Spike! And A New Power Line

Spike!

I don't mean an electrical spike.
And I don't mean a spike in volleyball.
Or what they do to the football in an end-zone celebration.

Instead my "Spike" ended me up in the emergency room. Not fun!

My sudden spike in blood pressure went up to 190 and I was not feeling right inside. I alerted my hubby after using our home BP cuff, so Steve bundled me up and off we went to the ER in Fond du Lac. From there it kept increasing up to 226. They got me on some medication and it started to slowly come down. They ran me through an EKG, a CT scan, and of course all the necessary blood work and lab work. Then they gave me a second clonidine pill and I could relax and really feel it coming down.

After three hours I was finally in enough of a safe zone to be released. He gave more clonidines to use in case it gets above 180. Since I normally don't have high blood pressure, he is not putting me on a full-time medicine. Instead he gave me pills for just in case. And of course, he wants me to follow up with my regular family physician.


The very next day we ended up going back there again to see if we needed to change a medication because it was creeping back up again in the 165 range.

I am following up this Friday with my doc.

This happened once two and a half years ago, on the day I planned my dad's funeral after a horrible battle with cancer, and dealing with my stepfathers soon to happen demise also from cancer.

This time, it happens to also coincide with a dosage change on my hormone replacement therapy patches, which may be a contributing factor. But, I feel there's enough crazy family stress happening in my life from all angles that is contributing to the spike again.

In the meantime, I am monitoring my blood pressure and it's been in pretty good zone since --- so I hope this is not going to reoccur again.

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Onward to other things!

The ER doc prescribed me one hour of peaceful sewing or weaving or knitting if I feel my blood pressure going up. Now that is a good prescription to hand out!!

I managed to put together these 20 blocks into the main section of this quilt that I started while on vacation a few weeks ago. Now all I have to do is work on the borders.

I also managed to paint a rainbarrel for our brother and sister-in-law, Pete and Cindy. They built a new house and are starting their landscaping and yard work. The rainwater will come in handy. I use stencils and Krylon spray paint for plastics.  Steve drills a hole and puts in the bung plug and spigot.

Since we changed the color of trim on our house from green to blue, I decided to paint up a barrel in blue for us as well. I am selling the green one on the local Facebook Marketplace. I still have another green one in the backyard but I think I'm going to paint over that one next time it's empty so it can be blue as well. I just love using rain water on my plants and flowers instead of city water. Not only for cost but also because it is minus all of those chemicals. I even painted up both of my watering cans.

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Almost all of the crazy little helicopter seed pods are down from the soft maple trees in our neighborhood. We had a lot of wind the last few days and they have really covered the ground.

I've been waiting to spread my pretty black mulch around in my flower beds until these crazy things are done falling. Otherwise they look so messy on top of the black mulch.  The last few times Steve has mown the lawn, he uses the bagger device and sucks them all up. Then he deposits them in the city garage mulch piles for yard waste so they are no longer in our yard.

As it is, we still get seedlings 

popping up on our lawn,

in my flower beds,

and among my tomatoes.  GRRRRR

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It's a beautiful week of weather here in Wisconsin with low humidity and in the low 70s. Right now I'm dictating this blog while sitting outside in the shade on a lounge chair. I'm watching Steve work on his newest project.

Steve has decided to run a 50 amp line from our updated electrical panel in the garage out to our motorhome where it is parked in the back yard. He has acquired the heavy electrical cable, the underground conduit to run it through and a post with the 50 amp outlet and breaker, just like what you see in a campground.

Now if we have guests stay in our motorhome, we can safely run both roof air conditioners, the refrigerator, or an electric heater if need be without worrying about overstressing the power cord from the garage.

With our updated service in the garage now we can run a full 50 amp power line instead of extension cords. The old service was only 15 amp off the house, and we could pop breakers just running a vacuum cleaner out there or trying to cool the rig down before loading for a trip with the fridge on.

We had already called Diggers Hotline last year to do the fence and knew there were no power or gas lines or water service in this area of our yard. Safety first!

He measured out and marked the line with paint across the grass and now has commenced digging where the post is going to be set in cement by the fence.

I'm enjoying watching him work, and I told him there is only one shovel so that means he gets to use it!?  Next he needed to dig the long stretch from the garage out to the fence through the yard.

He rented a trenching tool from the local hardware store. For 30 bucks for 2 hours it's well worth it rather than having to dig this distance all by hand.  PS he has on his safety work prescription glasses and steel toe sport shoes from work.  Even in retirement, he finds use for them.

We haven't had much rain in Wisconsin lately, so our ground is pretty hard and dry. Steve will let the trencher do the hard work instead of his back.

He completed the entire trench in about 20 minutes flat. He only ran into three rocks and no tree roots.

It's about 35 ft long and 14 inches deep.

Once he was done, he took the time to clean the machine all off. Being returned a much cleaner condition than when he rented it. That's my guy!

Whew.. that is enough work for the afternoon.  He said we should relax now and take a nap. I am up for that!!!