ZOMG puppy face.

Adorable. Good luck, Brenda!

Sweet puppy! Fingers crossed for your dad, Brenda.

I'm seriously ready for another dog already, but Tim isn't, and that's fine. I can wait.

Plus, his dad being in assisted living is NOT going well. It's requiring a LOT of time and work on the part of all 3 boys (and the wives). His dementia is at the stage where he still remembers and retains a lot of information that he already knew prior to, say, 2015 or so. But he doesn't retain anything new, so he doesn't understand why he's in assisted living, and since it's an unfamiliar place, he's SUPER disoriented all the time and needs a lot of attention and reassurance, generally in person.

Someone has to visit him every day, for hours and hours, which is really hard. It's more care than the boys were putting in when he lived at home (and they were putting in a LOT of care). Every time he goes to the bathroom it's a surprise to him that he has a catheter, and he doesn't remember why it's there and he wants to know when it will be removed and when he can go back home (the answer to both is: probably never).

I think if he were back at home, he would be less disoriented, but at this point he requires more or less around-the-clock medical care, so a healthcare provider would have to live in at his house, and he would NOT stand for that. Basically, he wants to go home and have the boys continue to care for him, because he thinks he's healthy and doesn't need much help. Since that's not actually true, him going home and the boys helping is not going to happen. There's no good solution here.

I'm ashamed that my reaction is to be frustrated that Jack hasn't jumped into all the activities and such at Evergreen (and, again, this place is swanky as hell). I assumed he would slide back into being the gregarious, outgoing, extroverted man he used to be, but...he's pretty much given up. He said, in so many words, that he just wants to go back home and "sit in his chair in the living room and look around at things, drink some beers, and go to bed." That's all he wants to do. Even getting him to go to Mass on Saturday was like pulling teeth (and this is a man who went to Mass literally every DAY when I first met him; he's a hardcore Catholicism fanboy). We thought we'd go over mid-afternoon on Saturday to visit for a couple of hours, take him his laundry and make sure he had nice clean clothes for Mass, and then scoot off to run errands. In the end, Tim had to agree to go to Mass with him and spent about 6 hours with him before going home (I was in cutoff shorts and used that as my excuse to not go to Mass, plus someone really needed to get groceries).

tl;dr: We are expending a LOT of time and emotional energy on Tim's dad right now, and there's no time or energy to get a new dog. But I want one.

One good thing is that my improv class's next session starts May 30, and I am SO looking forward to that.

That sucks a lot, Steph. I hope it gets easier somehow as time passes.

PUPPY! So frickin cute! I got weirdly confused by that series of posts, though, and thought the link would have something to do with wedding dresses.

YOU SHOULD NOT BE AT WORK MSBELLE THAT IS TERRIBLE!!!!

Oh, I'm sorry Tep, that is so hard. Strength to all of you to keep helping him.

We took a short trip to Arkansas this last weekend. It worked out pretty well even though the weather forecast made it look grim. We also managed to find a good route home that avoided roads closed due to flooding.

Also this weekend I got the first, I guess proof of concept, 15 minute recording for the audiobook edition of Cog.

[link]

Ugh, that's so hard, Steph. And I hate to say this, but it may just get worse until he's beyond knowing what's going on at all. Is he in the apartment kind of assisted living? I.e., would he just be alone if you all weren't constantly visiting? He may be better off in a situation with more staff interaction, so they can be the ones to tell him what's up a thousand times a day. (One of my nursing home friends spends an hour or more a day explaining her relationship to her mother, that her parents are dead, etc., and it's been like that for years.)

In better news, PUPPY.

In other better news, physical plant just showed up at the office next to mine and said they were there for a "cold call." I didn't know that was a thing! Get ready for me to complain about every single room I go into, because they are all freezing most of the time. (Although apparently some coworkers know how to adjust the thermostats that seem to randomly located.)