Rob's Corner: The Quiet Got Me I love war movies and history in general. Heather doesn't, not really, she tolerates them, tunes out half the dialogue, and has heard the same films enough times in the background to know them by heart anyway. So when I asked her to actually sit and watch a new one with me, that was already a good night. We did it right. Couch fluffed, snacks out, surround sound on, lights off. Fifteen minutes in, I started narrating the equipment on screen, the names of the...
20 days ago • 2 min read
Rob's Corner: The Carboy Incident Years ago I planted grapevines in the backyard. Syrah, Chardonnay, Zinfandel, a few table grapes for good measure. I have no memory of what I was thinking at the time, but they've been growing ever since, and this year I finally decided we were making wine. Braden and Audrey got me winemaking kits for Christmas and my birthday, which I took as a mandate. So I went out and picked, basket after basket, sorted by variety, and got everything ready for press day....
27 days ago • 2 min read
Some of the hardest parts of caregiving happen in the middle of an ordinary day. Breakfast. A conversation about money. A familiar routine that suddenly needs more help. I wrote the everyday parts down. Meet Pivot: A Caregiver’s Path With Frontotemporal Dementia. It comes from life with my husband, Rob, and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, or bvFTD. He shares his perspective too. There is love in these pages, frustration, and the kind of humor that turns up when the day has already...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Rob's Corner: The Photos in Braden's Closet Heather was cleaning out Braden's room yesterday, the way you do when a kid's room slowly turns into a storage unit for everything nobody wants to deal with. I wasn't part of the project. I just wandered in to check on her and got ambushed by a shoebox of old photos. Beach days. The kids were tiny, boogie boards under their arms, goofy grins, the wagon packed with every toy we owned. I remembered all of it, the early mornings driving out to grab a...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Rob's Corner: What the Water Knows I've been a water guy since I was a kid. Surfing does that to you, it gets into how you see the ocean for the rest of your life. Even now, when I'm just standing on the sand instead of paddling out, I'm still reading it. Where the currents are pulling, why one break works and another doesn't, which sections you'd never paddle out on and which ones you would. We end up at the beach more than people might guess. Sometimes it's because we're already out that...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Rob's Corner: The Sauce Aisle Standoff Something I am seeing about myself. If I start avoiding something because it's hard, I'll keep avoiding it until I don't leave the house at all. I don't want that to happen, so even on the days when going out sounds unbearable, I make myself go. Not always to somewhere big. Sometimes just to the grocery store. Big box stores are their own kind of chaos for me. Too many people, carts pulling out of nowhere, kids running past, someone always coming at me...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Rob's Corner: The Horse's Grandfather I've wanted to go to opening day at the races for years. Something always got in the way. This time it wasn't opening day, just a regular Saturday, but it counted. Eight of us went. The guys took one table, the girls took another, the way it always goes with this group. These are people who've known me long enough that I don't have to explain anything to them. Nobody at that table was thinking about my diagnosis. For a few hours, neither was I. Before...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
HEATHER'S CORNER Every few years my heart needs a little maintenance. Same procedure I've had done several times over the years, nothing new, nothing scary, honestly the easiest part of my whole month. We knew it was coming, we planned for it, no surprises there. Here's what was new: the last time I had this done, I was the patient and Rob was the one who stepped up and ran the house. This time Rob is the one who needs care, which means my own surgery isn't just a prep on me anymore. It's a...
2 months ago • 3 min read
ROB'S CORNER This week, medically, we have both been a mess. Heather's recovering from her own thing. I'm tapering off a med. Between the two of us we've got maybe one functional nervous system, and we're sharing custody of it. My neurologist warned me before we started the taper. Coming off this one, she said, might make you feel bad. Not sick. Bad. Just, bad. Which is not a diagnosis you can Google your way out of, but at least she told me to expect it instead of letting me think I'd lost...
2 months ago • 2 min read