themselves, then we searched for the next one together before parting ways. So two finds for me, then came up empty on the next two. I left when it started getting late enough I got worried about it getting dark while I was out in the park, which would be bad. I got dinner at Village Inn for old time’s sake. The a flight back to Indy the next morning.

Alex was at ICYC this weekend. Since he was, the girls and I all went to see "Murder on the Orient Express," since we figured he wouldn't be all that interested. I liked it, but it seemed to me to be more of a TV movie than a movie movie.

I’m a bit stiff and sore today, but not too bad. I ran the Veteran’s Day half-marathon yesterday, my fourth year in a row to run that (I finished in 2:09:22, slowest time yet by 40 seconds), but honestly I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it at all because my knee has been hurting so much lately when I run. Last week, when I ran I stopped at about 8 miles because my knee hurt so much. So I did pick up a knee support bandage and wore it to run. It was also the coldest race day by far. I had a lot of layers on. The bandage helped a lot, I think. So my running goal for the year is over and now my goal is to not run again until my foot and knee stop hurting. Beth also had a craft show yesterday, conveniently in Columbia City. The race started at 8, the show started at 9, and as I was running along a segment of Old 30 she and the girls passed me going the opposite direction. We saw each other so that was cool. I stopped by after the race and then came back after I’d gone home to shower, and stayed to help out for the rest of the time. Unfortunately this show was not nearly as good as the previous show, she sold 8 jars of soup all day and mostly to other people who were selling things at the show. It was the first year for this particular show, so maybe that was why there wasn’t much foot traffic. Thursday was the Veteran’s Day concert at the middle school; Natalie is in the choir so we all went to the evening show. Since I’m a veteran Natalie got to introduce me…which she did, as her dad. Last Tuesday was also the Veteran’s Day program at the church with SOS. The kids put on a nice dinner and a brief show (piano recital of patriotic songs), then gave out gifts to the veterans of a very nice embroidered plush blanket.

Now on to Mom. She seems to be over the UTI and the antibiotics have been in her system for some time now, but doesn’t seem to be getting better mentally. The nurses have told me that a UTI in a dementia patient makes them really crazy but I was hoping she’d get back something. She still won’t leave Mary, her sister in the mirror. Beth and I got her to eat lunch with us in the dining room last weekend but she left early to go check on Mary. And she’s insisting she wants to go to her grandma’s house. Meanwhile, Laura and I are trying to finish getting things in Arizona taken care of, most notably the Prius. We still do not have the title. For some reason the landlord started pitching a fit over us leaving the car in the garage, or more precisely that nobody was talking to him about it. Which is disputable. Anyway he was being pretty hostile with the estate sale agents so I called him to smooth things over best I could; he agreed that we could keep the car in the garage until we could dispose of it but the estate sale people moved it out right away anyway. Laura called then to get the utilities shut off so we are done with the house. But the car in in the agent’s driveway now and we still do not have the title. We’d designated one of the estate people as a POA so she could go to MVD for us, as MVD had told us to, but when she got there MVD told her that she could not do it that way (can’t use a POA to designate another POA) and they wouldn’t give her the title. So plan B was for me to get mom to sign all the affidavits and POAs herself and send those in so they could get the title that way. I brought in a mobile notary with the documents but mom just looked at them and asked what they were over and over again. Wouldn’t sign, and the notary could tell she didn’t understand them so he wasn’t going to notarize them anyway. So to Plan C. Either I or Laura have to go to Phoenix.

Beth had a very successful soup sale in her first show of the season yesterday. It was at a little craft fair in the basement of the Brethren church in town, and one she only found out about a couple weeks ago. So she’s been working diligently to get a good dozen soups of each kind ready to be on hand for the show. And it was a very good show, even better than we were expecting. She sold around $500 worth of soups. Natalie helped her out for pretty much the entire time. She had a pot of soala and a pot of calico bean soup for tastes, so those both sold really well. I thought about trying to get Mom over there to check out the show, thought she might like that, but in the end decided not to. She has been fighting that UTI all week now, been very agitated and delusional. She was refusing to take her antibiotic pills, saying she doesn't need them, and the staff there has called me over a couple times because they can't get her to take them. I came over a few days ago and made her take them, but she threw them up soon afterwards, and was asking why I'm doing this to her. She wants to go see her grandma and is talking to “Mary” in the mirror. And she lately won’t leave her room. She seems to be taking the antibiotic pills now though, as long as they tell her it’s her thyroid medication.

This past week was of course Halloween. Again this year, Alex chose not to go out. Missy didn’t either, but she did go to her friend Abby’s house while Abby’s younger siblings went out. Natalie was planning to go to the Dells to meet her half-sister and her nephew to go around with them. She did colorful zombie makeup and Beth took her there, but they never met up with her. I think she was disappointed but tried to hide it by saying she wasn’t really expecting her to show up.

And this week the check engine light in the van came on! Woo hoo. Like I need this right now. I took it in to Ab & Tom’s and they had it all day but couldn’t tell exactly what was causing it. It was an evap/emissions code, but that can be from a lot of things. But they did a smoke test and find some leakage, and several other things that may be wrong with it now or soon enough. I’m going to bring it in again next week.