Mom & Me Three Archive

...we had a couple of really windy days which swept the last vestiges of summer out of the mountains. The nights are bordering on cold, now, the days are cool and bright and I'm making bread again, every day to every other day. I found a store that sells high altitude flour and what a wonderful invention that is! I'm not having any flops. In the spring I was having such trouble with figuring yeast usage on a day to day basis that a little over every other loaf was either too well yeasted or didn't have enough. We ate them anyway and they were good, but the texture and the tops left a lot to be desired. This flour makes for a much more pungent smell when the baking cycle on the bread machine starts, too. Both Mom and I are reveling in the smell. We were experiencing a loaf back-up so on Monday I didn't make bread and in the afternoon Mom complained about the lack of the aroma of bread baking.
    Speaking of which, we've begun our Christmas baking list. Mom's famous fruitcakes are on it. I'm going to attempt our own Panettone this year, too, in the bread machine, of course. As well, we're planning on old fashioned ginger snaps, Mexican Wedding Cake cookies, the old original Hudson Date Bars (totally different than the one's you're probably used to with the date mixture between oat crumb layers), my original German Chocolate Cake cookies, the perfected Honey Bear Brownies, of course, and we're looking for a really spectacular chocolate cookie, something different from the usual. I'll probably be pulling out my maternal grandmother's cookbooks and notes to see what I can find there, too. We haven't done Christmas baking for more than a few years. If you're suspicious about why I'm making sure we do Christmas baking this year, you've probably guessed the reason: It's one of my mother's favorite things to do during the year and I'm thinking we don't have too many more years to incorporate it before she won't be here, anymore. I just want to make sure that she slip slides away in the midst of doing some of her favorite things.
    My fascination with my writing in these journals continues to hold up the actual creation of the dynamic Table of Contents. The database I'm setting up is divided into categories underwhich I'm cataloguing anchored snippets that pertain to the categories. I hadn't expected that I would find so much to catalog. I thought I'd repeated myself a lot in these journals and probably said a lot that wouldn't need to be catalogued. I'm find the opposite, though. In case you're curious, here are the categories underwhich I'm currently cataloguing journal entries and snippets of journal entries:

1. Anemia
2. Assistance Devices
3. Bad Days
4. Bowels Away
5. Caregiving and Relationship Issues
6. Caregiving and Spirituality
7. Dementia
8. Family Dynamics and History
9. Food
10. General Health and Medical Issues
11. Giving Up Things
12. Home Doctoring
13. Housing and Ancient Ones
14. Hydration
15. Inactivity
16. Incontinence
17. Leaving Mom Alone
18. Medical and Healing Treatments, Procedures and Diagnostics
19. Medical Professionals and Us
20. Mom Mourning
21. Mom's Attitude and Stamina
22. Mom's Changing Preferences
23. My Commitment to My Mother
24. Old Age Diabetes
25. Pertinent Descriptions of My Mother
26. Protecting and Surrendering
27. Purpose of Journals
28. Sleepy Time Gal
29. Taking Over Business Affairs
30. The Caregiving Situation
31. The Detail of What I Do
32. The Literature
33. The Smell of Caregiving
34. What Old Is
35. When Other's Notice Caregiving
36. When Others Notice My Mother

.    Hold on. I'm going to publish this so I can see how many categories I've got. I've not yet counted them.
    Shit! 36! I was figuring maybe 25. My guess is that by the time I'm done with the initial cataloguing I may have added a few more categories.
    Some of the categories contain entries as straightforward as the titles underwhich they're organized. Some of them cover a variety of sins. The "Leaving Mom Alone" category, for instance, not only contains posting about, well, leaving Mom physically alone but also contains stuff about not pestering her about stuff that doesn't matter anymore. "The Caregiving Situation", which is one of the largest categories, contains a variety of material organized around postings that describe what it is like to be a caregiver and ruminations about caregiving in general. You'd think that "The Detail of What I Do" would contain essentially the same type of material as "The Caregiving Situation", but it is far more specific.
    I will be including yet another separate category listing the essays and various other stand-alone pages and journals such as the Test Index and the Movies, Mom & Me journal.
    Anyway, as I read I'm doing a bit more editing than I intended so my material reads more smoothly. I'm not taking out my stylistic peculiarities but as I read I notice and correct flubs that make reading difficult for me. I'm deleting excess commas, as well. I'm also trying to standardize items like how I publish links to movies, web sites I mention, places within this set of journals, etc.
    Well, I think I'll catalogue another archived section then head for bed.
    Later.