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Rambling thoughts . . . Letting off steam.
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Now displaying records 1 to 8 of 20.
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2009-02-26 22:06:35.88:
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I made fun of my cat in earlier posts in this space. It was all in jest. Everyone who met her liked her, even a few who might have thought of themselves as cat-haters. She was a Birman and that breed is known for its sweet personality.
She passed away today. Quietly, in her sleep. She was month short of being 18 years old. She had a good run. I greeted her this morning and put fresh food and water in front of her. She was gone before I came home in the afternoon. Jeremy found her.
She was on top of her favorite sleeping place, the VCR, where it was warm. She must have died just before Jeremy came home because her body was still limp. Jeremy knew something was wrong because one of her legs was hanging down oddly.
Tomorrow, we will bury her under a flagstone out in the kitchen garden. She loved the kitchen garden.
I have only just begun to miss her.
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2007-03-23 21:09:10.097:
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Ich habe eine Durchbruch. Or in English, I have a break-through. I have solved how to store doily patterns in the database AND how to pull them out of the database and display them graphically to the internet. I still have to iron out some format and minor presentation details. I will be able to hook it up soon to the menu listing.
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2007-02-26 22:12:09.6:
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I have it, I have it, I have it!!!!!
My Dad sent an email to Senator Durbin and I have a copy. I have corrected the typos but otherwise it is raw Dad, run-on sentences and all. Get this:
Dear Senator Durbin:
I was born on July 31st-1922 so I am 84 years old. This is not the same country today that I was born in. I blame this on you and your liberal Democratic party. When I was 14 years old in 1936 I could go to town on Saturday night and go to a hardware store and buy a box of 22 cartridges or a box of 12 gauge shotgun shells to hunt some rabbit or quail for the dinner table during the hunting season or go to the tobacco store and buy a package of cigarettes for 10 or 15 cents and now they cost over $3.00 a pack. I call that confiscation through taxation. I could go to the tavern, get on a bar stool and order a glass of beer and drink it. A 14 year old can't do those things today and I blame this on you and your liberal Democratic party. At my age I can't buy ammo or firearms without a F.O.I.D. card and a waiting period on firearms. I think this is ridiculous. I have a card. I blame this on your party, Chicago and the population that lives in the blue area of the 2004 map of this country. As you know 3/4 of that map was red. As your party takes control of Congress God only knows what freedoms we will lose next.
It looks like we are going to lose the Iraq war and I also blame this on your party. There will always be wars. The Bible says so. There have been war in the past as far back as history records. I don't think your party believes in the Bible or ancient history.
I am a registered Republican but I was an independent voter all my life. I voted for democrats in 1944-1956-1960 and 1964. By 1968 I changed because of the restrictive gun laws of 1968 as I hate gun laws and believe they are not necessary. All you have to do is put the people who use firearms in crime in prison and keep them there as they will always be criminals. You didn't answer my last email. I would Like to hear from you. Thanks.
That's the end of the email other than I trimmed off his name. Take a minute to catch your breath. He is like that all day long.
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2007-02-25 10:53:58.48:
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Dad once said that he would not want to live his life over because it had been too hard. There is one part of my life that I wish I could live over: the last six months of my mother’s life.
My Mom started to die the day Clinton won the election in 1992. Dad was pissed off about Clinton winning and he apparently took it out on Mom. The stress resulted in her having a gall bladder attack. The operation for the gall bladder damn near killed her.
It should have been a routine procedure. A doctor who had done it many times before should have performed it. Instead, she went to the family doctor. The family doctor had just completed a training course in using laser scope method to remove the gall bladder. It sounded good. Three little incisions and Mom would be out of the hospital in two days.
It appeared to work but a week after the operation Mom was in intensive care. The family doctor accidentally nicked the bile duct during the operation. Bile fluid leaked into Mom’s abdominal cavity. It literally started digesting her from the inside out. Her liver, intestine and pancreas had all suffered damage. There was a major operation to correct the problems from the first operation. Mom stayed in ICU for a week.
Even when she came home, she had a drain still in place, hanging out of her side. A home-care nurse visited her to attend to the drain. It was a year before Mom got back to normal. But it was never really normal. She lost something. There were the things she did before the operation and then there was a different set of things she did a year later.
Before the operation Mom and Dad went on bus tours with other senior citizens. After the operation Mom had little energy for trips. Before the operation my mother had a slightly stooped posture. Years of bending herself over a sewing machine accounted for her stoop. But after the operation, the stoop was a clear dowagers hump. Raising her hands over her head was painful and finally not possible.
Mom and Dad saw a lawyer about suing the family doctor. Mom was not cut out for her role in a lawsuit. She did not have the spirit of the thing. All she wanted to sue for was the cost of the second operation. She thought that Medicare ought to be paid back for the $30,000 cost of the second operation. She wasn’t interested in any other damages. The lawyer firm turned her away. She did not seek a second opinion. It’s just as well. Mom would have made a lousy witness. She would have apologized for getting sick in the first place. After all, the doctor would have never screwed up the operation if she had not been there. Perhaps the lawyers sensed that about her character. I bet the lawyers thought she was nuts.
After Mom died Dad often spoke about how many things he didn’t know about her. “I never even knew who she voted for.” Huh? Who cares whom she voted for? What has that got to do with knowing her?
It makes sense now. In 1992, the day after Clinton won, Dad probably wanted to know whom she voted for. Perhaps he imagined that she voted for Clinton. He gave himself permission to treat her like dirt. Dad was not a beater; he was a verbal abuser. I expect he said some awful things to her. The stress had stirred up the gall bladder attack. It was 9 more years before she died.
I never had a good talk with Mom. She did not invite conversation. She was about work. There was always sewing, quilting and mending; but only if all the sweeping, scrubbing and vacuuming was done. Her home was humble, orderly and clean. I must have been a frightful disappointment to her. I never learned how to sew very well; I was never orderly and I approach clean as a relative thing. She must have wondered whom she pissed off to end up with a daughter like me.
And so we continued for 47 years conversing in only the most functional manner. If I had been interested in quilting and sewing we might have been close. I did like to knit but unfortunately I am a process knitter. I only care about the mathematics of knitting. I don’t care if I end up with something useful. This did not make sense to Mom. Every time she saw me ripping out something I had just knitted, she would look sort of sad and perplexed.
Before Mom’s gall bladder operation, she could work me into the ground. When she came to visit me, we never sat down to have a conversation. The minute she got in the door, she started looking for something to clean. At my house you didn’t have to look hard to find something that needs cleaning and straightening. And so Mom would attack it. She always had a place for me in her vision of what needed to be done. She never ordered me to participate in her projects at my house, but how could I sit while she slaved?. She wore me out. The moment she left, I headed straight to bed. My husband said we should have her visit more often; he liked the results. My kids undid her good works in a few hours. After the operation she still tried to work, but there were many things she could not do. She could fold laundry almost to the end.
The summer before she died Mom and Dad had problems with their central air conditioner. The central air system was not well engineered. The part that broke was up in the attic crawl space. To fix it required going into the crawl space that was over 120º F. No workman wanted any part of it. The air conditioning still cooled the bedrooms, but the kitchen and living room were too warm to stay in for long. Mom had been very frail for the last year. She had a couple ‘episodes’ of fainting. The air conditioner problem confined her to the bedroom. Dad put up a card table in the bedroom for Mom to eat at. Dad put a portable commode next to the bed. Mom was marooned. Her back was in pain much of the time.
Dad started talking about putting Mom in a nursing home. He didn’t know how to deal with her when she had an episode. Her condition scared him. I didn’t understand why he wanted to put her in a home. What I didn’t realize until later was that Mom was putting on a good show when I was there. Dad had to deal with a truth I never saw.
In late August Mom went into the nursing home. I still believed that the air conditioner problem had just stressed her out. She would get some rest and be home soon. After she had been there for a few weeks, I remember visiting her on a Saturday morning. When I walked in the room she said, “I can’t walk anymore”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t control my legs anymore. They won’t go were I put them. They want to cross over each other.”
I had trouble taking it all in. Denial. My mother never exposed her emotions. I never saw my mother cry. Now, even her subdued presentation showed how dismal she felt. Then Dad came in the room. He told me how Mom’s legs had collapsed from under her a few days earlier when he was helping her to walk to the bathroom. It had taken several attendants to get her off the bathroom floor. She would never walk again.
There were subtle things going on during those early weeks in the nursing home; things I did not grasp or understand until much later. I missed a great and important opportunity. In the next few months Mom lost the ability to communicate. First she couldn’t make sentences; then she couldn’t make words. But that day when she told me she could not walk, I missed the opportunity to talk to her. There she was finally unable to work. For the next month she was still able to talk. But I wasn’t there for her. I came on weekends only. I didn’t stay long enough. I failed her.
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2007-02-14 22:46:31.23:
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My oldest son is so lazy you would have to drive a stake in the ground just to see if he moved. He never stands if he can sit down; he never sits if he can lay down. He is a bright boy made stupid by laziness.
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2007-02-09 23:33:03.43:
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While I was in college, living in the student slum, Stephanie Jacobs was my neighbor. Stephanie was deeply into all things occult. She mumbled over tarot cards. She insisted that she knew of several of her previous lives including a noteworthy stint as a priestess princess in the land of Mu. Somewhere in between bouts of reincarnation narcissism she had been abducted by aliens. It was never clear to me whether this abduction had occurred in her present life or in one of her previous incarnations. Stephanie spent so much time fussing over the events of her previous lives that she had little energy to notice how much she was messing up the current one.
The most vivid memory I have of Stephanie involved the I Ching. Stephanie tossed the I Ching coins regularly. On one occasion she was hoping the I Ching would give her a particular outcome regarding her current boyfriend. When she did not get the result she wanted, she tossed the coins again and again. Each time, she received a less than satisfactory answer. This went on until she received Hexagram 4. This time the I Ching was chiding her for repetition. Stephanie flipped out. She took a paring knife and eviscerated her I Ching book. “That’ll teach you, I Ching; don’t mess with a former princess of Mu.”
A few weeks later Stephanie freaked out from a bad drug experience at a Halloween party. When we got her back to her apartment, most of her friends were trying to calm her and restrain her. I, on the other hand, roamed through her apartment intent on hiding all the sharp objects. If you had seen what was left of that I Ching book, your first thought would have been to hide the scissors.
I do not know where Stephanie is today. She was too dangerous to keep in my life. She took a lot of wild things too serious.
Following college, I rarely visited the I Ching. Stephanie’s behavior sort of turned me off of the subject. Stephanie took it so seriously. The I Ching does not appear to invite humor. This lack of humor is true about many things religious and spiritual. For example, the shortest verse in the Bible is “Jesus wept.” It is my belief that there was another equally short phrase that was lost in the early editing: “Jesus laughed.” I firmly believe that God has a grand sense of humor. I can understand why the elders of the various religions would not put humor into their writings. It would be challenging to wield power and authority over a congregation if they are all giggling. As someone who doesn’t want the power or authority, I think injecting humor back into religion could only be for the good.
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2007-01-30 21:33:15.637:
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It's been a long time since I entered anything in here. I have a lot of stuff saved up to put out here little by little:
Not yet a fossil: the early years
Today I had a really rotten day at work. So remind me: how did I get here?
To begin with I was born. Drop that; it’s been done.
Let’s focus in on the career thing. Back in high school speech class, one assignment was to give a speech about what you wanted to be (“when you grow up ” was only implied since we were too old for that). I remember only one other classmate’s speech. She wanted to be a manicurist. Everything I know about painting my nails, I learned that day in speech class. Glad I got that out of the way.
For my own speech the theme was “I want to be a fossil.” It got a laugh and a good grade. I still have a chance of achieving this career goal. The best part of wanting to be a fossil is that it doesn’t limit you possibilities too soon. I may have had a bad day at work today, but at least I’m not a manicurist.
In the meantime I have been a professional student, an accountant in a savings and loan, a caseworker, an auditor, a programmer, wife, Mom. At least wanting to be a fossil leaves a lot of other options open.
Why do we ask little kids, “What to you want to be when you grow up?” Shouldn’t we ask, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Most of us don’t want to be our job; we just want to do our job.
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2005-01-30 14:56:44.827:
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I am mulling over the concept of documenting knitted lace doily patterns in a database so that they can be dynamically displayed as graphic images on a web page.
There would be a tblDoily for the name and size information. Then a tblDoilyRound for the round number, the stitches in the repeat, the number of repeats, and the number of stitches in the segment.
Actually knitted doilies are not as complex as they look. The hard part is the getting started because the needles are hard to manage when there are only a few stitches on each. If you get past about the 10th round, you get into the groove.
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Now displaying records 1 to 8 of 20.
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