Tag: Aging
Balancing stress and boredom in CA
Zephyr, Mizuki, and Raimei (not pictured) have been wihtout their human for going on three weeks. I know they're fine, but I worry about them.
Yesterday, I was asked how I'm holding up while down here in greater Palm Springs, and I replied that I was OK but doing a kind of balancing act—this experience equal parts challenging and boring.
Most of the challenges are emotional, of course, seeing and interacting with my dad in the state he's in. On that front, today was pretty tame. Marty had stuff to do out in the world this morning, so I had to be up early in case Dad needed anything, which he naturally did. After trying to get him up and about, he had to immediately go back to bed due to vertigo. I decided this was a time he could take one of his dizzy pills (which do have a name, I just can't remember it) even though his neurologist ordered him to cut way down on them and only take a few a week. I think I was vindicated in that decision as he later got up and wandered out into the living room on his own; I had sat down to read, but only going on a few hours' sleep, I'd nodded off, a dereliction of sentry duty. I stirred—after having some weird dreams involving my grandfather, his old house with a ton of people in it, and a phone call from Erik that I could never hear properly because of all the people making noise and that in the end turned out to be on speaker so a bunch of people on the other end were hearing me that I didn't know about; I'm sure that was prompted by something in my subconscious relating to how my dad seems frailer than Grandpa ever did along with the various bouts of chaos here—and came out to the living room to find Dad trying to figure out the Roku remote control.
No appointments today, no visits from nurses or attractive physical therapists, just hanging out and doing a fair amount of escorting dad back and forth to bed and making him lunch, which he ate about a third of. He wasn't going on about being in strange places today, though he did seem to think I had left and come back from somewhere distant between his naps, and once he asked me what grade of school I was in now. But, as I've said before, I'm kind of getting used to that. Sort of. A little.
While he was napping I took some time to clean up a little around here, and while I was running the vacuum it got hung up on something and started making noise (it's a fairly quiet vacuum otherwise) that I immediately equated with the "victory growl" Zephyr makes when he successfully steals food from either me or the other cats. I miss my cats. This is a long time to be away.
Dad and Marty's cat treats me like an intruder, which is fair. But this morning he let me pet him a little. He's got some abrasions and little scabs on his head and neck that I'd like to get a look at, but he'd never let me. His fur's a bit unkempt too. He's mostly an outdoor cat, so I think the abrasions are likely from altercations with other cats in the area (I hear them now and then) since this isn't an environment where you tend to get fleas. Still, I know he doesn't get regular vet care, so I'd feel better if I could check him out more thoroughly. I'll take what I can get, I suppose.
We've made progress on selling the truck and trailer, though nothing final yet. Got a decent offer on the truck, a less decent but acceptable given the ease of transaction one for the trailer. Also I'm trying to further refine what's needed here for after I leave and tweaking some furnishings. I wish I could convince Dad to use a different chair in the living room; years ago they bought these "captains chairs" that are deeply padded, swivel, recline, have footrests that spring out. All that flexibility makes them a horrible choice for him because they're so hard to get out of, it's impossible for him to stand from it on his own and a little tricky with help. Tried swapping it for a more stable option in its place, but he complained that the swapped-in chair didn't move enough and insisted we switch it back. I tried elevating the seat with extra padding and that just made it unfamiliar and distracting when he'd sit down and didn't really help much with getting out of it, so that experiment was short-lived. His bed's too high off the floor, too, getting in it is a struggle every time, so I'm going to try a sort of low stepstool thing. If I were at home, I'd just build one in my garage from spare wood, but not an option here so we'll be buying one.
I also watched this week's Strange New Worlds today. Eh. I didn't hate it, which is a surprise given the material—this week we got something like "SNW does The Princess Bride"—but once again it's the sort of thing that would be fun as one of 26 but is frustrating as can be when it's the seventh of eight (out of just ten) episodes that are gimmick-based and stray so far afield of the solid Trek sci-fi by being sendups of/homages to other media. It's just sad what the series became after two really good years pre-COVID.
Got another early (by my standards) day tomorrow, with visits from both a home-care nurse and the pretty PT gal on the agenda, so no in-depth SNW review for a while. I'll get there, though, I can't help myself.
Tagged
Dad,
Aging,
Health,
Cats,
Posted on September 17, 2026 at 10:02PM | Permalink | 
| 
What a drag it is getting old
I've been thinking about aging recently. More than I usually do, I mean. Mostly that's because my dad, now 83, isn't doing very well in a number of ways, and when one is 83 and in not very good shape and has preexisting issues, one new event can beget a cascade of things getting worse.
He had a fall a couple weeks ago that broke his shoulder and required a relatively minor surgical procedure to put the bone back together, but it was a general anesthesia surgery and there is a thing I now know about called "postoperative delirium" that is common in elderly folk. The anesthesia can have a delayed effect of kind of scrambling your neurons, all the worse if you've already got some sort of cognitive decline issue. It's usually temporary, but, again, if one already has an issue it might just accelerate that.
Who knows. I certainly don't, I'm just learning about these things as they come up. Anyway, Dad's had trouble recuperating and is back in the hospital with balance issues, having fallen down a few more times, and with evident postoperative delirium. His memory's been wonky for a while now, but now he's being especially weird, according to my sources.
So there's that. He and Marty were up my way a little over a year ago, and that was the first time I had truly clocked how frail Dad had become, but he was still managing cognitively. Memory was a little suspect, but to a relatively minor degree. I went to visit them last fall and things were worse but still following a kind of expected track. With this latest series of events, "expected track" is just a meaningless phrase.
I may head down to see them ahead of schedule; I wasn't planning on it until October, but I may well move that up. We'll see.
Meanwhile, I, too, am getting older, but thankfully my issues are more on the "annoyance" end of the scale, at least so far. For instance, my sprained finger still hasn't completely healed. That's annoying. I now weigh 10 pounds more than I did 15 years ago and 40 more than what was locked into my brain as my normal mass from the time I was a teenager until at least my mid-thirties. I have a protruding midsection. Not like many Americans do (certainly many in my age cohort), I still have no trouble fastening my 30" waist jeans, but it nevertheless feels "not-me." My bad cholesterol is high despite not having eaten land meat since 1987 (for which I blame genetics—Mom was always rather slight and she had the same issue).
So to maybe address these things (not the sprained finger, but the rest) I've been making a point to be more active than I have been. I'm a long way from the days when I bicycled everywhere, and I've no illusions about doing that again, but I have been getting out either on the bike or on foot (or in a pinch using the indoor stationary bike) for an hour or more a few times a week. Generally, it feels pretty good.
Not today, though. Today I got a reminder of something that is not related to getting older, it's just a thing I've always dealt with—overexertion. I think this is related to my lower-than-normal blood pressure, which has been relatively constant for me, but again, I'm only semi-informed about such things. (I do know it's not a heart problem, as I had a doctor once order me one of those treadmill stress tests, which achieved making me overexert and barf all over the machine but also showed no cardiac issues while doing it.) Anyway, for as long as I can recall if I pushed myself beyond a certain threshold of exercise—usually while biking, but once on a hike up Tiger Mountain (on a date—that was embarrassing, and there was no next date) and a couple of times playing ultimate frisbee—I feel overheated, slightly dizzy, and eventually nauseous. The remedy is to lie down and breathe deeply until the heat escapes my head and functionality returns; sometimes there's also barfing.
Anyway, I went out around the neighborhood on the bicycle late this afternoon and, knowing I'm not in the kind of shape I used to be in, tried to keep to as flat a route as I could. This is greater Seattle, so nothing is going to be flat, but I intended to avoid more challenging hills. This was going OK until I found myself across the border to Edmonds and didn't know the best way back; before I knew it I'd committed to a stretch of downhill that I knew was going to be a problem. Then my available options all had inclines. I took a breather for a couple of minutes and opted to walk the bike up the shortest of the options, a steep one-block length that would get me back on relatively flat ground soonest.
It probably was the best option, but when I reached the top of the hill I had to lie down, just off the street in the dirt and dead grass near someone's front yard. After about ten minutes I was able to get up again, drink some water, and proceed on my way home, opting not to stop by the store on the way as originally planned. When I reached my garage and got off the bike, yep, dizziness and vomit. Didn't even make it inside first. The upside is that after the vomit stage, things get back to normal pretty fast, so I came inside, cleaned up my face, and watched the Mariners win for once and all is well.
Except I still have a protruding gut.
Tagged
Health,
Dad,
Aging,
Posted on August 15, 2026 at 10:15PM | Permalink | |
Umpire angst
Yesterday was another five-game Sunday for your friendly neighborhood umpire, only it wasn't quite in my friendly neighborhood. Usually on Sundays I get assigned the park that is, in fact, nearest my neighborhood; close enough to comfortably bike there if I so choose, which I have on occasion. No, this shift was in my old neighborhood, the first Seattle neighborhood I ever lived in atop Queen Anne hill.
The hill has changed a great deal since I lived there, but it's still a terrific little community within the city. What hasn't changed much is the West Queen Anne park, with its three ballfields and playground. That's where I spent my day, field number one, which thankfully has shade over home plate for most of the afternoon.
It wasn't as hot as the previous Sunday, about ten degrees (Fahrenheit) cooler, so in that respect it wasn't as bad as last week. Nevertheless, eight hours plus is a long time for me to be out there umping, and as expected, by the time I was five hours in I was getting cranky.
While the first game included a few people I like and the second featured a team I've become rather fond of, game three was with two teams I didn't know. New to the league and/or new to me, they were a little on the too-competitive-for-my-taste end of the scale and there was a fair amount of weirdness in the game. Add to the weirdness was the fact that we were behind schedule by 20 minutes as it was, thanks to the first game going off the rails in the seventh inning with the then-losing-but-ultimately-winning team plating 11 runs and forcing a bottom half of the inning; that hosed the schedule for the rest of the day.
Anyway, there were a few arguments in that third game, none of which lasted long but also none of which I was sure I was on the right side of given the circumstances. When there's only one ump working a game there are bound to be things that fall outside one's visual field, and I was getting tired and cranky anyway, so by the time we got an hour and ten minutes into our eighty-five allotted minutes of gametime, I had to call a conditional last inning—though we were only going into the 6th, it would be the final frame unless this top half went by in under five minutes. It did not, so when the bottom was completed, I called an end to the game and some of the players were pissed. "But we started 20 minutes late!" "You didn't call 'last inning!'" "What the fuck, man?" I had zero patience left and my replies showed it. "Yes, and if we continued we'd be at least thirty minutes late for the next one." "I absolutely did, you just weren't paying attention." "Say that again, see if it helps your cause."
We moved on, but as the teams were clearing out of their respective dugouts I felt a need to extend an apology for the sake of keeping peace within the league if nothing else, saying sorry for the sharp tone, this wasn't my best game and I'm a little pissed with myself about a couple things and it's leaking out. Half true, half CYA.
The final two included a doubleheader with a team two guys I know from Cap Hill games were subbing for, so I had some friendly faces there. It went OK, but I was beat. By game five of the day I could barely muster enough energy/motivation to jog down toward first base to make calls, I stayed in the shade and hoped nothing was too close half the time.
My fellow ump working the opposite QA field got the short end of the stick in the sense that he had to work the field with no shade for the first three-plus games, but then one of the teams scheduled for his fifth game didn't show up, so he got to declare a forfeit and bug out early. He could have come over and been a base ump for my game, but I don't begrudge him for taking off. Five-gamers are brutal, even for a twenty-something punk like him. (Kidding, I don't think he's a punk. Barely know the guy at all, really.)
As I was returning our gear to the office, I ran into another ump who had the games at my regular Sunday spot and asked him how it went and I learned that I'd been shifted to QA for the day because he had newbies to train and the schedule worked best to do that at Northacres. Huh, OK. Nothing against my fellow ump there, but he's relatively new himself and maybe the youngest guy on the staff. I later looked over the rest of the assignments for Sunday and saw that every field except QA had trainees.
Used to be, I trained a lot of new umps. Then the owner of the business came down to check out one of my trainee games and undercut everything I said the the new guy and I told him off, not knowing who he was. Oops. (On the other hand, if you ask me he wasn't helping the new guy at all and I was prevented from doing so myself.) Since then, what do you know, I don't get trainees anymore. OK, that's their business and all, but I kind of resent it; teaching is one of my roads-not-taken and I enjoyed training the new guys, I think I was good at it. But whatever, their loss.
Anyhow, after I got home I was completely wiped out and nursing a headache; I watched the afternoon's Mariner game and crashed hard, then slept away a goodly chunk of today. Spent the rest of the day lounging on the balcony reading and dozing. These long Sunday shifts do me in for far too long, I shouldn't accept them anymore, at least not more than once in a while. Next week I'm back to my normal spot and it's only four games, so that's good. And I have a relatively small schedule of games during the week too, which will be a welcome little break.
Between the long Sundays; the fact that I as one of the senior, seasoned, most popular umps is barred from training newbies; and the fact that I am thirty years older than most everyone else on field staff (and probably older than everyone in the office too), I have been wondering again if I'm much longer for this gig. We'll see. I think the thought will pass, I'll get over my age-related insecurities, and keep on doing it as long as I feel fit enough to and they keep asking me back.
But no more five-game Sundays, maybe.
Tagged
Umping,
Aging,
Posted on June 23, 2026 at 12:15AM | Permalink | |
What a drag it is getting old
Middle age sucks.
On the other hand, it is vastly preferable to the alternative.
So, though I am currently complaining in a way, I'm congnizant of the fact that I live in an era when life expectancies are longer than ever and we benefit from modern medicine, sanitation, etc., and am overall doing pretty well. Your 50s ain't what they used to be. Average age of demise is in one's 80s now, while back when my grandfather was born, the average male that survived infancy in the US only lived to be 62 (of course, Grandpa beat that mark by 30 years despite decades-long addictions to tobacco and alcohol, so hopefully I've got his constitution).
At any rate, I'm at that age when I'm getting mystery injuries. Like, right now my right hand hurts along the pinky side as if it were bruised, but I have no recollection of doing anything to bruise my hand, nor is there an actual, you know, bruise. I did play softball last night, so maybe it has some connection with swinging a bat, but I don't quite buy that. I've had other little pains that I couldn't account for too, like I'm in that episode of The Next Generation where Riker and company are experimented on in their sleep.
Also, I have this damned floater thing in my right eye that has now been there for going on two years and I was told by the reliable source that is WebMD that it would have resolved itself by now. But it's still there being annoying. Add to that, when I wake up now my vision needs time to focus that it never needed before, which isn't a big deal but noticeable, and things that used to heal up quickly now take longer.
Anyway, such is the price of life.
Oh, and in my game I went 0-for-2, grounding into two forceouts; committed a throwing error and failed to hang onto a pop fly for a second error; and gave up three home runs while pitching. We lost 24-10 and were mercy-ruled after four innings.
Huzzah!
Tagged
Softball,
Aging,
Posted on May 21, 2026 at 5:22PM | Permalink | |