Overwhelmed

Visiting Africa was a wonderful experience, one that I am eager to share with family and friends. While I was away, I nurtured the lovely notion of publishing a weblog post every week after returning home. In fact, I still have a handwritten list of title ideas jotted down during the 8-hour flight from Amsterdam back to the United States.

Thus it came as a bit of a shock to realize that it is already ten weeks post-safari. It sure doesn’t seem like that long, but the calendar doesn’t lie. It’s definitely time to own up to my procrastination. I am going to give a Reader’s Digest condensed version of why I haven’t jumped right in to posting. Read on if you’re interested – if not, check back next Monday for my first official safari post.

Coming home to a crazy winter storm (I wasn’t sure for a while if I was going to be able to fly into Kansas City that night), I learned that my mother-in-law was no longer mobile and had entered hospice care. With carefully orchestrated hospice and home health agency visits, Phil and I hope to be able to honor her wish to remain at home.

The following day I was reunited with my beloved kitty, Moses. Several months earlier he had been diagnosed with kidney failure, and his medical treatment meant it would be best to board him while I was away. Skeeter appeared to be stable during his stay at the vet clinic, and we enjoyed a week where he seemed back on the road to his old playful self, cuddling and wanting to go outside for short periods. Then he suddenly stopped eating, and despite increased subcutaneous fluids and appetite stimulating medication, went into a rapid decline. We made the heartbreaking decision to put my darling boy to sleep February 28.

Skeeter’s paw print impression,
made the day he went to kitty heaven.

Two weeks later, Phil came home from work to find Daisy in what appeared to be a post-seizure state. Usually she will stagger outside afterward to take care of business. This time, she was unable even to get up. Our vet was fortunately on call, and generously made a house call when she hadn’t recovered after several hours. Daisy’s age and epilepsy complicated diagnosis, but it was clearly some type of neurological event. Basically, time would tell whether she would recover, and how much. We spent the weekend keeping her as comfortable as possible and carrying her outside to try (unsuccessfully) to take care of potty business. At the point when we began to despair of losing two pets in under a month, Daisy began taking a few faltering steps. Then she peed outside! Each day is a little better than the day before. Now she can get around fairly well, although it’s sometimes difficult for her to get up by herself and occasionally she trips over nothing and takes a face-plant on the sidewalk. It’s terrible, but we laugh, mainly with relief that our sweet Princess Crazy Daisy is still with us.

The face of trust and love.

Many of you know that I work at my church. (One of my safari nicknames was “Church Lady” – and I may or may not share an anecdote or two concerning that in the future.) Just as I was leaving for Africa, we welcomed a new senior pastor, also my direct supervisor. Upon my return we reformatted the weekly bulletin, began working toward an electronic version of the monthly newsletter, and my website volunteer resigned. I also immersed myself in learning a new program for service slides. For a normal week there will be two slide sets and one bulletin. During Lent, that increases to three slide sets and two bulletins. During Holy Week: six slide sets and four bulletins. Yeah, it’s been crazy busy.

It’s not my intention to whine, make excuses, or solicit sympathy; I’m just outlining what I have allowed to demand my attention lately in an effort to shake off the lassitude. Life is life and we are all constantly evolving toward a new normal.

Which brings me to fess up to my biggest obstacle to timely posting – the sheer number of images I brought home from Africa. All told, more than 8,000 pictures over twelve days of shooting – not including the ones that I deleted in-camera before being scolded out of that bad habit. Some of them are easy to discard – out of focus, bad lighting, missed action. For others, though, it takes sorting through dozens of similar shots to pick the one that is just right. And sometimes a so-so picture needs just a little tweaking or cropping to become “the one.” As great a tool as PhotoShop is, it can all too easily become a time vacuum.

That said, there comes a time to kick inertia in its passive rear end and just get on with it. Plus writing is generally very therapeutic for me. So I am returning to my self-imposed yet long-ignored weekly deadline for new posts until I have exhausted my list of ideas inspired while watching The Lion King on Delta Flight 161. Monday mornings, here we come.

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