Highly unusual cold weather hit the Coeur D Alene area the week before Christmas, 2022, mostly in single digits. For us the culmination was Christmas Eve when a hot water pipe in the laundry room burst, flooding the laundry room floor, Lietta’s office next to it and flowing outward into our living room. The basement wound up with approximately six inches of water. The hot water pipe that burst was not insulated and was located less than six inches from a partially insulated wall the other side of which was our uncovered back patio exposed to open air.

We immediately called the landlord who sent the maintenance man over to turn off the water to the laundry room.

The upshot of that event was a realization on our part that we had struggled with inadequate winter heating long enough (for the last three years or so).

Lietta commenced a search for a new place to live even as we both occupied ourselves with salvage/recovery of an enormous number of cardboard boxes in the basement in which we had stored any possessions that would not fit upstairs in the house itself.

As soon as we were able and mostly completed cleaning up, we began viewing an assortment of apartments and a few houses up for rent in Kootenai County. Eventually we located the apartment we have now some nine miles north and east of our house. We hired a moving company to haul our furniture, boxed up the things we decided to keep, boxed up things we donated to Habitat For Humanity, Goodwill and a Veterans thrift store. Habitat came with their own truck and accepted most of the furniture items we knew we could not keep. The rest of the things we decided would not be valuable as donations (including most of our outside yard items) I hauled to the local landfill.

This for us was the reality of a forced and almost-immediate downsizing.

We rented our current abode the first week in February and took up residence after the movers completed their delivery. We attempted to sell the piano Lietta had purchased for me almost twenty years earlier with no success. That piano is still for sale but covered in our garage in Hayden. Lietta purchased a Clavinova for me a few years ago and I have been playing it almost exclusively.

The downsizing we knew had been inevitable. After putting it off for so long, the immediacy of our need to relocate was in that sense a blessing in disguise.

There were consequences though of being committed to time deadlines for completing the move. Principally we both suffered more than a normal share of aches and pains – particularly for both of us in our arms and shoulders.

Despite all of this Lietta has maintained her routine of following strict dietary requirements for diabetics, checking her blood sugar daily receiving mostly positive results. More significant (in my opinion) is what happened when Humana suddenly announced they were withdrawing from Kootenai County which in truth forced her reacquisition of her former medical practitioner at a clinic in Spokane; someone in whom she has greater confidence. The alternative would have been to change from Humana to another company offering coverage in North Idaho. The Spokane Clinic still had all her data and quickly obtained the more recent date from the Coeur D Alene physician.

I found it easy to consume the same diet regime as Lietta going back to the earliest weeks of her initial diaabetes diagnosis. The result for me in eating the same diet as she is that each of my annual VA physicals has reflected steady health, a lowered average blood pressure and no evidence of diabetes in me (something I had been concerned about for a long time.)

In addition I suffered a drastic inflammation of my right ankle that left me limping all day and dealing with a large amount of swelling at night. I contacted the VA who took two series of x-rays and scheduled me for an appointment with a podiatrist that back then was two months out. (My actual appointment with the podiatrist is set for the day after tomorrow.)

In the meantime I made some dietary changes that I felt prompted to make and that now seem justified. The swelling decreased dramatically after the third day. Within a week, walking on high-arch shoes I became relatively pain free with less swelling.

That brings us up to date as to where we live and our health.