Long time No Blog.

I keep checking to see if somebody has snuck in to update my blog for me (or something, since I know that would not be a good thing), but I haven't felt like blogging in awhile. And it's not as if I have nothing to write about.

Over Labor Day weekend, we had a house full of guests: Mother and Daddy and their dog Cheyenne in the guest room, my niece Liz and her husband Jerm on the convertible sofa in the living room, and my sister Charlotte and her daughter Cat on an airbed on the floor in Evan's room. I had Evan swap beds with me, so I slept in his, and he shared with Lee, so we had a girls' room and a guys' room.

Jerm, Cat and I planned to go with my Dad up to Lancaster on Sunday to install a grab bar in the shower for my mother, leaving Charlotte to stay with Mother, and Liz to work on her Law School notes. I had done all the advance planning and had the bar, Wingits mounts, special tile drill bits and a carbide hole saw, etc. On Saturday, we reviewed the instructions, charged up my Makita cordless drill and generally got ready for the job.

At 2:30 Sunday morning, I got a call from my mother. She had fallen and had hurt herself, and my dad wanted me to look at her. When I got downstairs, I found her lying on the floor. I offered to call 911 to get the paramedics, but my folks preferred to take her in the car if possible, so I checked her condition. She had a badly skinned elbow, which I washed with just warm water and covered with a gauze pad to protect it. Other than that, she didn't seem to be in excruciating pain, so I figured it would be safe to move her. Liz and Jerm offered to help, and it's a good thing they did, because I don't think we'd have gotten her to the car without them.

At the emergency room, the doctor ordered blood tests, urinalysis, x-rays of the left arm and pelvis, and a CT scan of the head. Everything came back okay, so the nurse carefully flattened out the skin on Mother's elbow, which had pleated up like a window blind, and mended it with steristrips. Then she covered it with a dressing, wrapped it in gauze and pulled a stretchy sheath over the whole. By this time, Daddy and I had been about to drop in our tracks, so we went home and sent Charlotte back. She arrived just in time to bring Mother home, too.

I don't know how much sleep anyone else got, but I took a nap from about 8:00 to 10:30 or so, then got up and started getting things ready to go. After lunch, Jeremiah, Catherine, Daddy, Cheyenne and I went to Lancaster to install the grab bars as planned. Having the right tools really does make things easier. As Jeremiah went outside to practice on a scrap tile, he commented that he'd never yet drilled tile without cracking it - but the carbide hole saw and spade-shaped glass and tile bits I had found at Lowe's did the trick. He and Catherine went on to drill a couple of perfect holes in the shower, and then install the Wingits grab bar. Catherine tried a chin-up, and the bar came out of the wall. Jeremiah figured he hadn't hit the mounting pieces hard enough to properly break them open, so he did that. Then, with the addition of some new mounting tape and some caulk, he and Catherine mounted the bar again. This time, it held Catherine's weight very nicely.

We also made a trip to Lowe's to buy three more grab bars along with mounting hardware, and we installed the 18" one next to the toilet in the back bathroom and the 36" ones on the bathroom walls in both bathrooms in place of the towel racks. I say we - I located studs with a studfinder and drew horizontal lines. Jeremiah and Catherine did the actual work, finding the studs for real with a wire brad, drilling holes, installing mounting hardware, etc. I may have driven a couple of screws. Oh, and I did take the old towel racks down. Daddy mostly napped in his chair and offered advice when asked. We cleaned up, had dinner at Marie Callender's and came back to my house. It was a very full day.