Summer Wind-down

Oh oh oh I don't want to speak too soon, but we might actually be making it through the quagmire of August. 

The days are noticeably shorter. We are just now getting some heavy rain! The HVAC people came and serviced all our units...

 And all the craziness previously described sprawls behind in a checked off checklist. 

Guest, check! 

Suffering weird cold brought by guest, check! 

DMV purgatory, check!

 Birthdays, check! 

Missing family visit due to weird cold brought by guest, check! 

Two other family visits held in the backyard to avoid passing on weird cold, check! 

Colonoscopy, check!

My prep required a week of the low fiber/residue diet. In my case, this becomes semi-fasting, since I don't necessarily have a lot of low fiber "safe foods". I made the best of it with skinned potatoes, boiled carrots and cheese sticks, and a side dose of Miralax to make the system work ok considering all that.

I suppose on the bright side, there really wasn't that much waste available for the giant purge, so that whole sordid affair was far less dramatic than a lot of people have described it. 

Yes, the purge. As we all know, the most prohibitive part of the entire experience involves chugging a shit ton (pun intended) of laxatives and then emptying one's bowels well into the wee hours so that your colon looks nice and clean and pink by the time you pull into the clinic rocking your adult diaper and clamoring for propofol!  

 I did the traditional split dose 4 liter prep, despite many horror stories of it being particularly emetic to folks. Honestly, it wasn't that bad for me. A bit like drinking dirty dish water, but without any mystery chunks of decaying food or anything like that. I am prone to dehydration and low blood pressure, so drinking salty water isn't exactly a novel experience for me. 

 It was admittedly a lot of liquid, even for me. But I managed the evening dose without any particular gagging or nausea in the prescribed two hours, and did the morning prep (got up at 3:30 for that one!) in just over an hour while sitting in the dark of my bed pretending that I was still fucking asleep because 3:30 a.m. is simultaneously too late and too early to be sane on either side. 

Undeterred by my 4 liters of ocean hydration, I also drank an additional 2 or 3 liters of Essentia water to get the dishwater taste out of my mouth. On the bright side, I'm pretty sure I did remain hydrated!

The whole thing was a bit nerve-racking. First just because i had no idea how gag-worthy it would be. And later because the laxatives took their sweet time kicking in. Five hours and change, in fact, even though I was promised to start THE PURGE within an hour of my first sip.

 I went from all prepared to spend a night upstairs in the master bath (comfy pillow, laptop, plenty of hard candies, a few drinks all set up for nought) to going about my usual evening routine and even trying to get some sleep once the on-call nurse told me to just carry on as normal and it would be fine.

 But in the end (har har), seems like things finally came together and came out. Not particularly dramatically, as I've been promised, but out nonetheless. I am so relieved no to have to do that again in a couple of weeks. Because it felt like this was a real possibility at about 10:15 p.m. the night before. 

The process itself was a bit nothing much. I changed into a gown and was shuffled from room to room where various nurses and doctors talked to me and made me sign things. Eventually they brought me into the actual room, had me part my gown for a glorious half-conscious moon, got me a little high on oxygen and then filled me up with propofol. Came to feeling quite relaxed and thirsty. 

I had a "diminutive" (yes this is a medical term, and I think it's cute so I'm saying that instead of 2mm) polyp that is now being tested to tell me when my next colonoscopy ought to be. 

Which means all good news: (1) the prep was adequate (excellent, apparently); and (2) there wasn't a gigantic mass of cancer OR small gremlins running around biting my colon from the inside (maybe I just flushed them out with the prep or they went to hide in the small intestine, but I'll take it).

 Either they caught a precancerous little butt-face mega early and saved my ass (har har) or shaved off a benign cosmetic lump. Either way, I feel ok with that result.  

Now I just have to wait for my body to get back to "normal". That whole brother-in-law bleeding story is still haunting me a bit. But so far, so good.

So, bring on autumn, I say! August is soooooo last month (almost)

Even the fairy garden is getting ready for fall. 

Allan decided the bees weren't getting quite enough noms in our garden as summer winds down. So, last weekend, we set about trying to make that right. 

We loaded up with a few brown-eyed susans, some echinacea and some lavender. The lavender is more of a mid-summer flowerer, but the other two seem to often go well into fall. And since both are common about our neighborhood, we definitely know the bees are fans. 

Sadly, the grand plant experiment seems to be failing a bit. 

The echinacea and brown eyed susans look dreadfully droopy. The lavender is looking pretty piqued as well, but it kind of always does, so it's harder to tell. 

Ah well. Hopefully not an omen for the coming season. On the bright side, while Allan was doing most of the arduous planting work, I got some clippers and deadheaded the fireweed. Yep, getting ready for spooky season with plenty of decapitations! But also, deadheading really just means cutting off flowers when they wilt to prompt plants to flower a second time instead of going to seed. 

I trimmed the fireweed down a good foot or so (it was getting seriously unruly). A lot of the plants had released a ton of cottony seeds already, so I thought it might be too late, but some of them actually are making more blooms now, so I'm feeling kind of good about that! I'll be more aggressive with the clippers next year!

 While I hope the echinacea et al. survive, I'm also pretty fine with letting the fireweed and some of our wild flowers spread into those areas. The flowering currant and the Oregon grape are doing pretty well, at any rate. 

So, cheers to summer 2026! It's a little premature to say that you didn't kill me, but I feel like we're heading in the right trajectory finally! 

May all the dead flowers make nummy seeds and the leaves get redder and redder! I'm so ready to do this fall thang!