Yesterday I went to my grandfather's apartment to visit him and complete any Sarah/honey-do tasks he had for me. This was the first time I've been without the children, and the atmosphere had changed because of it. I was more relaxed, not worried about the kids being too loud or disturbing him and not worrying about needing to be a referee if the situation arose.
The first honey do I did was check his medicines to see what refills he needed. Then I cleaned up his mail-order papers. He had several empty envelopes around the house, so without speaking, I picked them up and threw them away. One of them had some wetness on it, and I commented. My grandfather was icing a swollen knee, so I understood the wetness to be from his ice pack. I threw away the envelope anyway. Five minutes later, when I was about to step out to go buy some tea, he asked where the wet envelope went to. "It was on the floor," I explained, "So I went ahead and picked it up for you and put it in the trash." Big mistake. The next minute I was in the trashcan, digging it out. Luckily the trash was clean. I put that envelope right back on the ground following directions: "A little to the left. Now up some. Now flatten it out." He was using the envelope to protect his carpet from the sweating ice pack. I had forgotten that every single item, even something I consider trash, has importance in his world.
After I returned with his tea: "Make sure it's Nestea, because that bottle fits in my hand easier." he told me he had a pizza in the freezer that I could heat up for our lunch. When the kids are around, I just drive through for all of us and the kids and I have a picnic on the floor while he eats in the tiny kitchen. Today he wanted pizza, and I was happy to oblige. It was a freezer-burned Totino's, which is by nature, absolutely disgusting, but who cares? An old man wants a pizza, I'm happy to cook it for him.
I tried to preheat his oven, but I couldn't. I didn't know if there was a safety button or latch that I needed to use. He lives in a retirement apartment, so I thought it might be likely that the oven had some precautionary button on it. All I could do was hit preheat and then the oven started beeping loudly and incessantly. I got that to stop and tried again and again to no avail. I told my grandfather, "You want pizza, so we're going to have pizza." I went to the front desk and asked if they could tell me how to preheat the oven. The ladies at the front desk assured me that they didn't know how to preheat the oven in their own kitchen, much less the one in my granddad's apartment. They called the head of maintenance to come down.
Juan met me at the apartment. I explained my problem and he looked at me confused. He said, "All you do is press this and this" and then he started the incessant beeping. The next thing I knew he called backup, was pulling the stove out of the wall, resetting it and eventually replacing the electronic panel. After all that, we were able to preheat the oven.
The oven preheated and the pizza in, the next thing was to set the table. My granddad has a tiny kitchen and no extra chairs. He eats on a TV tray with wheels, but he arranged his walker and the TV tray so I could join him. For my chair, I backed his electric scooter into the kitchen and swiveled the chair backward. This took about 10 minutes to set up.
A broiler pan as an improvised pizza pan, a knife as an improvised pizza cutter, both of us hunched over a TV tray and some soggy, freezer burned pizza. It was the best frozen pizza I've ever had.
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