Do the Yak

This is where our next-door neighbor was fatally injured just before Christmas. His death was initially mysterious but ultimately just sad, as was much of his life. The final tragedy was his fall (probably) from the slippery roof of his house where he had lived his whole life. Early that evening, we saw an ambulance and police cars outside, but this wasn't a major concern because we'd seen emergency vehicles over there several times before. This is because Bill called them himself when the voices got too frightening. He took medication for his condition, but sometimes it stopped working, or maybe he stopped taking it. In the past, he went to a hospital for a couple of weeks to stabilize and then returned home. That night, after the ambulance had taken him away, a policeman came over to ask if we knew of anyone who had a key to his house, which was "like a fortress," he said. That's because Bill was afraid people were trying to kill him. He had an assortment ...

That sort of sums up the rest of our vacation. I'm ecstatic to report that the kids will now sleep as late as we do (or in Sarah's case, wake up earlier and read quietly). So Ben and I got to loll around in bed until 9:30 or even 10 on some of those mornings. There is no greater pleasure than a good night's sleep and a gradual awakening when it's not still dark out. What did we do when actually upright, you may ask? For the most part it involved sitting in front of the fire, playing Monopoly, watching DVDs, cooking and eating, seeing friends, and just hanging out. Somehow the time seemed to pass in a normal fashion. We also caught up on some stuff we'd been putting off while Ben was unemployed, like taking the cats to the vet for shots and getting a plumber to deal with the clogged drain in the kids' bathroom. Isn't that exciting?Buy we did get out a bit... we went to a fun potluck in central Mass. at the home of an old colleague of Ben's. There were m...

Christ almighty, this is fucked up in so many ways. By "this" I mean today's news that the Senate health-care negotiators have dropped the provision in the health-care reform bill that would have provided hospice counseling and other end-of-life advice . First of all... VOLUNTARY, okay?? Secondly, since when does counseling about hospice = euthanasia? Do Americans even know what hospice is? Apparently not. They're so fucking stupid that they believe these BLATANT LIES put out by right-wing nuts who don't believe the lies themselves but are deliberately and maliciously doing whatever they can to torpedo health care reform and, by extension, Obama himself. And these sheep don't bother to do some basic checking to see if such an outrageous thing might possibly be, oh I don't know, maybe a wee exaggeration? Or even a complete falsehood? Nope, they just believe what they're told by liars. Who are using this provision to play on stupid people's primitiv...

Our drive to New Jersey on Friday was punctuated by frog-choking downpours, mostly on the Mass. Pike. On Sunday in New Jersey, there was another FCD, but fortunately it held off until everyone was back at Ben's brother's house having brunch. An hour earlier, and dozens of people would have been drenched, standing outside at the cemetery for the unveiling ceremony for Ben's aunt, who died last September just 22 days after being diagnosed with stomach and liver cancer. Unveilings are apparently a uniquely American Jewish custom. Traditionally, family members bury the deceased within 24 hours and sit shiva (mourn) for seven days (shiva means seven in Hebrew). Some think the unveiling evolved as another life-cycle occasion to bring together geopgraphically scattered members of an extended family. Or if you're more cynical, you might see it as a way of saying "It's been a year, let's move on." In any case, it was very moving for the adults and sort of so...

I never heard of Clerihews until I came across the term in the Miss Conduct blog vv. The basic idea is that the first line is the name of a celebrity and the other three lines poke fun at that celebrity in some way. The rhyme scheme is A-A-B-B but there's no meter, so any number of syllables in any line is fine. Like every other red-blooded American, I have Michael Jackson on the brain, so this is what I came up with in about 10 minutes: Michael Jackson Died with his slacks on, Which is more than you can say for David Carradine, Who was hanging out with a dirty magazine. I entered it in Miss Conduct's contest (#24 if you click on the comments in the link above). It's gotta have a shot, right? Along the same lines, there was an NPR story yesterday about the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest . So I was inspired in the car to jot down my own entry, which came to me unbidden on a flaming pie : He knelt and laid a trembling hand on her shapely head, acutely aware of her ...

It's fall again and we're off to the races... new schedules, a new job for me, logistics of Thursday afternoon Hebrew School transportation to consider... but also a new era without Ben's aunt Priscilla, who died Sept. 12. I've been a tad busy since then at the funeral and getting back on track here, hence the silence. We left that afternoon with a rented minivan after I couldn't rustle up one to borrow from family or friends (everyone was away). In true Murphy's Law fashion, I had to get Ben to come to the rental place in Harvard Square because it turned out my driver's license had expired. Which I knew about months ago and sent in for a renewal to the DMV , which fucked up and sent me a duplicate instead with an expiration date about a week after it arrived in the mail of course . Stupid fuckwits . So we left late and hit traffic. We picked up G. and handled her repeated questions about where we were going, where the funeral would be, etc. It started t...

Ben returned about 10:30 last night from a very difficult weekend in Delaware visiting his dying aunt and extended family (see last post). For Ben, the secondary drama was dealing with his mother G., whose Alzheimer's disease and being away from her familiar surroundings under such circumstances made her understandably confused and upset. This was just as hard to take in some ways as his aunt's illness. An example: G. asked Priscilla's nephew, who is a doctor, whether there was any chance Priscilla could recover. When he gently told her no, G. burst into tears and wept for a few minutes before calming down. And then asking the same question again. And getting the same answer, and experiencing the shock and pain of that information for the first time -- again. Ben did a wise thing, which was to have G. write down what she wanted to say in the way of a good-bye to her sister. Ben also made a short video using his cellphone of the two of them in the hospital room. It was shock...

Here I am at home on a Saturday morning with the girls... but no Ben. This is because he took a train with his mother yesterday afternoon to Delaware, where G's sister Priscilla is dying of cancer. A couple of weeks ago, Priscilla was feeling tired and vaguely ill, so she went to the doctor, who did some routine blood work and found that something was wrong with her liver, so he sent her to the hospital for more tests... which revealed cancer throughout her liver. The doctors suspected that it has spread from another site in her abdomen, so they did an endoscopy and found a large mass in her stomach. The cancer was deemed inoperable, and she was also too weak or too far along to benefit from chemotherapy. Now we're up to Tuesday (four days ago). The prognosis was three to four weeks and hospice was called in. So now Ben had to decide what to tell his mother (who's close to her sister) and when. The staff at her Alzherimer's place were in two camps. One guy thought G. sh...

Two nights in a row with babysitters -- woo hoo! Friday wasn't even our idea -- Sarah and Becky insisted on participating in Fun Night, which is where every few weeks the after-school program keeps the kids from 6-9 pm. and they can watch a movie in their PJs, stuff themselves with pizza and ice cream etc. Good wholesome family fun. Of course Ben and I rae such losers that we wouldn't think of enough to do to fill three whole hours, so we went to dinner and then back home to watch a couple of episodes of "The Odd Couple" (he gave me the first two seasons on DVD for Hanukkah... YESSSSS!) and then went back for the kids. On Saturday we went to a party while my father and stepmother babysat. Once a year a wonderful couple (childless, probably in their late 50s) invites us to their holiday party with excellent South African food, beautiful decor, cosmopolitan and sophisticated guests... I always feel like we're trespassing in the Adult World, but it's great fun. D...

The kids seem to be enjoying our new house, and they certainly love the ol' swimming hole we can walk to. They can splash around for hours in there. I love the water too, but now I'm a boring grownup and I don't seem to want to splash around for hours but would rather take a dip and then go lie on the beach. We had a real nice time there two weekends ago with a family from our previous town who have two kids roughly Sarah and Becky's age. We met them at school through the kids, obviously, which is apparently the only way to make new adult friends once you're a parent, but that's OK. The only drawback to the new place from the kids' standpoint is that it's bigger and has higher ceilings, which means it's echoey and hard to locate the source of a sound or make yourself heard at the other end of the house even at top volume. So when we're all at home with the adults are puttering somewhere and the kids playing, quite often the kids, especially Bec...

One of Sarah's first-grade classmates earlier this year was a boy named AJ in a recumbent wheelchair. We didn't know what was wrong with him but he seemed pretty immobile and unresponsive, so I assumed he had severe cerebral palsy or some such thing. He had a personal assistant who wheeled him in each morning and helped in the classroom. Another parent in Sarah's class organized a schedule where families could take turns bringing dinners to his house, since his mom was taking care of AJ alone – more than a full-time job – and she had two other young kids. So I made a pan of lasagna and Sarah and I brought it over (right around the corner from our house) between Christmas and New Year's. The mom seemed tired. I could glimpse AJ through the hall lying on a couch with some kind of machine to help him breathe. In calling to confirm arrangements, the mother who organized the dinners said that AJ wouldn't be coming back to school after the holidays. Yesterday, the school...

... is dead of a heart attack at age 96. His secret to longevity? According to Wikipedia , it was "playing golf and eating Chikin Ramen almost every day. He was said to have eaten Ramen until the day before he died." If he'd only had time to choke down a hearty bowl on the day of his death, it might have postponed his demise! Defective Yeti has the scoop on the interment plans. Recent comment fom our eldest child after getting a Band-Aid on her left thumb: "I'm glad it's not my sucking thumb because thumb-sucking is part of life." And later, after explaining something highly conceptual to Becky: "When you get to be a first-grader, you get to be smart and you know these things."

Sorry for the lack of recent posts. Work has actually gotten very busy -- I'm overseeing the redesign of a big web site, including writing and editing a lot of the content. Also I've been having feelings of inadequacy about blogging when you don't really have anything important to say, largely because I've been reading a blog the last few days by a woman who just this week died of ovarian cancer. Obviously someone in that situation has a lot of serious emotions and important information to share about herself, and some urgency to record these things before they're gone. Plus she was a terrific and funny writer. Plus I have a workplace friend in her early 50s who was healthy as a horse until she had a seizure in December and was diagnosed with Stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme, a brain cancer that is 99 percent fatal within 12 months. Aside from the usual stuff about her courage, she is still thinking a great deal about our workplace and the people in it, and the fact...

Ben is much better now. He was a big pile of misery for 48 hours starting around noon on Wednesday until yesterday, when he got 85 pounds of sodden, packed cotton out of his nasal passages after day surgery for a deviated septum. We knew he would be uncomfortable post-operatively, but not to that degree. He was more or less OK when I picked him up Wednesday afternoon, but it turns out he still had some good drugs in his system even though he was awake and alert. Then they wore off and he took Percocet and tried to eat something, all of which resulted in him tossing his tacos repeatedly and feeling panicky about all the crap in his nose and throat, so we went to the ER and they have him some saline in an IV and calmed him down. I felt very helpless since I couldn’t make his fear and discomfort go away. Sort of like he felt in February 2001 when I hit the wall, post-partum-depression-wise, as I woke up one morning at 6:00 and realized I was so anxious and unhappy that I felt like I was o...