2026 Life Logs, Day 198: Baby Steps Back to ‘Normal’
Date: Friday, July 17, 2026
Weather: Sunny Day; High Temp 81, Low 65 degrees F
Location: At Home with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA

I am not sure I would ever refer to my life as ‘normal’, but today I took the first baby steps to get back to some sense of normalcy. Since the beginning of April when my sister was hospitalized with Covid and double pneumonia, my already busy life started bordering on insanity. And it hasn’t stopped. But yesterday, I made a decision to find some way to start getting my life back. I thought I would spend the day today working in the yard today, but that didn’t happen. But, I did take a nice long walk with Shadow this morning after doing all of my back exercises, and I ate breakfast and lunch. That is something I haven’t done for weeks. I have been eating a late afternoon lunch and a very late dinner with no breakfast, or breakfast and dinner with no lunch. I also spent time outside with Shadow this afternoon, and I at least looked at my garden of weeds. I changed the settings on my phone so that it only alarms when sister’s blood sugar number is extremely high or low because for the past two days since I started following her, it was dinging constantly. I still ended up spending much of the day dealing with my sister’s issues, but I did it more slowly, trying not to drive myself crazy. I found out at noon today that she fell again last night after she got back from the hospital, but I was never notified. Yesterday that would have put me over the edge, but once I found out that she is okay, with my new mindset, I calmly made calls and wrote emails to people at Bridges to find out why her financial Power of Attorney was called, but not me, her Healthcare Power of Attorney. I am realizing that these incidences are not going to go away. I just need to take it all in stride, and baby step, by baby step, get back to life as normal as it can be for me.