A Big Hand for the Little Lady

Merrily made another qualification drive, today. it was with a driving instructor that she had not driven with in a few weeks.

She did almost perfect and literally “stunned” the instructor with how much better she was than the last time he rode with her.  He really verbally praised her improvement and said he could not believe how much better she was doing than the last time.

She got kudos for getting up to speed, smooth shifting, great turns, just everything. She came off of that ride with a really big grin on her face, I am sure.

Then, while they were out on the practice field, one of the other students came up to her and put his arm around her and said “Miss Merrily, you are soooo nice. Everyone in the class just loves you. They respect you and if they happen to let a bad word slip out, they immediately apologize all over the place. No one else gets that kind of respect.”

I see that, as usual, she has really set the bar high for everyone and they know it.

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Lets hear it for the girl..

Merrily passed the first of a number of skills tests she will have to perform to get her CDL license and graduate from the truck driving school.

Before any driver gets into a truck and drives off, a pre Trip Inspection (PTI) of the vehicle must be done. This consists of visually and mechanically inspecting and challenging 100 specific points of the truck.

Some examples are:

1. check to see that there is no more than 1” of movement in each brake slack adjuster.
2. Make sure that none of the springs are loose or broken.
3. Make sure that tire pressures are all correct.

Etc… for 97 more things.

The last few PTI items are done in the cab of the truck. Merrily got 99 of the 100 correct. These checks must all be done from memory, too. She only missed 1 thing…… she was sitting in the cab with her hands on the steering wheel at the end and still had about 3 minutes do go to complete the PTI test.(You only have 20 minutes to do it in).

She felt she was forgetting one thing but just could not think of what it was. She turns to the instructor and said that she was finished.

He said she missed one. She said “which one?”

He says “Steering Wheel Check!”

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SEIZURE!

68 days…. Not better than the record 100 days but still much better  than the typical 14 days between them she has experienced most of her 4 year life.  Katie had one this morning about 10am.

I really hate it for her when they happen but thankfully the meds are working and the seizures that she does have are wayyyy  less intense and last only a few minutes instead of hours.

None of us slept particularly well overnight. I usually blame on a full moon because that is typically when I don’t sleep too soundly.

Looking back, Katie has had a few small cues that she might have been working up to a seizure. Little things, like a sudden involuntary flash-kick of a hind leg while she is resting or some pacing for no apparent reason.

She is fine, though.  it lasted about 4 minutes and then she was off walking it off. She seems to have discovered that walking around helps clear it out of her system and I can believe that. The normal Cross-crawl patterning that takes place in the nervous system when walking on 4 legs, is a powerful normalizer for the whole neurological system. 

Therapeutically, cross-crawl simulation, even while lying down, is used to stabilize unbalanced muscle tone and works for all 3 axis of the body (front/back, side/side, top/bottom).

I have not seen anything specific about its use in humans in seizure recovery but from what I have seen in Katie, it definitely shortens the number of bouts of rigor that she typically has (3 –6 per seizure to just 1 or two). It also seems to bring the slobbering and glassy eyed stark staring to an end much more quickly than if she does not walk.

Back when she was having them several times a month, I found that even if I carried her outside on a leash and helped support her while she tried to walk, she would return to normal much more quickly. You could just watch how her walking around went from that of a drunken sailor to a normal dog in a matter of minutes while she was walking, even just doing figure 8’s.

Although this day started off with a few minutes of angst it has turned out nicely.  Though a little cooler in the 50s today, it was still very nice to take a few walks and enjoy the filtered sunlight through the spring trees and a few clouds.

Maybe tonight will be a sound night of sleep for everyone.  Merrily is driving on the road tomorrow and is nailing the shifting so I can hardly wait unti we can climb into Clifford and share the drive to wherever we want.

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Merrily got to drive a Volvo today

Yep.,, and she liked it better than any of the other trucks she has driven (Freightliners and Macks). She had a good day, drove for an hour and even crossed a DOT scale (big deal?) and came home still positive but tired.

Tomorrow is just an all classroom day except for a few demos of the new field exercises to be done starting on Friday. 

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Tuesday’s Child is full of grace

Yep, that about sums up Merrily. Today was a great day for her. Most of the day was on the practice field and her backing problems have been overwhelmed by her persistence and she did GREAT! 

She came home for lunch and when she called to let me know she was just leaving I could tell from the crystal sparkle in her voice that today was going very well for her.

Things had not changed by dinner time, either.  She was still up and feeling in control again.  This is wonderful for me to watch because having been there, I think that she is actually doing better than I was at this point in the class. I know she does not see it that way but all the evidence says that she is nailing it!

Another beautiful but chilly day. Tomorrow promises some rain but so far, nada, so maybe it won’t be so bad.

She is driving on the road tomorrow, so I am anxious to see if her problems with downshifting have gotten any less, too. She was really frustrated all weekend about her difficulties with downshifting and Skip shifting on a down shift.

The good news is that she will be driving a Volvo but it’s a 10 speed and she feels like a 9 speed is easier for her to handle. maybe this will show her that it was the 10 speed transmissions in the Freightliner trucks that was the problem.

Anyhoo, she is sleeping right now because she will be gone all day tomorrow (7 hours out on the road).

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Have a nice day…. thanks, I just did!

Sundays seem to always be an awkward day for me. The whole “is it the first day of the week… or the last?” thing kind of keeps me a little uncommitted as to just what to do on a Sunday.

Tomorrow Merrily starts week 3 of 8 of truck driver training. She is struggling more with learning to back a 40’ trailer than what she thinks is normal.  Actually, that is the toughest of the field exercises that they do.  They intentionally have sloppy hitches between the trailers and the trucks so that it is impossible to just hold the steering wheel in one position and have the trailer move in a constant line.  It wanders all over the place forcing the driver to keep correcting it in real time…. not easy.

She is doing very well in all other areas, though. Getting good scores on the written tests and on all the other field exercises she is getting them down pat.

However, tomorrow, they are stepping up the difficulty of the exercises so they will be even more challenging.  She is not looking forward to that.

Her shifting is getting better, too.  Last week, they introduced skip shifting (where you skip one or two gears at one shift point) and she even got that one pretty well.  I never got that one very well at all. I am really glad that Clifford has an Autoshift transmission so it knows how to do it without grinding the gears.

Our Autoshift truck has a standard 10 speed transmission but the computer controls the actual gear selection and synchronizing so the driver just has to pay attention to the road and the truck takes care of the rest and does not have a stick to shift gears.

As for the rest of today, we walked Katie a few times (she is on day 61 of no seizures, wahoo!) , read the Sunday paper (Merrily’s job- I am not a newspaper reader) and swapped out the empty propane tank with the full one that Emery brought down.

We knew from late last week that Emery and Christi would probably come down today and that was a good thing to look forward to. Merrily even said yesterday that she was missing “the kids” and I will admit that I think of them most every day at least once. Having them come for dinner at Cracker Barrel was really a very good thing on several levels.

Merrily was doing a lot better after dinner. I think she just really needed to see her “kids” even if they are pushing 30. Okay, Okay, so maybe I was really missing them, too.

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A place for everything… and everything, eventually in its place.

I usually try to start my weekends sometime during the day on Fridays but today, I actually forgot it was a Friday and worked right up until time to go pick up Merrily from Truck driver training school.

It has been a very productive day for me. I managed to get a lot of boxes of miscellaneous items sorted and then collated back into the regular storage boxes that already have similar items in them. This is always a work in progress in the RV new items come inside in bags or odd boxes and are set down in convenient places to be dealt with later. 

Maybe there are some RVers that have perfect recall and know exactly where the existing storage box is that has other USB cables or pet items or whatever is similar to what has just been brought in. I am not one of them.  I can put my hands on the box for receipts (most of the time – Middle cabinet, top shelf, left most top-most box), the box with my medicines in it (about 93% of the time – Cabinet behind the open smoked glass door on the far right) and the hair cutting equipment (bright blue plastic box in the middle cabinet, top shelf, far right). if it is not one of these boxes, I am probably going to have to look for it for a bit.

Disorganized, you say?  No!  I am organized and have a place for just about everything… .I just can’t remember exactly where it is.  This is a primary reason that I don’t file paperwork. If I do, no one, including moi, will be able to find it later. I am sure it is a defective gene in there as my Father had the same problem. Rolling with this same story a bit farther, I also don’t try to remember things for other people. I will never remember them when I should or when it is needed.  I will remember it in the shower at 1:22am or while going to the bathroom at 4:27am.

These are not convenient times/places for remembering things that are important to anyone but unfortunately, this is typical of when I will remember stuff that should have been recalled on demand at specific times and places.. .usually earlier in the day…. or week.

Another obstacle to storing items in an RV is that there is INSIDE storage and OUTSIDE storage. OUTSIDE storage is any place that is not directly accessible from inside the RV by opening a door or a drawer. The so called Basement storage area is OUTSIDE storage as is any place in the tow vehicle or Towd if one has it. In other words, If I cannot put my hands on it in my underwear, it is OUTSIDE.

Often items new to the RV are best suited to be kept in OUTSIDE storage and that is usually inconvenient to access at the time the item is brought home so it is set aside for future relocation to the correct storage box and location (When I can remember where that is). Today was a day that I chose to deal with a lot of these sorts of things and put them in their correct storage places (I think). I made big progress, too. I actually put stuff away that had been waiting for relocation for nearly a year. I emptied 2 big cardboard boxes, 2 small ones, 2 grocery bags and also, through superior collating skills, managed to empty 3 of the shoe box storage containers that had accumulated a variety of stuff from 3M command strip items to RV related parts removed during other work.

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I even found a new location for Katie’s crate. She goes to it to rest, take a nap, hide, chew a bone. Who really knows what a dog thinks it’s for? I put it back of my computer table and was not sure that she would use it. I think she liked it out in the floor where she could hide inside and peek out through the ventilation holes in the side and feel she was in the room with us but still “protected”. Since we never have to lock her into it, I removed the door so she could easily come and go as she pleases. It is ghastly unsightly to have sitting out in the floor and does take up vital square footage but back where I tucked it, is space that is only used when we are traveling and not really visible from the rest of the room. She found it and quietly slipped into it for a nap this evening so I am very pleased.

Now, we can actually enjoy our fireplace, again, which has been quite nice while I am sitting here working on this blog with it in the mid-30s outside. This makes it a bit chilly on the floor and this fireplace does a nice job of keeping my tootsies warm without running the furnaces.

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