Posted 5/4/22 May the Forth Be With You
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.- Psalm 139:9-10
Hi all! Sorry I have been gone a spell. 🙁 I have been soooooo booked with tasks that my writing time, done off the clock and on my own time for free, suffers. I really wish I could go back to writing every day, but we are where we are… Anywhooooo off we go. 🙂
I am a St. Louis Cardinals fan. I just am. I always have been and, minus another strike, I always will be. I have been fortunate to be able to listen to and watch several wonderful announcers in my 40+ years as a Cardinal fan. John Rooney, Rick Horton, Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky, Dan McLaughlin, Tim McCarver, Jay Randolph, and Mike Claiborne among others have been on the other side of the radio/tv. Every one of these men have been great, but I left out the most famous: Jack Buck, Harry Carey (a longtime Cardinal announcer before moving on to the Cubs) and Mike “Moon Man” Shannon were a constant source of ear candy for me all of these years. Buck and Carey are both gone now, far too soon. Shannon retired last year and was my favorite. I especially loved how he wordsmithed his way through a broadcast. Consider these Shannonisms:
- “Chicago always seems to blame all of their problems on animals. For that big fire, they blamed it on a cow. And for the Cubs not winning a World Series in over a hundred years they blame it on a goat. (pause) By the way, they’ve got a great zoo here in Chicago.”
- “If you stuck your money clip between the foul line & the baseball, you’d be on welfare.”
- “The United States is the greatest country in America!”
- “The Cardinals try to mount some mustard and come back.”
- “If you wanna dance, you gotta pay the fiddler!”
- “They’ll be hanging from the roofters at Shea when the Cardinals come to town.”
- “He hails from the island of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is an island, isn’t it? Well, just try to swim off of it and I guess you’ll find out.”
- “The key thing is, he has that photogenic mind.”
- “Well, no one’s perfect. Only one guy was ever perfect, Jack, and they nailed him to a tree!”
- “He made that play beseated.”
- “Two outs, two on. The Cardinals trailing by two here in the ninth. The 2-2 pitch to Pujols – Swwwwiiiing and a looong one! Get up baby! That’s a winner folks, the Cardinals win it — what? Oh! Sorry folks, we’re in the top of the ninth. Still got another half inning to go…”
- “Low and away… they’ve been trying to hit that for a hundred years.”
But my favorite thing to hear Mike say, at least when the Cardinals are batting, is this:
“Get up, get up, get up!!!” seemed to add wind to the ball’s sails more often than not.
There is even a theme song based on the Get up, Get up, Get up he was known for:
OK…that was a lot of work to get us to the introducing dementia point. 🙂 Who would I be to be brief anyway?!?! (Note: these “introducing” pieces aren’t REALLY a true introduction…they are just tips that you will have likely never faced before that will likely kick your butt if you are like me.
Gettin’ up. Sigh…
One of the tragic things about dementia is the physical, mental/cognitive, and even emotional unholy trinity of cruddiness that causes a person with dementia to, at the same time, desire to stand up from their wheelchair and walk around and be normal…. and be unable to do so. I have written about falls many times and this factors in again here. They attempt to get up like they always did, perhaps forgetting they can’t. Bad things then ensue. Typically falling face-first, but sometimes merely falling over. So, to fight this terrible event, we as caregivers incessently have to remind them, over and over and over and over and over and over………..and over again to sit down. Then, 30 seconds later, when their short-term memory egg timer goes off, they try all over again. 🙁 This is stressful, it is sad, it is frustrating, and it is every other emotion in the thesaurus.
Nursing homes try to use alarms to remind them when they are standing up. These are seldom effective, often annoying/loud, and dubious from a law sense in some areas as they are considered loosely as a restraint, all of which are guarded carefully under the so-called Right to Fall laws guaranteeing the freedom to bust your face wide open in a fall to protect your dignity. I have written about that before with some level of grumpiness. Don’t believe me? Here is mom after one such fall from her chair.
This get up, get up, get up routine cycles over and over and it wears you out. Just be prepared. 🙁
We need to defeat this disease, friends. Soon! Before a million try to get up, get up, get up…
#EndALZ
#RunninTilImPurple
Update: I am very sorry to have missed Friday and Monday. I try to find time, but it is not always possible. 🙁 I will keep plugging away and trying to get some time here and there because I have 100 articles that need to be written today. 🙁
Running Til I’m Purple update: The fundraiser is up to about $600. 🙂 I would love to get to a little over $10k, or double the last year’s goal since I am jumpin’ double the sharks. 🙂 I ran my first real test Saturday: a 50K (aka 31 miles for us in the US that don’t metric our pizza.). I completed it in 7:56, give or take. That weekend I hit 100k steps. 🙂 I need many more if I am going to do that beast 2 days in a row. But I am tryin’. Here is the donation link should you be so inclined to drop a coin in my little tin cup: LINK
Thank you all for your support in every way. See you again Friday if at all possible. 🙂
Note: Mike Shannon doesn’t have dementia. Hopefully he is recovering from a bad spell of Covid, though. He is a wonderful guy!