My mother-in-law (Kate) arrived Friday night for her annual visit, and we've been busy settling her in. Tonight we're headed out for a fried chicken dinner at our favorite local restaurant: the Descanso Junction Restaurant. Kate's been there many times before on past visits, and loves it.
We love to have her out here visiting, but it's a long flight (from Cincinnati, Ohio) for someone her age. She's in her 90s, frail, and each year we fear it may be the last time she's able to make the journey. But she did it again, without any trouble, and now we've got her with us for three whole weeks.
On almost every visit she makes to see us, something goes wrong. Typical of these problems happened on a visit perhaps 15 years ago. After arriving at the San Diego airport, she visited the restroom there on the way down to get her baggage. When she entered one of the stalls and shut the door, it fell off its hinges and landed on her foot! The door was a heavy metal door, and it broke several bones in her foot. For that entire visit, she was on crutches with her foot immobilized. Now when we look back on it, we all laugh at it, but it wasn't so funny at the time.
This time the now-expected thing-that-goes-wrong happened just before she left her home to go to the airport. As she was getting ready, she poured her eye medicine into an eye-cup (as she does every morning) and upended the cup over her eye. But she had accidentally filled the cup with mouthwash instead of her eye medicine! Her eye was burning, very painful. Fortunately she had her wits about her, and quickly did exactly the right thing: flushed it thoroughly with plain water. Her vision wasn't hurt, but her eye was tearing badly for that entire day, including on the flight out here. Furthermore, the mouthwash had irritated the skin under her eye, so she had a big, angry red patch under her right eye. Today the tearing is all over, and the red patch is fading, so as best we can tell there was no permanent harm done.
Hopefully that's the only thing that goes wrong on this visit!
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