Just so you'll know I'm still around, even though I haven't even been reading blogs for the past week, let alone writing! I've been ebaying, a frustrating task. I had bids on six out of 8 items, and then discovered I hadn't measured an inseam and the pants had evidently been shortened. I sold one pair listed at 30" and had to contact the buyer and tell him the unfortunate discovery. Now I've relisted them, just shorter.

I was afraid I'd listed a pair that Bill was wearing!

It's a nuisance to find boxes to pack things in, but if you're not making much anyway, that's what you have to do. Sigh.

I listed my first of Mother's sterling tonight. It's called a marriage cup, and even though I have no use for it, it's very pretty. The thing is, I can't keep all her things, even if they are pretty, and I know I value them higher than someone is willing to pay, which is not exactly the same thing as what they're worth. I am too attached to things.

I could try to rewrite this and make it clearer, even humorous, but a flat of impatiens is getting impatient to be planted and night is drawing nigh.
 

Tonight's the night!

The shuttle has made its final trip to the space station, at least for the foreseeable future. In addition to the toilet it delivered, probably to a very welcoming crew, it has carried the final piece of structure to be assembled. This piece is from Japan and is the largest of the components that have been ferried up there and put together.

Last night both the shuttle and the space station were in clear sight to the naked eye, and very bright. The shuttle was just a minute or two behind (from our point of view, that is;) and the entire pass lasted maybe five minutes.

Look up Nasa.gov to see when the sightings will be in your area. It's worth it.
 

Here it is, the first day of the month, and if I don't post quickly I'll miss out.

Or not! I forgot that last night's post missed the witching hour a little. Oh well, I didn't have much to say anyway.

I did intend to give you a link to a funny video, with an apology to anyone it might offend, so I'll do it anyway. No offense is intentional. Here's the link. I hope you laugh.

http://www.anchormast.com/2008/05/28/lifestyle-choice/
 

We didn't get started quite as early as I'd hoped. We never do, and it's almost always my own fault so I can't complain. But the weather here was nice, and we took off a little after ten. Had to make a pit stop in the Dalles, and then on to Newberg for lunch. The girls ate all their lunch and were well behaved, and that made everything else just fine. It was great to see them all, and the food was good too.

Afterwards we went back to their house where Liz was planting her garden. Lucy planted two packages of pumpkin seeds at the other end of the yard, despite protests that she wanted them in the regular garden. She worked pretty hard with the hoe, sprinkling the seeds in the furrows and stomping on them with her green garden boots that she wears everywhere.

Lucy played pet shop with me for awhile-- that was a first that I was glad to see. She isn't usually that personable or interactive. Granted, I did most of the playing and talking, but she played along, added some dialog and made some suggestions. Then she went out and showed me all her tumbling achievements and showed me how she can ride her big bicycle-- like the wind!

Katie played pet shop with Bill while Lucy tumbled. She talked Bill into reading two books to her too, which he loved doing. She is very engaging. Then she poured two bowlfuls of hot water into the kiddy pool and filled the rest with the hose. She wanted more hot water, but Hap stopped her. He said she spilled half of it just getting it out from under the faucet, and the sun would warm it up anyway. Then Katie put on a new swimsuit that came from her aunt Lenore, and her mask and snorkle and dunked her head in the pool. Too cold for her. The dogs liked it though. Irma, mostly boxer, lay down in it.

The next thing the girls wanted was a snow cone, so they brought out the hand crank machine, a bowlful of ice and a bottle of grenadine and got their dad to start cranking. I had picked some mint to take home with me, and we (the grownups) talked fondly of mojitos we have known. Sadly, they were out of rum, but Bill wouldn't have had one anyway before flying. So we put some mint in the snow cones with the grenadine, and had a good time. The girls had disappeared by then, and Hap went in for something and found them snorkling in warm water in the tub while holding each other's snowcone! What a pair!

What do you think? As soon as the weather actually warms up, don't mojito snow cones sound great?
 

For the last next to the last day of May, we made it back from our walk in the orchard in time for a short blog.

Supper tonight was a 'whatchagotchi' of frozen chicken tenders, olive oil, fresh garlic, onions, mushrooms and zucchini, with a garlic ginger sauce and low sodium soy sauce. It will probably be a few weeks before we have fresh spring onions growing in the garden, and a few more weeks before we have our own zucchini.

Had a good visit today with a 50+ yr old woman with ALS, a terrible disease. She is a very religious person and is in good spirits when I visit, although I've heard from her sister that she is not always so up. Of course. Who could be? I'm sorry she doesn't dump her sorrow and doubt on me instead of her sister, who is not very religious at all and thinks she's a little wacky.

I convinced myself to go to the Y Wednesday and felt better for it. I didn't even treat myself with a Blizzard from Dairy Queen, which I bribed myself with to get me to go. Wasn't that good? Today I bribed myself with a game of Jewel Quest at the computer at work (on my own time) and a promise of a Blizzard, which I again avoided. Yea me!

Tomorrow we're hoping for good enough weather to fly to see my son and his family. He came over to help saw up the downed trees in January, but we haven't seen his girls since Thanksgiving. I'm excited. We can fly around any thunderstorms, I hope. Wish we could spend the night, but I have to get back for church. Also, don't want to take Seamus to the kennel. We'll have to do that when we're ready to fly to Florida-- probably for two weeks. Maybe in June.
 

I was going to skip tonight, and then I noticed my views just went over 10,000! 21 over, in fact. Wish I'd noticed who to give the big prize to. Oh well, maybe I'll just have a quiet celebration myself tonight. How does rum and Coke sound? With lime, of course.

Met a new patient today, the third new one this week who lives more than 30 miles away. It's nice to get paid for driving and seeing beautiful scenery, but I haven't noticed our gas allowance going up. Gas today was $4.15 a gallon.

I have two new ones to see tomorrow, both nearby. One, however, is someone I know, a nurse from the hospital, younger than I am. Her husband just died of cancer last fall, and now she's close. I knew she had breast cancer a few years ago, and treatment for it. It must have come back.

Let's see if I can't think of something that is funnier than all of that. A co-worker was telling me about his evening. He'd waited up for his teenage daughter who was out on a date, and he heard screaming from the back yard. He rushed out and saw twelve little eyes in his garden, a mother raccoon and five babies eating his newly planted vegetables. He said he grabbed a broom and ran at them, chasing them all up a tree, giving each one a little smack on its butt. But then he saw all the little eyes just staring down at him, and knew they'd be right back in the garden as soon as he went inside. So he got the garden hose and sprayed them all until they jumped out of the tree, up the fence and out of the yard. He hopes that will do the job.


 

This is a fascinating 18 minute video about the working of the brain by a doctor who recounted what it was like to have a stroke. Sounds grim, I know, but it was really interesting to hear the way the two hemispheres of the brain work, what they do differently, and how she experienced all of it. The speaker is easy to listen to, animated and funny even.

http://vsl.veryshortlist.com/ct/2955167:3229895434:m:3:226900516:4B0734476D81370...

 

Next week will be the last week of our grief group. It's gone well. We had one man drop out, for which we were thankful. He wasn't ready to listen to anything but his own sad tale, and however sad it truly is, group members have to be able to support each other, or at least listen attentively. A woman came the following week and took his place, so we came out okay in numbers. Five is a small group, but a workable size, and people became close and talked easily.

The group is held, I may have mentioned, in the apartment building we moved my mother into when we first brought her over here from her home in Kennewick. Tonight, since I was early even to set up, I let myself feel what it was like, putting in the pass code and going through those doors every night.

I was always there with a mixture of feelings. If I came for lunch, I had to hurry back to work. Usually I came after work and fixed supper for her. My most intense feeling was sadness. The apartment was brand new, a decent size for her I thought. Her furniture was a tight fit because she couldn't decide to leave anything else out. She really couldn't decide much of anything. She hardly knew where she was, and where she had lived before. Her house, where she and Daddy had moved to from Atlanta fifteen years before, was just a hole in her mind. Pictures of it looked familiar if one of us was in the picture too, but she couldn't quite place the location.

She missed out on the joy of seeing her mother's red Oriental rug look perfect in her new living room. She missed out on having a patio with a view of the fountain below and the mountains in the distance. She didn't really notice any of it.

For years she had been making us a perfect Sunday dinner, week after week, only the entree changing from pot roast to salmon to maybe meatloaf. I forget. Suddenly I was cooking the meals in her apartment, and Bill would come and eat with us. This was the same mother who barely let me in the kitchen except to dish up the salad, set the table, fill the glasses with ice water. Suddenly she had trouble remembering how to work her microwave, and ate a lot of cereal and toast when I wasn't there.

It still makes me incredibly sad to remember how lost she was in a new place, and I wonder again and again if it was really the best thing to do. But what else could I have done, you ask? That's what we all say, except the ones who choose to do something else. Like the three sisters who are giving full time care to their brother with Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease. They have jobs and families too, but they're managing. And the daughter who came all the way across the country to tell her mother she forgave her so that the mother could die in peace, and stayed for a month expecting it to happen.

I'm not at all convinced I couldn't have done better by her, somehow helping her stay in the familiar territory of her own home. But, as I think of it, she didn't have a terminal diagnosis then. She just had Parkinsons and was becoming demented, little by little. So, although I might have stayed with her and gotten some live-in help, I probably wouldn't have thought to do it so early. Still, she lived another four years. Sigh. I guess I couldn't have done it differently after all. But maybe, live-in help....

For our final week we are all supposed to bring a food the person who died really liked, and eat together. I'm thinking. I don't think salmon would be a good choice. Probably salad. We had a green salad every Sunday, with peeled tomatoes and oil and vinegar dressing. That would be okay for the Adventists in our group.

I'll close this off before the hour turns, then maybe come back and add a video that I thought was really good. Serious, but good. If I can find it in time.
 

Bill has spent Memorial Day weekend in his customary and endearing way, thinking of the family members who have died. He always gets out the buckets of water, patrols the yard cutting all the best flowers, loads them along with scrub brush and Windex, me and the dog, and goes to the cemetery to take care of the graves.

Actually that only takes a couple of hours, max. But this year he decided to load his Family Tree program, which was on my old, deceased computer, and to hunt for more branches. Must be because he has a new bud for it, little Zach, that he got interested again.

Plus, after since we visited Howard Castle he's been trying to find a legitimate connection between that family and his. Well, sure, there are a lot of Williams, Elizabeths, Charleses and Johns in both branches of the Howards, but what family with an English surname can't say that?

And what did I think we'd get done this weekend beside geneology? Well, there's the basement to work on, the other half of the fish pond to empty and re-line, and the living room to be painted. I thought maybe we'd get at one of those.

But since that wasn't happening, I washed and photographed clothes and put ads on eBay. Those are the old ones I spent my time with. I didn't have as much fun as he did, and I'm still not done, but it's a start.

Is it worth it? I'm not sure about that one. I need to buy some more silver polish, I guess, since I can't find mine. How in the world can you lose silver polish?
But I thought if anybody ever buys silver any more, June brides and 25th anniversaries ought to be the best time to sell.

There are a lot of Bill's too big pants that were hardly worn. They're tricky to photograph though, too wide to hang neatly on a hanger and I don't have very good light on my wood floor to lay them down on.

A friend suggested I make a cardboard insert to hold them upright and stuff them! And she was serious!

Oh, another old one-- Bill got out most of the stump and root of the big pine tree that fell in January. That's progress, and it didn't take him long either.




 

Bill is currently on the phone to a surveyor of some sort, maybe cars, from the sound of it. They've evidently asked him about servicing his cars, because he's talking about tires.

We always take them to Les Schwab for everything. They're fast, accommodating and do a good job. Bill is now having a good time talking though. He's going on and on about the mileage on his Prius, the touring package, and hybrids in general. He also told her about Phil Wick, a former chairman of Les Schwab who used to be his neighbor. Bill told her they'd had him stuffed and displayed in the home office when he died. (He admitted later that he didnt' know if Phil was still alive or not. If you are, sorry Phil!) In between his funny stories he's answering a question or two. I hope she's enjoying this interview as much as he is!

She's evidently from Las Vegas, because he's now telling her about visiting area 51. He equated Prineville, the home of Les Schwab, with Elko, a town in the middle of nowhere.

He says she didn't even know how to pronounce Prius when they began talking, and now he has her convinced she should be ashamed not to be getting 47 mph! He really ought to be a salesman!