CHANGES IN PLANS OCCUR AND ONE HAS TO DEAL WITH THEM

I had plans for tonight's post – but things come up and I almost forgot what I had planned to write about. 

We were suppose to take mom back to her cancer surgeon today for a second follow up visit.  I have spent part of the last two weeks getting the wellness center at mom's assisted living residence to do the blood tests requested by this and also by mom's oncologist and send the results to them.  My sister who sees mom a lot more than we do as mom lives near her, had to go in and talk to the staff to get the results sent.  I checked with this doctor and the blood work results were finally there – great, we could take her there today.  Oh heck, I had not realized that today was Ash Wednesday when I made the appointment.  Why does that matter?  Well husband is Catholic and cannot eat meat today – so for lunch he had to have Wendys fish instead of his usual lunch.  So?  Well, often eating fried foods makes his stomach ill and we were concerned about eating lunch, then having to drive out, pick up mom, take her to the doctor, take her back to her residence and then drive home if his stomach was bad.  But he figured he would be okay, but was not happy about taking mom to the doctor today.

Yesterday, the day before the appointment, I was called by the doctor's office - though they thought they were calling mom as we gave them my phone number instead – why? - you will see in a later  paragraph.  They wanted to move her appointment an hour earlier.  Big problem.  It takes, from the time we arrive at mom's residence, an hour and a half to get her to an appointment 15-30 minutes from there.  We have to go up to up to her room, take the big wheels off her wheel chair (or it is terribly heavy and does not fit in the back of our car and she cannot deal with getting in out van). Stop at the wellness office for a list of her meds for the doctor (easier than trying to remember).  Get her through the building to the front (only) entrance.  (Mom's apartment is literally the furthest in the building – top floor, end of the hall.) We then have to sign her out of the building – and we have to sign in as we run through the lobby coming in and then again when we leave.  We have found it easier to take mom to our parked car than try to get her in or out of the car in front of the building – curbs and sidewalk cuts are problems.  So we have to push her – uphill – to the parking area – either together or me as too hard for husband to do.  Then we have to get her into the car and stow her wheelchair.  Then the drive.  Then on the other end we have to park – where there is room for mom to get out into her wheelchair (we have to get her a handicapped permit so we can park in those spaces with her) and then get her into the building.  This last can be very easy to do – or hard – one building was on a hill with the building at the bottom of the hill and we had trouble finding the doctor's office – out and down hill, then back up hill – with both of us pushing.  Most of the doctors offices require one to sign in 15 minutes or 30 minutes before the appointment time or they cancel it.  Mom's lunch is at 11:45 am. Her dinner at 4:45 pm. If I make the appointment for 2:30  - it allows us to each lunch, drive out there, pick her at 1 pm and get her to the doctor – after she has eaten lunch.  Other than the “doctor with the office from h*ell”  she will be back at her residence, with the big wheels back on her wheelchair and settled in, in time for her dinner.  So 1:30 pm was a big problem.  We compromised on 2 pm.  

So now mom was going to have a problem with her lunch, husband was going to have a problem with his lunch – so I had a problem in general.  Then I had a thought.  I telephoned the doctor's office back and asked about moving the appointment to a different day.  Doctor would have plenty of time to her surgery and not rush us, husband did not have to worry about his stomach after lunch, and mom would not miss lunch.  First date offered was next Wednesday – my embroidery meeting and my only day out – no way.  We settled on a date in mid March.  Doctor's office happy.  Husband happy.  I had to call mom and let her know of the change.  I had been texting my sister as I went along in case she spoke to mom before I did, she could let mom know.  Mom is hard to reach, at least for me, by telephone.  By the time that generally I can call her in the afternoon – she is at dinner.  I figured that the best time to call was around 7:30 pm as that is when she calls me.  First time I left a message – but knew she would never get it.  I called another 4 times as time passed.  I went down to cook dinner.  Mom called,  “Did you call me?”  I explained.  “No, I never hear that there are messages.”  Huh, hear that there is a message, she has to look at the machine – and has being doing so for over 40 years.  Okay, go on there from there.  She remembered we suppose to go the next day and I explained about the change.  Fine with her.  We discussed it four times.  I also told her that if my sister called and said it was to be earlier tomorrow – that was old news and changed.  We did not get a call from her today asking where we were so apparently all went well with the change.  Mom is 90 and a year ago I would not question that she understood and would remember the appointment and the change,  but a year can make a big difference.

Next wonderfulness was our basement freezer.  We have a small freezer that we bought probably 30 years ago or more (it has out lived at least 2 refrigerators, probably 3).  We used to grow vegetables in our back yard in summer and would freeze the excess in this freezer.  Have not done so in at least a decade and it was being used for backup frozen vegetables and meat since, until about 3 years ago when we somehow switched to buy the food for dinner that day.  So it has mostly sat in the basement with some commercial frozen vegetables in it and a few other items.  Last year we used it when our refrigerator died and we had some items in its freezer.  It had about 4-5 inches of ice on the top coils.  Husband will not let me put frozen items at the back of the freezer in the new refrigerator – he read an article that the back needs lots of space for air to circulate – so I have (somehow) a smaller freezer in this refrigerator than our old and I cannot use about 1/6-1/4 of the space in it.  I figured I would melt the ice in the basement freezer so it could go back to being used – and since there was nothing in it as we used the last item stored in it about a month ago – this was the time to do it. 

I knew it would take a long time and would be messy. I had a plan.  I needed to remember to do this when we come home fairly early from running errands.  Today was the day.  We were home early and I would be making many trips to the basement at night to do laundry and could combine the trips down for both purposes.  When we came home I went to the basement and shut off the freezer.  I put in two large, deep baking pans – one on the right of one shelf and one on the left of the other shelf to catch the dripping water as I knew the bottom drip pan would not hold anywhere near enough and would be a mess to empty.  I grabbed lots of old used for junk purposes towels and spread them in front of the freezer.  I propped the door open, set an alarm for an hour and went upstairs to work.  An hour later – nothing had started – reset the alarm and back upstairs.  An hour later – still no melting, reset again and started to cook dinner.  After dinner while watching TV in the kitchen the alarm went off again. I went back down – goody!!  Two small puddles (dots) of water in one of the baking pans – it was working.  I went back to the kitchen – husband asked what I was doing.  I told him.  He had to inspect the situation.  He decided that what I was doing would never work.  He was going to use his heat gun.  Luckily he decided that was too hot.  We sat there for a couple of hours as he melted the ice with his hairdryer.  Dumping the baking pans and a couple of times the bottom drip pan into a bucket.  (I have done this before – just with a lot less ice – and knew that I would not be able to carry the baking pans or the drip pan to the sink without spilling.  Finally the last big piece of ice was loose and fell free.  After dumping the last of the water and ice into the basement sink he went upstairs and I dried the inside of the freezer. It is sitting with the door ajar to dry out before being plugged back in. 

Sooo, my post on doing your income taxes will be delayed until at least next week. 

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -

Plans are plans  - until they go awry.  Whether the appointment has to be changed for someone else's convenience or needs or what you plan to do in the house needs to be done differently than you think it will  - and takes more of your time as a result, or have you plans to write something and other items come up which need to be written about first  - they go awry. 

One has to deal with the changes and see what can be done.  If nothing else – the appointment change and the change in how we had to defrost the freezer gave me something to write about and you get out of hearing about income taxes for at least a week!

ALMOST A FIRE

I was taught to be very careful when cooking, My mom’s stove (an electric one) had 1 2 3 heat settings on the dial.  I was taught never to walk out of the room if a burner was set at 2 or 3 and never to walk out of house when the stove was on (unless in either case someone else was in the room to watch the stove).  After we married, in our apartment we had a (natural) gas stove/oven combination which scared the heck out of me as I was always afraid that it would blow up.  I had to light the oven with a match to use it and was always sure that would be the last thing I did. (I actually once smelled gas outside the apartment as we were going out, called the gas company and when we got home later we had no stove.  I telephoned to have it turned back on per the note left.  When I asked, I was told that this all stemmed from a woman who had smelled the gas leak in the street and called them - hey, that was me.) 

When we bought this house there was a gas stove/range combination also.  I was not happy about that.  I was even more upset when I was sure I smelled gas when we were in the house for later visits before we bought it.  I was again right.  Rather than get the unit repaired, we bought an electric stove/oven unit and had the kitchen wired for it. 

Last night I made for dinner a pot pie we had bought on sale (we bought a few of them on sale - these are small production ones, not the major brands ones). I, of course, had forgotten to go down and put it in the oven to bake and therefore did so an hour late.  Husband really likes these pies so he did not complain. I bake it in an oven which sits on the counter (uses 1/3 of the counter space we have).  I carefully pulled the oven away from the wall and the stove and removed some plastic storage items sitting next to the oven to the other side of the kitchen.  I lined the pan with foil to keep it clean. 

In the interim while it was cooking I set the table, laid out our pills for dinner, etc. I would have thought nothing of walking out of the kitchen while the baking was going on, but in this case I stayed in the kitchen.

I made a can of soup for us to share as a first course.  I split the can of soup before cooking it and use two small pots to cook it.  It is worth cleaning the extra pot as it is much easier to split the soup as it comes out of the can and husband likes more water added to his soup than I do.  As the pie went into its last ½ hour of cooking, we sat down and had the soup.  After I poured the soup into our bowls, I put the pots on the stove.  The burners for the soup had been shut off and I also made sure not to put the pots on the burners they had been on as the burners were still hot (electric burners take a short while to cool down after they shut off).  As I said, I am very careful.

When the pie was done cooking, the countertop oven beeped and I took it out and put the pan on the stove - on the larger burner in the front on one side which was cold.  We had the very nice pot pie for dinner. 

After dinner I normally have a cup of tea for dinner. I normally cook it on the rear smaller burner, but I had moved the pots onto the baking pan and had put it on that rear burner, so I put the pot of water on the front, larger, burner to boil it and turned on the burner.  I went back to the kitchen table - 5-6 feet away - and started reading the newspaper (TV was on for husband) while I waited to hear the water boiling. 

It dawned on me that it was a bit long for the water to take to boil and something smelled wrong and notices small bits of black floating around the room.  I had turned on the wrong burner!!  I had turned on the burner with the pots and baking pan!  I shut it off and using pot holders moved the burner with the pots still on it to another burner that was cold.     

Luckily I caught it before we had an actual fire.  The stove was covered in soot and the pots looked burned.  The foil I had put in the baking pan was what seemed to be the black wisps flying around the room and the pan had a mark that went through it.  I never did have tea.  Husband suggested checking inside the oven to make sure all was okay there - I carefully put my hand on the front of it first to check that it was not hot before I opened it. 

When they cooled a tiny bit, I put the pots and the pan into a dish pan of cold water to finish cooling them off.  I was surprise that the pots and the pan (even the foil stuck to the pan) cleaned so easily.  The pan though rocked when I put it on a flat surface, distorted by the heat.  After I was done with pots and the pan, I started on the stove.  It cleaned up much quicker and easier than I thought it would.  I took apart the burner that all this happened on to clean it and found when I took out the drip pan that the foil liner in the drip pan had mostly melted.  This had been the source of the black wisps floating about.  I immediately pulled the liners in the other 3 pans - too dangerous (despite this not happening in the past 30 years) - and threw them out also. 

Today husband was able to mostly get the baking pan to stop rocking by leaning on it.  The kitchen no longer has a burning smell.  Unrelated to all of this, we took in Chinese food for dinner tonight (easy way to deal with Ash Wednesday for husband).

Something we realized later in the evening when I boiled water - with the same pot I started to do so to make tea - later in the evening for some hot cereal before bed. The smoke detector had not gone off.  (For a reminder of a past cooking incident that did set off the smoke detector see - http://wheredidileavethat.blogspot.com/2018/07/not-in-pennsylvania.html    )   

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK -

Well two of them actually.  Be careful when cooking - even if you think that you are being careful - be more careful.

If you have foil drip pans in your stove - TAKE THEM OUT.