Welcome to the Only Child Diaries Podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Wallace. Have you ever felt like you didn't receive the how-to brochure on life? That you didn't get enough guidance about major life issues? So did I. You don't have to be an only child to feel this way. In my podcast, we'll explore some of the best ways to better navigate adulting. While doing so, with humor delight. Welcome everyone to the Only Child Diaries Podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about a few different things. Maybe we can call this episode a potpourri episode, but I just want to touch base on several different topics. So, first of all, I want to start off and update on my COVID um progress, if you will. It's been three weeks since I was diagnosed with COVID. And I think for the most part, I'm recovered. I'm I was going to say fully recovered, but I'm not going to say fully recovered because my appetite is still not where it used to be. My appetite is still not very robust. And I noticed that most foods don't taste the same as I remember them tasting. I know that with Paxlovid, the medication that they gave me to help with my recovery, some people have complained that Paxlovid, one of the side effects is that you have a metal taste in your mouth. And I wouldn't say that that's the case with me, but it just that it things just don't taste the same. They don't taste right. They don't taste maybe as flavorful. I don't know. It there's something amiss there. So however you want to say, they I just the flavors are different. I s I can taste, but it's just different. My sense of smell never changed, it never wavered. Um, and so my appetite is just not there either. So that's not a bad thing for me because I could stand to lose a few pounds. But in three weeks, having not eaten anywhere close to what I used to eating, uh, I wouldn't say that the pounds are falling off of me. But I haven't weighed myself because I did go, uh I got out of the scale, and it's one of these newfangled scales, and I need a new battery for it. So I tried to get a battery today, and the store was out of that size battery, of course. It's a little frustrating. If I had known that I wasn't going to have an appetite for three weeks, I would have weighed myself at the first part of it, and I probably would have lost something like two pounds or something equally as silly as that. But uh anyway, um I can laugh uh for the most part. When I was really sick with COVID, if I had laughed, I would start coughing so badly that I wouldn't be able to breathe because I was coughing so much. Not because I couldn't breathe, but just because I was coughing so much I couldn't breathe. So now I can laugh. It's still a little bit awkward because I will start coughing, but it's getting better. And my energy level, I would say, is almost up to speed. It's almost 100%. So I I think that that side of it is pretty good. I am gonna just reiterate again that if you've never had COVID or you haven't gotten the vaccine, please take care of yourself. Please mask up, please get the vaccine because seriously, COVID is nothing to be taken lightly. You can get really sick from it. And I I don't know if people are still dying from it, but you can get really sick from it, and it's it's just not a good thing. It's just not a good thing. Like the flu. Especially when you're older, the flu is a bad thing. So anyway, that's my little COVID minute on that. Uh I have been trying to get out in the yard and do some gardening. And as most of our country here has been under snow and ice and cold weather, uh, here in the Los Angeles area, we have uh yesterday our temperature was 85. And today I think we're at 80 perhaps. So I just want to apologize to anyone who is freezing right now, but we um we do have cooler nights. So it's a little awkward because during the day it gets so warm that I have to turn on the air conditioner. And then at night I have to turn on the heat. So there's that awkward transitional period where I flip over the little thermostat thing, and it's like that that shouldn't be the way that it is. It should either be heat all day or it should be air conditioning all day. Um, that's just really wonky. And so as a result, I don't think that our cat likes it when it's hot, especially if it's hot during the day and not at night. I think his appetite has waned. Well, I know his appetite has waned. And so as a result, I've had to adjust his insulin because he just hasn't been eating. You know, he's like, um, he's like me when I was a teenager and it would get hot, I wouldn't get hungry. I mean, that never happened to me again, but um, he just hasn't been eating a lot. He's been like, it's too hot. So as a result, I can't give him his regular dose of insulin because then he'd go really low and he'd be like hypo uh hypoglycemia kitty. So um, or if that's the right word, is it hypoglycemia or hypo hypo anyway, so you know what I mean. Um, I think. So that's been I've just been watching him more carefully and trying to play with him to get him to chase his playmite play mice, his squeaky mice, so that he will rev up his appetite and not be so lethargic with the heat. It's always something to think about. On the other hand, our dog is pretty much the same. She's you know, she gets to a certain time of day and she's like, okay, let's go on our walk. And I'm happy to say that I can now walk around the block, which is about, I guess it's uh close to a half mile. Because when I was really between that period of time when I was really sick, and then I started to recover, I could only really walk her down to the end of the block. And then she'd get down there and we'd, you know, I'd say, okay, we're gonna turn, we're gonna go back. And she'd be like, No, we keep going. We're we're we keep going, right? So she's much happier now. We can go around the whole block, and she feels you know, like she's getting a real sizable walk-in. She'd rather go further. She, I don't know, someday I should probably just take her and just walk with her until she just says, looks at me and just says, I'm done, but I don't know how long that would be. You know, I'd probably be on the ground and she'd probably be dragging me um before she'd give up. So anyway. Um, and for the most part, like when I first started walking, I felt a lot of pain and discomfort because my body had been sitting around. And so that's never good for me to sit around. So, but anyway, I'm feeling I'm feeling better. Um so we had a lot of rain this season, and uh, they tell us that we live in a desert, even though we don't actually live in a desert, they say that because of the water, and they've told us for years that we're in a drought situation, we didn't get enough rain, we don't have enough water, and and I think for the most part, I mean, in today's world, most places don't have enough water, but this year they said that right now we're not in a drought situation, but I've been looking at my lawn in the front. We only have lawn in the front of our house, if you can call it a lawn. It's not really a big area, but I I have resisted doing anything about it since we've lived here. It's been four and a half years because you're not supposed to pour water into a lawn, you're not supposed to have lawn, you're supposed to sacrifice your lawn, you know, and and once I put out the Halloween decorations, and when I put put out the Christmas decorations, I don't water because I don't want to hurt the decorations, and then it rains, and then they get hurt anyway. When we'd always have people coming, guys coming by saying that they want to seed our lawn and fertilize it and all that, and I say, No, I have a gardener, you know. So I finally said to myself, Tracy, life is too short. There's these big, there are some, well, not big, there's some patches of ground that have nothing growing on them. So I asked the gardener to come and seed it and put the fertilizer, the manure, whatever it is, there, and let's try to grow some lawn. And so it's been two weeks now. I mean, you just sometimes you just got to treat yourself because many of my neighbors, I'd say it's like half and half. Some of my neighbors have these California native plant things going on with the with the gravel and the water-wise thing, whatever. And then the other half have these very robust lawns that look like they've been nurtured and they have all the water in the world. And, you know, I just think, wow. I mean, they're both great, but um so it's been two weeks now, and I've gone out there and I've looked at the seeds. I can see the seeds. The birds are not eating the grass seed, but I've wondered why is nothing growing yet. And part of it is because we don't get a lot of sun. We get minimal hours of sun here. We have the tree, we have the big tree, but also because of the canyon and the mountains, we do have limited sun. But today I did see some actual little tiny sprigs of grass coming up in one part, and it was very exciting. It was the part that probably gets the most sun. Um, so it's maybe a you know, eight by six area that actually has new grass coming up. So that that is exciting. Uh so keep you posted on that. I've tried I've tried not to walk on that area with the seeds. I've I did water it extra. Um, the sprinklers only go off two times a week, and they go off for I think seven minutes. So it's it's really not a lot of water. When I try to save extra water from the kitchen or whatever, I mean, I'm not a water hog or anything, but sometimes you just have to treat yourself in small ways. I mean, we do have a lot of crabgrass out there. So anyway. And in the backyard, there's weeds everywhere because if I could just balance it a little bit, there's, you know, been so much rain, and so I'm fighting the weeds in the backyard, and as much time and energy I put into just trying to maintain the areas with the leaves from the trees that aren't ours, uh, the leaves in the backyard picking up the leaves, and we have the house next door that our neighbors are um putting the second story on. And I found nails and I found on our driveway, and I found there's little pieces of plaster and shingles all over the place. But anyway, we're working through that. And another thing that I want to talk about is the passing of actress Catherine O'Hara. She died on Friday, and I've always considered myself a funny person and a person who really enjoys comedy, right? And Catherine O'Hara was the first time I saw her, I was pretty young, and I was watching um that show SCTV, Second City Television, um, which I've gone back and looked at it now, and they have some scenes on YouTube, and uh I haven't been able to find full episodes, but um I think this was part of really how I formed my comedy persona and my understanding of comedy and kind of an obscure sense of comedy because some of the characters and the the things that they did were kind of a little off the wall. But Catherine O'Hara has always been just so funny and so gracious and such a great lady to me, and losing her is is a hit, it's a real loss, I think, to the entertainment industry. We loved her in Shits Creek, and we also loved her in the studio, um, two of her recent projects, and just so funny and so good at what she did, and so sorry to to lose her. So uh those are some of the things that I'm thinking about this week. I'll tell you that I really do find a lot of peace and solace in my garden because in today's world, with what's going on in our country, it's very, very difficult for me to see what's going on. I'm very empathetic, and my husband likes to watch the news, and with everything that's gone on in Minneapolis, um it's just it's very hard for me to watch. Um, again, we are both liberals, and we do not believe in what ICE is doing. Uh, it makes us sad, it makes us angry. And when I first heard about Alex Predi, my husband wanted to watch all the coverage, and we changed the channel, we watched the news, and when I first really saw all the coverage, just that first blip about it, I just sat here and cried. And he realized that I, you know, he couldn't put me through it. I know what it is, I understand what happened. Um, I don't have to have it thrown in my face continually. Um, but I find it incredibly sad. And my heart goes out to all the people that were affected by the loss of Alex and also Renee Good and all the people that are affected, the children that are affected by these immigration raids, the children that are at these detention centers. I don't understand this. All the lives that are affected, they're not the criminals that I I understand that they're trying to fight crime, but a five-year-old is not a criminal. So either you are on the same page or you're not with me, but that's basically how I feel. And uh these these times are tough uh for our whole country. So um I think it's important to find things that bring you peace and bring you hope because there's so much of our lives right now that are out of our control. There's things that we could do, but let's face it, it's out of our control to a to a great extent. So I'll leave you with that next week. Well, we'll tackle another topic together. I hope you'll join me. If you like this episode, please follow the Only Child Diaries Podcast on Apple Podcasts or other platforms you might listen on. And consider rating Only Child Diaries and writing a review. It helps others to find us. Please share it with a friend you think might like it as well. Visit my Instagram page, Only Child Diaries, or Facebook, Only Child Diaries Podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Tracy Wallace, and these are the Only Child Diaries.