When I'm 64... Dealing with Temporarily Decreased Mobility

Today the weather is absolutely PERFECT....

If you can have the windows open and be comfortable, it's PERFECT as far as I'm concerned...

.....plus it's my birthday....

.....but I'm basically stuck inside waiting for new tires to arrive from Monster Scooter.

I think they'll be here Tuesday or Wednesday. I know, this is a temporary setback, but I don't have a whole lot going on in my little life and it feels like all the wind just left my sails completely and I'm stuck languishing in a dead calm. I want SO much to go outside!

But the fact is that my slightly-used, heavy-duty Pride XL mobility scooter simply wasn't built for our rocky driveway. So I'm pretty hard on tires and tubes, and solid tires or foam-filled tires aren't an option on this model. But fortunately I enjoy live-in tech-support,  so it was just matter of scraping up the $100+ for two new tires. Which was not easy. At all. But poverty is another blog for another blogger.

I think that if you can venture out of bed at all, even using a mobility device, then you have at least some mobility. Personally my mobility depends on use of a walker inside the house and a mobility scooter outside. So obviously I'm mobility-impaired, but at least I had my trusty scooter :o(

My current scooter, a used Pride Pursuit XL, sidelined by an unfixably-flat tire :o(

I love my scooter. I really do. There are a lot of things I can't do anymore and a lot of places I'll never see, partly due to MS, partly due to my collapsed spine, and largely due to a complete lack of wherewithal, but my scooter at least allows to get out of the house and enjoy the outdoors, which prevents cabin fever.

On my scooter, I can go out and see the wildflowers in the daytime or recline the seat and watch the stars or the moon rise at night...all while safely and comfortably seated on my trusty scooter.

This is my previous scooter, a Merits Road King S148, dead of a broken axle :o(

Of course I loved the scooter I had before this one, until its axle broke, rendering it useless. (Yes, I did realize that a machine shop would probably be able to make a new axle for me, for the right amount of money, but my tech-support dude and I decided that the other axle might logically be pretty close to cracking too, so it was time to look for another scooter. Come on Craigslist!)

I even loved the scooter I had before that last one; my first scooter, now quite obsolete, came from Costco at a bargain and I loved it until it developed fatal electrical problems that could not be overcome since the company that made it was out of business.

Sudden and increased immobility always makes me appreciate the limited mobility I'd temporarily lost. Yeah, I not only appreciate my mobility, I NEED my mobility, or I'm just not a very happy camper. More like on house arrest, and what did I do anyway?

My life was pretty small and didn't involve very much, but it was pleasant. Up until this past Thursday, these were the happiest parts of my daily life, the things I looked forward to every day... 

At least 3 or 4 times a day, I took "Henry", our rescue dog, out for for walks on the 10 acres where we live in the Texas Hill Country. Obviously Henry walked while I scooted.
 

On the first walk of the day, we'd go all the way down to the bottom of our 1/4 mile long road (driveway), carefully cross the farm-to-market road we live on, and get the mail out of the mailbox and bring it up the hill. 

While out on these walks, I usually took photographs of the wildflowers, wildlife, etc.

 

 

 

 

 We finally got a couple of decent rains, so it's getting kinda pretty out here again, after a brutally dry summer.

 

I also enjoyed tending to my elevated gardens from the seat of my scooter.

But that's all now on the shoulder of trusty Tech Support, my son and caretaker. Now HE gets to walk Henry and get the mail and tend the gardens, but he doesn't notice the wildflowers much and never takes pictures, but oh well. In a few days when my scooter has tires again, I'm gonna be SO back out there!