No worries

Michelle, the cleaning lady with OCD, did a great job, and, she is very nice. There were a few things that I will probably need to work on. All the sheets for the bed have to match. Consequently, she didn't replace some of the pillow cases because they weren't right. My linen closet is probably as unorganized as they come, and I throw together whatever as long as its the right size for making up the beds. I guess I'll have to re-organize that closet too. It's time.

She confessed that she replaced John's water glass three times because there were bugs in it (fall is always ladybug / elder bug season crazy in the house). If you live in the suburbs you will not understand, or if you are heavy into pesticides, my house would be a problem for you, because I will not even kill spiders. Here in Minnesota we really do not have anything lethal anyway that would come indoors.

My husband keeps a beer mug of water on the table that he uses all week long, and maybe once a week I'll replace it with a clean mug. I don't worry about the possibilities of him swallowing a bug unless I see it happen or there is one in the glass at the time I am passing by. Michelle suggested putting saran wrap over the top, but that would be complicated for John to remove at best.

The only incident was, very early on I recieved a call from Michelle, because John was asking for her help to find a disk that contained his phone numbers. Well, he hasn't used a diskette in a pc for ten years, and he was thinking of when we lived in Maryland and he used to carry his phone numbers on a diskette that he would take between his home office and work. So I walked Michelle through re-booting the pc, and bypassing the hard drive scanning program. John is using a 486 processor pc with windows 98 because his talking program, Jaws, is old and has been out of service for years. It would cost $900.00 to upgrade, and another $135.00 for software maintenance agreements, so I am keeping this pc alive for as long as I possibly can. John has a phone number file on his desktop, and I showed Michelle how to access this. I explained the situation to her, that as a result of the stroke, he confuses past and present and sometimes he will have moments of clarity so she will just have to ask Harry or I to explain what John is referring to. Brain damage is an interesting thing. It can turn life into a crossword puzzle. I guess I would prefer to work them at my leisure, but it is what it is and we can rise to the occasion.