Cheese and carrot strudel with salad

I started this morning, as usual, with Suki snuggled against me, floating up from a dream featuring an oddly familiar little tune. It sounded a lot like my phone’s ringtone.

No, it was my phone: the plumber, who had told me he would be here this afternoon, was sitting outside in his van, at just before 10am. With mum panicking and Suki trying to trip me up in the mistaken impression that this would get cat food into her bowl more often, I got my contact lenses in, clothes on, and the front door open.

After all that panic, the actual clearance of the blocked pipe took less than 30 seconds. The plumber only charged me his call-out fee, and apologised for having to charge me that, but it was still a pretty pricy 30 seconds.

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With that start, it’s perhaps not surprising that mum has been having a really bad day with anxiety today.

As the morning wore on, my patience with mum’s complaining and reassurance-seeking wore periously thin. In a desperate quest not to snap at mum to give it a damn rest, would you?, I put in my new, rather expensive earplugs, Loop Engage 2.

Unlike conventional earplugs, they don’t block sound completely, but just reduce the volume. That means I can still hear every word from the blaring television (to take an example completely at random) but just with a little less pain. If you have the clear ones, they’re practically invisible.

Mum is amazingly good at sensing when she doesn’t have my full attention, and kept coming into my room to get the reaction she was deprived of when shouting from the living room. Of course, the more she did that, the more thankful I was for my new hearing limiters.

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For dinner I made cheese, carrot, and mango chutney pinwheels, using a recipe off the Riverford website. When I tried to cut the pastry, though, it threatened to fall apart and throw the filling across the kitchen, so I cooked it more like a strudel (i.e. all in one long roll). The result was… uninspiring.

Mum only ate about half of her slice; I ate all of mine, but found it just kinda sweet, stodgy, and bland. I’m hoping the leftovers will be better cold tomorrow.

Now it’s another evening of mum pacing around and complaining, just as she has been all day. I am deep in compassion fatigue, and am finding it hard to empathise with her problems with her teeth and mouth and back and stomach and knee and anything else that she can think of at any given moment.

I might be better if I ever got any sympathy in response, but such things were beyond mum even before the dementia turned her self-absorption in self-obsession. At least I’ve got Suki, who will soon be back snuggled against me, hopefully without early interruption from the phone this time.