Red Letter Day - NuMotion

Today is a Big Adventure for Julie. At 10 AM a new semi-electric wheelchair will be delivered to her at Mesa Manor.  It is to have wheels powered by an electrical battery that will give acceleration when pushed, with both low and high settings.  Even for a bariatric person, it should be able to go up inclines with a manual wheel turn.  It is a NuMotion chair, sold and fitted to her by a fellow who worked at the Para Olympics in prior times, pairing para athletes with specially adapted wheelchairs. A picture of the new electric blue chair will be included later. It costs as much as a small used car, a kings' ransom in my mind, but all for the cause to help Julie have a more functioning life. Her borrowed chair is unwieldy.

And speaking of Julie, I have set up a blog for her, As The Wheels Turn.  She is not enthused about this endeavor, but I will continue pushing for her to write about things that interest her.  She did manage to dictate her own "profile" for the blog.  When she sends me an email about a topic that piques her interest, that will be the clue for a new post.  I would dearly love to see if she gets any traffic to her site, but sitemeter has been down for over a month, and visits cannot be tracked through them.  Does anyone know of any gizmo that will track blog visit sites by location?  Please comment, if so.  Google only tracks visits by number in their stats.

Every morning, Julie and I stay outdoors at the facility, and she often eats her lunch on a tray alfresco before I leave for home.  So far, no other resident has been at the gazebo table, as one-to-one staff attendance is mandated outdoors.  And our lack of other patient visits to the gazebo may be because we are calling the gazebo our own, and I spread out all my doings on the tabletop.

A few weeks ago I was cutting down the front bushes at the nursing home and was told to cease and desist because of liability reasons; that incident must have come up in their weekly staff meeting since the summarial dismissal to QUIT making the facility more attractive was reversed.  Several days ago I was told by The Powers That Be that I could officially be a volunteer at the Genesis owned facility.  Official in their corporate minds must include coming under the umbrella of their liability insurance policy.  So, I duly underwent the first of two tuberculosis tests, and was deemed negative for the dread disease yesterday, but still they need to inject me for a second screening at the end of the week. It is a good thing they are allowing me to volunteer, because Saturday I planted several containers with geraniums and petunias, watered all the plants in cement containers, and weeded. Yesterday I painted one of the geranium boxes red because it looked like it had not had any attention in ten years. Surely the Powers are grateful for all this gardening attention?

This evening the husband and I are hosting a writers' class pot luck with fellow students from Sandy Dorr's spring writing group here in Grand Junction.  I am making sangria, red, for the festive occasion.  Pictures tomorrow if I remember to take snapshots.  The weather has been cloudy and rainy and since this is to be an outdoor soiree, we may have to be indoors, defeating the purpose of the outdoor summertime theme.

Post Script: the party did take place outside, although we received more rain while eating and the six of us scurried under cover so our combined sweetness did not dissolve into sugar.