Just Passing Through

Ya Can't Do It That Way

2012-02-09T06:00:00.003-06:00

Steve and I just finished our wills, along with a couple other legal documents, and some more to come. When you're working on a whole lot of expenses at one time, including those for buying a house, some things just need to happen later than others.

Part of the process was listing individual items and to whom you want them to go once you're gone. You'd think it was easy. Nobody here is rich, no complicated trusts to set up. However, I ran into two issues.

First, it seemed like every time I turned around, there was something else I'd forgotten about, either with sentimental or tangible value. After all, right now a large chunk of my "stuff" is packed away in the basement. I need to rely on an aging memory to recall just what is on all those totes. Since I've been collecting things from my auction job for a couple years now, buying partly with an idea to sell again later once the economy has recovered and the market returns, partly with an eye to display once there's a place in Arizona for just us and our stuff, and my tastes are quite ecclectic, I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of what's there.

Heck, I have forgotten stuff right under my nose and in plain sight. One of the last things added was my carved Dalls sheep horn, picked up in Alaska on the trip with Paul and Jordan. It sits on top of a set of cabinets in my bedroom. They're rare because only some of the natives are allowed to harvest them, and each with a permit may only harvest two sheep a year, meaning 4 horns, and of those only a few are carved. It's something you don't trust to just anybody with a jacknife and a yen to make their mark on the world!

I tried one method of distribution: let each kid, in a specified order, take their first choice from a category, say books, then once that was done, their second, etc., until all items in that category were gone. That way everybody is at least partly satisfied and nobody can say they've been neglected.

Ya can't do it that way. Judges throw out wills written like that. You have to be more specific. AND you can't use terms like "etc." in your will.

So, back to the books. OK, what kinds of books have I got? There are some science fiction/fantasy, though I've thrown a lot of those away (ahem: donated to an interested reader), cleared out when there grew an increasing need for shelf space. There are a lot of mysteries. There are field guides, coffee-table books, children's compilations, classics....

I talked to Paul, since he was the only one home at the time I was going through this category. His fiction interest is sci-fi. Not mystery. He also goes into the field guides regularly. It seems logical therefore to leave those kinds of books to him. With only one grandchild, it seems logical to leave the kid's books to her, since she will most likely be the one to continue the family into the next generations(s). Keep going with that kind of distribution, and eventually you get to the "and everything else" category. No, they won't be getting equal amounts of books, but the courts will accept that as a specific enough set of instructions. It's do-able, in other words.

In jewelry, specific descriptions of individual items, such as "my mother's ring, with _______ stones", are needed. There is no other ring in my possession with that collection of stones. It's unambiguous. There's still an "and everything else" category. Somebody better bring a box. Actually, since that happens in several categories, a bunch of boxes.

Since furniture is involved, somebody better bring a moving truck.

But hey, not my problem. And they can always refuse a bequest. Or trade, or sell it off, if that's their choice. By then I won't care. And that part of the will is always changeable.

Another one of THOSE Days

2012-02-03T06:39:00.003-06:00

My knees had actually been holding up pretty well for most of the week, considering. But then there was THE run. A pick up at _____, heading back up to HQ. No indication of just who wanted it at HQ, so I texted dispatch, and was told to bring it in to Jay. No problem. Turns out later I found out he had no clue either, but was willing to sign for it and figure it out later.

The pick was someplace I'd been before, usually having easy on-street parking near the side of the front entrance. Not this day, though. This time I had to hit the handicap parking spots. That usually means an easier walk, but these spots are well away from the office entrance and down the block by the store entrance. It's a pretty new building, built to impress. That means once you finally get down all that walkway, past all the landscaping, and to the front door, there's a very long atrium to reach the information desk, pretty much at the back of the building. So not just a long hike from car to door, another from door to desk. Yeah, I was impressed, all right. Not favorably. All that wasted space with no purpose, all that space to heat, all that space to walk through before you can speak to your first helpful person.

Assuming you can find one.

There were three people behind the front desk. One was being helpful on the phone. The other two were chatting away as I stood there. And stood there. Finally the man gave a start and said, "Oh, you want something."

Brilliant!

I explained my purpose, and he left to find my package. It'd said 1 piece, 1 pound, the default settings in those categories, and usually meaning, from a company like this, an envelope of some kind of paperwork. I strongly doubted their business provided a service or equipment for ours.

My package wasn't where he thought it should be. He needed to make a phone call. I gave him the contact name I had on the order, and first thing he did was tell me she wasn't there anymore, that Mary Jo was handling "it" now. I didn't ask what "it" was. I don't need to know. Mostly I'm not even curious anymore.

After being told "it" was on its way down, I looked for a seat while waiting. There was a grouping of overstuffed, poorly designed but pretty chairs if I wanted to walk another 40 feet back into the building. There was also something of a flat railing I could lean on close to the desk. I chose that. It was plenty sturdy and I had visions of dozens of people cooling their heels in that same spot. I didn't have long before a young man struggled to bring a large box out to the lobby.

Oh crap, this wasn't mine?

After setting it down next to me and removing a few large envelopes from the top destined for UPS, he indicated that the box was indeed mine to haul away. With the UPS envelopes gone there was room for me to fold the flaps down. This meant not just that the freight inside was more secure, but I could now balance the box on one hip, taking some of the weight off my arms. Better for the back than his way of carrying it, but still tough on the knees. Now, not only did I have myself to haul all that long way back to the car, I had an extra 30 pounds which, no matter how I carried it, had its weight spread out over my knees.

I could have brought the two-wheeler in with me had somebody been honest about the package. I could also have hiked all the way back to my car, gotten it out, come all the way back in with it, and wheeled the box all the way back out to my car.

Not bloody likely.

The pick wasn't far enough from HQ for my knees to do more than to begin to recover from the abuse. Once at HQ, I had the privilege of hauling it up a few steps into the dispatch room and across to the far wall to the dispatcher who would be receiving it. Of course to do that I breeze right past the sign on the door directing drivers to use the dock entrance - about 100 feet down, over twice the stairs, and 100 feet back again.

I don't think so.

By the time I was standing behind the dispatcher with the box balanced on my hip, I'd had just enough of this run, thank you very much. I'd never do this in front of a customer, but knowing there was nothing fragile in the box, just lots of indestructible envelopes filled with paper, I moved it marginally off my hip and let it drop.

Thunk!

No really: THUNK!

Another dispatcher turned around at the noise, looked at the box on the floor, and asked, "What's that?"

"One piece, one pound."

Wedding Shopping

2012-02-03T06:25:00.003-06:00

The most recent stop was The Party Store. Finally, a night of work ending early enough and close enough in town for me to swing over to Maplewood Mall. I'd been there once for plates, napkins, etc. I still needed small napkins (where was my brain on the first trip?) for the cake, a roll of tablecloth paper, and now that we found the candelabra to rent, two tapers and a pillar candle, no wider than 4".

Unfortunately, no motorized carts, and the knees were an issue. I roped in the first clerk to come my way with, "and where is....?" to save time walking. I'd already grabbed the napkins, found that the roll of tablecloth paper these days is actually plastic, comes in white and not ivory (plus lots of other colors I didn't even consider), and convinced him the candles I was looking for were not the birthday variety.

We headed towards their wedding department, where he pointed out the tapers and pillars selection. Tapers in both ivory and white, check. Pillars in... OK, white only, forget the ivory tapers. The choice was between a package of two (!?!) or a single one that was scented gardenia. Cool, I love that scent. Sniffff....

Gakkk! Blech! Whatever that was really, it was the essence of pure stink. So I reluctantly reached for the two-pack, knowing one would get wasted. Who ever needs a two-pack of wedding unity ceremony candles?

He obviously sensed my dissatisfaction, and headed further down the wedding aisle to see what else might be on offer.

"Anything?"

"Nope, just the unity candles sets."

!

Updates

2012-02-01T06:50:00.004-06:00

Less than two weeks till our commitment ceremony/wedding. No, we're not ready.

The ceremony is finished, text-wise. Legal documents in process. RSVPs coming in. Found a candelabra to rent.

The house is complete chaos. The flooring project is going very slowly. The cement compound needs sanding after it dries. The dust hangs in the air for hours, and nobody, and no critter, should be in the main part of the house during that time. While hanging around, it invades every space and settles. Nobody but me seems to see any kind of a need to clean up, and I'm usually too tired to do much of anything but the most necessary of surfaces. I can just imagine the yelling when fine duds touch anything on the 14th as people get ready to leave and collect that lovely dust. Meanwhile I have no usable kitchen - still - no icemaker, no counters except one, no stove, and a sink full of dirty dishes collecting crap. The fridge is plugged in and sitting in the living room, a solitary piece of normal. Kind of. My chair and Steve's are backed against the back wall on the bit of "done" floor, no room to stretch back and put one's feet up at the end of the day. Wedding stuff has to be stored elsewhere.

The headpiece is finally finished, and fortunately sitting in a shoebox. The tunic is done except for sewing on buttons, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit on my bed behind a closed door to work on it - not ideal. Same for any other chores, like wrapping the gifts for the wedding party. I have no idea where I'm going to put the ironing board for touch-ups.

The offer on the Sun City house was accepted by the buyer, passed through the title company OK, and now we're waiting on the bank. I've planned on which of the IRAs will be tapped to pay for it, and may need to tap one more little one for all those extra expenses, but it'll get done. My credit union tells me I don't qualify for a loan because they think I can't pay for two homes to keep them running. Well, that's where the other IRAs come in, until the markets recover, I retire, and sell this house. Then that becomes the retirement income. And they can't count the contributions the rest of the family make towards living expenses because you can't count that stuff on your taxes so it's not income. Somebody paying phone/satelite/internet is income? Absurd! They're locked in in their thinking.

I'm not. And a solar installation down there next year will offset much of the utilities there.

And back to speaking of retreating into my bedroom, there's a new something for the new house sitting in there. I had picked up a couple of Persian rugs at the auction house previously, at danged good prices, and they are there, rolled up next to the bed away from the traffic pattern. There is now a third, picked up Saturday. This one is mostly blue, and absolutely exquisite, and will go in the living room end of the living/dining room. So the living room theme will be blue, the Arizona room/1st lanai will be green/rose, and the screened lanai will have the inexpensive rose/tan one. (Or maybe it'll go in a bedroom instead. Still thinking about that one. It's smallest.)

Assuming the bank OKs the short sale, of course.

Meanwhile, there's still much to do, including getting dressed for work.

Groundhog Day

2012-02-01T06:46:00.002-06:00

I love it! That is, if you're talking about the movie with Bill Murray. In fact, it's the only Bill Murray movie I like at all. Every other movie he's just too much of a cad or a buffoon. In this one he becomes a character that I give a sh*t about.

But as a "holiday", it's never made sense. I grew up in north central Minnesota, still live in the state. Six more weeks of winter, here, is a reprieve, not a sentence!

Conundrum

2012-01-27T20:49:00.003-06:00

There was an ongoing discussion on species and evolution on the radio this afternoon. It was a call-in show, and one caller brought up the "we're all black" theory. Another corrected him with the refinement of his idea that DNA shows we all have our origins in Africa, not that it had an impact on the question. Racism has been another ongoing topic on the airwaves, between MLK day and the presidential primaries with all the dog-whistles getting thrown around by candidates and supporters.

It occurred to me that it ought to be impossible for a fundamentalist to also be a racist. I only say "ought to" because I'm well aware of the propensity of the human brain to twist itself around so that people don't even notice that they're believing six impossible things before breakfast.

Here's the reasoning. If you accept DNA results, it is true that we are all from the same origins. If you accept the Bible, we are all from the same origins, namely Adam and Eve. In either case, we no longer all look like each other, and the differences we historically call "race". But if you believe those differences are somehow fundamental, then we've changed due to a process that can only be labeled "evolution." And since the fundamentalist evangelicals don't accept the concept of evolution, how can they believe in different races? Not to mention that some are better or worse than others?

Does This Make Me Look Fat?

2012-01-25T22:15:00.004-06:00

It was time for a new uniform shirt. They come in long or short sleeved, regular and tall. All men's only. All pale blue.

I picked one a size smaller than the one I was wearing, the one having the under-collar showing through in spots, the one where you could practically see through the fabric at the armpits. The epitome of "threadbare". She asked me if I wanted regular or tall. Actually, I plan to cut a good chunk of the bottom off and hem it across. No long tails to make it three times as hard to get to the bathroom fast. No long tails to take an extra minute tucking back inside the pants so there is no unsightly roll of fabric.

We got into a discussion about the guys who came in for replacement shirts. Some of them have to be encouraged strongly to go for the tall sizes. Nobody wants to see our drivers' butt cracks. Really. Or whatever isn't covered in front where the belt is fastened under the belly, and that means under all of the belly. And these, of course, are the drivers who wind up asking, "Does this make me look fat?"

She doesn't know how to answer them. If it were her husband, she'd know what to say: "Yes." But mostly these are strangers, and who knows how badly they want the question answered, or with how much truth in it?

I have some suggestions:

As opposed to what? Being naked?

No fatter than you looked before.

Only when you stand like this....

Try sucking it in and see if that helps.

Only in the belly. The hips look fine.

Of course not. Everybody gets fooled by that dropped belt trick.

Don't worry about it, everybody looks like that after 250 pounds.

Why? Cute girls on your route?

What makes you think you look fat?

It's just the lighter color, it fools the eye.

Nothing like the last guy who was in here for shirts. Wow!

No, but let's go for this larger size this time, OK? Keep those buttons from popping. Somebody could lose an eye.

No, just 8 months pregnant.

It's a medication reaction, isn't it?

You used to play football?

You look good in that relaxed fit. I bet suspenders would be more comfortable too.

And Now, A Shorter Honeymoon

2012-01-25T06:09:00.003-06:00

Hey, it's all good. There's a reason we're choosing to have me take less time away from work, i.e., uncompensated. We're cutting back from three to two weeks. After all, we're no longer going to be spending a lot of that time house hunting. Instead, we'll be paying for living in both houses!

Yesterday was some day! It started with another quick look at the home offerings available, noting that another couple had fallen to the wayside, victims of other buyers. The buying of Sun City homes has certainly picked up since the new year started. Even the radio has commented on things starting to look up nationwide. Not only have some gone away, others show raises in price, not drops. It might be time to hop aboard while there was still something we could afford.

I took another look at one home that we'd considered above our top budget - by just $100! Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, 1365 sf, two (!) lanais, one with gas fireplace, fenced back yard, front and back tall pine trees, plenty of storage....

It was time to hop online with a query to our agent. I'd picked her because she was the listing agent on the very first piece of property we were interested in on line, and we stuck with her because she's been extremely helpful. She's half of a husband/wife team of realtors. Was this one still actually available or had the bank simply not de-listed it yet? Had they been in it and did they know if it stinks of cigarette smoke? And were my impressions right that houses were really starting to move?

Then after working half a (slow) day, I hopped on the phone as well, between jobs. This time I spoke to her husband, who was actually enroute to view the home for me. Another great idea popped into my head, with the potential of saving me about $800 in air fare in coming down to view the property myself. Yes, I know buying sight-unseen is risky. Some would say foolhardy. However...

I called Joan and Bob. Joan has been my best friend for many years, and has, to me , a great sense of how homes work well and what makes them livable. Being a former landlord of the other half of the duplex she lived in, she has a sense of repairs and maintenance, and has hands-on experience with many redecorating chores. Bob is a retired building inspector. Were they busy? And might they like to go view this house for me and give feedback on what's good/bad about it? Their opinions I trust way above any realtor hoping for a sale.

With a little back and forth calling to arrange a meeting, they agreed.

Twenty minutes after the appointment started, I heard first from the realtor. He mentioned that it was dated inside, and carpets needed replacing. Some floors were laminate, such as lanai, kitchen and master bedroom. Kool! Being somewhat dated myself, I can live with ugly while the budget adjusts and more money becomes available to make alterations. The pepto-bismol-pink kitchen walls can be painted fairly quickly, and holes in walls from pictures be mudded over easily. Dirty carpets will wait a bit longer, as will wallpaper removal.

Then Joan called, and we talked for over half an hour. She was overwhelmed by the size of the cleanup of dirty walls and ugly carpets, but again I expected to repaint and eliminate carpets. Bedrooms are big enough without being unnecessarily huge, kitchen is adequate, both tub and shower are walk-in. Some repairs are needed: a window is broken in one corner, a screen is ripped, some of the laminate flooring has water damage but I was planning to have tile in the bathroom and kitchen instead, being much easier to keep clean and undamaged in the presence of water. An awning over the front of the carport has had something tall back into it at some point, but that can wait a few years. The bifold doors for the third bedroom closet have been removed, but that can easily become open access den storage/shelving.

Two huge citrus trees in back have been removed, and the stumps will have to be dug and the trees replaced. Maybe one orange, one lime? The screen lanai is shaded by the back pine, and Steve is excited by having his own special smoking area. There's a dog door off the room with cupboards and a workbench, out to a section of the back yard that's fenced off from the rest. The old furnace has been replaced with a heat pump, the roof is about 5 years old, and so is the air conditioner thingy on top of it. Even with the trees there is room on the roof for solar panels to go in and function well.

They sent lots of pictures. So did the realtor. They are distinctly different, one showing everything good about the house, the other showing flaws. Funny. Predictable.

The upshot is: great bones, help from family with cleaning/painting/flooring, and a buy-now price. As a matter of fact, it's an approved short-sale, with a time limit expiring in two days before it would go in to foreclosure if there were no pending offers, at which point it would disappear off the market for months. It was time to decide.

I did.

We did.

A call to the realtor and documents were written up and send on-line, along with a link to a site where I could e-sign. Since there were only about 18 pages of them to be read, it took a while. By about 11:00 PM last night, the signing was done. Today I'll hit the copy machine to create copies of the statements which show where my cash assets lie, proof that I can, in fact, buy this property. I also get to cut a check for $2,000 earnest money and put them all in a Priority mail envelope to hit the title company tomorrow morning.

Assuming the offer's accepted, I close March 15th, exactly on time for when I can tap two of the funds without penalties for early withdrawal. On the plus side, I will close out the US Bank IRAs where they changed the rules on me and decided they were entitled to tap $30 a year from them for "managing my retirement account". Yes, there's a penalty. There's also an end to the aggravation of dealing with them. I call that a win-win.

I think I finally fell asleep about 2:00 AM.

Whatever It Takes

2012-01-19T06:34:00.003-06:00

Yes, it's been a mild winter - so far. For Minnesota standards, anyway. Then...

Last night was a brief stopover in Pine City. The cold front had arrived before I had, snow was blowing horizontally creating near whiteout conditions where no trees blocked its access to roadways. When the WalMart doors opened, the wind blew straight back into store over a hundred feet. My gas level was low, so I stopped for a fill before heading home, not wanting to run out if emergency conditions struck, like sitting along the road for hours. It was bitterly cold and my hands ached just putting the nozzle into the tank and setting the pump to start. The wind cut through all my layers like they weren't there.

Thinking longingly of never having to do this again once this winter has passed, my mantra became, "Whatever it takes, whatever it takes, whatever..." It didn't make me any warmer, but it did give me hope. Possibly tolerance for the next three months as well.

I blame my intolerance of winter on my almost four years living in Georgia. There I watched neighbors mow their lawns on X-mas Eve. Growing up in north central Minnesota, it had never occurred to me that there could be an alternative. Winter just was. Now I was living an alternative. Should nostalgia strike, well, we actually had two inches of snow once, and it closed down everything. It was fun!

And it was gone in two days

Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes.

774

2012-01-16T06:09:00.005-06:00

This past weekend was one of those busy-busy ones, knocking a bunch of stuff off the to-do list, getting closer to the upcoming deadlines of wedding, trip, house hunting. Four weeks left! Gulp!

We've started on the ceremony itself, along with working on vows. At least we settled on music, finally, and Rich agreed to be our official music person. He can put our selections on his laptop and cue them up - with good speakers - at the right times. We're going with "Here Comes the Sun" for a processional, with everybody heading up the "aisle" in pairs. Steph and Ben did that for their wedding and I liked that. There's nobody to "give away the bride" even if the bride agreed that it was proper to "give" her/me "away". This is me, my decision, and it's a joining, not a transfer of ownership.

And by the way, for anybody who's not caught on yet, it's a wedding without a marriage. No legal ties as far as the State of Minnesota is concerned. That's why we hit the attorney's office Friday morning, making sure we can legally share in what we chose to share in and keep separate what we chose as well.

But back to music. Steve loves Peter, Paul and Mary even more than I do, and insists on Paul Stukey's "Wedding Song" as part of the music. I agree, noting only that some of the volume is so low it might be tricky to hear. It'll be helped by being in the middle of the ceremony, when everybody "should" be quietly paying attention. For a recessional, it'll be "Our Hearts Will Go On" from "Titanic" from the soundtrack. I had thought over a year ago to use something from "Winged Migrations", beautiful music and a theme where the geese, mated for life, fly away together, but if Steve couldn't get it, I figured nobody else would either, especially in the chaos of a recessional.

So: music: check.

Start legal paperwork: check.

Apply for a loan: check. Of course, that took a couple long phone calls to the loan folks of my credit union, and a packet of paperwork to sign. They needed copies of 2009 and 2010 tax returns, and that was $.70 for copies just for 2009. I happened to have a spare copy of 2010 that the county never got around to asking for when they approved my Minnesota Care health insurance, saving a few more dimes. Since it's a home equity loan on this place, they needed proof of insurance including the replacement cost, which is over 5 times the amount of the loan I'm requesting. Note that the county assessor has its market value in this economy as just over twice the loan amount. That's one of the reasons I'm not selling now, but the same reason I'm buying now. It's easier to finance here than down in Arizona.

It took me about a week just to figure out the 2011 tax situation. I had to cross-reference a bunch of figures, with incomplete documentation this early in the year. Plus I managed to misplace the whole stack of cell phone bills after filing them along with all the other paperwork from last year in preparation for the task. At least those are available in other places. The loan folks made it more complicated by requesting a Profit and Loss record for last year. I had no idea. I mean, I know I've been paying my bills and managing to pay down my credit card bill while still earning little enough to have much of a taxable income after all the legal deductions on a Schedule C. I just haven't figured my actual expenses for over 20 years since going by mileage is so much simpler. After figuring them all out, I was pleasantly surprised. It should help me look capable of paying off the loan I'm asking for.

Besides just finding a place locally open on Sunday which makes copies, there was the half-hour hunt for the old tax returns. I knew exactly where they were before moving out of the new bedroom and back into my old bedroom. Where on earth had I put them during the move? With help from Paul, resident tall person, in getting stuff down from top shelves where they stay stored, including tax returns from 1995 (!) and 1981 (divorce year records), looking in any cranny large enough to hold the paperwork, and just plain stubbornness, aka desperation, we finally located them... still in Steve's room, high on a shelf in the back corner of the closet. They now reside in my room and Steve has a whole new half shelf to fill. It won't get his fishing rods off the floor, or the globe relocated so one can move through the closet, or the rest of his pictures hung up, but it's an improvement anyway.

Note to self for after return from Arizona: clear out all the old tax returns I no longer need, after pulling out documentation on capital improvements to this place. Owning two homes complicates the capital gains picture. Paranoia ought not to rule my life so completely when it comes to the possibility of an IRS audit. 1995!?!

Additional note to self: enjoy all the new space!

Last thing on the list that got checked off: do the headpiece. Only, I put it at only semi-checked off. I'd like it much better if I could figure out how to anchor it so it stands vertically on my head, with my short hair, rather then horizontally. It's too big and heavy, but it's just what I had in mind. Plus it's done, which may count for more in the long run. Still, if I can find the time, I'll go back, tear it apart (just the central frou-frou), cut it back down... and likely still be unable to anchor it vertically. Right now it's about twice the width of my head when it's on, including the tulle ruffle. The fear of looking ridiculous is the spur that will goad me into finding the time to put it back on the to-do list.

By now you're probably wondering why the silly title on this post and what on earth it might have to do with anything I've written thus far. Well. it's simple. Tucked in all those forms I had to sign for the loan was this little number. I missed it on the first read-through, looking only for places to sign and things needing to be dug out, copied, and included. Before signing, however, I did the every-word check. And there was that little number, sitting modestly on the page in normal type, right after the words "credit score".

Not bad for a single person with a decreasing income and still more debt that I care to disclose. It helps that I've reduced my credit card debt by over $10 grand over the last several years. It didn't help that I paid this place off early, taking it away from my record of debt-paying. It seems to make no impact that I'm paying above-and-beyond on the car each month. I'm told it should have damaged my credit score when I told U S Bank to go take a hike and destroyed their credit card and its $10 grand limit. I had no idea what the number would be. The last time I knew was when I financed the car: then it was 715. Good enough for a car loan, but for a home equity loan? I tried to check, but being the cheapskate that I am, I balk at every "free" credit score site on the internet that seems to require you to sign up for some plan or other which carries a monthly charge along with it. Not my idea of free. So I had no idea. Just hope.

Gee, 774. Cool!

NOT a Christmas Card

2012-01-11T06:24:00.004-06:00

There are a number of people on my Christmas card list who unfailingly return a card to me every year, or even send theirs before I get mine out. Dick was one of those, and each year his card featured a red cardinal as part of the design. I didn't get one this year from him, so it was not a complete surprise when I opened the oversized envelope which came in the mail yesterday. Instead was a note from his daughter informing me of his sudden death last month, enclosing a copy of the funeral program, and letting me know they found my address in his address book.

He was a friend, and more than that, more than 20 years ago. I can date it because that's when I moved up here into this house, and became "geographically undesirable". Since our relationship had been more cozy than passionate, I had anticipated that. There had never been a possibility of more. He never really got over his divorce, for which he held himself responsible. Dick was a recovering alcoholic.

I was lucky. I got to know him in the context of a support group for re-singled people, long after his sobriety had been established. In fact, he did counseling for others with the same issues for many years. Though I pretty much lost touch except for the cards after I moved away, I suspect that happened as long as he was physically able to do so.

I also knew him as a gardener. In the spring his shady Mahtomedi yard turned nearly solid blue with scillas that had naturalized years before with some help from the local birds. It was so lovely that I determined to plant some in my own yard once I moved in. They've been growing and spreading, in my case with help from my youngest son, who delights in collecting seeds and scattering them in the newest designated locations or giving them away to spread the joy. Every spring as they pop through the snow they remind me of Dick. It's a fitting memorial, I think, to a very kind, caring, gentle man: Richard Rogers Sr., 1929-2011.

Welcome to Chaos

2012-01-10T19:48:00.005-06:00

So you think to dare to come in my door? OK, well, it's not so scary right now. I may be the only person who actually swept away the cobwebs around the front door before the trick-or-treaters came to call. Didn't want to scare the little ones with any realism, after all. The leaves are still there though. Not that they're the same leaves that were there a month ago. Those got swept away, but with no snow every breeze sends more into the black hole for leaves that is my entryway.

Once you get inside, you'll find every available surface is covered. Jackets, computer stuff, books, small blankets for people and/or dogs, magazines, beverage containers that haven't made it into the dishwasher since the last load.... Candy canes, having lost their perches since the tree got put away in its box, now adorn the arms holding my two wall-mount lamps over the futon. They disappear at a rate of about one a day. This tells me I'm the only one eating them. I'm trying to ration myself.

Those are just the upper surfaces. Look to the floor and there'll be shoes, rawhide chews that haven't yet gotten hidden by Fred where he thinks Koda can't find them, or ones that Koda has dragged out of Fred's hiding spots. Look closer and you'll find the dark green carpet is covered by light colored flecks, and perhaps a few wood splinters or even small chunks. (You removed your shoes when you came in why?) There are collections of X-mas wrapping that haven't made it into the recycling yet, but I could tell you we're not all that sloppy because the last present opening was just Sunday. I could tell you that but that wrapping pretty much got picked up at the time. What I see mostly goes back to the day, saved with the optimistic thought of "somebody" taking the time to refold the tissue for packing around next year's packages. "Somebody" hasn't. Yet.

The kitchen gets more interesting. The poinsettia is still thriving in the window, and the roaster pan just found its basement home again this morning. It had been keeping the poinsettia company. The table, once recently so very nicely cleaned off and scrubbed, is again cluttered with mail, tools, tax paperwork, boxes of apple butter in jars which finally used up the last of this fall's supply of apples when Paul showed Steve how to make apple butter. A few spots of glitter glue decorate the table from this weekend's project of decorating the flower girl's basket: I think they'll scrape off. Soon.

The counter by the stove is collecting boxes of ZipLoc bags in various sizes, waiting for me to find the next item to pack for the upcoming trip. I did 21 days of pills, each day's worth in its own snack bag. These are just the OTC ones. I'm waiting for next month to get the latest bottles of Rx pills to add into the lot, and then the whole bunch of them go into a gallon bag. Really, they fit into a quart bag now, but the little bags with the zippers that don't bend take up enough space that it won't quite close now, and adding stuff will just make it worse. There'll be a big bag of little bags of jerky, and one of dried fruits, and... and... and....

The kitchen sink is its usual: one semi-clean sink for using, and one filled with dirty dishes waiting for the next full load in the dishwasher. Really, it got run this morning, but the sink never stays empty. The wastebasket is mostly empty, but the recycle bag is splitting its seams. Lots of stuff has been running through recycling lately, and nobody but me seems to know how to squish cans and plastic milk cartons. Plus, we reuse the paper sack we collect the stuff in until it finally has no further use than to join the recyclables itself. Tomorrow, perhaps.

Once your eyes drop all the way to the floor - can you possibly have not noticed yet? - it really gets interesting. The linoleum is gone. Some of the plywood sub-floor is gone, leaving a lip where it still sits next to the appliances. It's harder to remove there, starting with the part where you disconnect the water or gas and actually move out the appliance so you can get at the floor. Then there's the part where you use a hammer and chisel and chop through the thin plywood so it's even with the front face of the bottom of the cabinets sitting on it. And of course when I say "you" I really mean Richard.

It's his job. I hired him after giving him three days to research the job and decide that he really could replace my flooring. In exchange for doing three rooms (just labor) he gets paid three month's child support. He needed some kind of off-season job, and this is it. He was going to hire out to shovel snow. It hit 52 today. That job idea just isn't working out for him.

The plywood which has been removed is sitting outside in the back yard waiting for warm weather demolition. The pieces which remain are covered spottily with what Richard thinks is glue from the linoleum. While they don't cling well to the plywood in spots, they seem to have no problem clinging to the carpet. The do, of course, cling so well in other spots that the only way to remove them is remove the whole sheet of plywood. I guess it's a good thing the job requires removal regardless.The linoleum has been cut into small pieces and fed out through the garbage system. So has the beginning of the carpet being removed. Padding too.

Oh, didn't I point it out? The hallway floor has been denuded. There is a pile under the table of wood strips with lots of little nails sticking out of them. (Why are we keeping these? Anybody?) The original idea was to hold carpet in place. It might have worked better had the carpet been stretched tighter in the first place. Or perhaps it should have been better, thicker carpet, able to adequately cover the strips so the bare foot putting pressure in a downward motion didn't acquire small puncture holes in the process. That happened mostly at the join between the living room and the kitchen linoleum. We learned to step over that area rather than on it. Eventually. There was a learning curve.

Anyway, strips of carpet in rolls or pad in rolls are also being fed out via the garbage can. Duct tape is great for helping them keep their shape enough that there is room for actual garbage in the can each week as well. And really, the guy at Home Depot suggested it. This was when I looked at their estimate for doing the job without including all the maybe extras like plywood under the linoleum or filling the hollow places, but did include their disposal of carpet and linoleum - and decided our own labor was better suited to my budget. And again, when I say "our own" I mean Richard.

So the chaos is just going to get worse around here for a while. Half my bedroom floor is filled with boxes of laminate. Things are starting to accumulate on top of them, like the laundered X-mas table linens awaiting folding and putting back in the closet till next year. It's the glue flaking off the plywood which is creating the spots on the carpet which nobody is bothering to worry about. They'll go away when the floor is cleared. Anybody who shows up is warned about the hazards of going barefoot, though I do it myself. Richard pretty well sweeps up after each bit of the job he does. No unwanted skin punctures yet. And empty boxes are collecting in the den so when it's time to empty a display cabinet or a bookshelf there's someplace to put the stuff for a bit.

It just needs to happen a bit faster. I can only stand so much chaos for so long.

Word Puzzle

2012-01-03T22:20:00.003-06:00

Star: it's a simple word, yet with multiple meanings, and depending on context, its usage can be as different as a noun, adjective, or even a verb. All those different usages can have their own set of synonyms. For example, when used to identify a shape, a synonym might be the word pentagram.

One of its usages has multiple synonyms, two of which are each part of their own set of homonyms. Which usages of the word is it, what are the two synonyms, and what are all the homonyms?

Packaging!

2012-01-03T06:46:00.005-06:00

New Year's Resolution: nope, not lose weight. Been doing that, thank you: 47 lbs. now. Nope, not exercise: been getting slightly more active without the weight, but the knees are still plenty quick to reassure me they're still there, still not fixed. This year it was Get Organized!

Better organized, anyway. With some things I'm very organized. In a house with likely over a thousand books, if they're not alphabetized by author, one can never find anything. The reason there are stacks of them on the windowsill is that we've not taken the time to rearrange the shelves to create more room so they can be folded into the existing system, aka organized. Of course the computer Dummies books are on the computer stand, the tropical aquarium fish books are on their own shelf, the field guides are in their own spot, and the very oversized books have their own book case entirely, but hey, it's a system.

With DVDs I have to be organized, doubly so. First they have to be registered on my computer list, which gets printed out regularly (not enough!) and tucked into my pocketbook so when I'm at the store I don't buy something I forgot I already have. It's been done. Happened yesterday, in fact. My list wasn't the most recent. Oops.

Second, they get their cases removed and get slid into albums with disc sleeves, again in alphabetical order. I do try to leave spaces in them so new DVDs can be added without having to pull everything out and re-file. However, yesterday it was time to file the three bagfuls of DVDs which had been sitting on the den floor where they had been waiting after getting computerized, and add into the mix all of Steve's DVD movies.

Well, most. I made exceptions for his John Wayne collections and a western movies collection that crammed 50 movies onto a few discs, no way to alphabetize. I also rejected the how-to DVDs. They don't really count as movies. Seriously.

Since I had been caring for my dad the last couple years plus, I brought a sharp knife to the task. Non sequitur? Just wait a sec, it'll make sense. With Daddy living his awake life in the living room and unable to really watch TV, we had to do our watching pretty much around his schedule so as not to bother him. That hardly left room for the regular TV programs, much less adding in movies. Thus, most of them were in their original packaging, unwatched. They needed that knife to break through the cellophane and the end tape.

I had stuff spread out all over my bed, and the packaging got dumped onto the floor until I paused in the task to round it all up and pack it into shopping bags for dumping in the garbage can. As a side note, something actually on the topic of the title, three bags of DVDs made 6 bags of trash.

There were three start-overs to the job, only one of which was due to needing to go to the store to purchase a new album, one promising to hold 342 discs. I have no idea how it'll go on the shelf, but that's another day's organizing task. The most frustrating one was after getting all the way into the Ls before Steve added his DVD collection into the mix.

And they weren't alphabetized yet.

I made him do it. I also had him write movie titles on half Post-It notes to put on those discs where the title is in the teeny weenie ring on the ring around the center hole. Having to squinch the eyes once to read it was twice too many times.

About four hours into the process, including the shopping expedition, having gotten to the "m"s for the first and last time, I came upon one particularly remarkable example of, uh, enthusiastic packaging. Yeah, that's it: enthusiastic. First was the cellophane. Then a sleeve, made of cardstock weight paper. Then a cardboard box, open along one long end. Out of that slid a single piece of cardstock weight paper again, plus a multiply folded cardboard folder holding the DVD. If course, it looked like several of the cases I had already opened which held several DVDs, opening first in the middle, and then each side having a flap which opened outward to finally reveal... just one disc.

"Meek's Cutoff". I wonder if it's a good movie. I'd never heard of it before picking it up, haven't heard anything about it since for that matter. It's a western. It was cheap. I figured at least Steve should like it, and maybe we can find a couple hours to watch it together.

And laugh at the packaging.

Lesson Learned

2012-01-02T05:46:00.004-06:00

Finally, snow! I mean, we weren't complaining that it had taken so long this season to get here. Not we who were beginning to plan how to avoid snow altogether for the rest of our lives by turning into snowbirds, oh, no.

It had come down Saturday evening, forecast for early in the day but dragging its winter storm feet as if as reluctant to arrive as we were to have it. As we were preparing yesterday morning to leave for the annual New Years Day Auction, we could acknowledge it even was pretty, clinging as it did to tree branches everywhere despite the stiffening wind, covering all the brown dead grasses and dirty everythings. Little clumps of snow on tops of brilliant red highbush cranberries were especially lovely. For kids, it was perfect snowman snow.

Of course, it also brought work. As the first to venture from the house, I had the job of grabbing the shovel and creating a path out to my car, last in line of the vehicles sitting on the driveway, and there to clear snow and ice from all the windows and car lights. I know, I know, I'm supposed to clear off hood and roof too, but that would have really been work, and with only so much time left before Steve and I were due to arrive to work, I needed to add in extra time for slow roads, which may or may not have also gotten ice removed well.

Finally finished with my chosen amount of snow removal, I found I had one extra unscheduled task ahead of me. It wasn't just brushing the snow off from everywhere I'd leaned against the car, plus pant leg bottoms. That's expected. No, I discovered that I thoughtlessly forgot to fold the pocket flaps out over the two wide pockets in the coat I was wearing! There they were, gapping wide, each now holding enough snow for a respectable snowball!

Oops.

Year In Review, Or ...?

2011-12-31T07:59:00.005-06:00

Everybody else is doing it. I'm having trouble getting up the energy to revisit this past year. So much of it, from this perspective, can be summed up in the word "deathwatch". Besides, I already did that, only it was called a Christmas letter. Of course, reading that, my news of the past year could best be summed up in the word "deathwatch". Sound a bit redundant?

Does to me. Why repeat it yet again?

I'd rather think about upcoming events. The kind of things that are important enough to require lists. There's a wedding, and it's got a long list, lotta stuff to do in six weeks. Then there's a honeymoon trip, shorter list but we're taking it pretty much by ear, so to speak. Its schedule mostly depends on weather and how we feel day-to-day. None of this by-Tuesday-we-have-to-be-in-City-X-so there's-no-time-to-stop-at-.... crap.

Then there's househunting. I contacted a realtor down in Arizona, and got a login-in password to a realty website. Steve and I have been pouring over the listings, narrowing down the wish-list, comparing features and prices. Dreaming. Beginning to arrange financing. Looking at serious snowbirding if I can come to an accommodation with the Phoenix branch of the company I contract with.

And there's this house. The carpeting needs replacing in the living room after Daddy's walker snagged it all to heck. After looking over options, and noticing that the kitchen linoleum hasn't held up well to 20 years of wear, I decided to go with ripping it all out and putting down laminate flooring, a vinyl-backed product vs. particleboard product, in light woodgrain. The formal estimate was a bit outrageous and didn't include leveling or taking up the plywood in the kitchen, or any other little unexpected thing that is sure to come along.

So I went with Plan B: have Richard do the install (which he agreed to after much researching), and work out an agreement to pay three months of his child support in exchange. There was a gap in his income from summer work that would have wound up with his losing his driver's license again, and likely ending up in jail again, probably just in time to screw with his next season's job. This bridges that gap until work starts up again, as well as getting me a decent new flooring that doesn't cling to every allergen in the world that's decided to pick on me.

The original offer was two rooms for two months' support, but after I cut down the labor-plus part of the bill, I added in my bedroom to the job. Its carpet is nice enough for twenty-year-old carpet, but my allergies are kicking up a bit again after I moved back into it, so I'm following Doctor's orders and getting it out of there.

I've already picked up the flooring. The cost plus what I'm paying Richard plus miscellaneous tools and supplies is still less that the 'they-do-it" estimate, even when we know the estimate doesn't include extras. It's sitting on the floor of my bedroom in a spot I usually don't need to walk on. Good thing too, since it's not going to move easily. When I picked it up I had to argue with the store to be able to get the extra 9 boxes (Have you had it measured? The installation price will have to be adjusted. How do we tell the computer what you're doing?), but three people later it was mine. It took two young fellows and a flatbed cart to get it loaded, taken to the cash register (more arguing), and finally loaded into my cute little hatchback. (You don't have a truck?)

Their guess while loading it was that each box weighed 15-20 pounds. Their estimate was 400 lbs. total. Yeah. Right. We're talking 33 boxes of laminate. It got stacked front-to back with the seat down, but there's a little tilt on the floor that way, and once the boxes cleared the back lip of the hatch door in height, there was the issue of keeping slippery boxes from sliding right back out again. So they put the remainder crosswise right behind the seats, since there's a spot where the back seat backs go when upright that's narrower. It turns out it's narrower than the boxes are long and they wedge three across in that space very nicely and don't slide any further back. Everything went in, the car sagged a lot but not too much for a cautious drive home, and my two-wheeler still fit right in on top of all the boxes without doing any damage.

Yee-haaa!

I enlisted Paul and Richard to haul them into my bedroom, though I had to wake Rich to do so. That was the simple part. Where the problem lay was getting the boxes out of the car. Those cross-laying boxes, wedged forward of the narrow spot? Well, when the third box went into each layer, it took up the remainder of the space behind the front seats. No biggie if you can take them out the same way they went in, but in reverse: lift, turn at an angle, slide out. The turning at an angle part is only possible after one box has been lifted clear. And I quickly found out that each box weighs, not 15 lbs., not 20 lbs, either of which would have been enough fun when one needs to stretch way forward over the back of the car towards the front and then have only one's arms for leverage, but 40 lbs.! We wound up putting my seat back forward and taking the first box of each crosswise stack out my door so the other two could be turned to free them and slid down to the hatch opening. Eventually it worked, they all got in, and the car rose back to its normal height above the ground.

So, 33 boxes at 40 lbs. each... Nice little load for my hatchback. Nice load for my bedroom floor, spread out over about 12 square feet.

There's a lot of prep work first. I'm taking Rich shopping this morning, before the weather moves in with rain/ice/snow, wind and cold temps right in time to stay home for New Year's Eve. There are supplies and tools to get, though I've already picked up 100 lbs. of leveling compound, a squeegee, and a linoleum knife. The first segment of cut up linoleum went out in the garbage can this week, and that and carpeting will be fed through in bits till it's gone. Maybe May? We need a 3-foot level to find any other hollows besides the one we know about in the floor which is already going to take the 100 lbs. of compound to fill. Then knee pads, a small thin pry bar to remove the wooden floor molding - carefully, I hope, to reuse - razor knife and blades to cut carpet, a wood chisel to cut through the plywood the cabinets stand on to we can have a smooth vertical edge and a floor level from kitchen to living room, shims or something to give a gap around the edges, and whatever else we find out we might need. Something to pry up plywood? Eventually quarter-round for along cabinets, covering the gap, and trim strips where laminate meets other flooring.

Still cheaper, even with an added room, than the incomplete estimate.

We'll have to be careful for a while of splinters, especially as the kitchen plywood is being torn out. The curio cabinet will have to be packed up and moved out. (Where? Please, where?) A plumber or similar expert will need to be called to disconnect and reconnect the water to the icemaker and the gas to the stove.

Oh yeah, and I've told Richard it needs to be finished by the time Steve and I get back from the honeymoon. March 6th.

It's going to look so good.

When Headlines Hit

2011-12-30T06:28:00.003-06:00

I admit it: I'm one of the many who let most of the news headlines just wash over them. Heard it before, somebody else's family/neighborhood/situation, stuff of my own going on. So when I heard about yet another shooting in Minneapolis where a stray (they think) bullet entered a house and hit a child, it didn't really register. Yes, of course it was a tragedy, and of course it hit all the local news services as repeating headlines.

Some things made this one stand out. Little Terrell Mayes was only three. I'd listened to his mom being interviewed over my car radio, talking about how after having her first child, she'd been told there could be no more. The next two were her miracle babies. Terrell was the youngest of her three. The bullet hit him in the back of the head, and he spent 17 hours in the hospital before he died.

Still, this story was just another tragedy for somebody else until yesterday's TV news. I saw a picture of him, so adorable it broke my heart. Now most 3-year-olds are cute, possibly except when their noses are running. Mine were. But this little guy was exceptional, especially in one picture where he and his mom posed with their heads together and big wide grins filling their faces. And then I heard some of the rest of the story.

Terrell and his brother had been eating supper in their home when they first heard shots nearby. The two of them were doing exactly what they had been taught to do under those circumstances: either drop to the floor or head upstairs to the second floor and hide in a closet. Terrell grabbed his plate of spaghetti and was heading up the stairs with it when the bullet struck.

It hit me over and over. It's not the irony of doing what's right and it turning out wrong. It's that they had a plan! Gunshots are so common in his neighborhood that the kids are all told what the plan is for when they hear gunfire. Imagine! When I hear gunfire around here, I know it's another hunting season. There's no plan, except to be cautious outdoors away from the yard. Orange might be a good wardrobe color. I've never needed "a plan". I've never needed to tell my kids to hit the floor. I can't imagine myself having to drop to the floor when any loud noise sounds, mostly because of the problems getting up again with my knees. But in these neighborhoods, these families have a plan.

That breaks my heart even more.

Ghosts of Christmases Past

2011-12-24T19:20:00.004-06:00

Work has been slow this week. There's been a lot of time to listen to the X-mas music on Classical MPR and let the melancholy set in. Not sure why, but I figure there's still some grieving catching up with me, having been so busy-busy these last couple months and not slowing down. Lots of memories come up, bringing lots of feelings, all tied into the season.

The earliest X-mas memories come in tidbits and flashes. There's the tantrum at Grandma's (Brogren) when I hated the silly little present she got me, threw it against the wall, and broke it. Needless to say I was sent to bed without any presents or other goodies, definitely intensifying my mood if not improving it. I was just old enough to be selfish, not old enough to be grateful. And certainly not old enough to understand about budgets and tight times. I suspect that was also about the time that Grandma was newly widowed.

The trees were generally spruces, often cut ourselves, and set in a stand that needed watering yet still let needles drop all over before it was taken down. Tinsel was a must back then, hung carefully after all the other decorations were on, and neatly vertical or we'd done it wrong. The other decorations consisted of regular lights, now the size of night-lite bulbs, and bubbler lights, something still available every few years. Some of the ornaments were shiny foil circles sewn in chains or folded flat for storage and opened up into many layers spread into a three-dimensional shape such as a ball, bell, or star. I've never met anybody who remembers that kind of ornaments outside of our immediate family, but would love it if anybody could come up with a line on how to find some.

Being great on economizing, we also strung popcorn and sometimes cranberries. We never economized so much that we turned to using the funny pages to wrap presents in, though I'd heard about it when raising my kids and thought it seemed like a good idea in the really lean years.

Earliest traditions involved waking up on X-mas morning, waiting for our parents to get up, and then, finally, being allowed to open presents. You had to recognize your own name and only open your own, but it was pretty much every kid for herself/himself. I have no idea what my parents did with opening their presents. One year I got up early and snuck down to peek at my presents. I didn't dare turn on a light because Mom was a light sleeper. I slid open the wrapping paper, careful to make it so I could re-affix the tape later and pretend it was a complete surprise. I'd been hoping for an Easy Bake Oven. Unfortunately, it was so dark and some of the letters were red on black or perhaps black on red, and thus invisible in the dark. So it was still a surprise when I opened it the next morning and got my oven! First time I recall getting just what I asked for.

Some years there were dolls, or gray modeling clay in a block like a quarter pound stick of butter. Often clothes came disguised as presents. When I got older there was a Kodak Brownie Starflash camera. It had some flash bulbs which melted on the outside when they were used. And it came with a roll of black-and-white film. I was busy for a while shooting everything I could, finding out that flash overpowers nearby things and doesn't touch far things, making some interesting pictures. I also learned about budgeting to buy new flash bulbs, film, and paying for developing.

The family went down to Minneapolis most years to join the rest of the relatives who mostly lived down there. There'd be a big Maxson Christmas party while my grandmother Elizabeth still lived, held somewhere large enough to accommodate that huge and growing bunch of us, though we were about the youngest, thus last, of the grandchildren and many of our cousins were old enough to have been our aunts and uncles. Every kid would get some kind of present, and a couple years a photo was taken of the whole group. Looking back it's amazing what we thought fashions should be and how young our parents were. The last year I remember of one of those parties, our parents had told us while we were about halfway down in the car that they'd had Goldie, our golden retriever, put to sleep while we were gone. We never knew she was sick, never noticed her getting old, never got a chance to say good-bye to her. She was older than I was, and had always been a part of my life. I keenly felt the betrayal, and wore it like a Greek tragedy the whole time we were down there. Nobody else seemed to care, and it wasn't like I didn't announce it to anybody I thought might listen and sympathize.

The tiny Methodist Church in Hubbard, the nearest town to our resort, celebrated X-mas with lots of singing of carols and by giving each kid a small paper bag of salted-in-the-shell peanuts. There were some candies in them as well, nasty little things, but, hey, sugar! I seem to recall an orange one year. At any rate, these were treats for us and our parents didn't object to us eating what we got, so there was nobody to spoil the gift of goodies. Mom was always so full of rules and cautions that I sometimes wonder how we got to enjoy anything.

While we didn't often get peanuts, every year at Christmas there was a bowl of mixed nuts, along with a nutcracker and nut picks. Walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, and Brazil nuts. Of course we never knew their proper name back then. They were always called "nigger-toes", back before we'd ever seen anyone of African descent, before we had any idea that the name was offensive. We giggled about it, but it was the thought of nuts being named after toes we found so silly. They were the hardest to crack too, needing to be lined up just so in the jaws of the nutcracker, and could take up long segments of time trying to pick the last speck of white nut out of the unforgiving shell.

Speaking of nasty little candies, those were the days of ribbon candies. Pretty until they broke, relatively flavorless, but again, hey, sugar! And too big to put all the way in your mouth so you'd drool while eating them. I found some years later to give my kids, but they were completely unimpressed. Another fond memory/tradition bites the dust.

Once grown and married, we started some of our own traditions. Every year I bought some new ornament for the tree. When the kids were old enough, they painted and glued wooden ornaments, or melted plastic beads in forms to make "stained glass". There were beaded snowflake balls using sequins and beads on hatpins stuck into a cork ball. I handmade felt stockings decorated with sequins including each kid's name, still surviving to this day including the part where Richard chewed off a few of the sequins. If he swallowed them, they seem to have done him no harm. I never did find bits.

While the kids were young, we traveled to southern Minnesota to the Rosa family farm to do Christmas with Paul's folks. Mostly my memories were of how drunk everybody got. Except me. After one drinking disaster during my college years, I couldn't stand the stuff, and was the sole sober person in the room hoping nobody would notice how impolite I was not to be entertained by all the rest of them, hoping I didn't show my total boredom, hoping it was soon bedtime.

There was one amazing exception. Steph was two and Richard a baby that year. I'd just taken her to see the Loyce Holton's Nutcracker, the version filled with tiny kids in mouse costumes. It was a magical time, and the first of several such times we went to such performances until finally the kids announced they were bored with them. But this year it was new, fresh, magic! After supper, the afternoon rain stopped. In the weather's wake a thick fog rolled in. The strong yard lights typical of isolated farms revealed that the rain had frozen on every surface including tree branches, resulting in a glistening and crackling winter wonderland worthy of the best Nutcracker set. The family located the old toboggan, Steph and I dressed in our winter warmest, and escaped for about half an hour into a land of fantasy and ice. Arriving down at the end of the drive near the highway, there were moments where we could imagine we were the only people on earth, until another car came along to spoil the illusion.

One new tradition with our kids was started by my folks. They gave us $20.00 for each kid to spend on other people. The only rules were they had to spend it all on others, and we parents could take them shopping but could not influence their choices of gift. We could inform them how much they'd spent and how much they had left, and often the last few pennies went for a candy cane or some such tidbit, duly wrapped and gifted. The most memorable gift was a toy "Little Bird", a small yellow stuffed friend to the Big Bird on Sesame Street, presented to me by Paul. Of course after I opened it he thought it should be his to play with since I wasn't going to give Little Bird the proper attention he deserved. Paul got properly thanked, and after a few days it went up on a shelf somewhere. But not for long. We gave the kids toys for Easter too, and Little Bird showed up as one of Paul's presents that spring. On another gift-giving occasion, Little Bird went to somebody else, and his travels became a family joke for a while afterwards.

Hmm, I wonder if anybody would remember if I located another one and restarted his travels?

Steph has strongly negative associations with Christmas. The year her father and I agreed to split up, it was just before Christmas. He decided to wait until after the holiday to tell them and move out, so as to not spoil the holiday for them. But by noon on Christmas day he couldn't stand it any more and gathered the kids together and informed them he was leaving. It finally was about him after all. Thanks, guy!

While the timing sucked, the reason for it and the implementation made it ultimately the best thing he did for his kids. We had been visiting my folks for Thanksgiving while they were vacationing on Sanibel Island, relatively close to where we lived then outside Atlanta. Seeing the shock in their eyes over how he treated his kids opened his eyes to what he was doing. While he told a lot of wild stories later about the "why" of the divorce, his reason at the time was that he didn't want his youngest and namesake to go through the abuse that his older son was. At that time, if you yelled Richard's name in irritation at him, his response was to duck and cover his head with his arms. Somehow, we'd managed not to let ourselves see it. It's the one thing I'm most ashamed of in my life, not seeing my child being abused. My only excuse is that I was so busy surviving emotionally myself during those years that I wouldn't allow myself that one extra blow to my defenses.

It still doesn't help much.

There were some particularly lean years after the divorce. It got so bad one year that one day a neighbor came over to announce that we had been chosen to be the family "sponsored" for X-mas by the hospital she worked for. She explained that everybody at the hospital contributed, our family was selected of the ones submitted for consideration, that she was sent to explain the gift, get my permission for it, and get the kid's sizes for new clothes. Later she'd be back with clothes, toys, and food. Even all these years later remembering that Christmas gets me choked up. I'd already had the humiliation of applying for food stamps. The child support, had I known it, was about to go from erratic to nonexistent, and my job was proving insufficient to the task of supporting the family. It had never occurred to me that somebody else had noticed, much less would offer to help. Once back on my financial feet again I've tried to find ways to pay it forward. While I sent a thank you letter to the hospital, I can only hope that they might know how much it still means to me.

This year Christmas is mostly a joyful time. I'm surrounded by loving family, making plans for wonderful new things in my life. All those Ghosts of Christmases Past are still there, but the melancholy doesn't last. Mostly they make me appreciate life today all the more. For all of you and yours, I'm hoping for the same.

Caught 'Em!

2011-12-22T20:37:00.002-06:00

Ahah! I caught them in the act. Trying to make my payment late so they can raise the interest rate in my credit card account, those scoundrels!

Too bad for them. I pay them with what's left after bills out of every paycheck, and that's every two weeks. This one may be held for three days so it comes in at my credit union the day after billing cut-off, but they've already gotten paid once, perhaps twice this period, depending on what finnagling they did two paychecks ago. So I'm not late, hard as they try to make it so.

I love electronic trails. My pay period on the credit card is the 18th of each month. This time I paid them electronically on the 16th. I print those out every time, figuring the proof is worth the paper. It got paid in actuality on the 19th. Had it been my only payment, it would have been late.

I understand their motives. Greed, of course. Plain ol' greed. I still have the deal on this card of prime plus 1% for my interest. I've had this card with this deal for years. Were I late once, they could bump me way up. So I don't get late.

I've noticed that a payment made, say, on the 1st of the month, midway through the period, can go through the same day or at latest the next. They do want their money soonest then. Funny how efficient they can be when they want to. But I'm keeping an eye on them. Or rather, I'm keeping an eye on me, making sure I'm prompt. It pays.

On the Vikings

2011-12-19T07:02:00.003-06:00

Face it, this year they stink. Somehow, they seem to still be winning in the we-want-you-to-fund-a-new-stadium battle with the state. Apparently good things come to bad teams' owners. For some the threat of no football is worse than really bad football. (They probably see relationships the same way.)

I had to watch a few early season games. We taped them for my dad, and while he was still able to watch and enjoy them, somebody had to be there to pause, or fast-forward through the commercials. That was me. They gave a pretty good showing for a while and still wound up losing. Just before the weekend they had a 2-11 record, and I neither know nor care whether they even played this weekend.

I wound up thinking of them this way: they're nearly as good as every other team out there.

X-mas Letter 2011

2011-12-17T08:57:00.001-06:00

December, 2011

Boy, what a year! Where did it go?

Most of Heather’s year was spent either working or watching the long slow decline of her father, managing his changing needs, blowing off steam on her blog, and finally seeing to his funeral and burial at Fort Snelling in November. Seeing/hearing the full military burial honors experience (WWII First Sergeant, Europe) is quite impressive. Getting to tell the stories of his life at his funeral was a great way to say, “Good-bye.”

Once Steve picked a date for moving in, there was a whole lot of work dedicated to rearranging half the house to accommodate him and his belongings. The date he picked turned out to be just after John’s funeral, so there wound up being room after all, at least for most stuff, but we would have made it work anyway. Steve started his year busy enjoying retirement out in Dassel, and as soon as the lakes opened up, fishing with one of his sons who also lived in the area. After the son moved away with his family, Steve sacrificed the rest of his fishing season to get his third knee replacement - and no, he’s not a three-legged man!

Speaking of our collective offspring, both of us wound up this year having a son working and traveling with a carnival. Orrin stayed mostly in Minnesota. While Rich spent spent the summer here, he also worked off-season locations in Miami and Dallas. Maria is taking time off from working on her degree at St. Kate's to deal with health issues, but plans to return and graduate. When Lance moved his family last summer, they wound up in a situation with such severe electrical problems that between lack of heat and hot spots in the walls, they evacuated under emergency conditions - but luckily safely, and are now sharing space with relatives while seeking safer, more comfortable quarters. He’s looking forward to learning welding in an educational setting that has a great record with job placement. Paul and Josh are pretty much same-old, same-old, although this year Paul finally instituted a regular spraying regimen on the apple trees and suddenly we were finding a whole new cluster of friends to donate bagfuls of them to. Stephanie is starting to think about finding another company to work for, disliking the increasingly corporatized atmosphere where she’s been for 9 years now that they’ve been bought out by a larger company. I have a granddaughter (Jordan) old enough to graduate high school last summer. Steve’s grand kids are younger, enough that two, Angelique and Ethan, will serve as flower girl and ring bearer in February.

Steve and I remain busy, settling in and making future plans. Even a small wedding on Valentine’s Day requires a lot of work and expense, though we’re keeping that down as much as possible. Topping that off we plan a three-week driving honeymoon down to Arizona. We’re hoping to make it work without a lot of advance reservations, not knowing how much distance we’ll make each day with the sightseeing we want to take in along the way, and especially not knowing what Mother Nature’s got scheduled on her blizzard calendar. Once there, we hope to find a way to begin making snowbirding possible on our budget.

So while it’s been something of a sad, hard year, we’re looking forward to our future together, and extend our wishes to all of you for a brighter year next year as well!

Pay No Attention to That Other Post

2011-12-16T06:26:00.002-06:00

Oops. Mea Culpa. Forgive me. My Bad.

Of course, I paid for it already. That's how I know. But you shouldn't blindly follow and have to do it as well.

What am I talking about? That substitute pumpkin pie recipe, of course. Yes, it tastes great when it's only a single spoonful sample. But whoa! Too much is waaaayyyyyyy too much! I was just in such a hurry for something nummy that I didn't go cautiously.

Remember that comment about the strong flavor? Apparently after sitting overnight it only got stronger. So much so that I was only able to force myself to eat half of what I packed. And maybe there's something about cooking that destroys some of the spice - volatile oils or whatever.

On the plus side that means fewer calories in. On the minus, though, it means that nasty deprived feeling all day. Well, emotionally, anyway. I wasn't actually hungry for the whole day. Partly because the spices lingered on my tongue - for hours! Well, not quite, but it seemed that way. And I guess also just because there was simply no time to stop and indulge in shopping for something else to eat, and every time I might have been tempted to be hungry I hit that barricade of this is what is sitting in your cooler waiting for you! I did finally hit a Holiday for a couple jalapeno cheddar brats with mustard, no buns, about 4PM.

When I got home the other container, untouched, was still cold and went into the fridge. Today I'm going to mix it with a full 'nother container of cottage cheese. It'd be better if there were an easy way to mash out the lumps and spread the flavor even more, but no time or energy for that. Still, it's gotta be better than what I had yesterday. And hey, Mom taught me not to waste food. So, another day, another experiment.

I'll let ya know.

Patience - RIGHT NOW!

2011-12-14T20:04:00.000-06:00

I guess it's a good thing I'm actually capable of having patience. Or maybe it's just a case of really, really lowered expectations.

Take my recent experiences with my car, the one I just got back with the pretty new outside. After the second time when a minimal drain on my battery required jump starting, and with winter coming up, I decided I needed to replace it. Nevermind what the gadgets said about it being just fine, thank you. I have a winter to get through as well as a 4500+ mile trip, where I need absolute dependability. It's worth a few months less use of the old one. Then, there were tires to replace. I'd done two earlier in the year, and with upcoming snowy conditions, it was time to go for a full four with decent tread. One of the rear tires had a slow leak, and maybe it was in the tire though nothing showed like a nail head. And what the heck: oil change due as well.

So, Walmart. On a Sunday in the X-mas shopping hubbub. Hour and a half wait.

That was OK. I brought X-mas cards to work on. First, 70 return address labels. Then fold and stuff 70 X-mas letters I'd written and printed out before leaving home. I left the picture cards home, not willing to risk any damage to them in Grease Central. I'd add 70 addresses, but honestly, we just didn't have all of the ones we needed for the cards we wanted to send out this year. Steve isn't used to sending out cards, so he needed to dig up nearly all the addresses for his list. (Just got the last two finally.) And if that wasn't enough, I had a book in the bag which only had the first chapter read.

Ergo, patience. Plus, I've waited at Walmart before: ergo, lowered expectations.

Sore back too, since without any table to work at but juggling everything between two chairs, I was doing a lot of twisting in the same direction and my body started protesting halfway through.

Or, what should have been halfway through. A full hour into the wait, the whippersnapper at the counter, an obvious new trainee, came to me and announced that the two tires he knew he had at the start of our transaction were no no longer anywhere to be found. A bit later one of the actual fellows working on my car came in to verify that I really wanted my battery replaced, and questioned why I canceled my tires order. I explained they were not in casa, and he went to check for himself. I guess he'd had some experiences with the trainee guy before. But they truly were not there, so after finishing up my car, taking up the full hour and a half without replacing any tires, he called over to another Walmart, confirmed the presence of the desired tires (they had 11) and had them reserve two for me, sending me over there.

Another hour and a half. And a broken TPMS sensor discovered, possibly explaining why one tire required filling every 2-3 weeks. Possibly not, since the other one had a valve stem where the center part couldn't be replaced because it just turned in place, not unscrewing, demonstrating stripped threads. I'll know in another three weeks or so. I can't be sure which back wheel landed on which front side, even though I asked for a straight rotation.

Finally I got home, and was able to enlist Steve's help in finishing up the cards, or at least as far as we could go at that time. Some addresses were still missing then, and there were cards I wanted to put notes in. He stuffed the picture card inside and licked envelopes, while I added stamps.

However, the car stuff still wasn't done. I'd spent Saturday at Steph's house in Minneapolis. Together we were sewing my piece of silk into my tunic for the wedding. This actually means I helped at the dining room table with layout, pinning and cutting, and she did the traipsing up and down the stairs to use the sewing machine. It finally got to the point where there was nothing left that I could do, and we were pretty talked out by then, so I drove home after her offer to finish up. Eventually I'll have a bunch of Czech art-glass buttons to sew on it, 7/8" shank roses with irridescent backs. Leaving, my car started missing and my engine light began flashing, then held steady.

OK, this has happened before. The cure before has always been to turn it off and restart. This no longer worked. So all the running around Sunday was a bit nerve wracking, wondering if it was going to get bad enough to stall out. I started putting it in neutral every time I hit a stop.

Monday morning it went in to my favorite mechanics at Mike's Amoco in downtown St. Paul. Yes, they're worth driving the 41 miles for when at all possible. They're good, tell you up front what they can/can't do for you (no trannys, no allignments), and never charge you for 4 of something when only one needs replacing just because the book says it's done that way, unless you give the OK, don't add in fixes for things that weren't broken in the first place. It was acting like an engine coil (this car has 4) had given up the ghost for real this time, as it had threatened many times before. So the engine codes say.

Plus, I still had a TPMS sensor to replace. Walmart didn't carry my kind.

In almost no time I was out on the road again, ready to work. You thought that was good news? Well, the sensor got replaced, but the "missing" problem turned out not to be the coil - cheap and easy to replace - but the fuel injector. It seems that instead of going spritz spritz spritz with the gas, it went drip drip drip. Not conducive to firing. More expensive to fix. And not a single replacement in the metro area. It needed to be shipped in, taking a day. So meanwhile they put injector cleaner in, in case it might fix things, and sent me on my way until the part arrived.

About 20 miles down the road my TPMS sensor light came back on. Dang! Which tire was going flat this time? Did they fix it wrong? Did they fix the wrong one? Back I drove to the shop, after checking tire pressure (fine) and dropping the work I had aboard. No problems, go ahead and drive again, just keep an eye on them in case...

The car at least was drivable, though still a bit nerve wracking. There was a "sweet spot" at about 35 MPH, and another at 50-62, where you could almost be fooled into thinking there was nothing wrong. Almost. Try maintaining either of those speeds driving around the metro area.

Now let's top off the day by having the dispatch computer system totally crash at work. We wound up calling in on our cell phones, writing down the run information, and calling back when we were ready for more work. We had to tell them where we were as well because there was no GPS working. Oh, yeah, and noting the time of the drops on our logs because there was no computer to keep track of that for you. The next morning after logging in, those runs would show up on your blackberry and you'd have to wade through them, dropping each one adding time/date information so it wouldn't show falsely that they got dropped a day late at 7:23 in the morning, or whatever.

And yes, through all this I was able to remain patient. Cheerful even. Hmmm, what's wrong here?

Tuesday was deja vu. After completing a run, I got the call my part was in so I headed over to the shop again. This time I finished the X-mas card letters and got well into that book I'd started. The fuel injector was replaced, I turned the car on... and it was still missing. They sprayed stuff on all four cylinders, making for quite a wheeeeeeeee as my fan intake feasted on the chemicals. But, still missing. They got the bright idea to replace my spark plugs, reasoning that the dripping of the gas had likely fowled them up. I saw them: it had. A couple more tiny tweeks, and she's purring now.

They checked on my sensor: it needs to be programmed after being replaced, meaning going to the dealership, more down time. I'll think about that. I can ignore the light, treating it as if it wasn't there in the first place, just like every other car I've driven to this point. I'll just keep an eye on the tires myself, like in the good-ol'-days.

After emerging from the repairs, I tried logging back in to work and... gee, down again. I did say deja vu, after all. Cell phone and pen-and-paper time again. Oh well, been here before. At least there was work, and I was in shape to do it. No fuss, no bother. Let's just get on with it. Someday, likely soon enough, there will be things to loose my patience over.

Just not now.

If You Hated Giving Up Pumpkin Pie...

2011-12-14T18:43:00.003-06:00

Joan, this one's for you too.

Ever notice? The taste of pumpkin pie is such a favorite that now you can even get coffee in that flavor - seasonally, of course. Forty years ago a local dairy even made pumpkin yogurt - again, only seasonally.

I'm one of the pumpkin pie lovers. I tried this year to be very careful: tiny servings, waiting two hours after the meal, leaving the crust behind. It still kicked up my blood sugar levels past desired levels. I had to satisfy myself with a bit of the pumpkin cappucino in a big cup of black coffee about once every other week, on days when I really needed some extra caffeine. Like today, when the rain, the windshiled wipers, long drive and slight shortness of sleep combined to make me drowsy. Yummm.

It got me thinking.

To start with, I've been combining my cottage cheese with apples for way too long now. I particularly don't like the ever more frequent surprises in the middle of the apples we're storing in the back entry. You know, those brown trails through the core with an occasional extra bit of protein at the end. Sure, they've been cheap. I don't need to buy fruits twice a week or so, since I'm supposed to stick to fresh rather than canned, presumably because of no added sugar. But it's time for a change.

When I passed a Pumpkin pie filling display while shopping for other things, it hit me: I can "fake" pumpkin pie with blending ingredients into my cottage cheese! Worth enough of a try that I picked up three cans. Then I called home to see what still existed on the spice rack and shelves. OK, needed ground cloves. Not sure how much Paul has raided my Splenda supply in making low-carb jellies this year, I got a bag of that too. And, may as well grab more cottage cheese while I'm here.

Among the benefits, it's easy, tasty, and no-cook. Reasonably nutritious, low fat, low calorie, low carb. Also no gluten, since I don't bother with a crust. I guess if it needs a fancy name, you could call it lumpy pumpkin mousse, served chilled. Lumps are optional, depending on how much stirring/beating you feel like doing. Mine will have lumps.

Here's my recipe:

1 29 oz. can pumpkin filling.
1 22 oz. container 1% fat cottage cheese.
1 1/2 cup Splenda
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. each ground cloves, nutmeg, and ginger.
1/2 tsp. salt.
In a very large bowl, mix all dry ingredients thoroughly. Stir in pumpkin, then stir in cottage cheese. You can stir with a spoon for lumpy texture, or with a mixer for smooth. Makes about 6 cups. Divide into portions and chill.

What's a portion? Up to you. 1, 2, or 3 cups. Is it dessert? Part of a meal? The whole meal?

For nutrition stats, the whole recipe contains 720 calories, 90.5 carbs. Even if you only divide it into two full meals, each is 360 calories and 45 grams carbs, or three units as I'm counting them these days. That's the limit for a full meal, which is how I've divided mine: breakfast and lunch tomorrow. If you go for thirds, each is 240 calories and 30 grams carbs. If sixths... well, you can do the math. It's easy. You want more information like protein or fat, get your own and read the labels.

It is highly seasoned. You might play around with lower levels of spices if that's an issue.

We'll see if I'm still thrilled with it by tomorrow night. There are still two more pumpkin cans to go through.

Rental Car Blues Redux

2011-12-09T18:34:00.005-06:00

Ahhh, finally back in my own car. Gleaming white all over: they cleaned it! Not just the parts they replaced but every darn last inch of it. Even the inside is clean, though I'm having to drive with the windows open in 10 degree temperatures in a still-cold car just to get the fumes out from whatever they polished the dash with.

Note to the interested: ABRA does good work.

And my bill: $0.00. Perfect!

I forgot to mention the thing that really annoyed me about the HHR. It's not about the model but this specific car. It pulls to the left. You don't dare take your hand off the wheel for a second, unless you have some screwey idea about getting up close and personal with oncoming lanes of traffic. I can't just hold the wheel, I have to spend all day pulling on the wheel. My arm aches. While driving I feel like I've gotten a muscle pull from the back of my wrist to halfway up from the elbow. Every moment behind the wheel is annoying.

I was going to leave Enterprise a note about it, but after the run-in with the guy at the gas station, filling up so the guage registered at least as high as it did when it was rented out to me, it slipped my mind.

This car takes E85. There is one (!) station in Forest Lake that has one (!) double-sided pump for E85. When I pulled in tonight, one side of the pump was blocked by the tanker filling the reservoirs with new gas. The other side was blocked by two cars filling up (regular gas, mind you) and one waiting.

One might note that during the whole incident there were unused pumps at the other two islands at this station. Nobody had to wait in this row, unless they were waiting for E85. And none of the others were. Technically this takes standard gas as well, but I'm paying for gas somebody else will be using, and I'm not about to pay the extra $.50/gal of standard. Plus, I checked the last couple days, and the car claims to get just 1 mpg less than with standard gas. Definitely not worth the price.

A side note here, I'd let the gas get low during the day, unwilling to have more than the required 1/4 tank in it at drop off. After dropping paperwork off at HQ, I pushed the buttons on the trip up to the gas station to see how much further it said I could still drive on the remains of this tank: 78 miles. No sweat. After a couple miles, it changed to 79. Then 80, 81, and by the time I had driven about 15 miles, it claimed I could still go 85 miles on this tank. Pretty slick, eh? Wonder if I could repeat that?

I judged the space between the tanker and the pumps to be a tad small for the HHR, especially allowing for my need to open my door (big enough that it'd already clipped my leg a good one once) and my need to stand on the other side of the car where some idiot placed the gas cap, another annoying feature of this beast. I circled the pumps, and the line for "my" island just got longer. I swung around the outside of the tanker, and killed off a minute talking to the driver. He informed me he'd just finished, expressed surprise that there was only the one E85 pump, and offered to move his rig in a minute. I continued around to get into position, and suddenly the other side of the pump had cleared. I just needed to back in from where I was, which I proceeded to do.

Of course, that required a bit of back-and-forth, tight quarters being exacerbated by both my turning radius and the sudden presence of another SUV blocking me in so I had even shorter runs to make in my turn.

Got the picture? Are you ready for it? This new driver got impatient with me after complicating my task, and decided to just whip around me and pull up blocking the E85 pump so he could use another one to get regular gas.

ARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!

I honked at him, something I ordinarily consider the height of rudeness, unless done for safety reasons. Then I backed up - suddenly with more room - and pulled up to the pump on the side that the tanker was no longer blocking.

I could not resist. I rolled my passenger window down and yelled out to him,"You know I was backing up for that pump you just blocked."

He just looked all innocent and puzzled, and responded, "No I didn't. I just thought you were parking across the end of the pumps."

"I'M NOT THAT STUPID!"

I'm not sure why I bothered, except to vent. Some people just aren't trainable.

Creepy?

2011-12-09T06:24:00.001-06:00

Last night I was in Target ordering our X-mas cards for the year. First year in more than a decade I haven't used one of my own pictures in it, but you'll see why when yours arrives. (It broke the printing machine, but that's another story.)

Since I had to wait, but was told it'd be about an hour, I did some shopping. That didn't take the full hour, so I wheeled the stuff out to the car with plans to come back and wait on a chair in the area. Hitting the cold air, I noticed a black SUV parked in the driving aisle with the engine running. A skinny fellow hopped and quickly approached me, offering to help me with my cart "because it's cold out."

I smilingly declined, letting him know my car was right here, in the handicap area. He split, and using my manners training drilled into me since birth, I thanked him for the offer. Loading up the car, I turned the cart around and headed back in with it. I can, after all, lean on it a bit to make those short distances more comfortable walking.

But I got to thinking. Nobody, but nobody, has ever offered to help me with my cart and getting it to my car, unless it was a store employee seeing me in my electric shopping cart at the cash register. There were a mere three bags in it. I wasn't overloaded, merely, perhaps, a bit vulnerable looking. I do limp on both legs these days. Perhaps my car was somewhere down the row where the lights don't reach well. How would he know? Was he really a Good Samaritan feeling the spirit of the season?

Or do I read too many murder mysteries?

I'll never know. I do however remain thankful for yet another reason that I can park right up next to the store where the lights are bright and lots of people pass. When I emerged later with only a partial card order (I said it broke their printer), the vehicle was no longer in sight.

The Rental Car Blues

2011-12-08T20:00:00.004-06:00

I waited and waited for Idiot's insurance company to get back to me about fixing my car. I called my "assigned" adjuster and left messages. They went unanswered. Finally, I went back to the main number and asked for somebody else, somebody who was actually there and could/would talk to me. That got through.

After giving her the claim number, and giving her half a minute to look it up, she let me know that their company took full responsibility for the accident and how did I want to get my car fixed? All this nothing, and suddenly let's go ahead lickety split?

So, what were my options? I mean, the less work I had to do to accomplish anything, the better. There's enough to do already. We settled on my dropping the car off at ABRA in Forest Lake, who works directly with them, and they'd have Enterprise car rental pick me up from there and give me a car for the duration. Only, please start the repairs on a Monday so they didn't have to pay for the weekend.

That seemed reasonable. The process started this Monday. I am now driving a Chevy HHR, dark red. I hate it!

Let's start with it being ugly. It's Chevy's version of the P T Cruiser, only lumpier. It chugs gas, not too bad for its class but much worse mileage than I'm used to, and the gas is all on my dime. "Free" rental doesn't pay for the $15+/day they charge me for their insurance coverage. My insurance cover's whatever I'm driving but that doesn't count to the rental people. The visor doesn't block the sun. It's got a bigger turning radius than works well with all the funny places I drive into, and parallel parking is again an interesting endeavor. I no longer know where "my" corners are. (I start in a new vehicle by sending imaginary feelers out into the full body of the car until it feels like it's a part of me. Essentially for 10-12 hours a day, it is.)

Internally, everything is in the wrong place for my habits, or moves the wrong way, so I have to think about what I'm doing rather than where I'm driving. I never have figured out why sometimes the dashboard tells me the time, the radio station I'm tuned to, the odometer reading, and if I ask it to, all kinds of other things including individual tire pressure, and other times all those displays are black and stay black. I did figure out how to move the seat back away from the front so I'm not biting my kneecaps while I drive, but I have to keep resetting it every couple days. The lights and radio stay on well past shutting it off or even removing the key, and I just can't get used to that. Glad it's not actually my battery that's being asked to do that.

I can't figure out how the cruise control works. I've used cruise control on older American cars before, but nothing I try tells it to kick in on this thing. Lucky I am used to not having it. Of course I need to pay more attention to my speeds because it doesn't "feel" like I'm going the speed I am.

And of course it's not stickered "Dynamex" so I can park in loading zones. If I can find a meter or a handicap space I'm fine, but still nobody knows who I am by looking at the monster I rode in on. And speaking of handicap parking, my hanger card cracked in three places and the hanger part separated completely from the rest the first time I used it in this car so it doesn't actually hang any more. Sigh! Another errand to take time off work for. I'm not saying the brittleness of the card is the car's fault, but the rearview mirror is weirdly shaped and it's a pain to get the hanger card on or off, even without cracking apart.

So when do I get my car back?

Yesterday the guy fixing it called me, claiming he left me voicemail the previous day and was disappointed I hadn't called back. (I checked after the call: no message.) The upshot was after they pulled the metal parts off they found some plastic ones that needed replacing, and then there's my tricked-up paint job. I was in just the frame of mind when I dropped the car off to point out my silver-red-silver racing stripe on my white car. This comes from preserving as much of the old paint job as I could get away with when I had the car painted white for work. If they'd just put silver striping on a white replacement part, it'd look funny right next to the "original". It'd look repaired. So they're doing what they can to make it match the rest of the car. They're even making the underside parts red again!

He figured it'd be ready Friday morning and cost about $2600. I don't need to know the cost. It's not mine. Just... interesting.

But I called this afternoon to see if they could pin down the ETA for pick up any better for me. I was informed it'd just finished getting painted, like that told me anything about when it would be ready. So I asked for a translation of that into terms of time. There are plans to rearrange. I can now authorotatively state that the definition of "Friday morning" means sometime after 2PM.

Of course it does. How did I not know that?

What's that going to translate into tomorrow?

Timing

2011-12-03T21:50:00.003-06:00

They say timing is everything. In this case, "they" are right.

It was going to be a late night at work. This meant that when I headed north from my New Richmond drop on my way to Spooner, it was already dark. The snow that began to fall just as I walked into the Spooner drop meant it would wind up being over another two hours until I made it home, making for a 15-hour day with an 8-hour turnaround until I needed to be out the door for an early pick the next morning. Not that I was complaining. I enjoy driving itself, and long runs make for bigger paychecks.

It was what struck me on the way that made the night memorable.

I was taking the road through Star Prairie north to hook up to Hwy. 8 when it got interesting. It turned into a rollercoaster. Up and down in short steep hills, lots of turns, very little visibility, and I was attracting a bit of a following. My speed was decreasing the longer I was on this road. I just couldn't see past the top of the next hill. I knew there wasn't another car coming by the lack of a glow, but I couldn't tell if there might be deer moving or a curve just past the crest. Suddenly 30 mph seemed risky. As soon as a straight stretch opened up, I got passed, which was fine. I decided to pick up a bit and follow the car now ahead of me. It worked for a bit, but he really was more determined to move ahead than I was, and his taillights soon left my view.

Just about as this whole rollercoaster was ending, there was an interesting sign along the road. It warned of steep hills and limited visibility.

Gee, ya think? You couldn't put up this sign ten miles back? I mean, if we haven't figured it out by now....

Tonsil Exam - From the Bottom

2011-11-28T20:43:00.000-06:00

Before:

Ever had a colonoscopy? This will be my first, unless you count the sigmoidoscopy I had when I was 40 when they were ruling out other causes and homing in on a diagnosis of gall stones. I was awake for that one. I got the ask my doc if he'd found my tonsils yet.

Hah! The joke's on him: I haven't had tonsils since I was 5.

This time should be better. They tell me I get to sleep through it.

I've been putting this particular procedure off for years. It was a combination of not having insurance, or having $3,000 deductible insurance, or not having insurance again, and not having another driver to bring me back home. Now that I have good insurance and Steve has moved in, I'm out of excuses. Today's the day.

Of course, this doesn't just involve one day. There's a whole lot of fuss and bother beforehand.

First there's the shopping. You need just the right items to give yourself diarrhea, and it's got to be good enough to leave behind a colon nobody would be embarrassed to have on camera. There's Dulcolax, a stool softener, which supply we threw out after Daddy died since he was the only one in the household who needed it - we thought! Then there's MiraLax, 8.3 ounces of it to be precise. Luckily, the stores carry that as a standard size, unlike the Dulcolax which only comes in boxes of 30 or more. The 10 ounce bottle of magnesiun citrate is also standard. Again, 64 ounces of Gatorade isn't - or in my case, G2 for low carbs. I settled for an 8-pack of 20 ounce bottles, in the blue since you're not allowed anything with red dyes in it for a couple days before the exam. I had the blue when I was recovering from surgery this summer and found it tolerable. I hope after enough time passes after this I will again.

Three days out you need to start monitoring your diet. No high fiber items, and no Olestra. We had Brundy Thanksgiving over here that day, and once you eliminate high carb items and high fiber items, like raw fruits and veggies, there's ... uh, well, uh... turkey?

Two days ahead you stop aspirin and ibuprofin. Since we'd also thrown out the bottle of Tylenol that only my dad used, that was another thing for the shopping list. I fully expect both that and the Dulcolax will sit in the medicine cabinet unused until well after their expiration dates now. It doesn't work as well on my knees as the ibuprofin, but luckily I haven't need to do a lot of walking like I did getting ready for company by cleaning up the house and clearing off the table which had morphed into the all-family dumping station. You are also supposed to start drink lots of sports drink, like 8-10 glasses throughout the day.

Yeah, with what's coming up with that stuff the next day, don't press your luck.

The day before, you switch to clear liquids. Coffee, bouillon, water are on my list. At noon, take two Dulcolax tablets. Nice lunch. I found myself thinking I could just pop into the kitchen and fix myself a... No! Stop thinking that! You can't have any. Whatever yummy thing is left over from Thanksgiving, you can't have it. No turkey, no stuffing, no pumpkin pie (minus crust of course)! Not even a banana sitting on the counter or a piece of string cheese! Stop! Thinking! Food!

So I did the only thing logical in that situation: I started beading. When you are concentrating on a pattern - well, trying, since I had to restring twice for mistakes - you are not obsessing about the food you can't be eating. I'd stopped in at Jeff's (Non Necessities) in Taylors Falls on Black Friday for their 40% off one item sale, and had a bagful of new beads burning a hole in my brain. I even dreamed about stringing one set of them the night after I bought them. So I started with those, reworking the pattern a couple of times ( that was not counted as one of the mistakes!) and wound up with a necklace for me with small round gold tiger eye, larger faceted tiger eye in gold, red and blue, a gold tiger eye leaf pendant, and silver beads necklace. Then I did a jade one, using a large carved barrel bead and a bunch of very small carved round beads, all in tones of brown and black, again with silver bead accents. I was on a roll! I worked out another three I won't describe here, as all of the recipients (X-mas) read this and I won't spoil the surprise. Luckily, I finished the last one just before I could no longer stay at the table.

At 4:00, dump 64 ounces of the G2 into a large pitcher and stir in all the Miralax. Stir some more. And start drinking 8 ounces of it every 15 minutes. All of it. Every drop.

It seems unnecessary for the instructions to warn you to plan to stay near a toilet after that. After about an hour, the stuff started working, coinciding with ending beading. You're still taking the stuff, setting the kitchen timer for the next 15 minutes, and finally just park in the bathroom with book, lap blanket, cup, pitcher, and timer. Oh: and fan on.

I'd expected to find it difficult to drink that much liquid that fast, but it wasn't. However, by the last cup, I was starting to feel less than splendid. It's a good thing my toilet is right next to the tub, because I threw up at least the last cupful almost as soon as it went down, along with whatever else was left from earlier. Luckily, tubs are easy to clean: just knock the hand-held shower down, turn on the water, and hose it all down. All without lifting an inch off the toilet.

So no, I won't be finishing off the unused G2 for quite a while.

Just because you think after about three hours on the throne that there can't possibly be more in your system to clear out doesn't mean there isn't. Eventually I was able to leave the toilet unattended for brief periods of time, enough to watch TV with pauses. By then the book was finished, and I was just not in the mood to start another one.

I managed somehow to get through the night without an accident, but there's still liquid passing, just enough color in there to let me think something is still left to be cleaned out. I've not slept well, and finally decided to get up early and kill time here. But surgery is at 11, and it's just about 7 now. Four hours ahead of surgery you drink that bottle of magnesium citrate. I doubt I'll have time for blogging until tonight. I'll post an "After". Hey, maybe I can then report another smidgeon of weight loss!

Just one question though: after taking this next laxative, how do I then find the time to shower, dress, and get through the drive to the hospital without an embarrassing incident?

After:

Staying awake, that's the issue, long enough to come back and finish this.

The magnesium citrate claimed to have a lemon flavor. I'll give it "acid", but not lemon. And it quickly did its job, producing ample product of brilliant yellow color, but that's not a flavor, or not one I'd want to try. So mark it "Fail" on lemon. We had plans to make a couple stops on the way to the hospital, but after the first change of clothing before even leaving the house, decided it might be prudent to postpone at least one of them. I did hit the post office for stamps, and found out after getting home and sorting through them that our postmaster can't tell the difference between pine and Madonna themes in stamps. Oh well, X-mas is coming and I have friends who'll like to see those on their cards.

It's both amazing and reassuring how many times people asked me to confirm my name, birthdate, and procedure. Occasionally the same person repeated. At least I knew I could expect to get the correct procedure. After all, the view from the start of the procedure is not exactly one that someone can base an identification on. Imagine: "Hmmm, this looks like Heather's rectum."
They haven't started putting vidoecams in public toilets yet, the way they have at ATMs and in convenience stores.

I was offered a chance to use the restroom before changing into hospitals' perennial fashion statement. They kept the scale in there, so I weighed in sans shoes and found myself 5 lbs. under my last weighing. Just how much is real weight loss and how much recovers after the purging ends and eating resumes remains the question. But, hey, I'll take it where I can get it.

It only took two stabs and one nice hematoma for them to get the IV line in the back of my hand, much better than previous tries, say in the last 25 years. And this nurse was thoughtful enough to inject a tiny numbing agent first so I wouldn't feel the needle go stab, withdraw, wiggle wiggle, stab... got it!

I was concerned about my shoulder, since they roll you onto the left side for the procedure, but once I was laying on their bed with an extra pillow, the shoulder never hurt. Not even before the painkillers. Or at least they said they used painkillers. I can testify that they used some kind of tranking agent, although not enough to put me under completely. Dang! I wouldn't have minded missing feeling the procedure. They certainly go through like you can't feel a thing, and I felt the whole herd of wild stallions stampeeding and cartwheeling corners through my gut the whole time. Apparently my grunts and groans of pain were not sufficient to warrant more painkiller, and frankly I just didn't have the energy for screaming. For some reason I was still trying for dignity.

Keeping my eyes closed for most of it seemed to be the way to go, although I did open them long enough to get a clear view of the polyp they found and removed. It looked much prettier on the TV screen than in the little picture they showed me later. It'll take until next week to find out what exactly it was, and even not knowing that, they want me back in for another one of these in five years.

Good luck with that one!

When they finally wheeled me back into my "room", a nook with a curtain, there was finally time for that nap I couldn't quite get before. Or so I thought. They kept waking me up telling me to breathe, "a couple times, Heather, in through the nose, out through the mouth." Well screw that! If the nose is good enough for the "in" part, it's good enough for the "out" too. I cocked an eye at the monitor and noted that my blood oxygen levels were hovering around 85 when they were saying that, with the monitor beeping, so they probably did have a point. But I felt fine, no indication of being low on oxygen. It seems the meds used can slow down your diaphram, "make it lazy" as they put it, and I was warned they'd be telling me to breathe quite often.

Finally a nurse arrived with cranberry juice and two slices of buttered banana bread. (They know I'm diabetic and bring this?) I couldn't have the banana bread until after I started passing gas, so I started right in on it. I qualified. For that matter, I still qualify. Where can all that gas come from? How much can one gut hold when there's nothing in there making more? Well, at least it doesn't stink like "real" gas does.

I also grabbed the book I was reading before the procedure, and was challenged on whether I could even remember what I was reading. Sure, no prob.

Hey, maybe because I didn't get quite enough of the meds in the first place, eh?

I was out of there under my own power just at noon, after being warned it could be much later than that. I felt fine. I might even have been tempted to drive, but Steve was there with his truck and I yielded to everybody else's better judgment. I still felt fine all the way home, including the auto parts store for Steve's truck's tune up, performed by Richard after we got home. Since then, however, I've had two very nice long naps, and trust I can get another one tonight when there's nothing on the agenda tomorrow to worry about other than work.

Oh, and calling up that other insurance company and bitching to them ABOUT NOT HEARING FROM THEIR ADJUSTER YET TO ARRANGE TO GET MY CAR FIXED! Maybe I'll just sic Farmer's on them, eh?

Gratitude

2011-11-26T07:58:00.004-06:00

There are many reasons to be grateful this Thanksgiving season. Here is one of them:

Letter to the Editor:

I would like to express the gratitude of our whole family for the excellent care my father, John D. Maxson, received from the County Public Health staff, headed by Randy Green, with Patty Mattson and Chi-Chi Shipley, his two home health aids, during the last two years plus of his life.

Randy made sure she was always accessible for crises, or to help me sort out what was and wasn't a crisis, as well as the appropriate care response each time. She assisted in sorting through the bureaucracy of dealing with Medicare, gave information on medications and their negative side-effects, shared practical ideas for his care, helped us with scheduling his home health aids to best meet his changing needs, assisted us through his dying process. One relative started referring to her as "the Sainted Randy."

He looked forward to his visits from Patty and Chi-Chi, appreciated their willingness to work, their unfailing kindness towards him, their helpfulness and matter-of-factness which never allowed him to become embarrassed about the many ways his body and mind were failing him. When they were here, he was always the center of their world.

Before moving in with my family, he'd had private home health care, and it was our dissatisfaction with that which prompted us to switch to the County. We were so satisfied that when the time came to switch him to home hospice care, we decided to stay with the team we knew instead. I would like to strongly commend the county for keeping such an excellent team in place, and unhesitatingly recommend them to anyone else.

Gaining A Second Perspective

2011-11-21T20:45:00.002-06:00

The last couple weeks I've had a chance to compare perspectives with my brother. It's been enriching.

While preparing to do our separate eulogies of our father, we discussed a childhood memory from when we lived on Pleasant Ridge Resort. One bright autumn day a large flock of monarch butterflies passed across our lake. We all stood and watched it for the five minutes or so that it took. My remembered viewpoint is from up on the hill, the level the cabins are at. It offered a clear view, and I was awestruck at even such a young age of this once-ever experience. But I missed something. Steve's viewpoint was from down on the dock, much closer to the migration. He remembers also seeing almost as many large dragonflies flying alongside the monarchs.

When giving our eulogies, I discussed the major events of his life, adding in the stories I'd heard him tell about his childhood or WWII. Steve talked about hunting and fishing. Most of the stories I'd never heard, and somehow missed knowing that my dad was a very unsuccessful deer hunter over a long period of years. It didn't stop him from having a great time, however.

The story I do recall was what became known as "The Swamp Buck". In the early 50's, Daddy shot a huge buck out in a swamp. It was tremendous trouble dragging it back to camp, even field dressed. During the (professional) butchering, the butcher "butchered" the process: he cut through the bones, rather than severing the joints. This tough old deer's marrow so strongly flavored the already pretty gamy meat that pretty soon nobody wanted to eat it. When even our golden retriever, Goldie, turned up her nose at the offering, the rest of it was tossed out.

When Idiots Attack

2011-11-20T18:59:00.006-06:00

They're out there, all right. And even when you're expecting it and have your guard up, they can wage a successful attack. I have reason to know.

It was the first real snowfall of the season for the metro on Saturday. I had to drive down for my Aunt's funeral - kind of a big double-funeral-duty weekend. In the cities it started as freezing rain, then got covered over by wet slick snow. When I'd left home there were a few flakes, but it hit for real by the time I got to Hugo/Centerville.

My speed dropped to 65, then 60, and by the time I hit my first exit for a bank deposit at County Rd. E, 45mph was pushing it on the freeway. It got worse as I hit Stillwater and headed south, and today's weather summary showed a small band of heavy snowfall right in my idiot's target - or should I say targeting? - area. I was southbound on Stagecoach, less than a mile from my destination, and maintaining 30 as a safe top speed. It was slick. Just as I came up to 19th street, I saw a green SUV coming down the hill to the stop sign, showing no indication of stopping whatsoever.

Now I've learned that in these conditions when one is driving downhill on icy roads, one starts slowing and gently testing one's brakes at the top of the hill. If you still can't stop at the sign at the bottom of the hill after that, well, there's not much hope for anybody and you should have reconsidered your errand before starting.

I was watching out for everybody around me, which at that time was nobody. Good thing. When she popped into view, I was fairly close to the road she was coming down on and knew there was almost no chance of making a safe stop. If she couldn't stop before entering my roadway, we were going to get really well acquainted. Still, I braked gently, as safely as possible without throwing my own car into a spin and possibly heading down the hill on the other side of the road or hitting her with a rotating car. I steered gently out into the oncoming lane, thankfully empty.

There comes a time when you know there's nothing left to do but just get ready for impact. It's the kind of moment that inhabits my real nightmares. Brakes don't work. Inertia triumphs over traction. You watch the two vehicles getting closer, feel the bump, hear the crash. Eventually you stop.

My front passenger side hit her driver side just behind her door. She moved her car onto the shoulder, but not far enough forward that there was room for me to get off the traffic lane as well. I had to ask her to move forward more, but that was after she'd gotten out to come back to me and explain how it was the road's fault and not hers. Funny, but in the 40 minutes we sat there afterwards, several other cars came down that hill and not one had trouble stopping.

Not one.

One kindly lady stopped and asked if I needed a witness. She clearly saw the other woman not stop and plowing right into me from her vantage point in the oncoming lane, well enough back so as to avoid the accident. The other driver shooed her off, stating that that was what she intended to tell the police and we didn't need a witness. I got a slip of paper with a name and phone number from the witness anyway.

I do admit to losing my temper with the other driver - can we just call her "idiot" from now on for brevity? - and yelling at her as she first approached my car, "Can't you tell you need to slow down in these conditions?" Then she was busy hand-wringing and asking everybody -that's me and the witness - what she needed to do now? I just whipped out my cell and dialed 911. It was much more productive than a few other ideas that flitted across my mind. She did apologize to me after a bit, several times, but it didn't do much to soften my attitude.

In a lucky bit of timing, my brother happened to pass us on his way to the same funeral and stopped to see what was going on. He keeps his cell off except when he needs to use it, so I was wondering how I was going to let anybody know I might be missing the funeral. I gave him a quick summary and asked him to relay word to the others when he got there. As it turned out, I had planned on giving myself a lot of time due to the snow, and wound up missing only 22 minutes of the service. Since it was all Bible readings and nothing much about Nina except how she agreed with everything that was being read, I consider it the only good thing to result from the impact.

The Idiot's car had a tiny ding behind the front driver's door. It was Honda CRV vs. Hyundai Accent, after all. My car - visual inspection only so far - has a banged up front passenger quarter panel (rubs the tire on bumps and left turns), crunched front bumper, and headlight cover glass cracked but intact in several places. The light still worked, though I found out later that the right headlight points way down on the ground. I might need a front end alignment as well.

I left a voicemail message with my insurance company, and will likely hear from them early tomorrow. Meanwhile I'm wondering how much this idiot will cost me, starting with the deductible and adding days of lost work while repairs are done. That's what has really put a damper on the weekend. Both funerals are over, duties discharged, Steve moved in and working on settling and unpacking. I should be relaxing right now. Instead I'm coping with the dread of what tomorrow brings.

As a final note on idiocy, as I pulled away after everything was done, I made sure to clear the rapidly accumulating snow off my windows, lights and mirrors. I noticed as I passed her that she had about a 2" clear spot in her side mirror, and she was bending and trying to peer into it to see any oncoming traffic as she pulled out behind. She never bothered to roll down her window to clear it off.

Prologue / Epilogue

2011-11-14T06:41:00.002-06:00

Just after Mom died, I had grandiose ideas about writing a book on dealing with the aftermath of a family death. I thought I might guide others through it, help prepare for Daddy's (surely-soon-to-come) death, and tell about their lives so they wouldn't be forgotten. While I soon became way too busy caring for my dad, who lived 34 months longer, and the grandiosity drained off, I did write and preserve the following.

Prologue

The girl started, quickly coming to full alertness. Something, somewhere deep in the vessel within which she dwelt, had CHANGED.

A quick inspection confirmed her suspicions. The bindings holding the great circuit breaker up, already worn and weakened by long age, had broken. It had started slowly, inexorably, to close.

It was too soon. There was still usefulness left to this vessel, still a strong purpose to fulfill. But no matter, she knew, for once started, there was no stopping it. The only thing left was finishing her last duty, emptying its last compartments, a job she’d been working on for years now. Once completed, she would leave, return to her beginnings, there to wait for her companion vessel to finish as well.

She marked the movement of the circuit breaker, judging its speed. Likely she had just over a day to finish everything.

It was time to hurry.

- Click -

Epilogue

The boy stirred, feeling his vessel shudder slightly, veer off course again. It had been happening more often lately, since he’d felt his companion vanish. The two had made a great team, each supporting the other, assisting each other around obstacles, keeping each other on course. He unfolded himself from the corner where he had paused a moment to rest, arms hugging his knees for warmth, something unpredictable these days. His vessel’s navigation systems were damaged, and propulsion was faltering. Now his vessel, proceeding on its own, was starting to founder.

- Click -

Other vessels approached, offering guidance for a time, trying to offer companionship. It just wasn’t the same.

- Click -

He moved into the next compartment, emptied it out, flipped off the switch. He’d already been doing this for years. He was very efficient.

- Click -

He had become busier than usual since the companion left, wandering the long and tangled corridors, emptying out the compartments, storing the contents, flicking the switches, moving on.

-Click -

More compartments were getting shut off, some still flickering off and on a bit first, but the shutoffs were growing in frequency. He was keeping very busy.

- Click -

He wasn’t sure how long his vessel would continue, alone. The companion had been there so many years, he almost couldn’t remember the time before she was there.

- Click -

But of course the memories were there. He was the collector and keeper of the memories. That was his primary job these days.

- Click -

- Click -

He stopped occasionally to look at the bindings holding his vessel’s great circuit breaker in the up position. The sudden vanishing of the companion had upset the equilibrium of his vessel, and that had caused some of the bindings to snap, others to grow ragged. Soon they would fail and it too would start its descent. There was no telling if it would be fast or slow, only that it would be soon, and his job was daily bigger. There was much preparation before that time.

- Click -

- Click -

He was getting better, accomplishing more, traveling further distances each day. He understood the distress of the vessel, but that couldn’t be helped. If he managed to empty enough compartments before the great circuit breaker fell, the distress would ease as the vessel would slowly quit attempting to navigate and begin to simply drift.

- Click -

- Click -

He nearly stumbled with the vessel’s next shudder. It hadn’t quit yet. That was good. He still had so many compartments to empty, so many bits and pieces to store. The wait would soon be over. Then it would be his time to leave his vessel, just before it too vanished. It would be time to rejoin HER.

- Click -

- Click -

- Click -

He hurried.

-Click -

- Click -

- Click -

- Click -

The Afterwards

2011-11-11T05:27:00.006-06:00

Since I wasn't sleeping well Thursday morning, when I saw the clock read just after midnight, I decided to get up and check on Daddy. I was so sure he was likely to die during the night that I wanted to know whether it was going to be Wednesday or Thursday. He was still breathing. He'd reached his 97 1/2 birthday.

Not that he was going to appreciate it, like last year when we celebrated the 96 1/2 birthday with steak and cupcakes.

I woke for good just before 6:00, my usual for a work day. He lay awfully still, but I wasn't going to fully turn on the lights and verify my suspicions for a few minutes. I had a routine to go through, and I've learned from the last couple years that if I don't go through it a,b,c,d I'm likely to forget b. Never a, since that's the relief stop at the bathroom, but b might get skipped, and then where would I be? Once my pills were taken, the dogs let out, let in again and treated with their Milkbones, coffee made, apples prepared and put in the fridge to cool and all those other things done that I usually do before tending him, I was ready to deal with whatever I'd find.

Elvis, as they say, had left the building. Daddy was no longer breathing, cold, and his arm was stiff when I tried to lift it. OK: time to implement Special List A. This is my mental list of procedures to go through once he was gone. First, turn off the oxygen concentrator. Save on the electric bill. Appreciate the first silence in the house in over a year, since he's been on it 24/7. Second, call "My" Steve, letting my own personal support network be the first to know. Third, call the head of his care team, aka the sainted Randy. Since it was only 6:20, I left a message on her cell phone, giving her the details and asking whom do I notify to make it official. (I also thanked her and the team for their wonderful service.)

Then I turned on the morning news to catch the weather report while I had coffee and waited. Strangely, I remember almost nothing of what I saw, most especially what the forecast was. The snow I saw later was a complete surprise. The bits and pieces that later filtered through were at best confusing. Something about rioting at Penn State, over a coach firing and not the molestation scandal that preceded it - can that possibly be right? And Perry tripping over himself at yet another GOP primary debate. He wants to eliminate Commerce, Education, and... and... oh yeah, Energy. Just perfect! Kill the agency than can protect consumers so those poor corporations can do whatever they want to whomever they want, stop educating us so we won't be informed citizens and more likely to notice what they're getting away with, and... and... oh yeah, stop finding ways to give us clean energy and put the brakes on global warming so there are still things like, say, a viable food supply. Stop what can help deal with the most important long range problem on the planet. Sounds just like another Texas oilman.

Randy called back promptly: call the sheriff on the non-emergency line and inform them there had been a death in the home during the night. When I did, the dispatcher and I discussed whether the First Responders needed to be sent out as procedure dictated. I told her that he'd been dead for hours (doesn't matter) and that the last time they had been out they'd gotten a copy of his DNR orders. It sounded like she found a record of them, once she verified his middle name. She wound up, I found out minutes later, sending a single deputy, followed shortly by the coroner.

While I'd waited for someone to arrive, I woke Richard, informed him that the house would soon be filling with people and why, and that I needed him so I could go take my shower. (I was scheduled for my allergy shots that morning, and wasn't going to miss them. I had, however, called work and informed them I'd not be in.) Rich has his morning routine also, which includes dressing warmly enough to step outside onto the screen porch for him morning cigarette. Just after he stepped out, the deputy arrived, and verified the situation. While waiting for (a) Richard, and (b) the coroner, I chatted with him about some of my dad's WWII history, and about the mounted Walleye on the wall (Steve's - fiance, not brother). I hadn't thought he was quite that young, but every so often he'd react to what I was saying with "Awesome!"

By the time I was showered and dressed, the coroner had arrived, and Rich had moved my car out of the driveway so I wouldn't be blocked in. I answered a few basic questions, like the last time I knew he was alive, and the long list of what was wrong with his health. I referred him to Randy if he had any other questions about his health or care. I was informed that he'd be sending the funeral home a death certificate and instructions to pick up the body, and he was given their information. He stated he'd be taking away Daddy's medications, which relieved me of the job of finding a safe and proper disposal for them. I headed out the house as he was starting his examination of the body.

I still haven't remembered to ask Richard what he determined.

While on the road, I called my brother. I'd been keeping in close touch with him these last few days, and he figured why I was calling that early before he answered the phone. I told him I'd keep him posted as the day went by, and during one of several phone calls that day we temporarily settled on next weekend for the funeral. My Aunt Nina's in that Saturday, and I thought we could catch some of that side of the family in town the same weekend, as well as let Steve's family come down on just one trip. Steve agreed to make that call, since we knew the family would gather for her burial this weekend out near Wilmar. Burial first, then service. Interesting choice, but it depends on the family situation and who's out of town/the country and when.

I also called Steph, and she offered to inform Jordan, my granddaughter, her niece, and for them to be her transportation for the funeral. Paul got voicemail on his cell, since you can't reach him at work. His cell is off and in his coat, but he's reliable about checking it once he leaves work. I wasn't sure whether, leaving earlier than I do, he'd just done everything quietly and in the dark and just hadn't noticed that his grandfather wasn't just sleeping, or he had noticed and decided to let me sleep. (It was the former.)

Then, finally, minutes to stop doing and just start feeling. When I had thought about it, I figured that I'd feel an immense relief that Daddy was finally gone, all that extra work and scheduling and arranging finally done with, getting my space back for my stuff and room for Steve's as he moves in. None of that had happened yet. What's there instead is the tremendous sadness that he's gone, that his final weeks were so difficult. Somehow, with all the long dying process, I hadn't expected that much sadness.

Arriving back in town from my shots, I saw the hearse turning the corner of our street heading toward me. Rolling down my window, I flagged them, confirmed that they had the body, and they'd left paperwork and a phone number to arrange my coming in to deal with the details.

Details, details, details. First I called the funeral home and got a 1:30 appointment. I confirmed cremation, gave them his social security number, DOB, Mom's name so they could get his information from her file, etc.

Then tackle the stack of paperwork on the table. I knew the funeral parlor would notify Social Security, and they in turn would notify Medicare. He also had Blue Cross ( "Medigap"), so I dug out a phone number and called them to cancel his insurance. No, I don't have his account number. I got forwarded quickly to a person.

Apria furnished his oxygen equipment, so they were called. They'd be out Monday, likely in the afternoon, since we're so far away. We varified the list of what would be returned: concentrator, 2 portable tanks with a carry bag and their filler, large tank on a stand. I took a few minutes and picked up all the used tubing around the house, coiled it up into small rolls, and put it in the trash. It's not reusable. Then Anodyne, who supplied the wheelchair, a cushion for it that we never opened, and his hospital bed. It takes Medicare 13 months to pay enough rental on that for it to be paid for and become property of the user. He'd only had them 12 and 11 months, so they'd be picked up Monday around 10:00. Something else we didn't have to worry about getting rid of.

He had a pension of $18.39 a month from a job he held before WWII. It was supposed to be wonderful, back in the day when it was earned. Now it was just a blip in his financial picture. But they had to be contacted. Our problem was years ago when he changed bank accounts that nobody had any information on who it came from or how to contact them. Not even the bank could trace back to its source for us. It eventually got straightened out, and I now recognized the letterhead when the annual mailing arrived and kept it for future need. They were the first, and so far only, contact that informed me they'd need a death certificate, although it could be faxed or scanned and emailed to them.

I still had time to kill, and Rich was back sleeping, since I'd awakened him so early. There were things to clear out of the bathroom. The remaining single use catheters could go back to the store which provided them: I'd checked on one of my visits. There was a full box and a half, and while that box was opened, the contents were individually sealed. Add it to the list of errands while I was down in the cities for funeral arrangements. Some stuff went in the trash, some in the bathroom linen closet, some in the stack to donate to Randy's team. They had brought bunches of stuff over for him, and we could sent the remainder back as well as other things that other clients on tight budgets could use. His raised toilet seat could finally!!! be gotten rid of instead of kicking around the bathroom as we either put it on the toilet for his use or took it off for ours. The plastic parts were trash and the aluminum recyclable. His bed was stripped and those and other linens stacked for laundering, folding and storing. I'd need more storage containers, something to put on the shopping list - just not this day. His clothing and other personal items needed to get sorted and donated too, again just not today.

One errand definitely for today was his walker. I cut the strings holding his bag on it, emptied that out, tossed most of the contents. The walker got folded and put in the back of the car alongside the catheter boxes. Mom had gotten one on "six month loan" from Goodwill years ago. It was way past time to return it. Since I was the one who'd picked it up originally as she by then had difficulty driving to places she didn't know, I knew all the details.

I also grabbed a bag of nuts to take on the trip, along with my ice water jug. I'd need to eat and didn't feel like fixing anything or trying to maintain my diabetic diet at fast food joints on this day. These had been prepackaged weeks ago for brown bagging during a phase when I wanted something different than cottage cheese and apples. Apples, apples, apples! Easy to get sick of them when there's an abundance of "free" fruit. I also got Mom's urn down, and took their 60th anniversary picture from its frame so there'd be a picture to go with the obituary.

Oh yeah, add "his" checkbook to the stack. There would be bills to pay. Since I've been managing his finances since Mom died, and my name is on the account, no problems with needing to close it out or being unable to write checks. First, however, I sat and balanced it (roughly) through current checks, adding in estimates of outstanding bills, so I would know whether there would be enough in it to pay for the funeral. The good news was there should be, as long as this one cost something similar to Mom's. And a couple grand plus besides.

Finally time to wake Rich, bring him up to speed, and head out.

I was, of course, on the cell phone most of the time while driving. There were calls to make, people to update, incoming calls. (By Friday evening I got suspicious when my new cell battery ran out, and checked my usage. Oops, ran over my 1500 minutes for the month with a week left to go. Haven't done that for ages, not since... well, Mom's death, actually.)

The funeral parlor visit took over an hour and a half. There were calls to some central location out of state (I was told where, spaced it) to arrange his burial at Fort Snelling. In the process I learned that they are not open weekends, but would be open this Saturday since Friday is Veterans Day when they close, and they are legally prohibited from being closed three days in a row. You can't keep some bodies out of the ground that long. They also close at 2:30 each day, and with burials being strictly limited to 15 minutes each, you have to schedule by 2:15, or 2:00 if you want full military honors. We did. We would be adding Mom's urn at the same time, so they needed information on her as well, including her death certificate.

They found us a time slot of 12:45 on Friday the 18th. If we started the service at 10:00 that morning, asked the minister to keep it short, held the luncheon immediately after, say 11:00, and were lined up in our flagged vehicles promptly at noon, we should make the drive in 45 minutes and be in aisle 5 right on the dot. Late? Tough. It's November, so dress warm.

I had to sign papers affirming that he had implants, such as a pacemaker. It seems they might explode during cremation. Not a good thing. There were also clauses I needed to initial acknowledging that his body would be irreparably damaged during the process, that they couldn't guarantee every single speck of his ashes got included, and we'd likely get some specks from others, etc.. Duh!

The obituary had to be written, placed in three papers, and paid for that day. They took a check and gave the papers the routing number. There was a later call to my voicemail giving me the final price of each. At the end, I wrote a check for the final costs of the funeral, minus luncheon. The checkbook will have to come back next Friday.

There were the funeral folders to select, both picture and verse. The picture I chose was of a deer standing in the green woods. He loved hunting. The verse you'll have to read for yourself, if you attend. It talks about finding him now in the trees, the wind, the rain, but not in the old body. It says it much better than that, of course. There were a whole lot of schmaltzy or overwhelmingly religious choices, but I went for this one. Since he spent so much time in the outdoors, it seemed to fit.

There was also music, flowers (same bouquets as for Mom, only $8 more now), food (chicken stroganoff and two salads, brownies and cookies, coffee and punch). I need to bring one piece of music on CD, and we are encouraged to bring pictures. An easel will be provided. Irritatingly, there were repeated spelling corrections that needed to be made to his name. Over the phone she'd taken down "Dufty", kept missing the f for an s. That wasn't the mistake. The bar on the "t" was so short after finally putting the "f" on there that the "t" kept being read as an "l". Dufly. Nope, doesn't fly.

When I finally left well after 3:00, it was time to drive! First stop was Goodwill, since they closed earliest, at 4:00. That was in the Midway area, dodging the Central Corridor Light Rail construction on University that closed off the connection to Fairview. Work took me there last week, so I knew how to go. Made it with 4 minutes to spare. Then up to Fridley to the medical supply place near Unity Hospital. Made that. Finally a personal errand: I'd located a JoAnn store in Maple Grove the other day, after thinking they'd closed for good. I wanted to hit them for wedding trims, and wound up with headpiece fripperies, notably the feathers I had been looking for.

On the way home I hit a KFC for hot wings. One near work has a Thursday special on them, and 10 wings fit in to my carb limits. By the time I arrived home, I decided top put off the duty of calling relatives for another day. After all, we had a week to the funeral, and three days until the obit came out. I could veg out in front of the TV and get ready to go to work the next day. I must have been more tired than I realized, since I fell asleep in front of the TV by 9:30.

I made up for it by waking an hour early and starting this post. Even then I was on the road 45 minutes earlier than I have been since Daddy moved in. Maybe the relief part is starting after all.

Obituary

2011-11-11T05:15:00.003-06:00

John Dufty Maxson, age 97, WWII vet, died peacefully in his Shafer home on the morning of 11/10/11. He was preceded in death by his wife of 67 years, Gladys Muriel Brogren Maxson. He is survived by his son Stephen John Maxson and wife George-Ann, his daughter Heather Maxson Rosa, five grandchildren and one great granddaughter. Services will be held at Holcomb Henry Boom Purcell, 515 W. Hwy. 96 in Shoreview on Friday, November 18th, at 10:00 AM, visitation at 9:AM, followed by a brief luncheon. His remains will be buried alongside his wife's at 12:45 at Fort Snelling National Cemetary, with full military honors.

This says a bit more than appears in the newspapers, where you pay by how much content you put in. But just like those, it says nothing about who he was.

Not Much Longer

2011-11-09T22:51:00.003-06:00

I sat and held my dad's hand for a while tonight. It was cold as ice, though for the last few days this normally heat-loving guy has fought his blankets away. I pulled them up again while holding his hand, and he didn't fight, me or the blankets. He was pretty unresponsive in all respects. I expect they'll be pushed to arm's limit away again by the time I finish this.

It's hard to get any water into him now. He doesn't get fully alert, and swallowing anything under those conditions is risking choking. There's barely enough lung left to enable him to cough something out. Yesterday was the last day he got any food in. We had him drinking juice for a while to get him some nutrition, more than the two bites of food a day he'd been taking. We had been able to get him awake enough to say he was hungry or thirsty, but if the food or drink wasn't there immediately, he'd be asleep again before it arrived. If it was ready, he'd fall asleep after a couple swallows. With his current low alertness level, anything we offer is just water. Aspirating juice would be worse.

Breathing is the one thing he's still doing well. It's rapid and shallow, but strong and regular. He was good at moving his face away from the nebulizer this morning - even when we hold it for him he still hates it - but I just move it so he's still inhaling the mist regardless. Yesterday he pulled my hand away from his mouth with both of his, and I just plucked the nebulizer away with my free hand and held it in place while he was holding my other hand in his lap. This morning he closed his lips so I held it under his nose.

I'd been noticing how the flesh on his face has sagged, so that there's now a fold of skin over the front of his ears. This morning I was struck by how sunken his eyes have become. I'd heard the phrase, but this is the first time I saw what it meant. The eye is actually in the same place but everything around it but bone has wasted away, leaving a dark sunken ring around the eye. It's slightly cracked open, just enough that you can't say it's fully closed. He doesn't track light or sound with his eyes any more, however, so I suspect it's just lack of muscle tone that it isn't completely closed.

Sunday was his last active day. He kept asking for water every ten minutes or so, or if vocabulary failed him, just call out, "help". His voice was hoarse and raspy, as though he'd been using it for hours, when he'd been mostly quiet for days. By yesterday he was just making sounds, and we'd have to ask and guess what he wanted. Today I haven't heard anything from him at all, even when talking to him. They say hearing is the last thing to go, so I did talk to him for a while. I told him we all loved him, that he'd had a good long life, and when he decided it was time to go and join Mom, it was OK. I remember saying the same thing to Mom minutes before she died, telling her we'd take care of Daddy for her, and it was OK to go. I don't know if either of them heard me, but I felt better for having said it.

Yesterday was unsettling. I had another medication run to a nursing home at the end of my work day. I was feeling pretty nostalgic already, having driven through woody countryside in the dark - hyper-alert for deer, 'tis the season - and smelled somebody's wood and leaf smoke, a particular combination remembered from my childhood. It struck me how seldom we'd had our own bonfires this year with Daddy unable to go out with us and enjoy them, and by extension of that line of thought, how little of anything I'd actually done this year. I hadn't let myself notice or miss them, though I've fought with cabin fever on occasion, but now I was feeling it fully.

Walking into the nursing home, I had a few minutes to wait for the authorized nurse to sign for the meds, and noticed the residents. They were walking with an assistant, or watching TV, or holding a card game. It struck me how different it all looked this time. Most times I'd walk in to one and think to myself how much better Daddy was than any of the people I saw. Last night I realized how much better every single one of them looked than Daddy. For a moment I even had the ridiculous thought that he was to sick to be in a facility like this! It was a complete shock to realize how starkly my perceptions had swapped positions.

It's one thing to tell yourself he's in the process of dying. After all, he's been in "hospice" status for 11 months now. It's different when your gut slaps you with the realization that it's imminent.

First Progress

2011-11-06T11:28:00.008-06:00

The initial beading is done. I'm referring to the forehead band of the headpiece.

The first strand was easy. I did a pattern, after starting and ending with two pinch beads, of three pearls - small, large,small - three pinch beads, three pearls, and on, until the right length was reached. I want it to extend to just past my ears. Both ends were finished off with the thread protector looped on a jump ring that's a closed double spiral. Picture a key ring where you split it and feed the key around the circle until it's no longer between two pieces of the ring. They make jump rings like that. It's safer than the cut ones which bend apart and back with two needlenose pliers, might not close perfectly and some day might gap, and bye-bye strand of whatever you were wearing. When you connect to this kind of jump ring while in the process of threading everything through and before crimping, your connection is stable and safe.

The first strand was the center strand, and meant to run straight through the center of the other two, which were to wind around it. They needed to be longer, so I cut my soft-flex about 12" longer to give plenty of working room. Yes, it meant some was wasted, but it also meant I could start with all strands secured in place around the same jump ring.

I spent about an hour, subtracting extra time for interruptions, duplicating the first strand's bead pattern, then tried winding both strands around the first. There was just no way they didn't squirm out of the pattern and start winding at irregular intervals around whatever. So, five minutes to unbead, meaning now the beads were all mixed up and I had to look for the right next bead rather than just dip into the cup each kind was in.

The only cure for the winding around all over the place was to make loops with "x"s, by stringing both strings at the same time and at intervals putting both pieces of soft flex through the same bead. The same color pattern wouldn't work, so after again starting with two pinch beads, I did four pearls, 5 pinch beads, four pearls, and on. The pearls were small, large, large, small, and the central of the five pinch beads was the one double-strung. I now had loops, and the straight center string could weave back and forward through each loop. I thought I could make the loops extra long and have wide loops, but what I got instead was droopy loops hanging off a straight top string.

Ick!

After removing about 5" of looped beads, the lengths matched once the straight string was woven through. I knew it was too late to think straight about the final finish, so let it sit overnight. This morning I figured out that if I taped each loop with masking tape down on the kitchen table so nothing twisted, I could keep it all straight for the finishing linking through the jump ring. The looped strands ends needed to be on opposites sides of the center strand, with the back end of the ring clear for the elastic to go through. As long as I did it right, and thereafter kept the elastic straight, the bead pattern would also be straight. A bit of a touch here and there in the mirror to even out the loops just before heading down the aisle will be all it then needs.

Of course I still need to add the ruffles and a side centerpiece, but not today. Today I remove more stuff from the bedroom Steve is moving into. The good news is it looks very rich as it is. I'm not adding roses onto the beads. They'd just mess it up. The rest of the beads are in a ziploc awaiting further use.

A Spool of Tulle

2011-11-05T07:55:00.006-05:00

A spool of tulle, freshwater pearls, fabric roses, feathers, glitter, pinch beads....

I've been shopping. Wedding stuff. This is just the stuff for making the headpiece. Add a tiny wicker basket, spray paint, some ribbon, and some more of the above, and it's stuff for the flower girl's basket as well.

Just because it was there and I've been in the mood for wedding shopping, add a garter, a ring-bearer's pillow, napkins, plates, cups and plastic silverware, all in the wedding colors as well. Or close anyway. Items for the table settings will be in white instead of ivory, and red and pink instead of fuschia, colors easier to get for a Valentine's Day wedding than fuschia. At any rate, that much is done. Now I get to get "crafty".

The wicker basket was originally shades of brown and held a Christmas centerpiece. It's now ivory and stinky. So are the tips of my shoes, areas around my fingernails, spots on the backs of my fingers, and large collections of spots on the driveway and in assorted leaves. I was in a hurry for the first paint spraying and didn't go for the rubber gloves although I did remember to remove my glasses first. (Bad experience years ago on another windy day.) The paint remover does a half-assed job. Good thing I started early, eh? Gives the stuff time to wear off.

The basket will get lined with ivory tulle which will extend out over the lip of the basket and down on the right side a bit, held in place with glue, and with stitches which will also hold the fuschia ribbon in place along with fabric roses in fuschia and ivory. The ribbon is 3/8" with two outer bands in satin and a center band in tulle, or a good imitation. There'll be a bow at each handle. If I think it's justified I'll add glitter.

The headpiece steals a lot of ideas from the pictures my friend Joan sent me of her wedding headpiece, which she also made herself. There will be a forehead band of beads in three interwoven strands, in some pattern of freshwater pearls and pinch beads. I'll explain the pinch beads, figuring that since last night was the first I ever heard of them, this may also be your first time. (Hey, I can't always be the last to know everything, right?) They are glass, 4mm in size, smoothly rounded with a cross section like a triangle with a hole in it. The name comes from looking like they were pinched while being made. In color these vary from mostly clear to bits of fuschia, with the surface being irridescent. The latter helps them blend in with the pearls. The coloring is subtle, which is perfect.

I started looking for colored pearls, but nothing was the right tone and they were too big. I toyed with the idea of crystals, but while the colors were OK, the thought of their corners digging into my head all night put me off. After searching on my own unsuccessfully, I finally popped in at Jeff's last night, better known as the Taylor's Falls bead store, Non-Necessities. They've always been good at directing me to what I want, even when I'm not sure what that is. It's a few doors north of the light on 95, should you want to pop in yourself. You can usually find a curbside parking spot in front.

Back to the headpiece, I haven't decided whether to give the front more of a garland look by adding some of those fuschia roses or not. They're only about a half inch across. I'll see later, looking at it both ways. It'll be held in place, relatively parallel to the floor around my head, by elastic, upon which two layers of that same ivory tulle are gathered into ruffles, It's 10" wide tulle, and the layers will be offset just a bit and gathered from the middle so it will look like four ruffles, shortest on top with each layer a tad longer, varying between 4 and 6 inches. The edging will have glitter added, some combination of iridescent clear/white and light and dark fuschia. I have glitter, glue, and glitter glue. I'll experiment on some of the extra (10 yards total) tulle to see what works. I bought it all while I was shopping so I don't have to run out and risk not finding what I want if the first attempt doesn't look right. Where the middle of the tulle is attached to the elastic I'll be adding fuschia roses. Some of the color will show through.

It needs something of a side centerpiece, just one side. Poofy. For that I have feathers, a few larger fabric flowers, and whatever is leftover in beads to work with, possibly strung on wire this time. Not sure what that's going to look like, but we'll figure something out. So far all those centerpiece things are mostly ivory, so maybe the fuschia glitter will make another appearance. Or an appearance from fuschia roses. I bought lots. Whatever is left will get added to the trim on the ivory vest, tying it more into the color scheme.

And I still have to start the silk tunic.

Hmmm, good thing I'm starting now, eh?

A Challenge

2011-11-03T06:01:00.004-05:00

My friend Joan sent me another picture along with a challenge. She'd read my posting on the bats cartoon and wondered if I could paint a word picture of this one as well. I have to say, however, that while this picture may not require a thousand words, the picture is definitely better than them.

The text mimics a MasterCard ad:

This is the new Miss Kentucky.
The picture that will stay with her for the rest of her life:

Make-up and hair style ................... $500
New dress for the show ...................$700
Giant stuffed bear .........................$300

(Insert picture:

It shows our beauty queen on stage, spotlights in the background, holding a giant stuffed bear which is clad only in a purple t-shirt. Her top arm is behind the bear, out of sight, gripping it firmly, one presumes. The other one supports it from beneath, between its legs. The microphone also in her hand is, unfortunately, undeniably phallic as well as cordless. The camera angle is ... strategic. The mike appears to be part of the bear and a convenient handle to grip him with.)

Not knowing how to hold the bear with a microphone in her hand .....
Priceless!

Passing Along the Joke

2011-11-01T06:39:00.002-05:00

I received this as a picture email from my friend Joan. Don't know where she got it, but I have to assume it's being passed around on the internet. I do words better than pictures - takes me less time for one thing - so I'll summarize/paraphrase, with apologies if there are any copyrights being violated out there.

Two elderly, wrinkled bats are handing upside down on a branch, wings folded around their bodies. The first one asks, "Do you know what I hate most about growing old?"

"No, what?"

"Incontinence."

A Moment of Clarity

2011-10-31T21:04:00.004-05:00

They're fewer and farther between these days, those moments of clarity my dad has. His progress has been steadily downhill. He stopped walking, stopped standing, nearly stopped eating. Speech is slurred even when he is trying to communicate, so only an occasional word gets through most of the time.

We cope by changing his routines. His bed now sits in the living room, where the futon used to be. Since it takes two moderately normal people or one strong one to transfer him from bed to chair to bed, this makes it easier. He's out where we can see and hear him. Since he doesn't stand up, we no longer put on his pants, but leave his legs covered in a very soft blanket while in his chair. Mostly he fusses with it, taking it off his legs until they get cold, but not complaining about the cold. We watch for it anyway.

His sitting up muscles are pretty shaky, so there's a whole routine associated with getting him to sit in his bed so we can give him water or transfer him to the chair. First, you have to get him to bend his knees. They're stiff as two-by-fours these days, and bending is accompanied by groans. We try to soothe him and apologize for any pain we're causing. Once bent, the knees and feet are dragged over the side of the bed. More groans, making faces. Then we grab his hand and slowly pull him up to a sit. Or something close to one anyway. Balance is not a current skill, so one arm around the shoulders tilts him erect, and we place his hands on the side railing and the mattress side, where he can grip and hold his position on his good days. Even then he's a bit of a moving target.

There's very poor hand-eye coordination, even allowing for his blindness, so on the days when he recognizes the bottle of water and remembers how to bring it up for a drink, he often misses on the first try. When he does make it, he drools some on his lap, and often chokes on what he swallows. He's mostly being hand-fed now, rather than watching him tilt his plate so most of the food winds up in his lap or chair for the dogs to help clean up, or tilt the spoon/fork so ditto. Breakfast is his best meal. Often he'll finish his bowl of oatmeal with fruit. Lunch and supper can be a few bites or a complete refusal. We don't force it. Sometimes he'll eat a cookie instead. Lately maybe not even that. He might not stay awake long enough to finish it. Or for that matter, not long enough for his daily phone call from Steve.

We've discontinued his vitamins and most of his meds unless they keep him comfortable. The nebulizer is more of a battle than ever, and mostly we hold it. On his good days he keeps pulling it out to look at it, or possibly to make sure we're paying attention to what he's doing. Even if I'm pouring coffee, I can hear the difference in sound from the next room when he takes it out of his mouth. Lately we hold it just outside his open mouth and trust his breathing will suck enough of the medication in to do some good. He's been known to knock our hand aside, whether holding nebulizer, pills, or coffee. He treated himself to a fairly warm lapful the other day.

With all that, this morning was a complete surprise. I'd just gotten him to the sit-up-and-balance phase of his morning routine, when he asked, "What's wrong?"

"What do you mean?"

"I find it hard to wake up, you come and go, Paul comes and goes. Am I dying?"

We've avoided that word in his presence lately. But this time he brought it up. He deserved whatever he could grasp of the truth. I sat next to him on the bed and put my arm around his shoulder. Partly it was to help him balance, partly it's because I've learned that touch can keep him focused for a bit. It worked years ago with kids, a light hand on their hand or arm while you talk to them, so I'm doing it with him too.

"Yes. You've been working on dying for seven-eight months now. At the moment you're just further down that road. You might last a few more days, or several more weeks. But," - answering the question he hasn't asked but I figure he likely would if he could frame it - "we're going to keep you here at home with us for however long you have. You won't be going to a hospital, or to a nursing home. You'll be with family." It seemed to satisfy him.

Or perhaps by then he'd forgotten the question.

Halloween Trick

2011-10-31T20:43:00.005-05:00

The last runs of the day were pharmacy runs, taking meds from pharmacy to patient, either in home or care facility settings. The one I carried marked ASAP went to John Doe (not his real name of course) in an assisted living center. I did my usual by approaching the front desk and asking who I needed to see to sign for meds for John Doe.

Normally I'll be directed down that hall on such a floor to a particular nursing station. Only nurses are allowed to sign for the meds, since many of them are scheduled drugs. I wasn't expecting the reaction I got tonight.

First she gestured a co-worker over and informed him I was delivering meds to John Doe. Both then looked at me. The second co-worker informed me that he had been a patient there, but he was gone. "Gone", it turns out, is the euphemism for "dead." He'd been "gone" for a long time.

I asked him to clarify "long time". I'm thinking he died early in the month, now it's end of month, and somebody just hasn't caught up yet. No so. Not exactly. Long time meant years. John Doe died there years ago.

This so entertained them that they called up to 2nd floor and asked for his old regular nurse. "Hey, we got somebody here with medications for John Doe. They're marked "ASAP". .... OK, I'll send her up." She then started giving me directions to how to get to second floor. I guess the nurse up there wanted to tell me that John Doe had died years ago. I'd gotten the message. I declined the honor of hearing the message yet again from someone who actually knew John Doe. I believed it the first time. I even verified there wasn't a new admit with the same name. Nope.

Well, I still had deliveries to make, and now one of them was going to have to go back to the shipping pharmacy, and they closed at 7:00. I still had drops to make. Not a lot of time. While driving to my next stop, I contacted dispatch, told them the story, and let them contact the pharmacy to try to figure out why a ghost might needs his meds ASAP. (I think it's just a little late.)

Or more likely, why a second John Doe comes up on their computer with the first John Doe's old address. And who's not getting his meds tonight even though they're urgent.

Disqualified

2011-10-31T20:39:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite local radio stations was sponsoring a contest tonight, with a chance to win your admission paid to a workshop just for answering the question about what kind of Halloween candy you were giving out tonight. The workshop? Learning how to use social media like Twitter and Facebook. How to enter? Go to their Facebook site....

Reunion

2011-10-23T11:31:00.002-05:00

Steve has kept Fred here since his knee surgery. Fred gets outside into a fenced yard for exercise and doggie duties without anybody needing to get a leash and walk with him. With the exception of one weekend visit, when I put Fred in the car and drove out to Dassel, they've been apart. That ended Friday afternoon, at least for a bit.

Steve picked up Maria, his daughter, and came up here to spend the night so, among other things, both could attend/work the auction a couple towns down the road. This way they wouldn't have to get up super early Saturday morning and drive 100-plus miles before starting. Steve ran errands Friday on the way. His truck back was loaded with a few items he was moving here, not the least of which was his supply of dog food, since Fred eats about twice what Koda does. It was Steve's turn to supply some chow. Heading home the truck back was loaded with packing materials - bubble wrap, foam, boxes. Moving day has been set now for November 19th.

The dogs were in the back yard when the two arrived. After Steve was sitting in "my" recliner next to the back door, Paul let them in. Koda trotted right in. Fred waddled in until he was even with the middle of the side of the chair, suddenly realized his master and god was present, and jumped straight up over the arm of the recliner straight into Steve's lap! All 53 short-legged pounds of him, like he was a five-pound cat and not a basset!

Of course he didn't land quite like one. Steve claims he's just fine, however. Love heals a lot.

B & O? No!

2011-10-19T20:34:00.000-05:00

B & O: it's not a railroad in a board game.

Well, it is that too, just not in this blog. But there's a back story first.

Last Saturday Paul drove his grandfather to the ER. We thought his catheter was plugged again. He wasn't passing anything, his bladder was backing up, and his discomfort level was approaching extreme pain. Since it was Saturday, we didn't call Randy to come out, but loaded him up in the car. We were hoping for some kind of information that would tell us there was more than just a short-term fix. These had been coming more and more frequently, and this was the third in a week. The usual fix was a back-flush to rid the catheter of whatever was plugging it, then letting it drain. It works fine, just isn't permanent. Not even long term, lately. And it needs skilled medical help. But hey, it was Saturday. Randy has a life too.

While they were gone, I did call her, just to fill her in on what was going on. We brainstormed about more long-term fixes, like increasing his catheter size from 14 to 16, thinking maybe that wouldn't plug so easily. She was willing to chat for a while, until her grandson started waking up. Then he needed her full attention. I promised to keep her informed, both as Daddy's healthcare team supervisor and as a friend.

When they left the hospital, Paul called me. Was there a close pharmacy that we had used that would have Daddy's insurance information? Because the hospital is 8 miles east of us, and his regular pharmacy is 17 miles west. Since we had stuck strictly with Target for him, he brought Daddy back home and drove off again. He had a prescription for B & O.

By now Daddy was feeling comfortable again. When he was in so much pain earlier, I'd given him an extra dose of what are usually his bedtime pills: hydromorphone and lorazepam. One kills pain, the other relaxes him. They had done the job - incidentally - of treating his problem, had we but known it. He wasn't having blockages, but bladder spasms. The medications relaxed the smooth muscle of the bladder enough for him to empty it, mostly during transport. An ultrasound in the ER showed an empty bladder. The B & O was prescribed in suppository form for the next times it happened.

So what's B & O? Belladonna and opium! Yikes! Not only does it sound dangerous, there quickly developed other issues with the prescription. First, Medicare won't cover it. They think it's a quality-of-life versus a medical necessity drug. More voluntary than necessary is how I heard it. However, if your bladder is backing up to the point you're in extreme pain and risking a rupture, it's not a necessity? The full price of the 15 pills that were prescribed is a mere $300. It could be covered if absolutely necessary, but....

As a suppository, it's just more difficult to administer, starting with getting him standing up to relocate to a place - like bed - where he can lie full out so we can get to the proper area. Mouth is so much easier.

It's so unusual a drug that Target couldn't get ahold of any until Monday. (Later they called back and pushed that date back to Friday.) Since he'd been having increasingly frequent spasming episodes, Friday might be too long a wait.

The prescribing doctor wrote the prescription out with out specifying the strength of the dosage. It is available in two. And since it's a Schedule II narcotic, every single "i" must be dotted and "t" crossed. So if we were determined to get this particular prescription filled, we'd have to get another, properly filled out written prescription and physically bring it in. We're used to hard copy prescriptions for his Schedule I drugs. It just meant that we'd have to contact his regular doctor, get him to agree this was necessary, have him write out what he thought was appropriate, and have me pick it up. During his office hours. Regardless of where work thought they wanted to send me at that time. With his regular drugs, we call in the refills with a week of dosages left so there's time to play with.

All of that might have been worth the effort except for one thing. The combination of opium and belladonna might very well depress his breathing, something he can't spare these days. If we were trying to hurry him out the door and underground, it might be just the trick. However....

Surely there were newer, better, safer drugs on the market these days to help with bladder spasms.

I told the pharmacist to tear up the prescription for B & O. I'd need to call his doctor on Monday anyway, now that we knew what we were dealing with, and ask for some kind of more realistic drug for his conditions. Worst case, we could retreat him with the same bedtime meds we'd used earlier. We wound up with something called oxybutynin, regularly prescribed for bladder spasms, though usually the kind that cause incontinence. 3 pills a day with meals. $3. A very slight risk of sleepiness so he shouldn't operate heavy machinery.

As if!

On Tuesday a doctor from the ER called us to let us know he had a UTI. Technically, 2 UTIs. The cipro, his latest antibiotic he took for respiratory issues, wouldn't touch either of these, but he prescribed something that would work on both the pesky bugs infecting his bladder this time. So Tuesday night I went back to Target pharmacy yet one more time to pick this one up. Another $3. 3 pills a day with meals.

And the little coupon they gave us with the register receipt this purchase gives us a $15 Target gift card with our next new prescription we bring to them. I got a new one at the beginning of this month. Daddy got 2 new ones this week. And now they give us the coupon?

Squirrelly Day

2011-10-14T21:43:00.000-05:00

I suddenly realized it had taken me until about 3 PM to remember I'd killed that squirrel. Normally it's something that sticks with me for a while. I did remember it clearly: the acorn in its mouth, its running out in front of my car, my knowing it was timing it just wrong for it to survive the trip, the thump-thump as I rolled over it, the tail twitching as it lay behind me on the road. But that was the kind of day it had been so far.

At the time I was responding to Jessica's worried phone call. Fred had gotten caught under my dad's lift chair as he was putting it down after returning from the bathroom. Jessica was still in the bathroom and hadn't seen him there, and of course my dad can't. She reported that he made quite a cry of pain, and after being freed, limped and whined with each step. She clearly felt guilty about it, even though I reassured her that he'd just missed being caught under Steve's lift chair a couple months earlier and this really had nothing to do with her. We could hope he learned it was not a good place for a nap. Since her call caught me just as I was leaving the hospital from my allergy shots, I called work and informed them I would be even later, and why, called the vet for an emergency drop-off, and was heading home to pick him up.

It's not like Jessica could leave, even if she knew how to find my vet, across the state line in St. Croix Falls. She had her hands plenty full with my dad that morning, and they were to get even fuller. By the time I got home, Fred had perked up, quit limping, and stopped whining. I wasn't taking any chances. Not only is he not "my" dog, but Steve's, but his early history includes a broken pelvis and leg. I wanted to be sure he wasn't just faking "fine".

I actually lifted him in and out of my hatch for the drive over. Turns out he now weighs a hefty 53 lbs. You have to know that while he thoroughly sniffed the bushes outside the clinic door, he never raised his leg, an indication, I suspected, of some residual damage from the chair. Of course the second he stepped off the scale, he peed all over the floor!

Good thing they're used to that. Of course, they don't tell you if that means they add $5 to the bill.

They took him to keep for the day, at least, for observation, examination, and likely X-rays.

I logged in to work and headed for the cities. I'd have to be back to pick him up before they closed at 5:30. (Make a mental note: tell dispatch you need to be there by 5:00 or you'll never make it.) That's when I got the next phone call from Jessica.

Now my dad had felt fine when I left. He'd drunk a full cup of coffee, something becoming more rare as he tends to forget it's even there on his table unless he's reminded, and occasionally even then. But it was processing through - to a point. For the third time in under two weeks, his catheter got blocked and the bladder was filling uncomfortably. Very uncomfortably. I could hear him clearly in the background of the call. Jessica let me know that the part I had missed was him swearing at her due to thinking she was a nurse and was just standing by in his hospital room refusing to treat him.

Yeah, I get that.

Jess knows to call Randy when these clogs happen, and she comes out with supplies to back-flush the line, usually clearing the clog. Plan B involves replacing the catheter. Plan C involves the ER.

Randy wasn't answering. It turns out she was taking a day off. So Jess's plan B was to call the county and get the other nurse, Nancy. (Her plan C is the same as above, using 9-1-1 and the paramedics for transport. If Paul is in charge, he can transport his grandfather himself.)

Nancy finally arrived, tended to his needs, and then proceeded to berate everybody for what she perceived as his poor standard of care. The most obvious indication of that is what she diagnosed as a thrush infection (translation: rash) through his entire groin area. Yeah, we know about that. It's been an issue for weeks, about since he started his heavy-duty antibiotics for his latest respiratory problems. There was a ten-day course of treatment, and then a repeat. The thrush is a side effect. We've been working together to try napping with bare behind, soothing creams, Nystatin powder, you-name-it. Nancy called his doctor and got an order for Nystatin cream, to be applied twice a day.

All this process and keeping me informed took about three phone calls scattered through the morning, mainly while driving. Of course. Just because I have a busy workload doesn't mean I can't have a busy home life at the same time, long distance.

I then called Paul to pick it up on his way home from work. I was going to have to be home early - we'd known that but for other reasons and this day was turning out that it was even earlier than we thought - and we'd planned that it was a good night for him to run his errands and shopping after work while I watch Daddy.

Another call came from the vet. Fred was examined, and seemed fine enough that they decided he didn't need X-rays. I could pick him up today, and they were sending home a chewable painkiller just in case he was masking symptoms, as animals are wont to do. Two day's worth. And by the way, they trimmed his toenails. As a courtesy. They were too long and one was broken. Yeah, it was probably the one that dug a furrow across my wrist tattoo a couple days earlier. Even the scab is concave. Good dog. Really good job. That tattoo has been losing detail lately anyway.

Getting Steve the ongoing Fred updates took a few calls too. First problem was that he was sleeping and not answering his phone for a couple hours. When it's important, I tend to let it ring a few cycles to determine that he's not just away from it for a few minutes. Finally I left a message to call me, I had bad news. Of course, he called without checking messages first, so that was fun. Eventually, about six calls later, he was brought up to speed that Fred was OK.

So it was sometime after three that I relaxed enough to think about other things than whichever crisis was happening or details I had to organize, and finally remember that squirrel. And by then, I pretty much didn't care.

Hooray!

2011-10-14T21:35:00.003-05:00

I'm not quite sure why I felt so jubilant leaving the doctor's office Wednesday. It was the follow-up appointment with her after, well, everything we'd talked about at my first appointment since getting insurance in April. We went over the hysterectomy, the allergy shots, my knees, the diabetes progress. The labs were back, I'm taking a new med, and there was lots to discuss.

We started with the fact she's leaving family practice to go into geriantology (sp?). Hey, maybe someday I'll be old enough to get her back again. Anyway, she discussed her coworkers until I was comfortable making a preliminary choice for her replacement as my primary physician.

We discussed labs and how often I need to repeat the tests, assuming the numbers are within normal ranges. I'm thinking I'm likely to lose my insurance again next year, due to the state budget changes, so I'm planning ahead on what to do before year's end and how to most economically schedule upcoming care. There will be labs again before year's end plus an appointment with my new doc. Allergy shots will continue, so I'm cramming in what I can on the fastest schedule possible for this year. Surgery is done, no follow-ups needed there. The knees will be ignored until Medicare kicks in. I got my flu shot and, after checking to make sure it's covered by the insurance, a shingles shot. (Not only did Daddy have to suffer from it, but Mom's sister got it as well, so I'm prone to it on both sides of the family.) Not having to face that myself was part of the relief I felt after that visit.

Remember I said there would be questions on the new medication? I was mostly referring in that comment to needing to inform my doc I was diabetic before taking a medication ordered because I am diabetic. I asked, she answered, and somehow after a lengthy explanation, I've decided I know nothing more than I did before. Perhaps just poor choice of wording on the label. Anyway, it's not actually a precautionary note.

What was a precautionary note was the bit about muscle aches. It happens in about 1 in 10,000 people. She said I'd be able to tell for sure if that's what was going on: if you take the kind of muscle aches you get from influenza, add getting hit by a truck to it for the intensity level. What it means is that your kidneys are failing, a protein is not getting metabolized, and you should immediately stop taking the statin drug, and have somebody take you to the hospital.

You won't be able to drive yourself.

One possible way to prevent it happening is to take something called Co Q 10. Co for co-enzyme. It helps metabolize that protein. Available OTC in the vitamin section. Oh, and for those pains in the feet? Not likely - though remotely possible - related to the diabetes. More likely a neuropathy, like Mom had. Take magnesium. Also available OTC, same place. So now there are two more pills lined up for their morning dispensing to swallow with that morning cuppa.

Speaking of the labs, the A1C is down to 5.6. Normal! For at least the last three months, the diet is working to keep the blood sugar levels down. Obviously I test the drops of blood to get readings at particular points in time, but this gives an overall. Overall it's good. Normal. Normal is good. Not an excuse to let up, however, no matter how tempting the box of Goldfish is that Paul left sitting out for the last few days. No, better to go buy my own box and take measured amounts with me to work for snacks, instead of the Cheerios I've been taking ever since last April. Yummy, but losing their edge. Switch to Goldfish for a bit.

Not exactly a lab value, but my blood pressure reading was 112/70. Last week at the allergist it was 113/69. That's going well.

Of course, likely that most important reason for the great feeling as I left the doctor's office was the first piece of information gathered. No, not the fact that I've lost 2" of height somewhere recently. That first thing they do, making you step on the scale. I've finally broken the 40 lb. barrier! Uh, that's as in 40 lbs lost. Just in case you haven't been paying attention. In fact, it's 41 or 42, depending on exactly where in the hundredths of a pound it registered at the very first time. I wasn't paying attention further than the first three digits back then. So not only did I break that mystical barrier, the one that's been resisting me for a couple months, but I did it after adding ice cream back into the diet.

Yeee Hahhhh! I can keep eating ice cream!!!!!! In fact, it's time for some right now...

Reading the Label

2011-10-08T08:33:00.000-05:00

Tidbit: Because I am diabetic, my doctor is now taking my slightly elevated cholesterol levels seriously.

Got that? Good. Keep it in mind. We'll come back to that later.

It is time to return to the primary care physician for the follow-up visit. I haven't been in to see her since all this started - after I finally got health insurance again - on April 11. We're following up on what has happened on all fronts: diabetes management, knees, allergies, surgery.

Before one of those visits, one goes in to the lab and gets a series of blood tests run. The results are back. Good news: my A1C dropped to 5.6, nicely within the 4.3-6 range that normal folks have. That means that over the long range - 3 months - I've been managing my blood sugar levels well. Bad news: the "bad" cholesterol in not below 100. The doctor reading the results (mine was on vacation) sent my pharmacy a prescription for Simvastatin. Generic for Zocor. The operative part of that name is "-statin". It's a cholesterol lowering drug. I picked it up and started taking it a couple days ago.

Having never taken anything like this before, and not being familiar with it through my dad's long list of meds, I decided to spend some time reading the label. I was particularly interested in side effects. This drug's list is mighty impressive.

Now, I do know not to get freaked out over every possible effect this medication might have. It is protocol for test subjects to have to report every teensy little thing. Got a cold? Report your sniffles in case they might be relevant. Sprain your ankle? Report the joint pain. Food poisoning? Report nausea and the runs. If twenty-five people in the study get the same cold and sprain their ankles, there might be something there (like uneven flooring in the testing facility?).

Due to reading labels, I expected that my Lisinopril, when I started it several years ago, might cause a cough. Well, I did get a cough, all right, but when we stopped the Lisinopril for a month, nothing happened to the cough. It turned out that its primary cause was allergies, not that I knew it then - me? allergies? ridiculous! - and since the substituted medication did wildly erratic things to my blood pressure, few of them good, back on the Lisinopril I went with no side effects. I'm still taking it, and my latest BP reading was 113/69. But the whole experience drove home the importance of reading labels.

This new med can cause constipation. OK, just keep the vitamin C at the elevated level of 1000 mg. instead of the previous 500 mg. I used pre-surgery. That fibroid seemed to hurry all digestive processes along for want of space, and now is the first time I can remember since childhood where that might be an issue. In fact, the opposite was enough of an issue for so many years that constipation hardly seems an inconvenience. If it is, work on increasing fiber and raise C levels some more.

It can cause nausea. Hmmm, maybe that's why you take it at bedtime? I suppose most folks have empty stomachs then, so no big loss. What a way to ruin sleep, though. But hey, more weight loss, right? And in summary, you might have the effect of not being able to keep food down, and what you do keep down you retain forever!

What else? Muscle pains. So who doesn't get muscle pains? How do you tell if the latest pain is medication or life induced?

May cause liver damage. Scary. Sounds like another reason to come in for regular lab work. I'm already doing kidney function tests because the ibuprofin can damage those. But at least they don't double up, but pick alternate organs to ruin. And hey, stay off Tylenol, which doesn't do much for me anyway, so no problem.

Here's my favorite: Be sure to inform your doctor if you are diabetic. Uh, hello? That's the reason I'm taking this in the first place! (Remember, I said we'd come back to that.) So what's it going to do to me because I'm diabetic? What happens when the big precaution is part of the reason it's important to take this medication in the first place?

Good thing I go in to see the doctor this week. There will be questions!

Remembering Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T06:52:00.002-05:00

The world is poorer today. On the other hand, maybe we should just think about how much richer we are for having had his particular genius for as many years as we did. If your particular technology wasn't designed by him, it was designed by a wanna-be in imitation. He brought computers home for many of us, made them pretty and portable, connected them to music and phones, put them in our pockets, and sent us back out in to the world with them. That's some legacy.

One Person's Trash...

2011-09-27T12:42:00.004-05:00

C'mon, I didn't really think the collection was trash. I lovingly collected every bit of it. Still loved the idea of them every time I had to move them from one spot where they collected dust to the next spot where they collected dust. I just never found/made the time to walk back with them along memory lane. It would have taken months, after all. But finally the day had to come to get rid of them, and I got really lucky: I found a new someone to love them just as I had done.

I am referring to my old record collection. It took up about two feet of shelf space, starting with the first two I ever collected when I turned twelve. I got a turntable for my birthday that year (something my brother always regretted my getting, especially when I replayed and replayed and replayed favorites in the room with thin walls next to his.) There was also a bit of money, partly from just having my appendix out in the hospital right at that time too. Being home sick, I was privy to watching the Today Show - yes, it's that old! - when Peter Paul and Mary were performing "Lemon Tree." Man, I had to go buy that album! And somewhere in Park Rapids there was a store that sold records. (I can't remember where it was, but I'm guessing it was where you got band instruments too.)

Having a bit of money left over to burn a hole in my musical pocket, I asked the clerk what he might recommend in a (cheap) classical album to go along with it. I had no idea about classical music at that time except to know that I liked a lot of it. He suggested Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony sitting in the bargain bin - apparently he thought he'd found a sucker - and I bought it. Loved it. May still be the only person in the country who does, but so what?

Over the years money went into the collection. It became quite eclectic. Lots of classical, including Readers Digest version of the complete 9 symphonies of Beethovan. Lots of folk. More PPM, of course, but branching out from there to Chad Mitchell Trio, Smothers Brothers. There was a Judy Collins phase, a Helen Reddy phase, an Andy Williams phase. Then came the Muppets and Free to Be You and Me, fairy tales on vinyl. Later were "Solitutes" and similar voice/nature sounds collections, James Gallway, and some of the best X-mas music ever produced and irreplaceable now. (Yes, I'm prejudiced. So what?)

Eventually along came 8-track and cassettes, finally CDs, and lots of dust. The records got shuffled, boxed, unpacked, repacked, moved from one set of shelves to the next as each former location became more desirable and earned something "better". I just couldn't give them up. They had been well loved. In an abstract way, they still were.

So what finally happened? WalMart, that's what. They finally met my can't-resist-any-longer low price for a HD TV. A 40-incher can't fit in the space designed to enclose a 27" TV, so the entertainment system had to be reconfigured as well. These days that means replaced. All that storage space no longer existed. Out also goes the turntable, the old 8-tracks, the amplifier, the DVD player, the cassette player, the switcher box, the PS2, the speakers, the...

It was a lot of work. Mostly, Paul's. I did my part by sorting and throwing the little bits and pieces. But while the 8-tracks went in the garbage can with no backward glance, the records piled up in a couple stacks.

Along the wall in the living room now sits a discrete table/cabinet holding the new TV, the DVR box, the whatchamacallit thing for the surround system that Paul insisted I get to go with the enhanced visual capabilities and which includes AM/FM, 4 of the 6 speakers (two on the back wall), and a PS3, all new. He decided we'd keep the piece-of-crap VCR since you just about can't find them these days anyway. However, its disgraceful presence is hidden behind the lower level cabinet doors. Right opposite the PS3 which also functions to play CDs, DVDs and Blue Ray - should we ever acknowledge that the world is still changing technologically. The organizing principle is that what needs to be controlled by remote every time the TV goes on goes in the open part of the cabinet.

The principle behind doing the controlling of them is figuring out which of the three remotes one needs to use to make them work. Three! One turns on the TV. No, the universal remote won't turn it on. It will turn it off, but that only helps later. The second turns on the sound. Paul disabled the TV speakers because when they were on at the same time as the surround sound, we got an echo chamber effect. All three will turn off the sound, since it automatically turns off when the TV shuts off. The third controls the DVR, so you can change channels, pause, skip, set up timers, play recorded programs. (You can also turn the TV off.) Then, if you remember to push the right button, once the sound system has been turned on from its original remote, it will also control volume and mute, just like remote #2. You just have to remember to put it back to controlling the DVR again before you start hitting the wrong thing and getting a wild variety of unpredictable results. Or none at all.

Paul is not patient with me while I'm learning all these things. He especially gets upset if I go back to the original remotes to control volume or turn off the TV instead of switching functions on the DVR remote, since he spent so much of Sunday setting up the remotes and systems to recognize each other.

The old entertainment center has found a home. It's just not there yet. It's waiting for its new owners to find a vehicle large enough to transport it, or time enough to disassemble it before loading, so they can take it out. Meanwhile it's in the aisle between the kitchen table and my chair, blocking access to the back door. The good news for the new owners is that it's not outside getting rained on. The good news for us is - besides getting rain - we don't have to fuss with it. Just fuss around it, I guess.

We've been asking everybody we can think of if they know anybody who wants the old sound system and CD, DVD players. Most of them were polite enough not to snicker outright at us. But today that changed.

Those of you who have been reading this long enough will know who "the sainted Randy" is. I had to call her this morning when my dad's catheter became blocked, and it was either she come over and flush out the system, or we get the catheter replaced, possibly in the ER. It's not an insignificant note to mention that it all got properly fixed and Daddy's comfortable again. And I'm here to make note of it because Jessica's got a sick kid at home - throwing up, 102 degree temp. - and I had to stay home from work to take care of Daddy instead of her.

While Randy was doing her follow-up paperwork, since I was here, I asked her The Question. Expecting the usual response, I was delighted to see her light up. Yes, she indeed know somebody who'd like to take them off our hands: herself! When I threw in the offer of the record collection, knowing it wasn't "everybody's" choice of Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, and such, she positively started beaming. Every label I called out to her as I packaged them up in bags to carry out was met with, not just politeness, but enthusiasm. I even had the Judy Collins LP which was missing from her collection!

I had found the right person! These would indeed become her treasure as once they had been mine. I can feel good about their new home as well as loving the space created here in in their absence. That's important. Steve's moving in in November, and that's getting closer fast.

Just Another Week on the Job

2011-09-24T08:11:00.000-05:00

Monday: got a nice little out of town run, heading out to what turned out to be a hog slaughtering company - or at least a hog carcass cutting enterprise. My instructions were to see a Randy and pick up four coolers, bringing them back into the metro area to a medical device company. They make shunts, skin grafts, and other substitute body parts out of animal parts, after lots of processing.

Randy wasn't there, of course. Nor did he answer his cell the several times employees tried to call him. (Nooners for lunch, perhaps?) It wasn't that they needed him to tell them what the freight was. Everybody knew I was picking up pig skins. Frozen ones. Six of them. What nobody knew was how they were supposed to be packed in the coolers. The issue was there were supposed to be no creases in the skins. Hard to do when there must be a fold somewhere in the skin, even if the other way was rolled up. Were they to be cut? And if so, to what size? It was presumed that if the company paying for me to travel all that way to pick them up, and issued such specific instructions about packing, that they would also be picky about any sizes they were to be cut into.

I got on the phone to dispatch and had them call the customer, asking them to call the company where I was waiting, and please explain what these folks needed to know in order to pack the freight so I could haul it back to them.

It worked. I overheard a whole lot of "uh-huhs", a few questions, more "uh-huhs". The coolers were quickly packed, loaded, and off I went. I even got a message from dispatch informing me that they put me down for loadtime. I would get paid for standing around. Cool. Even better that most of the standing around wound up being sitting around.

Arriving at the dock for delivery, I walked in to find nobody in the receiving office. I brought the coolers inside, and still nobody. Heading over to shipping, I located the guy who looked like he was actually doing something and explained what I needed ( as in a signature). It turns out he was actually doing something, in fact so much something that he delegated another guy to check out the delivery and sign for it.

This fellow appeared clueless. First he checked the receiving office again to make sure I wasn't just overlooking some person tucked in a mysterious corner somewhere. Since the office was about 8" x 8", leaving little room to hide a body among the two desks and chairs, vertically or horizontally, I did my best not to feel insulted at the suggestion of my incompetence. After all, maybe he was just looking for an out for himself.

Then he let me point to the four boxes that the coolers had been packed into. The shipping company had thoughtfully left them completely unlabeled. I had to explain what they were, where they were from, what they needed - which I assumed was immediate chilling. He just kinda shrugged, signed, and walked off, saying, "Maybe when my supervisor gets back...."

I was impressed. Maybe if I had been a flirtacious sweet young thing, he would have tried harder?

Moving my car away from the dock so the waiting dock truck could back in and unload his freight, I found a patch of shade to wait in for my next run. The dock truck left, and a semi backed in. I was imagining the chaos and the likelihood that four coolers of (formerly?) frozen pig skins were in the process of getting lost on the dock. I couldn't leave it like that.

Now, we ignorant, uncouth drivers are not supposed to call the customers directly. But there was a phone number listed on the drop information, and I called it. Getting the front desk, I explained what I had just delivered, who had signed, his attitude, subsequent events, and my fears that four coolers of pigskins were rapidly warming up anonymously on the deck amid piles of other freight. She thanked me and stated she herself would go right back and make sure that they were taken care of properly.

Whew! Duty discharged.

I soon got a new run, and after picking up it, all hell broke loose. The system that allows dispatch to communicate with drivers via text messages on our blackberries was suddenly no longer working. Once we found out we were no longer communicating (no reply, the count of backed-up unsent messages climbing, etc.) we had to switch over to cell phone communication. It works, but it's slow. Dispatch has to read the run, we have to write down and/or remember pertinent details, and call back with updates. By 3:00 PM we're down to two dispatchers. After 6:00, one. As long as we don't have to talk to the dispatcher himself, we can call in to the phone support staff, called CSRs, with picks and drops and signatures. As if they weren't busy enough already.

At least they can log us out on their systems once we finish the day. In the morning, we have to log out via our blackberries before we can log in again.

Tuesday: I started logging in, the steps you have to take to start our company software in the blackberry, connect with HQ, and send in a zipcode. Then you can log out and start up again. Unfortunately, nothing worked. And I showed a backup of 89 messages! 89!

I called Bill at dispatch. Were we down again? More like still, not again. OK, he knew I was on the road, ready for work. Cell phone dispatching again, oh goodie!

I did manage to confirm with one of the many CSRs I talked to that day that we so far had been successful at keeping our customers from being aware of our technological problems. The work was getting done. Everybody was frazzled, just not the customers.

About 2:00 I received a call, telling me to park the car and get ready to reprogram my blackberry. Kristin patiently talked me through every step, in spite of my complete lack of expertise. It took about half an hour, with one break while the phone was processing that was long enough for me to head into the Holiday I parked in front of and use the restroom, my original plan fifteen minutes before. (Since my surgery I can be that patient these days.)

Reprogramming is a very slow process. She had to tell me what to scroll down and find on the menu, which button to hit (mouse, berry, etc.), and I'd report what I now saw on the screen. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Once I hit the wrong thing and it took a few extra moves to get back in the menu I was supposed to be in. That was where the blackberry wanted me to watch its video telling me about its copyright or some such thing that I have no interest in ever knowing about, since I never bump into that stuff. The only way out of the video was - OK, I forget now. The red phone? The berry? Whatever, the third thing we tried worked. And by 2:30, I was now back to text dispatching.

Hey, I could actually use my cell phone for personal calls again!

The rest of the day was good news, aside from having to turn down a run to Park Rapids so I could get home to relieve Jesssica taking care of my dad. Tuesdays she has to leave early. Last week I turned down one to Sleepy Eye, and two previous weeks I've turned down Tuesday runs to Pine City.

Dang!

Wednesday: I started logging in, fully confident that the system had been fixed and everything would be hunky-dory. Well, it partly logged in, but wouldn't accept my zipcode. It decided to let me into the working menu anyway. That wasn't any help, but it did let me know I had another problem. There were still two messages screens on it from last night, and it would only let me go from one to the other and back and over and over. None of the usual commands to escape or erase worked. Come to think of it, I couldn't get rid of them last night either, and just turned the thing off, hoping it would reboot without them in the morning. After all, one was confirmation that I had successfully logged out. Today I got drastic and pulled the battery out. It worked, but at a price. I just didn't know the half of it yet.

Those adorable little wafer batteries in the latest blackberry models we are using don't have much of a life, even fully charged. But I didn't know this yet. What I did know was it was taking me an awful long time to get it up and running so I could get logged in. Time that another driver or 30 could be using getting logged in ahead of me in the cue, in line for first-come, first-served work. But finally it was ready, I hit the buttons, and... wait... wait... wait... crap! It wouldn't log in!

Another call to dispatch, here-I-am-please-use-me. Bill logged me in, and there was a run for me! Heading that way, suddenly the blackberry log-in worked! I was up and running!

Sort of. When I got to the drop, things went haywire again. Messages backed up, dispatch had to be called. This time I was told to come into HQ, close to my drop - lucky me, and get the phone reprogrammed. Just like yesterday, but this time done in person without the go-between of me slowing it down. And hey, incidentally, meet the new dispatch supervisor.

We have a new dispatch supervisor? Wait, there was an old dispatch supervisor? Who was it and what happened to whatever's-his-name? Nobody tells us lowly drivers anything, unless we stop by after hours and bribe the night dispatchers enough for them to share gossip. Caramel rolls work.

Anyway, I met him, handed him my phone, and he quickly went through the steps on the blackberry. I knew I'd have ten minutes or so, and excused myself to use the facilities. Sound familiar? As soon as he handed it back, commenting my battery was very low, I was given a run, looked at it, and headed out to the car.

Oops. I now automatically hit the button on the side of the blackberry. It mutes it, locks the keypad, and shuts down the screen, saving battery. It's a habit. Otherwise, every time the mouse rubs against the fabric inside the pocket, meaning with each breath or slight movement, it gives a very loud BEEP! A you'll-soon-be-deaf-if-you-keep-hearing-this beep. Pressing the top button unlocks it. We both found out that Brian-new-dispatch-supervisor didn't know that this could/should be programmed into the phone. When it isn't, the phone starts talking at you, and not in a useful way. Besides, I had no idea how to get the phone back to the dispatch menu from here. So, out of the car and back inside again, hand the phone over, and demand a fix. (I'm not sure I remembered to say, "please.")

He figured it out in two minutes and fixed it. Meanwhile another driver was having him reprogram his blackberry. (The line is endless.) Seeing what Brian was doing, he piped up, "Really? You can do that? That beeping drives me crazy! Fix mine too!"

I had another fix I wanted restored, putting the work icon as 1st choice on the start-up menu, but I figured if Brian didn't finish the job properly, I'd have the person who's originally done it on my phone, namely Kristen, the one who'd talked me through the process yesterday, do it for me. Conveniently, the drop on my waiting run was to the off-site office she now works at.

By then of course, my blackberry was registering zero charge on the battery. Not beeping at me yet, but any minute. When our company hands them out to drivers, they leave the accessories off, suggesting we spring for the cost ourselves. This includes a protective case, and a car charger. I hadn't purchased either.

There was a Target on the way between my next pick and drop, and with the slow service it was paying for, I took a detour and went shopping so I could charge the phone. (It fits my cell as well, but I'm claiming it strictly as a work expense. My personal cell battery lasts more than a full day of lengthy conversations.)

Thursday: If any day on this job can be called normal, this was it. Well, except...

I was heading eastbound on 394 in the right lane when a squad car came screaming up on the driver in the carpool lane. Since he (?) took about a full minute to wise up and pull out of the lane - despite a double white line - I thought for a moment he was in trouble. But no, he pulled out of the lane and the squad kept going. I bet that was worth a huge sigh of relief! And as soon as the squad went past, he pulled back into the carpool lane. Alas, that move was short-lived. The squad stopped right in the lane, siren off but lights still flashing, and the original driver had to pull over once again.

While all that was entertaining, a look ahead and across the center barricade revealed the reason for all the fuss. A white sedan was stopped in the carpool lane heading westbound with the driver's side door open. About 100 feet behind it was another squad, lights flashing, driver's door open and the officer standing behind his door with his gun drawn and held rigidly in front of him in a two-handed grip. Just like on TV.

In the time it took to register all that, I had driven past. We were all slowing down a bit, but still going at close to posted freeway speeds. I had time to reflect that I had never before in my life seen a cop with his gun drawn. Not in real life. As I kept on, coming at the scene from the east were squad after squad after squad after unmarked after squad, all with sirens going and lights flashing. There must have been about twenty before I pulled off close to Hwy. 100, and that's just coming from the east. Who knew how many were piling on from the west, behind me?

I had reason to go by the area twice more that afternoon. The first time I thought I could get off the freeway before getting stuck in the traffic backup, but misjudged. All traffic was directed off at 169. They closed it down completely. Coming back, I'd seen earlier that eastbound was still moving, and took it. There was another delay since they had it down to only one lane. There was nothing to see except lots of cops standing around in ones and twos, not doing much of anything.

By end of day the radio stations were all talking about the officer-involved shooting, the freeway closure, and the officer's routine suspension. Eventually they passed on the information that the woman driver was dead, she had had a handgun, and the car had California plates. By Friday night we had a name. Still not much explanation. I'm thinking either she was already in deep shit and not wanting to go back to prison, too stupid to know you can't get out of a situation with a gun when surrounded by cops, on drugs, or just doing a suicide by cop. We may never know.

There was another remarkable sight on those same journeys, one much more pleasant. Cavalia is in town, set up in the southwest corner of 394 and 100. The tents have been there for over a week, along with signs. Now there were smaller tents along the perimeter, privacy fencing, and signs of actual occupation. Plus horses.

Oh, my, the horses! If you haven't heard of Cavalia, think Cirque du Soleil with horses, which is in fact part of the story of its origin. Cirque has no animals, and a small group split off to make a circus with horses. Half a dozen were out in the exercise areas at any given time, different ones each time I passed. The privacy fence ended just in time to allow passers-by a full view or a chance to park and stand around and admire them. There were white ones, and palominos, one even white with little brown polkadots like oversized freckles sprinkled over its coat. There were a couple small ones, either young or ponies, but with slender builds. Mostly, though, what registered is that they were gorgeous! Gorgeous!

Much worth waiting through the delays in traffic to drive past.

Friday: Thank goodness! A day with a whole lot of ordinary in it. Well, except for logging on at 7:40 and having to wait until 10:00 for my first run! Good thing I had a copy of "Port Mortuary", the latest Patricia Cornwell out in paperback, with a couple hundred pages left to read. Now, not so many.

And except for getting a run to Menomonie.

And except for what happened with my last two runs of the day, both medical deliveries up north of the metro. Both late, as in ending finally at 7:30. Not that any of that is unusual. But this was the first night that it actually was night by the time I had to hunt down my last rural address since last spring, even with DST keeping daylight going for as long as it can. I hate hunting numbers in the dark. So many people never think about needing to be found at night. So the numbers on the mailboxes are tiny or not reflective, or if on the house, are dark-on-dark or light-on-light. And don't get me started about the ones covered by shrubbery or - worst - by X-mas decorations! So after the great relief of finally finding the place and dropping off the meds, I went to drop the run on the blackberry.

I had 13 messages backed up! I couldn't send through anything, log off, and shut down. The number to call dispatch after hours (that's after 7:00 PM these days) went to recorded message after two rings. Three times.

Here we go again!

Two-Minute Solution, 18 Months Later

2011-09-17T22:15:00.004-05:00

The problem? A simple annoyance. I have a handicap parking sticker. Why it's referred to as a sticker when it's a hanger card, I couldn't say. When parked, it hangs from the rear view mirror. One is not supposed to drive with it in that position because somebody is concerned that it obstructs vision. So, it needs a spot.

In my car, that's on the dashboard on the driver's side, up in the corner next to the windshield, where the dash curves down a bit, so gravity helps keep it from sliding onto the seat or floor. That works perfectly, keeping it in sight to help remind me to actually use it and not risk a very expensive ticket. I have walked away from the car without hanging it. At least if I do forget, it's visible if some cop cares to actually look inside at the dash before writing the ticket.

However, while driving, when I take a sharp corner, inertia flings the card across the dash to some other resting place somewhere between the middle of the dash and the other corner, places much harder to reach once parked when I need to hang it again. The card is smooth, the dash is smooth, and away it goes. I do not drive that recklessly. It's just a lack of friction. Honest!

I got an idea several months back. Do not mistake this as being the same thing as implementing the idea several months back. No, that took until this week. I bought a brand new bottle of rubber cement, having ascertained the the previous bottle was as empty as if it had never held a drop of the stuff. Pretty neat trick, that. I would have expected at least a dried dollop on the bottom, wherever the bottom was in its resting place for the last few years since its last use. But, nope. Nothing.

Nor can you infer an instantaneous sequence of events from the ascertainment of need to actual procurement of replacement supply. That took a full day and a half. Then you must factor in the day the new bottle sat in the shopping bag on the table before transfer to my lunch cooler, and an additional day before its actual use. (Lest you find these gaps an anomaly, I must in all honesty inform you that the jar sat in the car another full day after use, before returning in my cooler to the house, and in fact still sits on the kitchen counter next to my cooler awaiting its transfer to the storage spot the other jar sat in for years and where I would in fact expect to locate it for its next use.)

Once I found myself with a few minutes on my hands, I took the rubber cement and applied a generous layer in a patch across the dashboard where the hanger card would have to touch it somewhere when tossed into its usual spot after parking use. After letting it fully dry, about two hours to get past tacky at that thickness, I set the card back in its usual spot. The rubber grips it just enough that it doesn't slide a bit while driving.

A little finger friction removed the bit I accidentally smeared on the inside of the windshield. (Both places.) And should I ever sell the car, more rubbing should remove the rubber patch as if it never was, except for the unexplained lack of dust clinging to the plastic.

Of course, since I average about 75,000 miles a year, I've never yet sold a car once it's been used for work, not once in 25 years. I'm just not up to the challenge of trying to convince somebody that there's life left in the old buggy when it's showing close to 400,000 miles on the odometer. I feel really bad when they laugh at me.

Talking With Daddy

2011-09-15T21:31:00.004-05:00

Last night he started counting, each number taking one breath. He made it up to 19, and fell back to 11, 12, 13... Last I noticed he made it into the thirties. He had quite a quiet night, but I heard as I went to get him up and dressed that he was counting again. 21, 22, 23...

"Hi Daddy, what are you counting?"

"Counts."

"What?"

"Counts."

"Counts of what?"

He just looked at me as if I were the stupidest person in the world. Oh well. I dropped it. There were more important things to do.

* * * *

Last week he mentioned in passing that he was 100 years old. I couldn't resist. I should know better, but there's a slow learning curve. So I inquired politely whether he would be very disappointed to learn that he was only 97.

Well! He should know just how old he was! He "begged to differ." But he let me know at length and in detail just how polite and well mannered he was being in not pointing out my mistake to me.

So there!

* * * * *

Those were what passes for actual conversations, rarer than ever these days. When he's in the pattern of saying one word with each breath, it can take him long enough to finish a sentence that either the end has no relation to the beginning or he forgets where he was going with it and just lets it hang there.

It's not always words between breaths. Occasionally he hums, usually nothing you can recognize. One exception to that was "Rock of Ages."

Sometimes it's just noises. They manage to sound like cries for help, but if I ask him if something hurts or what he might need, there's no answer of anything that can be addressed. If he manages to understand the question, usually he claims nothing is wrong. Sometimes he even tells me if he makes too much noise, I should just tell him to shut up. I don't. He raised me not to be rude. I just turn the TV up or leave the room for a bit.

There aren't too many conversations at night any more where he yells at imaginary people who won't cooperate with him and take his orders. I have learned to tune those out so I can get some sleep. Mostly.

The other night though, he started calling for help. When I came in, all he wanted was to chat. I explained politely what the hour was ( being a work night, of course) and left to return to bed. Ten minutes later came, "I need help! I need help!" Once again there was nothing wrong. All he wanted was chatty company. Not a chance in hell he was going to get that! I got right in his face, explaining how I needed sleep to drive safely, explained the condensed version of the boy who cried wolf, scolded him for calling "help" when he didn't need it, explained the consequences - short version - and left again. When I got back to my room, I unplugged the baby monitor so I could sleep.

All the way back to my room I was mentally kicking myself for bothering to explain things to him, telling myself he couldn't understand, wouldn't remember, I was being mean to him, and I was wasting my breath.

Much of that is likely true.

But he hasn't pulled it again, either.

Thoughts From a Wake

2011-09-15T20:49:00.002-05:00

I don't know whose perfume I'm wearing. I quit buying it for myself years ago. But tonight I hugged two cousins, two cousins-in-law, and one aunt. One of them shared her perfume, cheek to cheek. I quite like it.

The occasion was the wake of another cousin, Donald Price Maxson. He was my dad's nephew, and had Daddy been better, both physically and mentally, we would have told him about it and taken him to tomorow's funeral. Don was one of the cousins who came to the family parties Mom used to sponsor in the community room of their apartment complex while she was alive. Unlike many of my other, more distant cousins, I have actual adult memories of him. Most of us have lost touch with each other, or at best exchange a few words at the latest funeral.

I never knew until I picked up the little card on the table at the wake that his middle name was Price. I recognize it, of course, being a family name just like Donald was. Daddy's youngest brother was a Donald, though I don't guarantee that's the person they named him after. There are plenty of Donalds in the world. One less now. But Price was our grandmother's maiden name: Jane Elizabeth Price. Welsh, despite not having seventeen syllables and impossible spelling. I never knew until a relative few years ago that Grandma's first name was Jane. I just knew her as Elizabeth, since that's the name she used: Elizabeth Maxson. It occurs to me finally to wonder if anybody else in this large family is carrying on her name(s).

I got to talk to Bonnie (widow) long enough to find out what had happened. Don's brother Alan had called me with the bad news, so I knew a few details. Don was 77, and as far as anybody knew, in perfect health. He just didn't wake up one morning. I, of course, envisioned Bonnie freaking out waking up next to a cold stiff body, but that's not exactly how it happened. Bonnie told me she went to bed and Don elected to stay up a bit longer to finish watching something on TV. When Bonnie came down the next morning, he was still on the couch, his feet hanging over the side, sitting slumped over. She thought he was still sleeping, and called to him to wake him up. Since he could wake instantly, she knew right away something was wrong, and knew what it was as soon as she touched him.

While still a tremendous and sudden shock, I still think it was much kinder to happen this way than how I imagined it. That could disrupt my sleep for months! A part of me would be wondering just before waking just what I'd find next to me in the bed this time! However, I bet Bonnie would trade that for more time with Don.

When I contrast his death to my father's long, drawn-out process, I think I wouldn't mind so much going the way Don did. True, Daddy has lived longer. But Don enjoyed all the time he did have. Daddy's not enjoying much of anything these days, sticking around not from love of life but from inertia.

Good and Bad vs. Loyalty

2011-09-07T20:05:00.002-05:00

Our small town is abuzz. The gossip mill has been fired up and everybody's taking sides. And all in the absense of real information - that is, unless somebody's been talking out of turn.

As a former mayor of this town, I've learned to let go of a lot of things I used to be very involved with. But there's still a network out there of people who think I should be involved, or at least informed. I no longer have the inside track, especially on privileged information, but experience has given me the framework to fit facts into and come to my own judgment.

The thing is, the issue at the center of it concerns the firing of a city employee. This is where data privacy laws kick in, big time. When there's any job performance issue that may require some kind of disciplinary action, a closed meeting is held. In this case, closed means only the council members, the city attorney, the city clerk, and the employee in question attend. The doors are locked. Minutes are approved by the council afterwards, and both minutes and tape of the meeting are turned over to the attorney. Nobody is supposed to talk about what went on. Only the verdict at the end is public knowledge, as in, "X got fired for cause, effective such a date.," or, "nothing actionable was found against X". The only way such a meeting is other than closed is when the employee asks for an open meeting. That is always their choice and theirs alone.

Of course, in small towns, gossip is always a factor. I have heard tidbits over the months that can be summed up as two employees having a very bad working relationship. Downright disfunctional, in fact. Having known both people involved for years, I felt fairly confident in making my own assessment of the accuracy of the tidbits which came my way, as well as the likely person at fault. If I had to work under similar circumstances, I would have thought long and hard about quitting, despite the dearth of available jobs these days.

Recently, something happened between the two people. When? What? I don't know, as is entirely proper. Was it an escalation of what was already wrong in the relationship? Or something stand-alone outrageous? Again, I don't know. I do know one complained, the other denied. Classic he-said, he-said. It might have remained a stalemate, until something truly stupid happened.

This is where the issue of loyalty comes in. Because the stupid thing was that the person who previously denied wrongdoing went to a third city employee and said, "Here's what happened." Suddenly it was no longer just he-said, he-said, but he-told-me-too. And that third person became a witness against the employee who confessed all.

First of all, folks, if you really, really, really have to confess just how you screwed up at work, don't tell another co-worker who by virtue of their job description has divided loyalties. Go find a priest. He can keep it secret, because the secret part is a big piece of his job description.

Your fellow city employee can't. Their first loyalty is - properly - to the city. If information comes their way that can harm the city - say, if it could lead to an expensive lawsuit as well as a very public black eye - then their first duty is to protect the city. In other words, blab to the Mayor and the attorney so that appropriate action can be taken. In cases of eggregious wrongdoing, if it is not stopped, the whole city becomes liable. Lawsuits mean higher taxes or dropped services so the city can cover the costs. That's not how I want my city taxes spent.

The confessing employee was very upset - betrayed may not be too strong a word for those feelings - when the "secret" was not kept. But consider the employee who was confessed to. Had the secret been kept, there is the possibility that whatever action took case would be repeated, or even escalate. Silence implies consent. At any rate, the person receiving the new knowledge is now having to think about their own job. If the secret is kept, and it gets out that they knew but said nothing, they could also be subject to firing.

If you doubt the ethics or legalities behind needing to "tattle", ask yourself why criminal law includes a charge for "accessory after the fact". Weigh your loyalty against that.

Of course we value loyalty. Especially among our friends. It's what makes those people our friends. A breach of loyalty can kill a friendship. Loyalty's one of the things that makes relationships with other humans even possible. It's a wonderful ethic.

Just not the highest.

Great News

2011-09-06T20:47:00.003-05:00

I finally saw the hospital bill today. Wasn't sure I wanted to open it. Was sure I needed to.

$25,600 and change.

That wasn't the great news part. That came at the bottom. First, apparently the part of the claim that they are denying is the surgeon's bill. That I still haven't seen. After they paid their part of the bill, and knocked down the price on the rest of the bill, the part I was left owing was...

Wait for it...

$1,000. Even.

WHEW! What a relief! I won't have to cash in IRAs, pulling funds out of the stock market at the worst possible time, cashing in CDs before their maturity dates, and generally destroying my retirement plan. As a matter of fact, I was so braced for bad news that I've been taking extra care to keep as much as possible in my checking account rather than paying max on the Master Card or indulging in unnecessary shopping - though I did break down and pick up winter weight PJs yesterday. I'd done such a good job of economizing that there was enough to actually pay the bill.

The check is in the mail.

No? You don't buy that? OK, it will be tomorrow. Tonight it's sitting on the counter with my lunch cooler. Sealed, stamped, the works. Ready to go.

And now, maybe I can plan an extra couple days on the honeymoon trip.

Define "Stable"

2011-09-05T09:37:00.003-05:00

Randy noted a while back that my dad's condition has been stable for a while now.

That sounds good, right? No hospitalizations for pneumonia, no urinary tract infections, though his last diagnosing doctor mention he's been thoroughly colonized by nasty bugs by now. He can still walk - using a walker - from bed to chair and back, from either one to the bathroom or to the chair in front of the TV for, say, a Vikings game. His appetite is steady mostly, though low. He's also stable in being unable to really fight the pressure sore on his behind from sitting and lying always on his backside, however much you try to vary his position. (We're trying a new sample medication right now, but who knows how well that'll work?)

He's also fully in the grip of dementia. What's really rare are the times he seems to have some clue as to who/where/when he is. But he tries. He'll ask what day it is. Repeatedly. He can manage most days to button the front of his shirt while I manage the rest of his dressing for him. He gets how to thread his arms through the openings in his suspenders, though it's often a fight to keep his balance while each hand leaves the walker. Routine, and slow, simple sentences are key.

Sleep is both his best friend and his worst enemy. His brain resets each time, both good and bad, depending. Sleep is his escape from the daily struggles to make sense of his world, as well as just how he gives his body rest from the struggle to keep breathing and performing all the other functions. Many days he will sleep through except to be awakened for dressing, being bathed, being fed. He's always surprised at how fast the day has fled when we wake him up to go to bed.

Occasionally he has a day or two where sleep eludes him. Then we worry. He becomes crabby, touchy, balky. He'll try to find a way to cut his oxygen line, and when balked, refuse to wear it. (As I told Jessica when she was trying to cope with him in this frame of mind, you can't force oxygen on him until he's unconscious. But back off, and soon he'll forget whatever it was that put a bee in his bonnet.) He'll get very lewd in his conversation, and grabby-handed with his aids.On those occasions, we wait for an easing in his uncooperativeness, and get an extra Lorazepam into him. "Extra" meaning other than at bedtime. Usually this means he'll sleep, though it's not perfect. It also means he might not wake for his bath, and we've found out that it really matters that we tell his aids when he's been given an extra one. They worry, bless their hearts.

He alternates between not keeping an idea in his head for more than a minute, and worrying one like a terrier with a rat in its teeth for hours. The other night he stated he needed to go out to make mail deliveries. I tried to disabuse him of this need. He wasn't having any. It didn't matter that he wasn't sure if he was working for the local post office or the State Fair post office (doesn't exist). It didn't matter that he had no idea what he was to deliver. Somebody called and told him he had a job to do and by gum, he was going to do it. I tried to tell him nobody called: I was sitting right next to the phone for the last hour and it hadn't rung. Didn't matter. I reminded him of his difficulty walking. No matter, he'd make me drive. He wanted to know what I'd done with the $55 which Agnes had given me the night before to do this. The facts that nobody had given me money, that Agnes died years ago, and there was no job all had no effect on his obsession. He knew what he knew. Would I please go get the car ready? No, I wouldn't. There was no point driving him to the post office because it was closed for over an hour and everybody was home, like we were. Well, then, could I please go look up their phone number so he could call them? I could, but no. Same reasons. He tried to bribe me with the idea that there was $150 being paid for the job. No go. Well, was I willing to take his pen time then? Pen time? The time he'd need to serve in the penitentiary for not getting the job done. Sure, no problem.

That settled him down for a bit, but it was good that Paul arrived home from work about that time. He was just starting in again, and I needed to leave the room. And he couldn't be left unwatched. He just might decide to head out of the house on his own. He's tried before.

He can't stand to anybody holding a conversation near him that doesn't include him. He can be asleep and low voices will wake him. But there are times when we need to talk to each other either about the state of his care or just how's-your-day stuff. It doesn't matter if it's none of his business. He will get upset.

He has more problems handling familiar objects. Every nebulizer treatment, 3-per-day for over two years, is a battle. He keeps pulling it out to try to see the vapor stream, and wants to declare it over when he can't see anything. Nevermind that he's nearly blind and we can still see it fine. He wants to lay his chair back, putting the dispenser at the wrong angle to feed the medicine through. Sometimes we just take the chair controller away from him till the treatment's done. When it's time to shut it off, often as not these days he'll try the chair controller first, then the part he holds, looking for an off button, then finally going to the machine to fumble all around it to find the little rocker switch to shut it down. I can tell him where it is, but the words don't register.

His reward for all that is a hot cup of coffee (mornings), yet some days he can be told it's there and hot, even what color cup it's in today, and it won't matter. He'll put his chair back and tune out the world. (Of course there's nobody there for me to talk to at the time to drive him nuts. That would keep him awake!)

There have been no repeats of the what-is-a-spoon-for? incident, so apparently that goes far enough back in his memories that he still recognizes it. Some days the chair controller gets stared at like some foreign new contraption. The radio has so many buttons on it that he doesn't even try any more to turn it on/off for himself. Unless he has to. So sometimes I wonder just how much of what is going on with him is creative imcompetence for attention, and how much is real.

Speaking of attention, the moaning really gets to me. Partly, it's designed to. The instinctive reaction is to ask what's the matter? What can be done to help? He will say he's fine, nothing's wrong, he didn't even know he was making noises. Used to be that if you turned on his radio, the moaning would stop. Nowdays, not so much. It can go on and on, every breath a moan, for hours.

You can tell it's real when he starts squirming too. That means his butt is sore. He needs a change of position, a clean-up, an application of medicine. Sometimes all the above. He'll confuse the issue by confusing when he needs his leg bag emptied and needs to go to the bathroom for a bowel movement. When we question what he really means, he'll get angry at us, often while insisting on using the wrong word for the function needing attention.

When he's angry, it's tough trying to soothe him. Any explanation of what you meant is heard as criticism of him or his abilities. I understand the frustration, but some days whatever you do is wrong - just like it seems for him, I'm sure. If you're lucky, you can change the subject, say, by offering him a hot cup of coffee. If not, wait a while and he'll have forgotten what it was all about. If still not, get up and leave for a bit. Don't come back until your tone of voice can express your happiness to see him again after all this time, and your willingness to help in whatever way you can.

And mean it.

I wonder on occasion just how much of a favor we're doing to him by keeping him current on all the meds and procedures that not only keep him comfortable as possible but keep everything functioning at whatever its top level is these days. He's often expressed the wish to die. Perhaps that's why he removes his oxygen, or tries to find a way to sever the line. We let him know we won't cooperate in speeding him on his way. We replace his oxygen tubing, give him his full dosage of pills, keep track of his food and liquids, maintain all the systems as best we are able. Had he been lucid when these wishes came upon him, we might treat him differently. But his living will expressed his wish for everything possible to be done for him. It was only last December, when he became officially a hospice patient, that he finally agreed that DNR orders would be appropriate. It helped that he was more lucid then, and understood that CPR would likely break his ribs, and he'd live in extreme pain for however much time he had remaining. Even he didn't want that.

So we look for the small pleasures. A favorite cookie. A hot cup of coffee. A football game, likely watched by halves several hours apart, bless the DVR. A regular evening phone call from my brother. The drumstick from the turkey. On a really good day, a backyard bonfire and brat roast. A backrub with lotion.

And always greet the new day as if it's great news that he's still here, and let's get ready for that next hot cup of coffee.

Change in Plans

2011-08-31T06:48:00.003-05:00

I took Fred Basset over to visit Steve on Sunday. He's been staying here since Steve had his knee surgery. Part of the visit was to see if just perhaps Steve felt up to keeping him yet. He tried walking him with the aid of his walker, but declared after a few minutes that he just wasn't ready yet.

But it was tempting.

We did have a good chat about what we want to do in Arizona for the honeymoon next February. Our wish lists alligned up to be either north of Phoenix or south. Then we started thinking about the likelihood of there being snow around Flagstaff and Monument Valley that time of year. Then we started thinking about how long it was all likely to take, how much time we'd have to explore everything after retiring there in a few years, and just how little money was going to be in the budget after paying for my surgery.

We decided to cut our plans in half, and just tour the southern spots on the wish list: Old Tucson, the Sonoran Desert Museum, Tombstone, Karchner Caverns. That should give us one night out in a motel, perhaps two. We can still see friends in Sun City West, check out housing options (Sun City, S.C. West, single house vs. duplex vs. town house, sell here and move down vs. keep this house and snowbirding in a mobile home, etc.) and see a few places Steve wants to see in Phoenix proper.

That'll still be a full agenda. And we might even get to relax on occasion.

Back in the Harness

2011-08-30T06:08:00.002-05:00

Yes, I've been back at work, and doing pretty much everything I was doing before, regardless of the weight restrictions my surgeon tried to impose. It's a funny thing about calling in runs and getting the piece count and weight accurate: the customer - who is always right - seldom gets it right. They'll tell you three pieces, 10 pounds, and it's all in one box weighing 27 pounds. Or whatever. If I refused to pick up anything over 10 pounds when I actually arrived at a pick, I'd have no work.

But I feel fine. The scar is finally healed over, the adhesive allergy has finally given up on plaguing me after weeks of having scrubbed it all off, and I have some energy. Well, just about enough to get me through a work day.

It's amazing how uncomfortable my car seat has become. Two weeks off and you'd think I'd never sat in it before, much less for 11-12 hours at a time and for years in the same style seat. The body is slowly adjusting again, though any drive of a couple hours makes the hip and thigh ache. That never used to happen.

The knees felt completely fine for most of two weeks, but with resumed activity and cessation of the really good meds, they're back with a vengeance. By the time I get home at night, I can barely move, and just sitting in my recliner doesn't make them comfortable. It doesn't help that the end of summer has left us a bit short-handed, so I'm being asked to work later into the evenings. I hate to turn it down, after missing two weeks of income. Plus there's the little thing of a hospital bill. I haven't seen it yet, but I have seen the letter from the insurance company where they're denying payment. So whatever it would have been, add the ten grand that I thought they were going to pay.

With all that, the energy I start each day with barely lasts till I get home. There's nothing left to even watch much TV with, so I'm backed up on even the light schedule the DVR has been recording of end-of-summer programs. There's been none at all for blogging. I figure the only way to grab some time is to do it first thing in the morning. Right now, instead of getting Daddy up as usual by this time, I haven't even started the coffee.

So, bye.

Nonsense

2011-08-13T19:26:00.003-05:00

I'm just arriving home from one of our longest, hottest auctions, finding out that my car seat has become extremely uncomfortable for any distance driving, and get greeted with the following as soon as I put my things down and sit in my chair.

"I think we should call a meeting to set up ten clubs with two people each to discuss what we should do with the inheritance."

OK, there is just me and Daddy in the room, with Paul outside helping me empty the car of the things weighing over 10 lbs. that I'm not allowed to lift until October, namely my chair and the pieces of the scooter I hauled over to the auction. I don't even bother to ask him which twenty people he has in mind. But I was game to talk with him, if I could figure out where in his fantasy he was so I could participate.

"What inheritance, Daddy?"

"I don't know."

"Well, is somebody giving us money?"

"I don't know." He's already getting testy.

"Daddy, I just got here, late in the conversation. If I don't know what we're talking about, how can I contribute?"

He wasn't ready to hear anything approaching reason. I was already regretting my wish to keep him company. One last try. "Well, if there's no inheritance, what's the point of calling a meeting?"

"Can I talk?"

"OK."

"Stop interrupting me. I think you've had enough to say on the subject!"

Stop interrupting? Hmmm. "I just said 'OK', Daddy."

Apparently he can't take a "yes", because he continued, on and on, so testy that I simply left the room for little peace and quiet in the den. Here, doing this.

At that point he alternated between trying to keep track of how many dogs and cats were in the room at any given time, and wondering how he could hold a meeting if we weren't going to cooperate with him and attend his meeting. Paul was back in, and got his own earful. On several occasions Daddy voiced his disgust with the rest of us - whoever he thought we were or should be - for not giving him enough people to attend the meeting, announcing he couldn't hold a vote, take a motion, or even keep the meeting going.

About five minutes ago he formally canceled the meeting. Maybe it's time to go back and sit in a comfy chair again.

First Outing

2011-08-12T08:05:00.004-05:00

Since the screen house is attached to the house, it really doesn't count as my first time outside the house. So yesterday's drive to Wyoming for allergy shots was my first outing since the surgery.

There was a lot of prep involved, starting with a much-needed and long-delayed shower. I'd had one after getting home, but since the dressing I was told to leave on for ten-twelve days stayed wet for hours afterward, despite following directions to towel-wick it dry, I decided I could live without showering until it was ready to be removed. No sense courting infection. But first, remove the dressing.

It seemed like it was ready. Some of the lower edges were curling up and away from the skin, likely from being in more sweaty areas. I started there, slowly peeling off tape, until the whole gauze pad - nasty! - was removed. I found out three things: the tape removed some skin, it was the medical adhesive I'm allergic to, and there was a solid wall of overlapping tape strips over the actual incision yet to remove. The hospital had sent me home with three packets of wipes to remove the adhesive, so woefully inadequate that when Jessica offered to head to the local pharmacy and buy a box of them, I gratefully agreed. I think I ultimately used about a third of the box. I'm still reacting to having the stuff on my skin for that long, but that's just one of a myriad of itches I can't do anything about right now. Hardly noticeable in the bigger scheme of things - until I try to go to sleep at night, when each one magnifies without the distractions of the day to gigantic proportions to plague me.

Once everything was off, I discovered something else. I'd thought they sliced me open from pubic bone to navel. Nope. Didn't stop at the navel. Just went alongside and kept going. And apparently one of the stitches at the navel hadn't held. There was a gap, straight on one side, curved on the other, nearly an inch long, not healed over and oozing. Nasty!

Time to call for basic how-do-I-treat-this? information. My own doctor's office wouldn't even address the issue. Talk to the surgeon. So I did, and got the questions to assess the opening over the phone. Obviously too late to re-stitch. The ultimate was if it isn't oozing, leave it open to the air to finish healing. If it is, put a plain dressing over it to keep stuff out until it stops, then leave it open. And yes, showering is still OK.

Good! We had large dressings, with adhesive I was not allergic to, and I could buy more after the allergy shots. There was a whole list of errands.

I woke to the alarm for the first time in nearly two weeks, took care of the dogs, got Daddy up, and grabbed my shower. I was already exhausted. After a small break, I collected what I needed, got Paul up to fix Daddy breakfast, and got in the car. Whew! A comfy seat! There just isn't one in the house that doesn't get me saddle-sore and squirming after all this much time sitting. The car is much better, but still not perfect, and after this much time out of it, was causing problems by the time I got home again. I felt just fine driving, although generally weak. Hit the drive through for a breakfast sandwich - been so long I forgot to have them not add cheese (blech!) - and ate on the way to the hospital where the allergy clinic is.

While it took actual effort on my part to walk all the way in, even stopping at the bathroom, I had no problems. Walking out was another matter. I had to stop and rest partway through the lobby, rest again once in the car. I did take one small detour - two feet, actually - on the way in to stop at their scale. It's official: I'm down a full 35 pounds now since April!!!! I'm not sure it shows: the belly feels as bloaty-big as it did before surgery. It's just not solid anymore.

Was I going to actually be able to go back to work on Monday?

Next stop was the pharmacy, so I asked the pharmacist what she'd recommend I do besides taking iron pills to speed my recovery after so much blood loss. I'm pinking up again, but still feeling weak. She recommended Gatorade. Really! Maybe I was also needing to replace electrolites, since I hadn't been eating or drinking much. So I added that to the cart, after spending over twenty minutes reading labels. Once back in the car, I downed a small bottle, and started perking up again. More errands to run, none of which required actually leaving the car, and I arrived home still feeling fairly perky. Of course, with my 10-lb. weight restrictions, I let Paul bring in the bags from the car. Perky though I was, I went in my room and took a nap.

Had another bottle in the afternoon, maintained my feeling of increased well-being, finished the book I was on and started the next on in the series, and still took an afternoon nap.

Am I really going to be able to go back to work Monday?

Saturday will be a real test. It's auction day, over in Anoka at their fairgrounds. Doug has promised me a platform to sit on, rather than rolling around the room with the merchandise, and a computer (vs. paper) auction. I'm sincerely hoping to give him a good performance through the whole thing. I figure get there early enough to grab a morning nap in the car, get help hauling my chair and scooter out and setting them up, take more Gatorade, and maybe nap again before driving home.

Now to figure out what food to take, and when to eat it. The blood sugar levels have been kind of wild since the surgery, partly from no eating and no exercise. This is a month I have to keep track religiously, with an appointment at the end of it to monitor how I've been doing. It'll be interesting.

But seriously: will I really be able to go back to work on Monday?

This Choice?

2011-08-06T18:26:00.002-05:00

In many ways this has been the vacation I think I want when I'm in the midst of just too too much. Lots of sleep, though the dreams are a bit weird, like the snake I forgot I had and needed to feed for years, so I needed to wake up and clean up and go to the pet store - if I still could find one - that carried frozen mice for it to eat.

Somebody to cook for me, bringing my meals exactly as ordered, though the orders are limited to what's still in the house and what won't bump up my blood sugar. It does get boring after a bit when I can't just stop for Hot Wings or a Wendy's apple pecan chicken salad or mongolian beef on my way home from wherever because I haven't been out to wherever. Then again, no appetite.

Lots of reading, though my tailbone gets tired from sitting in the same way in the chair after a bit and I fall asleep on the book anyway.

No expectations of my taking care of my dad - at least not this week yet- because he gets it when my answer to his inquiry of how I'm doing informs him I'm still healing but slowly.

But the view is monotonous, no mountains, lakes, ocean waves, and little of interest on the DVR. Then again, no ambition to actually go anywhere I'd have to want to stay awake for. Nobody get the idea that you should come rescue me by taking me out for a drive to somewhere else. Please.

The last of the percoset pills get taken tonight, and after this it's only ibuprofin. I expect I'll sleep less, move more, and engender a bit more of an appetite. Oh, and hurt more, but after a week, I'm doing fairly well. I'm maintaining the 10 lbs of weight loss from the morning I went in, though the belly is still tender and a bit puffy, and way too easily will flop from side to side. I can drive after two weeks, lift only 10 lbs. for the next 4-6 after that. I could have showered by now, but the dressing is itching like crazy, and I suspect drawing any attention to it will drive me insane enough to worry it right off, something that shouldn't happen until next Thursday. The stitches will all absorb, so none to remove. Best take no chances with exposing them early . I can't smell myself, so though I feel grungy, there's nothing driving me to take a shower. Nobody else has been rude enough to complain.

I go back to the surgeon for a chechup 3-4 weeks after surgery. I expect next week I'll be clearheaded enough to remember to make that call. I kinda remembered sometime after office hours on Friday. I've had Paul monitoring my percoset usage because I've been too muzzy to figure out how many hours since - say, when was the last one again?

For all the laziness I claim to want when I'm overloaded, this complete indolence would drive me nuts for a planned vacation. It you're too drugged to be bored, you're not bored. If you're not too drugged, then you are bored, and that's no vacation. So next vacation will be called a honeymoon, located in scattered places on the Arizona map, and will have enough activities built in that I can entertain myself by complaining about how little free time I have.

Sounds ideal. I'll bring the camera for it.

Benign!

2011-08-04T01:49:00.010-05:00

Apparently, context is everything when one is picking out the most beautiful word(s) in a language.

The one thing that had me a little apprehensive about my surgery was waiting to hear what the test results were. I didn't have to wait. The first three words I heard as I was regaining consciousness were, in three different voices, "benign, benign", and "benign". As these voices were hovering near me, I figured they were referring to my surgery, and I didn't have to wait and worry. It was OK to wake up. I did, just long enough to moan, get a push-button placed into my hand, and heard another voice explain that all I had to do for the pain was push the button whenever I wanted.

It's pretty hard to OD on the stuff when the second push knocks you out. And I can't promise that it's not just a 10-second delay from the first push, that the 2nd one so soon doesn't count.

"The stuff" was dilaudid, the same painkiller we give my Dad in pill form at bedtime.

Everybody asks how long my surgery was. It was scheduled to start at 10 AM, but at 10:05 they were still working on finding a vein for the IV. Luckily for me, they tried using hot towels and finger slaps, not poke-by-trial-and-error like my most recent surgery, 22 years ago. Seven times! Seven times!!! Somebody's ego got in the way back then. I can't fault them for not finding a vein when first, I had one liquids-only day, then after 8 PM, no liquids, except for the two swallows it took to take my prescriptions, including a diuretic. Talk about a challenge! So, 10:05 was my start point, needle in and rolling down the hall, and 2:30 was when I started to wake.

They removed 6 lbs. (I asked them to weigh it and let me know. They weighed it regardless of whether I wanted to know.) I was told it was highly vascularized. In other words, it had a whole lot of blood vessels running through it, which also means it was not small and dense, but large and porous. Once the swelling goes down and the gas goes away, I'll have a nicely smaller tummy. Not tiny, just smaller. Highly vascularized also means I lost a lot of blood. I knew that the first time I looked at my hands. They were white, and since I was in the bathroom at the time, I checked out the face. It was too. I'm normally very ruddy-complected. I saw a "normal" face looking back at me. Weird! Anyway, my surgery usually costs 100 of whatever units they measure blood loss in. Mine they figured 1100. No wonder they were always asking if I felt dizzy.

No, I've been dizzy. This wasn't the same, but I did feel a little light-headed at times. and for the first several hours the dilaudid made the ceiling tiles roll, so I just closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

I got nothing but ice chips and a sponge that first day, although I was cheating and sipping the melt-water during the evening. Since nothing came back up, and nausea seemed to be their prime concern, I figured it wasn't going to be a problem. The nurses were all terrific, though the first night I'd forgotten where the nurse call was. They have these pictures on the side rails of the bed that work for back and knees up and down. They also show lights and the nurse call symbol, but they don't work from the bed sides. There was a thing on the end of a cord that worked for those, and by the time I finally got somebody's attention, I was pretty frustrated. They were busy settling in a couple other new patients, and didn't come in quite as often without my calling them. Once I figured that out, however, it was fine.

One of my big concerns was my blood sugar levels. It spiked a couple times, and they put me on insulin. Since I'd never been on that before, I was now concerned about how I'd react with that. Especially since it was night and I'd be getting fewer visits. When I was awake enough, I tested my own with my own kit. They took their own samples, so 6 times a day did seem reassuring. Their test might be ten minutes after mine, and it'd show a different result. I expected that. But their prick hurt a lot more than mine did, so for the final one before letting me out, I offered to do the stab myself and they could sample from the same blood spot. I was curious how well they two coordinated. Mine came up at 180, and theirs at 156! From the same drop of blood!

From the first I told everybody that I was leaving Tuesday by the end of the day. At first, only eyebrows were raised, until one of the nurses who was walking with me through the halls informed me that if I released myself without my doctor's approval, my insurance wouldn't cover any of the stay!

Well, then, I better hurry up and recover. Let's walk some more, shall we? The nice thing about my walking after surgery was that my knees didn't hurt a bit! Nada! Nothing! No twinge. Wow, musta been some good meds! Since the belly didn't either, I felt free to move a bit, when I wasn't asleep, which was still about 95% of the time. But I sat myself in the bed, "walked" my hipbones back into position so the bed bend and my back bend matched up, and no pain whatsoever. I even did a sit-up to pull the blanket up to cover my legs from the foot of the bed.

Frankly, I was amazed. The C-section hurt way more than this. So did having the gall-bladder out. Way more! This was a cake walk.

Food was a big disappointment. Breakfast was coffee, chicken broth and beef broth. (All three better at home.) With the nurse's help, I ordered Cheerios for my mid-morning snack. The kitchen wouldn't allow it otherwise. But we both reasoned that if I kept the broth down, I'd be on soft foods anyway, and after munching, Cheerios are mush by the time they reach the stomach.

Lunch was an omelet, with whatever I wanted in it. Only no onion, no mushroom, and no green pepper. Don't know why, something to do with my post-surgical diet. Supper was a cheeseburger, again no lettuce or tomato allowed. It's not that I had an appetite, or felt hungry, just deprived of flavor. And while they were very concerned about some things, including sodium, they sent along a little bowl with salt, pepper, cream and sugar - yes, sugar! - along with the food. One size fits all, send directly to patient, do not pass go, do not collect $200. I get to fill out a survey in a couple weeks about my stay. I'll be sure to mention it.

They switched me off the dilauded IV and over to Percoset with Tylenol the second morning to see how I tolerated it. It was two pills every three hours, and they were working fine. I finally convinced them to contact my surgeon at his office and get him over to check me out to see if I was indeed ready to go home. He popped in just before 5 PM, mentioning that the frozen section was also benign, and we were waiting on one more in a couple of days. I'd already ordered supper, had Paul on his way down, and was organizing my homecoming. Luckily the doc agreed. He did say, however, that the Percoset was slowing down my bowels, and I'd need to switch over to ibuprofin as quickly as possible. In aid of that, he sent me home with 20 pills, no refills. Fine, I was feeling great.

That lasted about halfway home. It turns out there are a whole lot of bumps in the road along that 45-mile stretch. By the time I got home, I was feeling every one of them. And that's with a pillow hugged between my tummy and the seat belt, taking most of the jostling.

I'm taking one pill now, every 3-4 hours apart, with Paul keeping track of them for me. While I'm on them, I don't do so well in that department. So he keeps track of how long since a pill, a meal, or whatever. And I'm mostly ensconced in my bedroom, either in bed or on the recliner loveseat for eating, reading, and some sleeping. I woke up an hour or so ago, and have been blogging. But now it's time for another pill and back to sleep. There's still lots of sleeping going on, and the pain isn't there until I move, mostly. But it's getting better.

Getting Ready for Surgery

2011-07-31T11:25:00.004-05:00

There's a lot more to it than I thought. I expected the pre-op checkup, of course. In case anybody wasn't sure, I passed. I'm healthy enough to find out just how sick I might be. Ironic, huh?

I couldn't get in to see my regular doc, but the clinic got me an appointment with another on the staff. After checking everything out, ordering labs, x-ray and EKG, he offered to pray with me at the end of the appointment. I declined, saying he could if it made him feel better, but he's not the one doing the surgery, so him I'm not that worried about. If my surgeon wants to pray, and it makes him a bit better prepared to do his best job, then go for it by all means.

I'm more concerned about what kind of music he likes in the OR. If I'm really lucky, it'll be classical, not rock or country western or jazz or.... Remember, they say even if you're unconscious, your ears register what's going on, even to the point of waking up depressed if negative comments are made about your condition on the table. So, Beethovan please, or Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Rodrigo, Vivaldi.... Or maybe ear plugs, eh?

Steve's pre-surgery orders were different from mine. Nothing about diet, just the nothing-after-midnight thing. The gave him some special antiseptic wipes to use the night before however, which still makes no sense to me. He was to bathe, then wipe down each limb with one and toss it, same for the torso. What was the point? All the normal bacteria were in the environment he remained in for hours afterward, including the ones on the clothing he dressed in afterward. He still got "sterilized" just before going in to surgery, as well as sterilizing the cutting field before the first knife cut.

I still don't get it.

I did get orders to stop taking ibuprofin and low-dose aspirin for 5 days before surgery, in other words, starting the next day. Ooohhh, fun. I get to work without any painkillers helping my knees? He did say I could take Tylenol, but that does liver damage in high doses, and I never found it helpful before. I was told for 5 days it wouldn't matter, as long as I took no more than a total of 8 extra-strength pills, spread out 2 at a time , 4 times a day. I've been doing that. I agree that there is a need to keep my platelets as sticky as possible. Don't want to lose any extra blood on the table. The first day it wasn't bad, likely because the ibuprofin and Tylenol were overlapping a bit as the first wore out of my system. I did note my blood sugar levels have been lower these five days given my usual eating patterns, and wonder how much ibuprofin has to do with it. I know it kicks up the blood pressure a bit, but never heard about blood sugar levels.

I still need to pack. They need my photo ID, my insurance cards, but leave the billfold home. Take off my rings, and bring no valuables. (So what do you call my driver's license?) I was given printouts of my xrays and EKG, along with a three-page medical history summary to bring. The doc was to fax these over to the hospital, but these are in case they don't connect. I'm bringing books, and a case for the glasses I'll need to read them. Toiletries are coming along, plus my cell and charger. (I wish I could give my cell to one of the OR nurses and ask for a picture of what they take out. Doubt it'll work.) The blood sugar test kit comes along. It'll be interesting to see how it goes with the combination of fasting, IV lines with whatever, and hospital foods. They said loose clothing (duh!). I'll wear out what I wear in, since the two hours I'm in it will hardly get it dirty enough to need changing, even the undies.

There was a call from the hospital OR staff explaining all the possibilities for parking. Not really necessary since I'll have Paul drop me off and go. He's looking forward to shopping at his favorite bookstore in Minneapolis as long as he's down in the cities and taking the week off work. But the whole call was necessary because the circle drive at the front entrance will be under construction. I could have him drop me across the street and walk in from there but there are steps, and I'm not planning on doing any since I'm not supposed to be taking anything by mouth after midnight tonight, so no painkillers for the knees. Oh, but then they changed that to mean I still take my blood pressure and allergy prescription meds. Just as little water as possible, please.

And then they changed it further to remind me not to eat anything the day before. That's today. Liquids only. The surgeon never mentioned it. Oversight? Or skipped due to the diabetes? But since the hospital staff mentioned that this doctor always requires it, I guess I'll work on compliance. Of course my definition of liquids includes yogurt, since that's just milk with bacteria added, and I just happen to have a supply socked in. I think pudding qualifies as a liquid the same way. Coincidentally, I have that too. Cottage cheese might be pushing it, however. All the other liquids in the house are extremely low in calories, so I'll be monitoring the blood sugar pretty closely today. After all, if it hit 83 on Friday with a normal diet, well.... Otherwise, coffee, tea, boullion, water.... BORING! At least I cooked the turkey for lunch yesterday so I got two meals out of it.

Steve joked that he wasn't going to call me today, that I'd be too cranky to talk to him. Well, he's part of what keeps me from being cranky. And yes, he already called. He's recovering in the one nursing home in Cokato, getting physical therapy for the knee. Today the dressing comes off, and he's looking forward to that. The knee implant feels more stable than the loose implant it replaced, so he's optimistic for a full recovery. We'll be recovering side-by-side, a hundred miles apart. I'm the lucky one who gets the two dogs, however.

It's time to go strip the bed so there are fairly clean linens to come home to. I won't want to do it when I get home!

Reclaimed 6: Thoughts on Stuffing a Turkey

2011-07-29T21:44:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to get my daughter to learn to make stuffing, but she insists that she just can't do it the same way I can. I suspect, since she's a fully competent and experimental cook, that she really just doesn't want to go through the work since she can talk me into making it for the family holiday get-togethers. After I retire and move to Arizona, maybe she'll get acquainted with the charms of a box of Stove Top.

But recently my son Paul, the one who was a cook in the National Guard and painstakingly translated the best of recipes for 100 into recipes for a normal family after he finished service, the same one who picks the backyard fruit and cans jellies as gifts for everybody, asked me how to make stuffing, and turned out a batch as good as anything I've made.

Back in 2009 I'd quit experimenting with it and stabilized how I made it. This is what I said about it then:

* * * * *

One of the first things my new mother-in-law taught me in order for me to be considered a PROPER member of the family way back when was how to stuff a turkey. It made no difference that I had been doing it with my own mother for years. It made no difference that there was a new product on the market for instant dressing called Stove Top. Sacrilege! I was to be shown the RIGHT way. I’ve made it ever since, making small adaptations but always following her core principles. It’s the one food my children expect from me every Thanksgiving, X-mas, and Easter. It’s now the one food I actually still cook, since my busy lifestyle lends itself to prepared, heat-em-or eat-em-cold fare. It became so ingrained that it was a total shock to me to find out after her death that the last years of my mother-in-law’s life she had actually started relying on Stove Top! (Now that arthritis has started attacking my hands, I’m more tolerant.)

I’ve tried writing it down as a recipe, so my own daughter can take over the tradition, but she tells me it never comes out right for her. While I consider that it might be just an excuse so that she doesn’t have to make it, since she is an excellent and adventurous cook, it’s possible that it’s simple truth. Later today I’m going to be in my kitchen, showing my other son and his teenage daughter all the steps and explaining the do’s and don’ts, in hopes that some day they can take over, and I can relax. Heck, I might even consider Stove Top.

The biggest problem with writing down my stuffing recipe is that the answer to every question about ingredients is “It depends.” So rather than writing a recipe, I’m going to attempt to guide you through all the different ways it depends and how to make your own choices.

Start with the bread. How much? What kind? How dry? What size? It all depends. How big a turkey? Will you cook the stuffing inside the bird or separately? How many do you want to feed, and do you want leftovers? I’ve found about 1-1/2 pounds of bread is fine for a 12–13 pound turkey, whether inside or out. Add more for bigger, more mouths to feed, leftovers. What kind varies, but always the more whole grain and less white, the better the stuffing. You can buy it right off the shelf, or save up for months with the heel ends and other bread scraps nobody in the family wants. In our family, one son loves raisin bread but hates the heels, so saves them up for his contribution to stuffing. It’s delicious! We also notice that the number of buns in a bag never matches the number of brats in the package, and the leftovers are stale before the next brat roast. For whatever tag ends, dry for a day, then re-bag and freeze. When you pull the bag out to thaw, open it briefly and knock out the frost that has accumulated inside the bag. Otherwise you have a nasty soggy mess. Even our dog won’t touch it.

All this bread has to be torn into bits. Not cut. torn. Anything between the size of the store croutons prepared for stuffing and the salad croutons served in a restaurant will do, but the smaller they are, the more the flavors mix and spread evenly. A very large mixing bowl or 10-quart roasting pan usually holds the smaller batches, but you'll find out as you go. I often spill over into two mixing containers, and then it is a challenge making the ingredients distribute evenly. While moist bread makes a better start and is easier to handle, if dry is what you have, just remember to add more moisture later. This will wind up being a moist dressing.

Speaking of moisture, that's the second item that requires advanced prep. Of course you could just open a can of chicken broth, or more if needed. But I like to take a couple of roasted chicken carcasses, including skin, bones, and remaining meat, and boil them in a pot full of water for about an hour. The broth will be dark and you will need a colander to separate the broth from the bits. Do whatever with the meat. The broth can stand in the fridge overnight to separate fat from gel, since gel is what your broth will be once cold. It can also be poured in leftover containers and frozen well ahead of time. You might just skip that whole bit if you're doing the stuffing in the bird, since that will provide plenty of moisture. Nowadays, however, worries about salmonella, or the desire to use pan drippings to make gravy, generally lead to the decision to cook the stuffing outside the bird. The moisture doesn't actually get added until just before the stuffing goes into the oven, and after all the other ingredients are added. How much to add then depends on what it still takes for a dressing that is moist and sticky, almost like bread pudding, before cooking.

The third thing taking advance prep are the cranberries. I have fallen in love with Craisins, the orange flavored variety. Orange peel has long been one of my secret ingredients, and this accents it. A few hours ahead of time, even overnight, the Craisins need to be rehydrated. I use the smaller 6-oz. pack for a 12-pound turkey. You can use orange juice, chicken broth, or in a pinch, just water. If you haven't used raisin bread, add some raisins to the same bowl to soak, just enough liquid to cover. If you have dried orange peel, sprinkle that on top. It all goes into the stuffing later. The fruit adds a special holiday touch to the turkey. If you like, you can also add blueberries, cherries, and/or apple pieces. My mother-in-law informed me that she always added apple to stuffing for ducks and geese, as it helps abate the strong gamy flavor that many people don't care for.

I usually add one large onion, chopped and sauteed in a pan with a stick of butter. Again, amounts are approximate for stuffing a 12-lb. bird. Sometimes the onion is cooked until it just goes translucent, sometimes browned for flavor. While that is cooking, I throw sage, celery seed, dill weed, and a bit of garlic in to flavor the butter. (Don't burn the garlic!) I don't add salt. How much again depends. Sage should be the predominant flavor, and I often add more after everything is mixed and I've tasted it. I start with about 2T sage, 1 tsp of each of the others. Mixed in the butter, the flavor spreads more evenly through the stuffing, eliminating pockets of overwhelming flavor and large pockets of blah. When the onions are done, the mix gets poured out of the pan over the bread, and I use still-dry bread crumbs to mop the pan and soak up the last of the butter and spices.

Half a stalk of celery gets washed, chopped, and added straight to the bread crumbs while the onions are cooking. You can use the heart if you prefer, but it really doesn't matter. I have learned, in order to save the rest for celery sticks that don't get nasty in a few days, to wrap and seal them in aluminum foil. Don't know why it works, but it does. Plastic lets them rot.

Through the years I have learned what I don't like to add. Wild rice sounds good, but it upsets the flavor balance for me, and I haven't figured out a way around it, don't care to try. Giblets can be OK in stuffing. but personally I love to munch heart and gizzard myself, having no competition from the rest of the family. And liver is fit only for the dog, who has learned to love when I prepare stuffing. Heck, when I prepare anything, actually. Slivered almonds are another thing that sounds better then the result, and I haven't bothered to check pecans to see if they fare better. Walnuts give canker sores to some members of the family, so I didn't ever try those either. Some years I have added blueberries and cherries, but their flavor tends to get lost in the mix, so I seldom bother anymore. Since they're not in season when turkey dinners are traditionally prepared, you need dried or frozen, anyway.

Now that all the dry ingredients are prepared, they and the onions/butter get thoroughly mixed together. It always takes a much bigger pan/roaster/bowl than I planned on, but I figure what spills on the counter is fair game for nibbling (aka taste test), so long as I've scrubbed the counter well first. This is when you check sage levels, since you are not risking your health over uncooked proteins. If it's not the predominant flavor, add more, cautiously, until it tastes right.

This is now the time for those final decisions. If cooked in the bird, your stuffing is pretty much done, ready for, well, stuffing. My mother-in-law would disagree, because she insisted the last part was unskippable: adding eggs. Whip up 2-3 eggs and blend them into the stuffing, and your end product holds together on your plate rather than falling all over after serving. If for any reason you can't commit to cooking your stuffing immediately after adding the eggs, leave them out completely, or keep them around cool and whole for adding at the last minute. And if you chronically undercook your bird, leaving the stuffing at best lukewarm, no eggs. Nada. Better yet, don't even eat that bird! It the meat's not falling off the bones, it just ain't done.

After adding eggs or deciding not to, check the stuffing for all-over moisture. If it cooks in the bird, not to worry: there'll be plenty of liquid soaked in by the time it's cooked, added to the moisture in the fruits and veggies. If you cook it separately, then add enough broth to make your uncooked stuffing moist and sticky. You will know this because by this time you will likely have given up on mixing your concoction with a large spoon and have resorted to digging in with your (clean) hands to evenly distribute the flavors. As a bonus for this practice, not only do you already know about moisture levels, you get to lick those hands clean before covering the cooking pan with aluminum foil, ready to be cooked. Well, unless you're paranoid about salmonella from the eggs you used, of course. But, hey, nummy!

Cooking temperature id 325F, with our without the bird. Slow but dependable. Turkey gets tender, stuffing doesn't dry out if properly covered. Stuffing alone in a single pan takes about an hour. In the bird, follow the cooking time directions that come with the bird, adding time for the extra weight. Better, use a good thermometer. Regardless, I'll repeat: if the meat doesn't fall off the bone, it's not done.

If it's a small bird, I like the paper bag method. First, go shopping at a grocery store that offers (clean) paper shopping bags. Set the bird in a standard 11x13 cake pan, set the whole inside the paper bag, close the ends by rolling them tight. The thermometer gets poked through the bag so you can read it without disturbing the bird. The skin browns nicely this way, while keeping much of the moisture in. After cooking, tear open the bag and toss, preferably not where the dog can get into it.

A large bird goes into a roasting pan with a cover, removing the cover for the last bit of cooking to brown the skin.

Since I always make more stuffing that fits inside the bird, I bunch the rest in the bottom of the pan around the bird to soak up pan drippings. No gravy, but the best dressing in the world that way! And no, I don't do gravy anyway, Ever.

This year we took making stuffing to a new level, and I'm not just talking about teaching the next generations. We made a super-sized batch, increased the egg proportion further yet, and cooked the stuffing in muffin tins. We used two different sizes, adjusting time accordingly, generally 25-30 minutes, depending. Smaller muffins got paper liners, larger ones got no-stick spray. (Buttering the pan works too.) The point was not just to avoid the hassle of cooking on the day, but taking a bag of already cooked muffins and a serving bowl saved the mess of hauling cooking dishes, and cleanup instead of conversation. Leftovers were no problem, since the muffins were simply left behind at my daughter's house (our host) to go with other leftovers for future meals. We had plenty at home. After cooking, the muffins were bagged in the now-empty bread bags, and either refrigerated or frozen, depending on plans for use. A bag could always be pulled out of the freezer for the next holiday meal, or a few pulled out at a time to go with a roasted chicken. They can thaw on the drive to the party, and get microwaved for warming just before serving. In case you are wondering, the batch started with 4 lbs. of bread, 3 large onions, etc., etc., and got topped off with 8 eggs. They worked like a charm, and will likely be cooked and served that way often in the future.

Reclaimed 5: Religion Hunter Bites the Dust

2011-07-29T06:54:00.002-05:00

The following was inspired by headlines a couple years back. By this reposting, the leader responsible for the deaths has been charged and sentenced. I'm not sure whether I think it's a fair sentence or not for the situation. Make your own decisions.

* * * * *

Five days a week I’m a news junkie. On weekends I take a complete break. Come Monday morning, I’m again ready for the news, catching up on whatever happened over the weekend. The first thing that slapped me in the face Monday morning, even before the every-five-minute repeat of the weather, was this story: a local woman had died after traveling to Arizona to participate in somebody’s idea of a sweat lodge ceremony. After keeling over from excessive heat (possibly literally biting the dust), she was taken to a hospital and later died. Authorities stated homicide charges were pending.

The headline is mine, so if you find it disrespectful, facetious, obnoxious, and judgmental, blame me, not the local news outlet. The story and what I took from it pushed so many of my buttons that every one of those adjectives fits what’s behind the headline. And I will confess right up front I’m reacting to very few facts.

I refer to her as a religion hunter. It’s not exactly a compliment. To me it’s more of a sickness, and it’s endemic in this society, perhaps throughout our species. I do understand the need to find something outside of one’s self, something bigger, hopefully wiser, something to fix whatever is ailing, whether in me, loved ones, or the world. We seek something to be worthy of our awe. Religions fill this need for most of us, offering answers to those questions. Sometimes the answers are easy, sometimes impossibly hard.

What bugs me most about religions lately is that religiosity itself has become sacred. It’s the same way nationalism has become sacred to some people. To me, as I understand sacred, that concept should be reserved for God, or Allah, or whatever higher being or ideal. To make the trappings that surround the group-think teaching, that describe the divine and set down rules to follow, as themselves sacred just succeeds in driving us a step farther away from the divine. Admittedly, they can be helpful, but so can a vacuum cleaner. While cleanliness is next to godliness, I’ll never call a vacuum cleaner divine.

Possibly one of the better arguments against making religiosity itself sacred is the number of people who are driven away from whatever the religion espouses in search of some new, different religion. I’m not talking about those turned off completely from the concept of religion. I’m talking about those actively hunting a new religion. This woman apparently was one of those, participating in some very minor (“fringe”) sect, adopting a Native American ceremony in search of meaning. If the Native American religion had been adopted (i.e., a context given to the ceremony to supply meaning) I’d have expected different skin tones and facial features on the group’s leader, and perhaps a name like Yazzie or Two Bears. But apparently they took the quickie route, not bothering to learn about harmony and beauty–or sensible, safe precautions–but going for the gimmick: the sweat lodge. I have to believe that’s as offensive to Native Americans as someone coming into a Catholic church, dispensing with reading the Bible or going through confession, and presenting themselves at the altar for confession. Voila–quickie Catholic on the half shell.

Since religiosity itself has become sacred, nobody questions what others do to “find” religion, or what they do in order to serve their particular brand of religion. So folks go along with the stupid, the selfish, the dangerous, as long as somebody tags it with “religion.” Another recent story points this out. A teenager with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was denied standard medical treatment by his parents in the name of religion, until the courts stepped in to order treatment. Nobody questioned the sincerity of the parents religious beliefs, even though these beliefs didn’t manifest themselves until AFTER the kid’s first course of chemotherapy, when the kid quite understandably hated the pain and discomfort of the treatment’s side effects and protested having to go through with round two. So is it still religion when the prime precept seems to be keep my kid comfortable even if it kills him?

Being a religion hunter says a couple of things about you. First, you are likely sincerely seeking that something outside yourself. Unfortunately, the longer you look without finding, the more you are likely to become prey to the grifters, the charlatans, the greedy, and the idiots who just might kill you. Second, it says you are looking to others to give you what you are unable to give yourself. If you hunt out religions, you must carry the belief that other people know something, hold some secret, that you haven’t found yet–and that it’s something that they can share.

I’ve long since had a problem with that. Being around groups of other people works against growing religious feelings in me. Partly it’s a trust issue–too few of them have earned it. Partly they’re a distraction from whatever I’m trying to achieve. We are such a gregarious species that it’s difficult to be in the presence of other people and ignore them, but that’s what I’d need to do in order to find something I’d call divine. I’ve concluded that religious groups are enforcers of the group-think necessary to keep the leaders in power and control the masses. That idea alone is a further turn-off for me. Finally, I’m simply not convinced that others know some mysterious secret, or that they can share it. I’ve had the distinct displeasure of working with somebody who KNEW that he knew exactly the right words to ensure his own salvation. He also KNEW that knowledge of those words was limited, and he was one of the select few and I wasn’t. Others haven’t been so obnoxious about it but still cling to the firm belief that there is only one way, and theirs is it. It apparently comforts them.

So, personally, I have to get away from other people to explore my own spirituality, to examine my conscience, find my values, discover whatever is worthy of awe. A quiet couple hours in the woods, watching waves pound the shore, watching storms build and pass, letting my eyes devour the mountains, or really listening to a Beethoven symphony–these are things that help. I don’t expect to find all the answers, nor even most of the questions. I doubt I’ll ever be a religion hunter, though I can manage a smidgen of sympathy for those who are.

And a part of me appreciates the irony that our local religion hunter already has found out the answer to the question all of the rest of us have: what happens after death? While I’m really, really interested in that answer, I’ll wait for it.

Reclaimed 4: Two Towers, Part 2

2011-07-28T21:14:00.001-05:00

It only slowly really dawned on me just how much courage my daughter has. To the casual observer, the life she lives doesn’t seem to require much courage, though we can never really know another’s demons. But the primary reason is that I never really had to struggle with a phobia as she has, and thus, never really understood it.

I’m not saying I wasn’t irrationally scared of something, although I dispute the irrational part. To me it’s rational, knowing that when I was four, observing in innocent curiosity the little black spider crawling towards me on the stick I held, it really did bite me on the webbing between my fingers, and I had the mark of it for a long time after. So my fear of spiders was from experience, not a phobia, and didn’t fall into the same league as a genuine phobia, at least to me. After all, when my kids were growing up, I conquered it long enough to “show them” that spiders were mere nuisances in the house, nothing to be afraid of as THEY squished one or captured it to be released outside. That way, you see, I didn’t have to go get close to one again. The kids did. It worked perfectly.

Not the same thing at all.

But my daughter had the family phobia, on her dad’s side: acrophobia or agoraphobia; there were long discussions as to just which it was by the family members who had it. It was definitely a fear of heights, compounded by the wide open spaces that revealed just how high the height in question was. Low, flat open spaces? No problem. Being high up in an enclosed space that hid the actual height? No problem.

It wasn’t my phobia, and I had trouble giving credence to it when my husband demonstrated his problem while hiking a clear, level path on the side of a low hill, or being near a high window. I knew these places were perfectly safe, and I’m afraid my empathy got somewhat replaced by silent snickering. Then I became pregnant, and the family brought me into the problem: what if the baby had the same phobia? Can one raise a child not to “get” the phobia by not talking about it and never acknowledging it? They thought it was the best way to go, as if it were contagious and no exposure, no problem. Being ignorant, I went along. I certainly couldn’t expose a child to fear of heights, since I gloried in them–as long as there was something to hold on to.

My first indication that this lovely theory was just so much wishful thinking came when she was two, and we were on a field trip to the state capitol building. We were climbing this beautiful marble staircase, which had a lovely marble railing supported by marble columns with–uh-oh–spaces in between where a child could look out and down and see just how much farther away the floor was getting with each step. Her steps slowed, then stopped. I tried the ignore-it bit, urging her to come along like she was just an ordinary dawdling child. We did finally get her to the top of the staircase by switching her over to the center railing where the view was mostly other steps and people’s legs.

We took the elevator back down.

The next opportunity this phobia had to display itself was a trip over the Blue Ridge Parkway when she was around eight. It’s a beautiful place, low, rolling mountains, bluer with the haze of distance. The highway is cut on the edge of the slopes, so land rises above you on one side and drops off on the other. I was entranced, pulling off at nearly every opportunity to park and gaze, soaking up the experience without driving right off the road. My daughter, on the other hand, was soon riding curled up down on the floor in front of her seat, despite the ironclad family seat-belt rule, so she didn’t have to look out the window and see so much “down” extending all around her. I wanted the drive to last forever. She just wanted it over.

The fact that she preferred to sacrifice this vision of timeless beauty for the opportunity to see nothing farther away than she could reach with her hand finally helped it soak in. My daughter had a real, genuine phobia. While I couldn’t achieve the full empathy of understanding how it felt, I did finally get that it was real and powerful.

During the next couple years, it was easy to forget it existed, as few things in her usual environment triggered it. In fact, she willingly climbed up the rope ladder into the tree house we put up in the back yard and showed no discomfort on our high backyard deck.

She was about ten when the family trip took us to Itasca State Park. My family had lived nearby while my brother and I grew up, and it was a regular destination for us. This was my kids’ first visit. One of the mandatory stops was the forestry tower, open to the public for the long climb up flights of stairs, to squeeze through a hole in the floor and emerge in the observation room, windows on all sides to view lakes and trees and, if you were a real forestry employee, watch for and report fires.

The boys were up it in a flash, loudly proclaiming their enjoyment of every step and every viewpoint. Somewhere in the 2nd flight of stairs I paused, realizing my daughter was not keeping up. Not only that, she was curled up in a ball on the landing below me and crying.

All my kids had grown up on my stories of climbing the windmill tower and how glorious it was. They’d also been prompted during the planning stages of this vacation that this forestry tower would be their closest chance–and safest–to live that kind of experience. She so badly wanted to know what this would be like, but her two bouncy, active brothers sent vibrations all through the tower structure and her phobia kicked in, overwhelming her.

She couldn’t go up. Nor, just one story above the ground, could she go down.

I sat next to her and talked to her, trying to find out what she really wanted and to figure out how, or even whether, I could help. What she wanted was to go up to the top. She needed support and encouragement and always the safety of the choice to change her mind. Most of all, she needed her brothers off of the tower, and staying off for however long it took. Not only did they make it wobble, but they would laugh at her, and under the circumstances, that was intolerable.

We talked it over, putting together a plan while the boys had their fill of the tower. Once down, they were soundly enjoined not to set foot on the tower until my daughter and I got back down. They were also not to wander anywhere they couldn’t see the bottom of the tower. Knowing them, I figured that had half a chance of working, at best, but right then, my daughter needed my full, undivided attention.

It worked like this: she would hold the railing with one hand going up and hang on to me with the other. She could close her eyes any time she needed and still feel her way up. At each landing I’d ask if she wanted to continue, and it would be her choice. She could sit down and rest at any time. If she needed to, she could bury her face in me, and I promised to make sure she got down safely even if I needed to carry her.

We started up. And she doggedly, determinedly, kept heading up. We paused occasionally, while she gathered herself and her resources for the next step, the next flight. Finally, a somewhat shaky but triumphant daughter stood in the top of that tower, looking out over the trees, pointing out lakes and matching them to the information inside the walls for identification, seeing how rolling hills made for rolling treetops, and spying birds and clouds above it all, everything she’d heard about from me. She stayed long enough to really savor the experience.

Then, together, we made it back down.

We even found the boys again, after about five minutes of looking and calling. It seems their definition of staying in sight of the bottom of the tower was, well, about what I’d thought it would be.

A lot of years have passed, and she’s done a lot of things to make me proud, make me wonder at the person and the package of skills and talents. But nothing ever matched this.

Reclaimed 3: Two Towers, Part 1

2011-07-28T21:12:00.001-05:00

To be completely fair to my parents, it simply never occurred to them that they might actually have to TELL me not to climb the tower. Who might have thought that a five-year-old would suddenly get a yen to see the tops of the trees? It never occurred to me either that this long-abandoned windmill tower set behind the main house on our eight-cabin resort on Second Crow Wing Lake was anything but just another thing in the landscape….

Until the day it did.

I think it started when I stood at the base of it and looked up its length and saw that it kept going up through the oaks that surrounded it. What was up there?

We had an old A-frame swing set which, when I was five, was still a challenge to me physically. No, not the swinging part, the “treat the frame as a set of monkey-bars, grab the side bar and somersault around to hang by your knees, pull up and stand” part. My older brother could do it, and it was something to ridicule me for that I struggled with it.

These braces, all triangular construction for stability, even at their largest near the ground, were closer together and nowhere near so intimidating to my shorter limbs. Plus, it looked like they got smaller and closer as they got higher. I should be able to do this. All I had to do was put this hand here, then this foot, then that hand, then that foot, and back through the cycle, moving just one at a time, in order. Only one. The other three stayed put until the fourth was solidly secure in its new position. At five, I was smart enough to know that.

It wasn’t scary. A few steps up led to a few more, then more, each ease of success breeding more. Finally I was nearing branches, and looked back down at how far the ground was below me. I had never been this high before and the world started to look different. This was great!

Moving up through the trees, my world narrowed to the bars and braces and the branches and leaves of the trees. It was like my own secret world up here. Suddenly I had the power of knowledge of a place nobody else had ever been. Well, certainly nobody else in my family, and at five, that’s pretty much the world, except for the customers of the resort. I knew THEY had never been up here!

Gazing raptly through the maze of zigzagging oak branches, I could imagine myself as a squirrel in the most marvelous playground ever, running, jumping, hiding, finding all the secret places available to something of that size. It was one of my favorite imagination games, telling myself if I were tiny, I could….

It got lighter as branches grew sparser, and suddenly I was above the tops of the trees! What a view! And what a surprise! The tree tops, in my imagination, would be spread out flat around me, but here they were in rolling hills and valleys, occasional tall ones poking above the rest. Oh, of course, the ground was hilly, especially around all the lakes, and the trees just followed the land. I got it. And there was our lake, what little I could see of it, since I wasn’t that far above the trees. The tower’s braces were significantly smaller at this point, and it was less comfortable finding hand and foot holds to climb higher. Not that there was much “higher” left on this tower.

Let’s see, over there, that lake must be Palmer Lake, where my dad would go fishing when he could get away from the resort. Almost nobody fished Palmer, and the crappies and bluegills were enormous compared to what came out of Second Crow Wing, with three active resorts surrounding it. I was nowhere near tired of the view, when….

“Heather.”

It was my mom, missing me. Oops. Maybe if I didn’t answer, she’d stop calling? Not a chance!

“HEATHER! WHERE ARE YOU?”

Oh-oh. Somehow, I knew that even though nobody had ever told me not to climb the tower, I’d be in trouble if they knew I had. Maybe I could wait until they went away so they wouldn’t know where I’d been? But I’d be in so much worse trouble if I ignored that call. Mom was a champion worrier, and every minute that passed was fuel to another disaster scenario, me drowning in the lake, lost in the woods, eaten by bears, run over by a car…. Realistic or not, the longer she got to worry, the more I’d get to pay for it. The problem just wasn’t going away, because now my Dad had joined in.

“I’m here.”

“Where’s ‘here’?”

“I’m up here.” I was climbing down, even as I spoke. Still safely, one foot, one hand, other foot, other hand.

As you might imagine, once they located me, they freaked out. Of course, nobody’d ever heard that expression yet, but it really fits. The more they insisted I come down immediately–I already was, wasn’t I?–they more they also got scared I’d fall, and told me so. What’s the big deal? I figured out how to get up, I can figure out how to get down. Can’t they see that? How stupid do you have to be to fall off one of these things with all these great places to hold on to, anyway?

Well, while there apparently are people that stupid, since those kind of falls happen, I wasn’t, and arrived in one piece on the ground to face my punishment. I didn’t complain too much over it, figuring I must have earned it even though I wasn’t really breaking the rules. It was much like when I wasn’t really breaking the rules–except for wasting things–when I lifted a box of strike matches to see how they–and the oak leaves next to the house–would burn, in ones, and twos, and head-to-head… Nobody had thought then to tell me not to play with matches, either. And by they time they did, I’d learned that fire isn’t as easy to control as you’d think.

But that’s another story.

I never did either again. I also never forgot the glory of climbing that tower. Even as a parent when I told my kids the story and told them that they must never ever do what I did as a kid, I never conceded for one minute that I had ever been unsafe up on that tower.

I still haven’t.

Reclaimed 2: The Picture

2011-07-28T21:01:00.002-05:00

The actual picture is shown on Quiche Moraine at the end of the story. I don't have a copy of it handy to add here.

* * * * *

The Picture

It all started when Steve and Gene met back in third grade. It was the early 50s in Greeley, Colorado, high plains ranching country with the Rockies on your west and sky in every other direction. It was when everybody liked Ike and school kids practiced duck-and-cover drills under their desks. Steve’s family had just moved into town, and of all the possible other kids to pick from, these two became friends.

Considering the times, you might think these two played cowboys and Indians after school, or war games, or maybe even ranchers and rustlers. Everybody else did, at least if they were boys. But these two developed their own game, an after-the-war game, and not even WWII, recently ended, but the Civil War. They never actually gave it a name. It was just the game they always played with each other.

It always starts the same way. Gene is the Union soldier, Steve the Rebel. (Steve says he picked that part, not out of sympathy for the cause, but because he’s always felt a bit rebellious, and it sounded good to him.) The war has just ended, both are finding their way home on foot, still in uniform, bedraggled, soul-weary. The only thing keeping them putting one foot ahead of the next is the thought of home and family. Meeting on the road, they recognize each other through the grime and dust for the brothers they in fact are. There follows a reconciliation, joyful that each has survived, each forgiving the other for taking the part they did in the war. United, they return home to their family.

They find that not all is well after their absence. And here is where each day’s game really gets fun. Now the boys fight together to save their family from the evil enemy du jour, whether it’s carpetbaggers, bands of marauding soldiers, wild animals, fire, weather, or anything else a well-informed imagination can bring to bear. And it is well-informed. As the boys grow older, they read and do research, and each bit of knowledge improves their game, makes it more sophisticated and more fun. And of course they always triumph. It is, after all, their game.

Nothing lasts forever. Families move, seldom for reasons having anything to do with childhood friendships. First one left the area, then the other. Both lived several places around the country, never the same place and time. Both married, had children, divorced, formed new attachments, developed hobbies, gained grandchildren, and managed, somehow, to keep in touch.

It was mostly by phone calls, perhaps as often as weekly through the years, sometimes skipping years. Recently they stopped to figure out that it had been 45 years since they had actually seen each other and were starting to give up on its ever happening again for real. Both were finally retired. What had been work and family commitments keeping them apart had now become a seemingly insurmountable financial obstacle. Steve was living in Minnesota and Gene in Florida, both surviving on Social Security and Medicare. Neither owned property. Neither could afford an internet connection. Both had debts. Only one had a car; only one had teeth. Life had etched itself on their faces, on their souls.

Still, they both had a dream, kept alive through the years. They would meet again, somehow, and when they did, they’d get a portrait taken. It wouldn’t be an ordinary picture, no, not for them. They would go to one of those costume portrait studios, where you can pick out your favorite period costume, pose with campy accessories in front of a period backdrop, and pretend you lived way back then, or just had ancestors who strongly resembled you. The two of them, of course, would be dressed in Civil War uniforms, commemorating that moment where their childhood game had started each time, meeting on the road.

More and more, it was looking like it was just a dream.

Then one year, Steve’s lady friend, desperately needing a vacation from both work and winter, decided the budget could be stretched just a wee bit more to cover a second plane ticket, if juggled with a shorter motel stay and car rental, and Gene’s city would suit as well as any other warm southern place. She promised to put up with Gene and his lady, whatever they turned out like, as long as Steve promised her a day for just the two of them. Merry Christmas!

In the actuality of it, everybody had a great time. All were friendly, good folks, each just enough of a character to keep the days spent together interesting. The weather cooperated, highs hovering around 70 and not enough rain to fill a thimble. There was plenty of Spanish moss and ocean in the scenery and sufficient local wildlife and birds to satisfy any camera-ready tourist. Steve and Gene kept conversation going almost nonstop. It wasn’t catching up on family, since they’d done that through the years. It was a combination of “Do you remember —— from school and whatever happened to them?” and discovering they could talk for literally hours about all the movies they had seen and collected, and books they’d read.

Turns out that several years after the boys split, Louis L’Amour wrote a book about two brother soldiers reuniting after the Civil War. Both Steve and Gene had read it at some point. Both agreed, no matter how great the author was, it just wasn’t as good as their game had been.

But what could have been?

Getting the portrait taken was the high point of the reunion. It took a whole day, involving a road trip to old town St. Augustine, an address with no directions or map, and a maze of streets with one lane and no parking. Gene, always striving for authenticity, tried to find the rattiest, thread-worn uniforms, as they would have looked after years of battle, but had to settle for the higher standard the portrait studio prided itself on. He was also the one who kept pulling his hat down to cover his forehead, as soon as the photographer finished adjusting it up again to show his face and turned back to the camera to take the picture. Gene had his own ideas of what was important.

In the end, the pictures turned out quite well. Each chose his favorite pose to keep, matted and ready to frame, and they bought the disc and rights for the whole shoot. There is one in there, after all the formula shots were taken, where the photographer let them chose how they wanted to pose. In it, the two of them are shaking hands, meeting on the road. You can still see the boys-that-were in their old-man eyes, ready to start the game once again.

Reclaimed 1: Goodbye, Toby

2011-07-28T20:45:00.006-05:00

I'm not feeling particularly creative right now, so I thought it would be a good time to reclaim some previous writings from where they were posted on Quiche Moraine. They all go back to before I was writing my own blog, but then that was Quiche Moraine's point. If they published from people who weren't doing their own blogging yet, they might be inspired to actually start one on their own. I guess I'm one of their success stories that way.

I did link to these in my opening post, but since Quiche has been inactive for a while now, though still present, I decided to post these on my own blog as well, keeping them against the day when Quiche might be abandoned. You can still find them there, although my name is nearly impossible to find. Mostly I'm listed as "Special Guest." But they are mine. They range from February, 2009 to November of that year. Their acceptance persuaded me that I had to write.

* * * * *

Goodbye, Toby

I asked our vet this morning whether she thought our pets somehow understood that we thought we were doing them a kindness when we brought them into the vet to be euthanized. I thought it was mostly a rhetorical question at the time, a way of stalling, a way to avoid crying, which I hadn’t thought I was going to do but did anyway, and a way, maybe, to beg for absolution.

After all, there was the same old perkiness in his step this morning, the same tugging-on-the-leash excitement he always had at going on a road trip, the same unquestioning loyalty and snuggliness, and even though he could no longer get into the car himself like he could just the year before, he gave every appearance of having a great ol’ time. Every bit of him this morning belied what I knew to be true, that the seizures were coming more and more often, that they twisted his little body into impossible contortions that would have done Linda Blair proud, and that each time wrenched a howl from him that broke my heart when I heard it, even jarring me from a sound sleep with only the memory of it in my ears and the dread knowledge of what it had meant.

I wasn’t expecting a real answer from the vet, but she surprised me by taking a couple minutes to answer fully and thoughtfully what she believed our pets—and hers—comprehended of what was going on in their final moments, and to state firmly and unequivocally that they sensed the caring and concern of their owners. And in this case, no doubt, the caring of the attending vet as well. I love my vet, not just for the year-round care, but because she never shirks from this last responsibility or tries to guilt me into expensive and pointless tests and treatments, though she lets me know when these might be a realistic option. She knows she has two patients in the room this final time, and manages to give us both what we need.

Goodbye, Toby. You were our “rescue dog,” a nine-year-old Shih Tzu given to us by a family who no longer had room in their lives for you but needed to find you another good home. You were the sweetest dog I’ve known, even if you did like the guys best. You hated the cold outside, and loved finding the warmest thing you could snuggle up to, even if it meant begging to be lifted up onto the chair. It was a privilege knowing and caring for you. If there is a doggie-heaven, look up Sam and Bridget and have a good romp. Then snuggle down between them; they’ll keep you toasty warm.

Health and Garden News

2011-07-22T20:39:00.004-05:00

So, the latest weigh-in has me down 21 pounds from April. That's good news. There has to be some, right? The men's work shirt uniform our company provides, to men or women, which I had to leave unbuttoned at the bottom because it tapered in just where I tapered out, now not only gets fully buttoned but is loose enough to slip over the outside of my shorts without pulling. So it's demonstrable good news. Some shorts I bought recently without drawstrings in the waist are no longer something I can wear without risking embarrassment. It may be fashionable among urban young men, but not in the circles I run in.

I wish I could tell you my knees are better with the weight loss. I'd love it. But when you're down to bone-on-bone.... 'Nuff said.

The blood sugar is being managed fairly well with just diet, since the exercise part of diet-and-exercise just ain't happening, so that's another good thing. I'm testing it less often these days, but the amounts are in line with what they were before, and I will increase the testing back to the three-times-a-day level next month so my diabetes person can have a full record for the 30 days before my next check on the 31st. Thirty days is how long the meter stores the memory. There may be some surprises through August, however.

The allergy shots might be doing some good but it's hard to tell. If my symptoms were sniffling and sneezing, it'd be more obvious what's happening. With the doubling of my Zyrtec, the dermatographism is pretty well under control anyway, and I'm not ready to back off and see whether I'm still driven insane by itching. Not yet. It is still my goal, however. I can tell that the post-nasal drip and cough have lessened, but it's summer and it always got better in summer. Since that increases molds and pollens, it's kinda perverse, but.... Anyway, I'm up to the green level of shots. I started out in silver, the color of the cap on the vials, with that being the weakest dose. Green is second, and I may be through them soon. We'll have to see how long I have to stay off them for the surgery, and what it takes to return to current levels. I can still get two more in before surgery.

And that brings us to the BIG news. It's definitely surgery. No embolization. no laser treatments, no other options left. Just surgery. I finally got resigned to it by the time I got around to calling the gynecological oncologist, so the rest is just carrying through. The appointment was yesterday. His office is across from United Hospital in St. Paul, where he'll be operating. August 1st. Check-in 8AM, so none of this 4AM wake-up crap.

It's funny how everyone assumes that the OB-GYN I visited recommended him. No, she could hardly be bothered to even give me the results of the ultrasound on-line, and only when asked several follow-up questions (at the prodding by my primary care physician to ask them of her) did she reply with a recommendation for the category of specialist I should see. I looked him up in the book that U Care sends out covering who is covered by their plan. I could have picked the U of M, but parking there is horrendous! And Southdale is too far. And actually, it was a different doctor listed at that clinic in the book, but they put me over to his office instead. He's covered though: I checked.

If the clinic gives you the code for that month, there's a free parking lot next to his building. No shade, so you return to your portable sauna after your visit, but that's SOP. And his office, of course, is at the exact opposite end of the building from the parking lot entrance. Also SOP, it seems. But there's a restroom halfway down the corridors, so a chance to sit a minute. And whatever.

I was the only one in the waiting area when I arrived. Another woman showed up and was quickly escorted back, and then three people came in together. They were there "for _____", who apparently was the woman just sent back, and were told to wait a few and they could go back and talk to the doctor. When it was my turn, among the long list of questions I was asked was whether I was (actually!) there on my own? It was said in such a concerned tone of voice that I gathered it was usual to bring a cheering squad/support group to these visits. Hadn't occurred to me. Been doing my own doctors' visits since, what? forever? Well, adulthood, anyway. Apparently I was supposed to be overwhelmed, distraught, incapable of digesting information, whatever. This was supposed to be scary.

Oh shucks, sorry to disappoint. Scary is facing the bills, and I've developed a plan, including checking myself back out of the hospital after two days to keep the costs down. There are enough healthcare professionals wandering through my house on a daily basis these days. I'm sure they can change a dressing, note inflamation, reassure me whether symptoms are normal, etc., if needed. Scary was not going to be something the doc said that day about what I was carrying around, since I already knew what it was or could be, and there would be no real news until after the surgery when my "football" was examined by the pathologist. That might or might not be scary then, but it'll be dealt with on an outpatient basis, and the insurance kicks in again.

What's your choice of "-oma"? I heard about five different terms, or at least I think there were five. He rattled them off so fast. It could be a myoma, a jargon-jargonoma, a jargon, a jargon-jargonoma, or carcinoma. I caught the first and last for sure. Actually, it helped that he wrote them down. The myoma is what this started out as: another word for fibroid, the "my" part of the word referring to smooth muscles, what the uterus is. Carcinoma, of course, is the worst possible case, and is exactly what you think it is. There are other levels and varieties in between of what stage it might be. They won't pull any lymph nodes until they get the pathology report requiring it, and that means I'll be "open" on the table while they wait. Hope they pick soothing music. Just not too soothing. I shouldn't have any problems with lymphodema (fluid buildup) if they do pull them, but on the rare occasions that happens (you hear about it with mastectomies) it's usually in combination with radiation therapy.

Fun.

After he examined me, I asked him how much weight he thought he'd be cutting out. Since I'd just lost a bunch, may as well take advantage when I can to lose more. He thought 10 to 15 pounds. See? That's another good thing. Of course, I may have to throw out more pants that'll suddenly become too big to stay up. Or just sew in darts and wear them out. Not like I'll have money to burn for a while. He said I can be out in 2-3 days - I told him 2 - and can drive again in 2-3 weeks. That will also be 2. There'll be weight restrictions for lifting at first, till I'm fully healed. Doable.

I've been working on arrangements. Steve can't visit or help with Dad, because he'll be getting his own surgery this Monday for a better knee replacement. He's agreed to spend a couple weeks in a nursing home TCU to recoup before going home. I'm heading out Sunday both for a visit and to pick up Fred. He can spend three weeks with Koda, chewing his Milk Bones and romping through the back yard. He's visited before, just not without Steve. Work got told I'm taking two weeks off for vacation. (I could have told them I need a rest cure from ___ .) As an independent contractor, I can tell them, not ask. Jessica can come early the day I go in, drop in on weekends if necessary either for me or for Daddy, and Paul can take a couple days vacation with fairly little notice right now to drive me in and pick me up.

Maybe he'll even take an extra day or so just to harvest fruit from the yard since the weird weather has put everything ripening at once instead of spread out over the calendar. Usually it's cherries for a couple weeks in late June, ending just as blueberries start, and raspberries get going a week or two later and last through much of August. He picked all three tonight. At least the apples haven't gone nuts yet. Nobody's looked at the currants, the Nankings, or the chokecherries. Don't know how the grapes are doing, but lots of fruit started, earlier this summer, and Paul tells me the mourning dove nest in the arbor is now empty, presumably from fledging. He hasn't said anything about the grapes, but they run late in the season if I remember. And speaking of fledging, the phoebes in the front entryway are getting ready for their second brood to fledge. Somebody's having a good year.

I need a pre-op physical, including a chest x-ray and EKG. I suspect labs go with that, but nobody said so to me. I just know what kind of pre-op tests Steve just had. We now know we share the same blood type.

There's a week to think about packing. I know which author I'm taking with me for light but fun reading. I think I know which clothes I'll wear, and yes, the shorts do have a drawstring. I need to remind Paul to bring a small pillow when he picks me up: a buffer between the incision and the seat belt. I've got a week to show Jessica where the coffee filters are and run her through the parts of Daddy's routine that I usually do before she gets here. And apparently I get to sooth a lot of the people who are freaking out around me.

I'm waiting to see how lucid Daddy can still be before I decide whether and what to tell him. If I do tell him, "female troubles" ought to cover it.

I've been toying with taking a black Sharpie and drawing either a zipper or a scissors and dotted line down my midsection just before surgery. You know, just to make sure they're cutting in the right place for the right thing. There aren't a whole lot of spare parts left.

The Florist's Tale

2011-07-20T22:29:00.002-05:00

My last run of the day was a stop at the florist to deliver a bouquet of red roses. I noticed they had no "from" on the card, and made a comment that I hoped they were a welcome delivery, not something from some stalker. I was half in jest, but only half. Lovely as they were, I had once delivered something similar to a woman who wanted nothing to do with the flowers. Me? I'm kind of a "Heck with whoever sent 'em, they're gorgeous flowers" kind of gal. Sure it's better if they're from somebody special, but hey, just send them.

The florist gave me a first name for the sender, and then filled me in on a relatively new law. Anyone who sends flowers these days has to give a name to the florist, and it can be given in turn to the recipient. It was enacted as part of anti-stalking legislation. Shortly after it went into effect, she had an order where the law made a difference.

The flowers arrived as requested, and both the recipient and her best friend were excitedly wondering who could have sent them. After making several guesses, they finally just had to call the florist to find out who the sender was. Both were absolutely shocked to find out the sender was the best friend's husband!

Some time later the errant hubby called the florist, demanding to know why his name had been given out, and yelled at the clerk that it was her fault that he was getting divorced!

She informed him about the law, and said that no, it was his own fault for trying to cheat on his wife with her best friend.

Fortunately for my delivery, the sender of the roses was the right guy and she was beaming as I left.

Blue Cross-Eyed

2011-07-14T06:51:00.005-05:00

This problem is so old, we thought it had been resolved months ago.

Apparently not.

Daddy is on Medicare. That doesn't cover everything, so he's also paying for what is affectionately called "Medigap" insurance. Blue Cross is the carrier.

Over a year ago - I've lost track now of just when - we ordered new checks from his bank. They got lost somewhere, since the bank sent them to his old address, even though they sported his new one. The bank recommended for security's sake to switch to a new account, with of course a new account number. (They also sent the replacement new checks out ASAP. And free.) This meant we had to contact those who either had direct deposit from the old account or had automatic withdrawal. It sounded simple: Social Security, Blue Cross, and his pension.

The first two were straightforward enough. Blue Cross sent paperwork requiring info and Daddy's signature. Social Security required Daddy's info plus him on the phone to verify this is what's happening for real. It took waiting for a "good" day, one where Paul was home and could handle the details - like dialing the phone and fighting his way through the voicemail system to get a human. The third involved waiting until we got some kind of mailing from the pension company. We hadn't a clue who or where they were, and the info the bank had was next to useless. Luckily something arrived within a few months, and the bank was patient about transferring over the $18.29 to his new account each month.

Yeah, don't want to miss out on those pension payments.

That all took a while, but it was finally all accomplished before the end of last year. Whew!

About the first of June, we received a letter from Blue Cross. It notified us that they had successfully completed the changeover to the new bank account. What? Really? After all this time, finally? Can you really be that incompetent? And just what have all those monthly premium withdrawals been about this past 6 months if not an indication that the switchover had gone as planned way back when? I filed it in the "ignore me" pile, one step away from the "recycle me" pile, and went on about my business.

The next day's mail brought three more letters from Blue Cross. The first one informed me that they had been unable to make the withdrawal they needed for the premium payment from Daddy's bank account, and we needed to make sure it got paid pronto or his coverage could lapse.

Really. I kinda thought not, after yesterday's letter.

The second was a lengthy form to fill out and have Daddy sign giving the new account information and authorization for them to withdraw his monthly premiums.

Hey, guys, been there done that, check your files, I'm busy.

The third was a duplicate of the letter from yesterday informing us that they had successfully completed the transfer over to his new account and we could expect to see his premiums deducted from it on a monthly basis now.

Oh goody. Imagine my excitement. Whee.

I put all four letters in my lunch cooler, fully intending to call Blue Cross and ask them just what the heck they thought they were - or weren't - doing, and rub somebody's nose in the mess. But, hey, I got busy, and they sat. And sat. It's not like I don't have enough life in my life these days, after all. Maybe not just how I envisioned it, but....

I just finished balancing his latest bank statement last night, and there was another withdrawal from Blue Cross at the expected date in the expected amount. Apparently my actions were sufficient, except for my anticipated satisfaction for rubbing somebody's nose in their incompetence. Oh well, we all make those little sacrifices sometimes. It was time to pull those four letters out of my lunch cooler.

Well surprise! Now that it's summer and I'm carrying canned ice again and the humidity is climbing, they seem to have started mildewing.

Oh shucks, something else to clean. And mildew or no, they've earned their way into the recycle pile.

I wonder if Blue Cross would fit in there as well.

Border Crossings

2011-07-13T22:11:00.003-05:00

I refer to crossing over to Wisconsin. Much as we are alike near the border, there have long been reasons to cross, benefits to gain.

Back in high school, it was common when on a date and "going for a drive" - as opposed to "parking" - for the guys to drive across the border from St. Paul to fill up their tanks. Not only was it scenic enough that the boys hoped it would turn out to be romantic, but at the time there was a gas war going on, and prices were often around the $.33/gallon rate. I had no clue what prices were on this side, not being a driver at the time, but I knew these were much cheaper. And often going for a ride was much preferable to parking anyway.

I understand that property taxes push some folks across the border to live, while commuting to work back on our side. I wonder, however, how much of that is made up in the cost of gas for the commute. This time, however, they fill up their tanks over here during their commute, because their gas tax keeps their prices higher. Do the high school kids drive their dates across this way too these days?

For a long time there was also a difference in legal drinking age, with Wisconsin allowing 18-year-olds to drink, and Minnesota requiring one to be 21 first. College fraternity formals often were held across the border, including the one I went to with Paul before we were engaged. I do remember little about the formal, but more about the hangover the next day, spoiling what should have been a perfectly wonderful hike through Interstate Park.

These days there is another reason to cross the border, and I'm told anecdotally that Wisconsinites are quite happy not only about us doing it, but how many of us are. I refer to buying lottery tickets. With the state shutdown, those who still want to play and are near the border just jump across to the nearest convenience store and stock up. As a matter of fact, I happened to have a run across the border this morning....

Delayed Connection

2011-07-12T19:04:00.005-05:00

It was nearing 11:30, the time I was to find out from Steve just when his first knee surgery was to be scheduled. I was well aware of that as I walked into the Secretary of State's office in St. Paul. I knew from experience that my phone got no signal inside that office. Experience also told me I could be in there quite a while.

It was the usual run to their office. Some company sent documents there for verification or whatever other procedures they performed while we, the couriers, waited for the documents, now including a fancy certificate signed by Mark Ritchie or whoever the office holder is at the time, to return to the company. In this case it was one of the really big name Minnesota companies, and a good run because they always sent it via the fastest service and it had to cross most of the metro in a round trip.

I had amused myself on the way in by wondering what the sending company knew that I didn't. After all, the state is shut down, and that was one of the offices listed in one of the endless reports covering what would be and/or was shut down. Perhaps they knew it was open anyway, perhaps considered a vital service, though it seems nobody else's important documents, licenses, or whatever merited that label. At any rate, I wasn't about to turn down good money. If they hadn't bothered to call ahead, well, not my problem. It's not my job to second-guess whether the destination will be closed, but to try to deliver wherever they send me.

Envisioning turning the corner and finding an empty parking lot, I was surprised to find it fairly full. The were open. Cool. (Great restrooms in that building. Long drive.)

The waiting room was fairly empty of customers, however. Perhaps the word hadn't really gone out that the office was still open. But they made up for it by having only one person staffing the front counter. I took my number and prepared to wait. And people watch. And eavesdrop. All favorite occupations while sitting in this office. Once called, there's another wait for someone to come from the back, pull "my" documents out of the tray, do whatever to them, and return them to the front, where I'm called by the company's name. That wait was unexpectedly short. They returned the documents to me untouched, explaining that the company had forgotten to have them notarized!

Ooooohhhh, somebody's gonna be pissed!

Returning to my car, I called in to HQ. Mine, not theirs. Luckily, Donna answered. Brains, efficiency, and common sense all on the end of one little phone line. I told her somebody was going to have to call Company X and tell them their document were refused because nobody notarized them. Meanwhile, I'd be heading back with them. She handled it. And yes, I'm sure somebody upstairs in that company really was pissed!

Just as I hung up, my phone recognized that it now had signal, and a message waiting. I started to hit the buttons to pull up voicemail when it rang. This time it was Jessica, who was taking care of Daddy. She wanted to know what I wanted her to do since he'd been moaning that something hurt for a bit now, but wouldn't tell her what it was. Should he get Tylenol? Could he? Or something else? She thought it might be about the pressure sore on his behind, but he wasn't communicating well. I asked her to put him on the phone so I could talk to him. Some days I think I'm the only one he'll talk to or trust. Not that it always helps.

"Hi, daddy, how are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm fine."

"Really? Jessica tells me that you've been saying something hurts."

"No, nothing hurts."

"Are you in any pain? Jessica tells me you've been moaning for a while."

"No, I'm not in any physical pain. Mental pain, maybe, from all the earlier... mumble mumble mumble."

Huh? I have no clue what he's talking about. (After I get home tonight he talks about his motorcycle accident, and I reassure him that, at 97, he just has not been out riding a motorcycle. It must have been one of his wonderfully vivid dreams. )

"Does anything hurt? Jessica thinks maybe it's the sore on your behind and you're too embarrassed to tell her about it and ask for help."

"Oh, I'm not embarrassed about anything."

"Well, how about putting Jessica back on the phone so I can talk to her?"

After listening on her end of the conversation, we agreed that there was nothing needing doing right now, but that if he started complaining again, feel free to call me back. She reminded me that with her CNA certification, she's officially qualified to dispense medications if they were needed.

So, now it's half an hour since I got out of the building, driving for most of that, and it's finally time to listen to my voicemail ("This is Steve. Call me." As if I can't tell his voice after 25 years!), and call to hear Steve's news. His first knee surgery is scheduled for the 25th. I'll stop by the 24th and pick up Fred Basset and bring him home until Steve can care for him again. Koda will love a playmate again. He hasn't seen Fred for weeks. We'll just have to put his favorite ball up out of Fred's reach. Fred thinks it's meant to be chewed up like rawhide.

Political Tidbits

2011-07-12T19:00:00.002-05:00

1: The case for raising taxes? Population growth.

2: One of the "joys" of living near the Wisconsin border is getting to watch the political ads for their recall elections. One goes on and on about how the opposing candidate wants to extend healthcare benefits for - gasp! - people who neither work or pay taxes in Wisconsin.

Yeah. Those people are called "children."

Why the Republicans Choose the Women They Do.

2011-07-11T20:24:00.002-05:00

In a word, it's misogyny. They actually hate women.

So you're scratching you head, thinking, "How can they hate women when they so strongly promote Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann?" If you examine these two candidates, you'll see how they embody exactly how little Republicans value women.

They think women should be eye candy. Think trophy wives. Young, attractive, good slim figures with lots of bust on top, even features, good hair. It's all about appearance. That's all we're good for: showing off to the next guy so you can imagine his erection while he's drooling over your wife, your status symbol.

That's all they expect of us women, so they don't pick for intelligence, spunk, character, experience, talent, education, ideas. And if you look at Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann, it shows. They pick exactly what they think women should be and are.

And if you get old, or get sick, the Newt Gingriches of the world will cast you off for the newer, younger, prettier, healthier version of eye candy to parade on their arm. She won't be any smarter, more talented, or have any other wonderful qualities either.

Revision

2011-07-11T20:17:00.003-05:00

I'm still feminine enough - no, make that human enough - to change my mind. I decided not to wait quite so long to see the oncologist. So I'm heading in on the 21st.

Partly it's because it's twanging on a nerve or two somewhere, and that signals to me that something's changing, perhaps even growing. Not necessarily a good thing.

Partly it's because the Minnesota shutdown can't really last forever - can it? - and if the Republicans win, I won't have to worry about a cap to my health insurance. The new cap, their style, will be zero. They want to eliminate Minnesota Care. (Along with Meals on Wheels, and a few other pointless programs because all they do is keep poor folks alive longer to bother them.) Right now a judge says they have to continue my coverage. If a budget agreement is reached the way the Republicans want, I'm SOL. So hang there, Governor Dayton.

Not UPS

2011-07-06T06:19:00.002-05:00

One of our customers is a medical supply company which sends its equipment out with us to the patients, wherever they may be: hospital, nursing home, or home. On occasion, they send us to pick it up again.

Yesterday I got one of those return runs. It was a huge complex, one of those places where the main building is a large "C" enclosing their parking lot on three sides. Finding the main entrance (they had signs with arrows) among the many, I walked up to the main info desk and asked for the specific location I had been given. The instructions went something like, "Go down that hallway, take the first left down a long corridor, pass through the blue double doors, well maybe they're green or blue-green, and the nursing station will be on your left." I enquired whether this was the closest entrance to that nursing station and was assured it was.

You wonder how some people hold their jobs. I walked. And I walked. On my way I passed two more entrances, and through many double doors, none of them blue. Or green, for that matter. Finally I stopped at the first nursing station I found and asked where the blue doors were, since that was my landmark. She was very puzzled. She knew nothing about any blue doors. However, this was in fact my destination, and she had the case of equipment I was there to pick up.

"But I just called twenty-five minutes ago, and they said UPS was coming out tomorrow. I haven't even had time to find it a box."

I assured her that sometimes they sent us instead of UPS, that it was all enclosed in a case and thus didn't absolutely require a box, that I could get it there safely without one.

"Well, they said you'd be coming with a UPS label for it. Do you have a UPS label?" This was said with a look that assured me she was checking my bona fides, and she wasn't going to let the case go out the door with just anybody. I patiently explained that UPS sends all its packages to a big central distribution area, and ships out from there. It's handled by lots of different people. I, on the other hand, was delivering it straight to the company requesting it, and didn't need a label to know where I was going. After about another second of indecision, she suddenly decided and thrust the case at me. But just in case I was somehow pulling a fast one on her (how would I have gotten the information on what and where to pick up? I'm psychic?) she asked for my name. I gave it to her along with spelling the company name and giving her my driver number.

Then I left via her entrance door and took the short path across the parking lot.

The Big Question

2011-07-05T22:12:00.002-05:00

Talk about elephants in the room!

I'm not in denial, really. I just think sometimes there's a processing limit, and when you're completely snowed under by one thing - or a whole set of things at once - then some other things can slip through without their due attention, or at least what everybody else thinks is their due attention. And everybody else thinks this is MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR!

They haven't said it's cancer. They just said they can't confirm that it's not.

We're talking about my "football" here. You know, the uterine fibroid that's grown a bit since 2007, my last untrasound check on it. I read the report back when I finally got the summation of it from my OB-GYN. I concentrated on the details like centimeter size. I also read the parts about not being able to distinguish the midline, hard to tell exactly where the edges were, rapid growth, and all of those combined meaning they cannot say with certainty that it's not cancer.

They didn't say it is.

Meanwhile I'm dealing with everything else, taking care of (or managing care of) my dad, monitoring blood sugar levels, monitoring and planning every bite of food, working, arranging allergy shots, trying to find time to get back to poisoning the weeds in the garden without nailing the flowers, shopping for two, sending Paul to the vet with the dog for his latest ear infection and accommodating that treatment in the schedule, finding time to work on wedding plans....

That plus trying to figure out what to do when "choosing" to afford to do something looks suspiciously close to courting bankruptcy. Or if not that, then just putting myself in a position where when I retire there'll be no funding for it. I've been working for years on being able to look forward to something other than poverty when I retire. I paid off the house, back when there was enough money coming in to do that. Good thing too, since commission cutbacks make it impossible to afford a mortgage these days. Any loan against the equity in the house is the same as losing the house, since there's no budget to pay it back. I quit paying into IRAs because I'm trying hard to whittle down my credit card balance so it's not choking me once I retire. Gas prices aren't helping. Having to leave work early to relieve Daddy's caretaker, or start late due to medical appointments, well, they're not helping either.

And frankly, I'm one of those people who get more scared by poverty than the idea of cancer. Except at this point, the idea of cancer means poverty. So, how long can I delay doing anything about it? Or how can I perhaps find out whether there's any problem or any urgency? And how much will that cost? Embolization includes an overnight hospital stay. A hysterectomy requires longer. The first may help, but also postpones the second for a couple years at best, and that's if there's no cancer. The hysterectomy gets rid of the problem, and saves "wasting" time and resources on the first, but bites a much bigger hole out of the budget. Can I wait for Medicare to kick in?

I checked out the possibility of a biopsy, but the problem is the fibroid is huge, and only part of it may have begun changing. What if they stick the needle in six places and it's the seventh that's turned?

It's almost funny how everybody else freaks out by the word "cancer". I think folks fear it more than another 9/11. Me? Not so much. It's just not something that's been on my radar. Even a request for a repeat mammogram for better detail doesn't phase me. I don't worry about it. I know people who've had breast cancer, died from it. I know people who've died from liver cancer, and I'm aware that my years in the dry cleaners puts me at elevated risk. But, so? I'm just thinking finances.

Well, I'm also wondering what I'll do with my "hair" for the wedding if I'm bald from chemo or radiation. C'mon, something to think about.

There's grim irony in finally having health insurance but with such a limiting cap, and such narrow qualifications regarding my income level. Suppose I cash in some of my IRAs to help pay the bills. The money then counts as income, puts me over the amount to qualify for my insurance, and off the plan I go. So, pay my bills, and wind up losing the house or the insurance or both. Don't pay, declare bankruptcy... another undesirable end. Can we make it not be cancer or not grow fast enough or metastisise so that it can be ignored for two more years? I can afford it better then.

OK, dream on.

I made two phone calls this morning. The first was to my insurance plan, asking just how close to my annual cap I was. There was good news: the $10 grand limit is for inpatient treatment, and since everything I've done so far has been outpatient, I still have $10 grand left! Plus, I can still keep on with the other things I'm dealing with, like the allergy shots and the diabetes.

Whew! It's not a complete solution, but takes care of a chunk of the bill. It's enough that I feel better, irrational as that is. There'll still be tens of thousands of bill to pay afterwards.

The second call was to a gynecological oncologist in St. Paul, the nearest to where I live. Yes, he takes my insurance. He's only available in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays: which would I prefer? Well, allergy shots are Thursdays, so can we try Tuesdays? Sure. This next Tuesday is filled, and, hmmm, let's see... Oh dear, the first available appointment is the 26th. Am I sure I can wait that long? It's waited 4 years, what's an extra week or two?

They want a list of my meds brought in, and a copy of the ultrasound faxed to them ahead of time. Faxed? What kind of detail can you get over a fax machine? Really, faxed? I can tell I'm gonna have some questions. But the appointment is made, and the rest is waiting. And working to rearrange my life so if I need to take a few weeks off from it, I can do it.

Nothing like another challenge.

Progress, Dead Ends, and The Elephant In The Room

2011-06-26T11:44:00.007-05:00

So, it's been over two months now since I got health insurance and started setting up appointments. Much has happened since then, and much not. Most has been written about, but one thing not. Yet.

The allergist diagnosed my dermatographism as a symptomatic expression of underlying allergy(-ies), tested, and found a bundle of things to avoid. Some of that is possible. Most, not so much. After some thought, I decided to go for the allergy shots, which actually start tomorrow morning, and go Monday and Thursday mornings for a while. Three shots per visit. Wheee.

They cause their own "little" side effect, and I'm not talking about the possibility of reaction to the shots, or even my decreasing availability for work causing lessening of income. After ordering having them made up, I was discussing with their office how much individual shots would cost if the ever-looming possibility of a government shut-down becomes fact on July 1st. My insurance is, after all, sponsored by the state. (An alternative scenario is I could get kicked off any insurance if the legislature budget goes through as written.) She thought about thirty bucks a piece, which is a strain but doable, especially if any shutdown is brief. Then she threw the zinger at me: it's formulating the shots themselves that costs thousands.

Thousands!?! Oooohhhh. Ummmm, maybe it's time to check how much of my $10,000/yr. insurance budget I have left. I figured this was one of the two things this year that I could take care of. There are already enough dead ends.

Getting the fibroid evaluated cost a visit to the OB-GYN, an ultrasound, having a radiologist read the scans, and an option for shrinkage treatment with surgery to follow in a few years when Medicare kicks in. The main problem with that treatment is that it is standard for it to require an overnight stay in the hospital, a very sensible precaution in case the wrong arteries got blocked somehow, but all by itself busting my budget. So, no go there. Keep carrying that football around, watching it grow. Meanwhile, a nice chunk out of that ten grand.

Getting the knees evaluated involved an orthopedic visit, X-rays, and a recommendation for surgery which also is a budget-blasting $60,000, give or take. So, live with them for another few years. Another, expected, dead end. Another chunk of the budget spent.

The last thing I'm dealing with, and have been since three days after my original physical when the labs came back, is diabetes. This at least is cheaper to treat. So far it's been two nursing visits, diabetes education on diet and a meter kit for stabbing my fingers three times daily and reading the blood sugar levels from a blood drop. The lancets and test strips need to be renewed by prescription, and there is an increased cost in food because the cheap carbs have to be avoided, but it has to be dealt with - forever! - and I'm doing it.

Actually, I'm doing a much better job of dealing with it on a dietary basis than I am in coming to terms with it. Mom always used to nag me that if I kept eating the sweets I love, I was going to get diabetes. Though my nurse tells me that's not strictly true, it still feels like a shaming punishment from Mom that I managed to cause myself. But I have developed a basic diet that works well, and occasionally try adding things into it that might or might not work, and getting the instant (2-hours) feedback that tells me when I've screwed up. For example, a 6" Subway is supposed to fit in, but the test strips tell me that they're pushing it. Don't do it often. Naan is out, since the allotted amount is way too little to consider anything but a hardship as a meal, and the pashwoori naan is too sweet to even consider trying, though I love the flavor. The beef-filled naan isn't worth eating. When I go for a burger or hot dogs, much of the bun is left out, which is OK unless I had in mind something that would hold a whole slew of condiments.

It's a lot of brown bagging, and my hours translate that into simple, easy, no-thought, no-cook, easy-measure foods. Cottage cheese is king. One carton covers two meals with fruits stirred in. Hence my recent expertise on what is good and what not. Cheerios are still OK, one of my favorite snack foods. Of course, that could and used to mean half a box if I was watching TV and not paying attention. Now it's a half-cup serving in a leftover container packed as mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack. Baby carrots are not supposed to count as a starchy veggie (who's kidding whom here?) but my test strips tell me that they seem to accentuate the carbs in anything else I eat. I do have to go shopping at least twice a week, since fruits spoil quickly, and there's only so much room in the 'fridge.

It's a good thing I don't drink my carbs. For years it's been diet sodas, diet lemonades and fruity teas, water, and coffee. Morning coffee turned over a year ago into morning mocha, but I found a cocoa brand months ago that offers a good sugarless variety, 1/2 carb unit the way I do it, and still makes good mocha. I found months ago that I need a little something to get my stomach to accept the plethora of pills I cram into it with my morning cuppa, and besides, this is my daily allotment of chocolate, a necessary ingredient in quality-of-life. Since I have my mocha first thing and delay breakfast till about 8:30, I can still get a full set of carbs in for breakfast. That's 30-45 grams. You try reading labels to see how it works!

I'm supposed to have a bedtime carb. Many days I'm just finishing supper in time to run a test strip before bed, and a late carb just wouldn't get tested. So I choose no snack, a slice of meat, or if it's early enough, maybe a slice of toast, possibly with margarine and garlic. Hold the garlic if it's raisin toast.

The reason for a bedtime carb is that the liver tends to decide by morning that there's not enough sugar in the bloodstream and releases some of its store, shooting blood sugar levels up. It doesn't seem to happen to me. So I don't take the bedtime carb as a religious mandate.

One side effect of the change in diet is its effect as a diet. I've been losing weight, slowly but surely. Steve noticed, as did Steph. Apparently mostly it's around my middle, something greatly to be desired, but not really noticeable until I stand up. However, the uniform man-shirt I wear for work now buttons at the bottom button, and those are designed to taper in where we girls taper out. Monday I go in for a weighing on the original scale from 2 1/2 months ago, and find out if all these different scales in all these different offices are uniformly set. I figure it counts more on the same scale. If all are equal, two weeks ago it was 14 lbs. down. Or 29 lbs. less than my overall max.

The good news here is that I can pretty much monitor the blood sugar and treat the allergies on an ongoing basis if the state shuts down or I've exceeded my insurance limit already. The surgeries I already figured out will need to be postponed, unless I happen to win the lottery.

Yeah, that'll happen. Of course, the lottery office also shuts down July 1st if the state does.

But the two most important things will get taken care of.

And Koda can come back and sleep in my room again, after a few months. That's not to be sneezed at. Hopefully.

Button Button

2011-06-25T07:54:00.008-05:00

Who's got the button?

Do children still play that game? I've been playing my own version of it, looking for suitable buttons, ever since I purchased my silk. The fabric shop was great for fabric, but not so much for buttons that I thought would work with it.

Oh sure, I could have bought those self-covered buttons you put the same fabric over as what you were sewing. Boring! And besides, I never was very good at doing that without wrinkles and lumps. That option would be my very last resort.

It seems that the world is buying tan colored buttons these days. Or at least that's what they're selling. Or novelty buttons. The individual cat buttons were cute, though expensive, and my friend Joan would love them, but I couldn't see them for a wedding. Nor silver, pewter, copper or gold-toned, round, squared, or bamboo-shaped oblongs.

Steph suggested I stop in a Hancock Fabrics sometime, so I decided to check them out online, see where they were located these days. Not only did I find their website and three locations, I found their pages of buttons listings. OK, let's check them out. Page 1, nothing I wanted. Page 2, nothing. Page 3, 4, 5....8, 9... Dang! I'm bleary eyed but nothing jumps out at me but my own impatience.

OK, how about a general web search? I'm thinking pink buttons, so Google that. The first site promises any buttons I want, so click and... Oh. Do-it-yourself political pins. Hey, dummies, those are pins, not buttons! Next site is... shirts after shirts in all colors, each bearing buttons. And none even my size, to add insult to frustration.

Big help!

Hey, here's an idea, how about seeing if anybody makes rose quartz buttons? I'm thinking using some rose quartz beads in the necklace I plan to make, after all. Click. Hmmm, button earrings. Button beads. Button beads? Where do these people come up with these things?

Pink pearl buttons brings me more jewelry, no buttons. Sewing notions helps narrow it down a bit, but still nothing useful. It's been about half an hour so far. I'm about to tear my hair out. Even eBay, my old friend, is not much help. I finally wind up on a website called Etsy that sells, of all things, buttons! Real, honest to gosh, buttons!

Somehow I wind up looking at some Czech art glass buttons, iridescent pink/green with gold dragonflies across the front. Intriguing, but at 1 11/16", way too huge, not to mention pricey. Still, I'm interested enough to email the seller and ask her if they ever come in smaller sizes, explaining my project and needs. Since she's in eastern Europe, there's a bit of a time thing going on, so I'm not expecting an immediate answer.

But hey, she, specifically, is selling lots more buttons, and I decide to explore her store. There are still lots of buttons that in no way fill my color needs, but eventually I come across some roses that are iridescent red/pink/whatever, and come in 1" and 7/8" sizes. I make a note of them to come back to. Then I fine clear/iridescent roses, same sizes. After much searching, and finding lots more dragonfly buttons, again in huge sizes, I decide to order a couple sets of the red/pink roses. Worst possible case, they clash. Best possible case, they work out beautifully. In any case, it's bedtime and I'm done searching.

Next day she answers my inquiry letting me know she'll check on smaller dragonfly buttons for me, and what sizes would I like? I tell her, and last night's email she says she's found some, but it's dark there and she'll send me pictures after it's day for her so she can get good pictures. I tell her I've already ordered some from her in the roses, but am still interested. After all, what the heck? I might be able to use them in another project, or even come to like them better than the roses. Who knows?

We keep corresponding in hours-separate chunks.

Button, button, I'll soon have some buttons.