Day 177, Year 11: Sorting, Sorting
Date: Saturday, April 16, 2016
Weather: Mostly Sunny, High 61 degrees F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
This afternoon was another four hour work session with my niece Lynn sorting, sorting, sorting through books and clothes she still has here in this condo. The realtor will come on Tuesday to take photos and get the condo officially on the market, so we are making a huge push to sort through as many things as possible before then. Today the focus was books and clothes. I went through her closet and sorted through clothes while Lynn went through huge plastic boxes of books that she is trying to sell and packed them into smaller cardboard boxes that we can actually carry out of the condo. The plastic boxes were way too heavy for us. She will return tomorrow for another work day and on Tuesday morning we will take the books into a bookshop in Boston that might buy them. She ended up with ten big cardboard boxes today and there are still more books to sort through. The job of whittling down Lynn’s belongings to a size she can accommodate in her new apartment seems endless, but I’m we are making great progress.
Mark had a good day. He got up at 7 am and had his double breakfast and then went back to bed until 10 am when he got up to take his chemo pills. He went back to bed, but got up after about half an hour. I then turned on the infuser with the peppermint oil in hopes of calming his nausea and giving him an energy boost. Last night I turned on the infuser on his bedside table when he went to bed. In about 20 minutes he woke up and was quite energized—too much so for bedtime. It could have been because he slept most of the day at the hospital or it could have been the peppermint oil. Obviously we have a lot to learn about using essential oils! We turned off the infuser and moved it out of the bedroom. He went back to bed and eventually went to sleep. When he got up this morning, I turned the infuser with the peppermint oil on in the living room. I ran it every other hour during the day, and Mark really felt like it gave him an energy boost and he had no nausea. He is still taking anti-nausea medications, but yesterday they weren’t doing the job. We are trying the peppermint oil to aid in the anti-nausea war and to hopefully avoid taking the Ritalin that the nurse practitioner prescribed. It does work to give him an energy boost, but I just hate having him take so many different medications. If the peppermint essential oil in the air continues to work, we’ll try some other oils.
Tomorrow will be a repeat of today with the exception that it will be a little warmer. It was delightfully warm by late afternoon today and tomorrow it should be warm much earlier in the day. It is hard to believe that it is really spring because it has been so cool. I, for one, am ready for some proof that spring is here in earnest.
