My big shopping trips to the city may be done, but that doesn’t mean I get to stay home!

I was going to start roasting tomatoes today, but got a call from my mother last night.

She said she called because we (my sister and I) hadn’t called her, and she was bored.

Gee. Thanks, Mom.

Well, it turned out to be not just that. She has a birthday coming up soon and I asked about taking her out to dinner for that, which got her to talking about needing groceries. After much waffling back and forth, it was arranged that I would come over today. We’d do lunch, then run errands.

I will say, it was a “good” outing with my mother, as far as such things go. There were a few things she tried, ranging from assuming my SIL, who is absolute gold and someone who has always been so incredibly kind and patient with my mother, was just a terrible person that would make my brother do things my mother doesn’t want him to do. Which is crazy enough in the first place (starting with the fact that my mother is still trying to control my brother, who is in his 60’s), but it also was about her trying to control us, after her death.

She’s most definitely worried about the wrong people, to begin with.

Part of the problem is that my mother thinks she understands thing she can’t even begin to grasp, they are so outside of her experience. But, because she’s turning 92 and lived through so much, that means she knows everything. Including people’s thoughts and motivations.

It was very difficult to reign in the conversation. I even tried to show photos of my brother and his wife that they sent me, but she didn’t even care to look at them. Even just ordering food was an ordeal. She was going to order nothing but a bowl of soup, because she has to “watch what she eats”. She wasn’t even going to order something to drink with it. Well, I certainly wasn’t going to eat a meal while she watched me, hungry, so I was just going to have my pop. She started telling me to order whatever I wanted, then suddenly remembered this restaurant has pizza and said that if I ordered a pizza, she’d share with me, got all excited, then told me to order a medium pizza.

I would not have ordered a pizza for myself, but if it meant she would actually eat, I went ahead and ordered one. I didn’t even try to ask her what kind she wanted.

She must’ve been famished, because she just inhaled that incredibly hot soup and was very happy to see the pizza when it arrived. Then suddenly she decided she needed coffee to go with it. She was all excited about having pizza to take home and not have to cook tomorrow, so I ended up having just a couple of pieces with her, and half the pizza was boxed up.

So… now that I’m home, I think I’ll have lunch. 😄

Oh, and as we were eating, she started commenting on how her small lunch was suddenly a big lunch, because of me. She said it like it was a joke, but she wasn’t actually joking, but trying to make it my “fault” that she *gasp* had an actual meal.

I’m not really complaining. This was supposed to be her birthday lunch, so I’m just happy that she actually ate something instead of starving herself for no reason. She doesn’t understand nutrition, either, but thinks she does, because she watched daytime talk shows in the past, and some guy somewhere said that if you eat soup, you’ll lose weight. Which is probably not what was actually said, but that’s what she remembers. She keeps cutting out the most nutritionally dense food and replacing it with empty carbs, then wonders why she’s hungry all the time.

Which reminds me. I didn’t see any meat left in her freezer, and she only bought some deli turkey that was on sale. I’ll have to grab some of the smaller packages of meat from our freezer and sneak them into hers.

I was just thinking that she is having a harder time moving around, so maybe I could bring take out, instead, but that would just result in different insults and complaints.

*sigh*

I want to do nice things for my mother. I really do. It just gets so hard, sometimes. I’m not after any sort of grandiose thanks for it, but I’d at least like to not be treated like crap for it.

Ah, well. If she hasn’t figured it out by her 90’s, I don’t expect her to figure it out now.

In other things…

Today has been a really bad day for smoke from the fires up north. There are no fires near us at all, but we’ve got high winds blowing. Yesterday, we got such wonderful rain – real downpours! – but apparently none of it hit the areas with the fires. Most of them are just being monitored; they’re smaller and not threatening any populations, because no one lives where they are. A few others are listed as under control. That’s it. But there is one fire to the north of us, listed as under control, that is a bigger, and I guess that’s the one that we’re getting all the smoke from.

Kitty status: Pom Pom is getting more comfortable with us. I’ve been able to snag him and hold him for a while, and while he does try to run away if I get too close, once I’ve got him, he’s okay with sitting in my hands (he’s that small!) and getting pets. He hasn’t figured out the litter yet, but he did figure out the puppy pads, until just now. He actually went under my desk, while I was sitting here, writing this post, and started digging in the puppy pads. I put him in the litter box he was right next to and blocked him from coming out again, so he used it. It’s a start!

There is still no sign of Nosencrantz, Butterscotch or Marlee. Not even sightings in the distance. I’ve posted their photos on a local group online, asking people to keep an eye out for them. No responses.

I did get a message from someone interested in adopting Ghosty, asking if she were still available. I said yes, and asked if she would be an indoor cat. I was told no; they were looking for a mouser.

Ghosty is not going to be an outside cat again! I did mention we had some older outdoor kittens, but they wanted a female, and all the most socialized ones are male.

Oh, my goodness! Looking out my window, there was such a huge gust of wind blowing the big maple round!

Now that we have the small scaffolding, I wonder if we can use it to get that one huge branch down, piece by piece, before the tree finally breaks off at that weak spot on the trunk.

Well, there isn’t going to be much we can get done outside in this wind.

Mind you, after visiting with my mother, even on one of her good days, I am going to need a few hours to decompress, anyhow.

The Re-Farmer