Dunham Family and My Stroke Story!

My mother-in-law, Phyllis Saxton, grew up in Caldwell. She and her husband, Harvey, owned Saxton Fruit Farm on the south side of Lake Lowell. She is spending a couple of days with us recovering from shoulder surgery. She loves her newspapers. She reads the Idaho Statesman and the Idaho Press Tribune. This morning, I cut up the newspapers so she could read with one hand because of the shoulder surgery. In my opinion, Idaho Statesman shadow of its former self. They still have great reporters, but there it’s not really a lot of news anymore. On the other hand, the Idaho Press Tribune based in Nampa is expanding their news coverage throughout the Treasure Valley. They hired the best political reporter in Idaho, Betsy Russell. They have a robust presence in every way. After cutting out the fluff, classifieds, and ads, this photo shows why the Idaho Press Tribune has more in depth news coverage then the Statesman. Pretty sad. Even when my mother-in-law goes back to her own house, I’m pretty ...

Recently I completed a very simple project. Our old mailbox post is comprised of one 40 year old 4 x 4 post and the horizontal supports made by two 2 x 4’s. Through the years, all the boards have splintered. I have tried to fix the boards for years with nails, screws, etc. Our neighbor’s mailbox basically fell off several months ago and I tried to fix it with new screws.  Last week when my wife was out of town, I decided to completely fix the whole thing. I did this when she was out of town because she’s very nervous when I use any tools at all.  Because of my strokes, vision loss and my aphasia, it is a little difficult for me to do simple handyman jobs that used to be second nature to me. I sold my tablesaw but kept my miter box. I did complete the job. No blood was shed. But quite honestly, in the old days it would’ve taken me maybe 30 minutes to do this whole job. This job took at least 10 hours including brakes because sometimes I get overheated and dizzy w...

 After my stroke 6 1/2 years ago, my wife let me have my phone. I was dazed and confused but I wanted to check to see if I could even use my phone.  The first thing I did was to login to Twitter to check news. The 140 character Twitter app what is a convenient way for me to read news. Unfortunately, even though it was only 140 characters, I could not read the news. I cannot understand and comprehend letters and numbers.  During my rehab stint, my therapist was trying to explain to me about Aphasia. Reading comprehension difficulties are a common feature of aphasia, affecting the understanding of single words, sentences, paragraphs and extended text.  Though Aphasia is not curable, through years of therapy and compensating, I have gotten better.  Recently, I bought an Amazon Fire Stick. To set it up, I had to enter my password and my user ID. For years after my strokes, I simply could not complete that task. Often, though embarrassing, I would ask my young son to...