Monday is always pot luck day in the full summer weeks. I look forward to it because I love to cook and I love food. There will usually be a lot of it on Monday evening at 6:00 p.m. This evening was no exception, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
John, my husband, called his mom at 8:00 a.m. to see how his dad is doing. The hospital was going to be doing some tests to see why Bud wasn't responding or swallowing. The tests showed that he either had a stroke or his Alzheimers was so advanced that the disease wasn't letting him even remember how to swallow or move. This is so sad and it seems so sudden.
John's brother, Jim, is here at the resort for the week with his wife, Laura, and their two children. So he was on the telephone to his mother too and they both decided to go to Door County to be with her. I think everything happens for a reason, and the fact that they were here this week made them able to go out there together. It is a 5 hour trip, and hopefully they had awhile in the car to talk about what to do next. Their mom is probably not prepared for this to happen yet and it will be very stressful. They left around 10:00 a.m. so will get there between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m.
John's sister, Kathy, lives with her husband and one son in the Marshall Islands. I had e-mailed her the previous night about what was going on so when I called her this morning to give her an update, she was not surprised. So now she is flying back, which takes two days. Hopefully she will make it before her dad dies. Before she could get a flight, she called the hospital and spoke with her dad, Bud, and he seemed to have a slight happy reaction to her voice on the phone, which is great.
This stuff took up a lot of our day. Our customers wanted to know what was going on and there was constant conversations about parents and how sad this all is in life. If you are blessed with a long life, this will probably happen to you too - the loss of a parent.
Earlier in the morning, as John was preparing to leave, he and I went up to the dumpster. We have had a bear getting into the dumpster so he set up a large metal sheet and chain over the dumpster. He took me up there to show me how to open it and set it back up. Our garbage gets picked up on Wednesday mornings and John noticed that the dumpster is pretty full. So he flipped back the top two, black plastic doors, put a piece of plywood on top of the garbage, and jumped on the plywood. This would compact the garbage a lot which would leave us more room until Wednesday morning. He climbed back out, we set up the dumpster and then we tried to move the car toward the door for him to pack, etc.
It wouldn't start. When I took my niece and nephew to the Wampum shop on Tuesday, the little niece didn't shut her door all the way. The dome light had been on for almost a week. The battery was completely dead. We pulled our old, beat up minivan over to the car, hooked up the jumper cables and we finally got it started. Then we let it run for awhile while John and his brother packed, got ready to go and finally left.
Tomorrow is recycling day pick up, so after pot luck I took the ATV/trailer and put the garbage from the pot luck, which is a huge bag, the recycling from the lodge, which is a huge container and very heavy, in the trailer. I drove it down to the campfire area, emptied the garbage and recycling from down there into the trailer, picked up another can from another area of the resort, and went up to the dumpsters. I had to take a bunch of cardboard out of the recycling dumpster. We have a separate area to the left of the recycling dumpster that has a large label on it that reads, "Cardboard recycling". I guess people just don't look around or something. We also have a big, 4 foot tall, black garbage can in front of the recycling bin labeled, "Alum. Cans for Mercer School". The letters are at least 8 inches high and people don't see that either. Or they don't care about taking out their cans first. Either way, John or I end up taking out aluminum cans from the dumpster too. There was also some garbage thrown in the recycling dumpster, which happens a lot. So the recycling took me longer than it should have. Afterward I spent a long time washing my hands and arms in our bathroom. It was a dirty job.
I spent the rest of the evening with customers down on the beach. The humidity was so thick in the air that I kept thinking I had to clean off my glasses. If we looked across the lake, it looked like there was a fog. The patio door on our basement had condensation on it so thick I could hardly see through it. The temperature was only about 70 degrees, so it was beautiful, but it felt like a tropical jungle. The kids were all swimming, and when the sun set, the sky lit up everything in a pink glow. It was beautiful and with the loons calling, geese flying right over our heads and the laughter of the kids, it was an awesome evening. I wish John would have been here to share it with us.
Later I turned on the Brewers game and people were in the lodge listening and watching the game until late. I had to serve some drinks, which doesn't happen often, but it was fun too. I got to bed late again, so that's why this is typed up the next day again. Hopefully I'll catch up with tonight's blog tonight.
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