Assorted anxieties about The Male. in The Big, Blue House, year one.

Let me state that I’ve referred to him as The Male since long before Prosebox. It’s not an insult, just the the best title I could come up with for someone I’ve lived with for decades without marrying. My mother used to call him my “shack up”.

Don continues to be sugary sweet. He was agitated the day before yesterday, when I asked him to bring in the pickets that had been delivered from Home Depot, and he stormed past me and slammed the kitchen door on his way out to get them. Then yesterday he came upstairs and apologized, and listened to me vent about it, while he fiddled with the fabric I’ve got hanging on my easel. (It’s to cover paintings when I’m not working on them, from house flies and airborne cat hair.) He was reticent. I am amazed.

He may also be starting to decline a bit mentally. That is NOT an easy thing to type, it’s F*CKING terrifying, but it’s true. Three times in the last six months I’ve gone into the kitchen and smelled gas, and found he’d tried turning a burner off in the wrong direction, so instead of being off, it was on REAAALLY low. (So I turned it off, of course.)

With menopause my periods make my arthritis fifty times worse, so several days out of the month I’m just kind of moping around. So bless his heart, he did the dishes yesterday. And the big cook pot is not clean. It’s MOSTLY clean. It looks clean. But picking it up to put it away, I felt the almost invisible dried on crusty stuff, and had to re-wash it.

When I met his mother, (I only talked to her twice), she came across as a flake. And I say this as someone infamous for being flaky. If I believed in any gods I’d be asking them not to let that happen to Don. - I mean, unless it comes with him being a nicer person. I’ll take personality improvements however I can get them.

But she eventually developed Parkinson’s, so no, not worth it. Not to self: Get Don to take 400 mg of Qnol a day. I read a study that it can forestall the worst stages of Parkinson’s and possibly prevent dementia from it. Well in mice it can. He does have some rodent-like tendencies to accumulate trash. (Har har trying to have a laugh in the face of my fears.)

On the other hand, he’s known for ten months that he needs cataract surgery. He’s putting it off, because who wants a scalpel in their eyeballs, right? FINGERS VERY SERIOUSLY CROSSED that that’s his problem.