wandering wordsmith

:sniffle, sniffle, sneeze, hack, snort, sniffle, sniffle:

Grandma’s been complaining about her (relatively, as of November) new “hearing machine,” which is basically a little microphone, amp and earphone. “It’s not working! It’s not working! The batteries are dead!”

I brought it home last night to give it a more thorough going-over than I could there. Batteries are good, connections are good, microphone seems OK… but the earphone wasn’t working. :sigh: Who knows what she did to that? Dunked it in a cup of coffee? Played fetch with the cat?

Since it only sends signal in mono (WHY would the mfr do that?!?), I took a pair of spare earphones, checked ‘em out, cut off the nonfunctional one, and took it back over this a.m. She’s thrilled. Again.

And she’s already forgotten that I was the engine for getting her into hospice. “Did you know they’ve put me in the hospice program, honey?” Um, yeah, I kinda had an inkling. ;D

:sniffle, sniffle, sneeze, hack, snort, sniffle, sniffle:

We got Grandma actually admitted to the hospice program yesterday—lots of paperwork, which she didn’t have to mess with, thank goodness—and when she met the hospice nurse, she was so excited. It seemed a little weird, like, “Oh, I’m so happy to be in your program, somebody will finally let me die!” But she was thrilled and hugely relieved. I think she felt much better just knowing that hospice, not the nursing staff on site, is in charge of her care and they will be called first the next time there’s an emergency. Not the EMTs.

After seeing her response to the program admission, I feel a lot better about the whole thing, too. And of course. . . the infection on her leg is much better. . . sans treatment. That woman is tougher than tempered nails.

Met with Grandma and her doctor today about her very, very sore shoulder (separated AC, possibly torn rotator cuff) and an infected owie on her leg. We decided to call in a hospice consult and not give Grandma antibiotics. This means she may kick the infection on her own… or she may not. If not, she will get sick and die.

She’s been angling for this for a long, long time, as you know (the dying part, not the infected owie part). And she was very much in agreement with not treating it. But still, it’s a difficult decision to make. If / when the infection moves into her bloodstream, she will die.

As I’ve said, I don’t want to lose my mommy. But in most of the ways that count, she hasn’t been my mommy for a long time. This is what she wants. I’m not going to do what one of my cousins did, and violate her wishes.

But still.

I’ve been feeling so good this week that it’s a little scary. After much reflection and analysis, I discovered that the reason I’d felt so bad was that the particular brand of brain pills the pharmacy had given me did not work. Yes, did not work. I’ve had them off and on for a month here, a month there, and it took a while to recognize it. They’re generic, so are required to have the same chemical composition as the brand-name stuff, but nevertheless, they did not work. It’s a miracle I didn’t fling myself off a cliff after murdering sixteen stupid drivers.

Of course, the manufacturer no longer makes the ones that did work, so I’ve been trying yet a third variety and they seem to be doing fine. It may be that, or it may just be that day length has increased enough to get rid of the seasonal crap. Either way, I’ve been cheerful, full of energy, and boisterous as can be this week. It’s a welcome change, lemme tellya!

Speaking of flinging myself from a cliff. . . Grandma hit the emergency room last Wednesday, so most of my day was spent there. She had shoulder pain (nothing showed on X-rays, but she does seem to be genuinely sore as opposed to, erm, inventing something so she can get special attention, though she gets royally pissed off whenever someone dares suggest that’s what she’s doing). They’d put her in the north unit, where I’d never been. On her left, behind a curtain, was another senile old lady. . . and on her right, behind another thin curtain, was yet a third senile old lady.

For five solid hours, maybe more, I listened to the three of them have the same three separate conversations. . . over. . . and over. . . and over. . . and over. . . until I would have flung myself out the window in despair, except that ER’s on the first floor and it would have been fairly pointless. Although it would have halted the original comments and started a new set of three repetitive comments: Why is it so cold in here? Why is that window open? I feel a cold breeze coming through!

My hooch has had booster yeast, but I don’t think it’s made much more of the vital waste product without which hooch is just rotten juice. Snaotheus and KrisDi are, at last notice, planning to come up and buy beer this weekend, so I may de-balloon the hooch while they’re here so they can help check it out. So far, it seems to have been a rather remarkably unsuccessful ’speriment. Maybe I need to throw in some robust wild (read: bread) yeast.

The other day, Grandma was complaining furiously that her new high-tech ear trumpet wasn’t working. She turned the volume up to 10 to no avail (I thought about telling her to try 11). She fussed and fiddled and farted around with it (as she always does; she can’t just find the right spot and leave it alone).

“The battery’s dead,” she announced (the battery was fine).

“It’s broken, then,” she countered when I pointed that out.

Well, not likely, I said, so I started checking things. She had it turned on, the earphone was plugged into the unit, the contact was good. . . so I followed the wire back toward her. . . you know where this is going, right? Yes.

She’d forgotten to put the earphone in her ear.

Somehow, this was my fault.

Today, she’s decided that she has “hallucinations” (read: inability to remember things) because of “something they gave me when they pulled my teeth.”

I will never learn. I just had to explain that a) lack of memory and reasoning ability do not a hallucination make; b) Novocain does not give anyone hallucinations; and c) even if it did, her teeth were pulled nigh on a year ago, and it wouldn’t hang around this long.

She, of course, was not having any of this rational, fact-based shit. No, by damn, she was having hallucinations and it’s the dentist’s fault she can’t remember anything.

Since she comes up with some cockamamie thing to blame this on every so often, you’d think I’d've learned by now just to mumble “mmm” and move on to another topic. But despite her lack of memory, she manages to hold on to these idiotic ideas for long periods of time, and my intent is to keep her from driving the aides insane asking / telling them about them. (See “repetitive comments” above.) We’ve all told her ten thousand times that she’s old, she’s falling apart, and she’s freaking senile, but she absolutely refuses to accept it. Aargh. I tellya, I’m checking out before I reach that stage!

A photo of the cranberry hooch with the initial (leaky) balloon.

Subsequent balloons didn’t work any better. It’s almost three weeks old, and the balloon is lying there sadly. I’m half afraid to check it; it’s probably strong enough to kick a mule halfway ’round the world. (P.S.: It’s not. I tasted it today and it’s still sweet as sin and not very boozy. Must be cold enough in here to slow fermentation.)
In other news, here’s the pincushion I put together for a Ravelry swap in the Ankh-Morpork Knitters Guild group. I’ll bet CMOT Dibbler could make a mint with the hooch. Oh, and I am a failure as a design engineer: I made the elephants what I thought were the right size but, when all was said and done, could not figure out how to get them, Discworld and Great A’tuin together.

A person probably shouldn’t write updates when she’s in a long, ugly trough. Unfortunately, doing so means I can procrastinate doing anything a little longer. Almost all of January I lacked the energy or enthusiasm to do much of anything—even keep up with my journal, which I’ve done, though boringly, every day for years. I just don’t give much of a crap about anything. Can’t concentrate very well. Not sleeping well. Feel about as mentally sharp as wet plaster, and don’t even care much. Perhaps most distressing, and forgive me if I’ve already whined about this, is that I’m not getting the endorphins I usually get after a workout. That has never happened before, ever in my life, and it’s sheer dogged determination that I’m still doing it.

Yet I am. Not quite as religiously as I was (not every single day, but most days), but still gritting my teeth and doing it. It doesn’t help that this has been yet another Idiot Week, which is requiring me to put in roughly two hours a day more than usual, which means I haven’t been getting finished with it in time to get Missy Blue to the park for her run. It still gets dark too early. Still, I dragged her down today (an easy chore; you say the word “park” and she’s at the door) and walked her back up the trail. We got a ways farther than we usually do and turned back up into the steep part. Even she was ready to turn around and come back after that. And a youngster on a bicycle went by us on his way up the mountain, and passed us coming back on the way down. I felt slow and old. I miss my youth. I’m pooped, and so is she, so maybe we’ll get some decent sleep tonight.

Finally got my fancy new iPod up and running. It’s pretty awesome, although it has a learning curve. Bassmaster tells me that putting audiobooks on it can be a pain, so I’m surveying friends with iPods to see how they handle it. I do not understand how a tech device can not have a directory structure, or how its owner can’t define that structure. I hope the liberry audiobook downloads will work OK with it. I guess we’ll see.

Got to wish Northwood and Bassmaster happy birfdays. Pretty spooky to think my oldest baby child is 31! Gave Grandma the willies, too, but she forgot about it in a few minutes.

I have found a new CBC show to watch. Called “Death Comes to Town,” it is rude, crass, politically incorrect, disgusting and absurd, which is probably why I like it. This is definitely not the genteel Death of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. I laughed so hard last week that my sides hurt the next day, despite the fact that it triggered gag reflexes a few times. I must be a sick puppy.

Oh. The balloon on the cranberry hooch is still not really inflating, although it’s sort of standing at half-mast. This is about mid-cycle for fermentation, so it ought to be big and fat. Bah.

Hope y’all’s world is happier than mine.

Third problem has arisen… er, not arisen… aargh, you know what I mean. This balloon plooofed out, too, and sags limply in despair.

I am doomed.

Snaotheus conned me into purchasing a half-gallon of cranberry juice at the same time he conned me into buying half-a-beer-store’s worth of packaged and processed barley and hops. “You can make cranberry hooch!” he announced.

All right. I got around to putting sugar and yeast (Montrachet) in the cranberry juice last week. My understanding is that “hooch” requires the use of a balloon atop a bottle rather than the primary and secondary fermentation tanks and clickety little fermentation locks I’m used to employing to make wine.  I suspect it also requires the use of bread yeast, but all I had was the Montrachet in its little nitrogen-filled packet, so that’s what I put in the bottle.

First problem: The balloon broke on day two.

First solution: I attached a second balloon.

Second problem: The second balloon stood up whenever I shook the jar, but within minutes would go limp and look sad, dejected and embarrassed. (I shall eschew the obvious analogy. You have imaginations.)

Second solution: I pulled it off and attached yet a third balloon.

Third problem: Hasn’t occurred yet, but after losing all that CO2 during the first week, I suspect I’m gonna miss out on most of the nifty balloon-inflation fun that should, in a good and kind world, accompany the brewing of hooch.

I feel cheated.

While Northwood and Bassmaster gave me a beautiful, sleek, sexy little iPod Nano for Christmas, I have yet to get it past the “battery charged” stage. This isn’t from lack of interest, but from mental and emotional exhaustion.

First, it was delivered to my neighbor’s house so I didn’t know it was here for two days, until Bassmaster sent a mildly irate email.

Then, as soon as I plugged it in to charge it, my computer/s went from Bad to Worse to Really Heart-stoppingly Awful in the Interwebs reception area. It was taking me 20 minutes just to log on to my work site in the morning, and forget such things as streaming video and accessing Web sites.

Since no-work-site access equals no-pittance-in-the-bank, that came first. Two days’ worth of diagnosis and troubleshooting later, and I had to go buy a new wireless router. And install it. By myself. Yes, I hear all your teeth gritting with horror and the intake of air swishing through them. However, for perhaps the first time in my long, pathetic life, it actually worked.

Which left me so weak with relief that I haven’t yet recovered enough strength to tackle the iPod and its software, which until the aforementioned issue arose was giving me the Apple version of grief.

And then my pay-period totals showed that I was getting less than a 10 percent return for more than 30 percent additional work, and despite efforts to cut back on that, I’ve been having more and more piled on my plate such that … well, if you really wanna know, you can e- me, ’cause I expect lightning or some other sort of disaster would strike if I said it out loud. You know how that is.

I did at least get a birthday smidgen in the mail for Northwood, and another for the Bassmaster is in the offing. I’ve also gotta get deadline-sensitive things done for two friends with cancer.

I gotta tellya, life is not what I want it to be. Not atall, atall. If I could find a high cliff off which to hurl myself, I might just do it.

One thing you gotta say for Snaotheus and KrisDi: They feed you rilly rilly good. I drove down yesterday intending and expecting to just hang out at the house, and they stuffed me full of the ineffably wonderful Naan ‘n’ Curry food for lunch, then we trucked over to Pam’s Kitchen for our first experience of Trinidadian food for dinner. Seriously awesome. We had, collectively, dahlpuri with beef and chicken curriy rotis and jerk chicken, some of the best habanero hot sauce I’ve ever tasted, and citrus rum punch, sorrel rum punch, and sorrel as drinks. The sorrel was fantastic: tart and sweet, with serious cinnamon and clove flavors cooked into it. I grew up with sorrel as a salad green, but this is evidently a kind of hibiscus flower petal. Yummmm.

We got to Pam’s just before it opened for the evening, and a crowd of people were already hanging around the door. We got in, but “had” to sit at the bar rather than a table. This turned out to be delightful, since we got to talk with the young man who was working back there, who turned out to be Pam’s son.

KrisDi and Snaotheus also sampled quite a few beers at Malt & Vine during the afternoon. They’re funny when they’re tipsy. And visited bookstores, where I was extremely restrained and couldn’t find the one book I was looking for.

And they gave me my Christmas present, which turns out to be a stunning, sophisticated photo album of their wedding, chock full of wonderful Matt photos of them and everybody else, including young LaRyantrelle, having a great time together. Yay!

Oh, in case you can’t tell, the emoticon at the top is of a person so stuffed that her cheeks have popped out.

No messages or posts from any of you three boyos about whatever Astonishing and Amazing Off-the-wall Project you intended to do over Christmas at Dad’s? Did you poop out? I’m so disappointed not to have heard about it!

KrisDi and Snaotheus lent me The Stupidest Angel to read, by Christopher Moore. This obnoxious young man has joined the ranks of exactly three (now) authors who can make me fall out of bed laughing. It was utterly delightful, and thoroughly, charmingly twisted. I’d put it on y’all’s lists, fersure.

I’ve seen a few movies lately. Worth watching:

The Maiden Heist, which lets Morgan Freeman, Christopher Walken and Wm. H. Macy have a marvelous time horsing around. Very charming and funny movie.

Sherlock Holmes, although Robert Downey Jr. comes nowhere near matching my mental image of Holmes. Jeremy Irons would have come closer. But Downey has a sort of insanity about him that fit.

Avatar, which has an utterly predictable story line but is so incredibly, beautifully imagined that it doesn’t matter. Saw it in 3D (the first 3D movie I’ve ever seen), and I kept wanting them to stop the action so I could examine the environment. Wonderful way to spend a rainy, windy, nasty afternoon.

Worth skipping: the new Taking of Pelham 123. The original is much, much, much better. They changed the plot a bit and updated some things, but the major “improvement” is using the f-word as many times and in as many forms as possible. Infinitive, gerund, adjectivally, adverbially, and several other ways. Idiotic thing to do, since it adds not one single thing to characterization.

I hope you’ve all recovered from your hangovers by now. Happy new year!

So, nobody’s going to take pity on my need for a right-angle jig? You think having fun and horsing around is more important? Sheesh! Kids these days!

Here’s the hat Snaotheus and KrisDi insisted I had to knit for Northwood. They saw one at the beer store so I made one up as I went along. Of course, despite having the largest yarn stash in the western world, I didn’t have the color I needed so I had to buy yet more yarn… good grief! I’ve noticed quite a number of this style of hat around recently. Must be popular at the moment.

It turned out pretty cute, actually, especially with the trim of leftover yarn from Snaotheus’s Fibonacci-sequence sweater. Also made a pair of fingerless gloves for my postal person, but those aren’t of general family interest.

Spinning fools

Wiste drove up before C-day so we could attempt learning to spin. I didn’t have any real expectations, though I figured it would take at least all day to get the hang of it. Instead, we both caught on pretty quickly, so it wound up being more of a “well, what do we do now?” issue. We built Wiste a spindle so we wouldn’t have to take turns practicing, and the carders worked impressively to untangle and straighten out the sheep hair (yes, I know wool isn’t hair) so we could turn it into yarn. Wiste caught on to that really quickly. Here’s Wiste giving it a (har, har) spin.

And here’s my first single, which is what you call the one spun strand. You have to ply two or more of these together to make a more balanced yarn (one that doesn’t twist up), and I haven’t yet tried that. It (plying) is a bit like making cord out of a smaller piece of string, a technique I learned from Grandpa and passed on to you boys. We didn’t get around to trying the wheel, but I don’t think it will be that difficult. I’ve been having too much fun making spindles to try plying or the wheel.

Several people have told me this is pretty impressive for a first effort—pretty thin and quite consistent. It came to me really easily, which led me to decide that I was a textile slave in a former life. You have to admit, that’s far more likely than all the Cleopatras and Julius Caesars running around.

Old ones

KrisDi and Snaotheus came up just before they left for the Dubs Clan’s for the holidays. We spent some time with the Auncient One, who seemed to hear a lot more with her new Pocketalker, but didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense out of what she heard. Snaotheus asked her to tell us a story at one point, and she started out, “Once upon a time there was a round yellow face. It had little black round eyes and”—here, we realized that she was using as inspiration the yellow smiley face on the bag in which the Chinese take-out had been packed. This seemed outlandishly funny at the time.

Yesterday, I was trying to show her again how to get radio stations on her TV set (on cable). The TV would not come on even though the DVD player was turned off. I found the DVD of the wedding shoved in the tape player, underneath a tape that was already in the slot. I managed to pull the DVD out, but she had shoved the tape in backwards, and no amount of pulling and tugging would make that release. Not a clue how to get that puppy out.

Despite the fact that we did not show her how to take the DVD out of the player, or even tell her it was possible, she evidently discovered that it was. While I can understand how she forced the DVD in because it ought to go in some sort of slot to play, I don’t know how on earth she could have shoved the tape cassette in backwards. That’s a technology she’s known how to work for 20 years. Although she’s at such a low point cognitively that it didn’t occur to her that she should check the tape. Her approach to problem solving (in areas outside her specialties) has pretty much been “shove it harder.” There’s nothing I can do to help, either, because she a) can’t remember, b) won’t (or can’t remember to) read instructions, c) loses instructions, d) can’t remember, and e) can’t remember. Talk about frustrating. She’s not aware of these things enough even to be frustrated anymore.

And yet… the day the kids were here, she had worn a new dress to breakfast (before they arrived, about 9 a.m.). I asked if she’d gone “shopping” in the “free” box, which she does fairly often (and recently scored a seriously luxurious possom/merino sweater from New Zealand that I think she threw in the washing machine without even thinking to look at fiber content). “No!” she snapped. “This is my wedding dress!”

This is patently impossible, and I foolishly expressed doubt, and then let it go. If she wanted to believe it was her wedding dress, fine.

But then I told her when the kids were here (maybe seven hours later; her usual memory span is about 10 minutes now, tops) that it looked very nice on her, and she gave me a smug look and said I shouldn’t've disagreed with her about its being her wedding dress. Sometimes it astonishes me that she remembers things—and they’re always things she thinks she can beat me up with, which is not part of what used to be her normal personality. She’s becoming spiteful and a little bit mean. It’s really hard to watch this happen.

The big tree trunk

Right on my favorite trail at the park stands a big tree trunk, the remnant of an enormous tree that probably blew over. About six or seven feet tall and probably four or five feet in diameter, it’s covered with woody spikes and lumps where the wood fibers broke and shattered. The first time I walked past it, I noticed that many of the spikes and crevices and holes sported little rocks and pebbles of various sizes, shapes and configurations: lots of single rocks, a few spots with two or three stacked in columns or placed side by side, all kinds of things.

This decomposing trunk had become a sort of community bulletin board, marking for those who put their pebbles on it when they’d passed it and with whom. It was easy to imagine toddlers sitting on their fathers’ shoulders and putting their little pebbles on the top, and best buds sneaking theirs into tiny crevices near the bottom. I put my own pebbles on it to commemorate the first time Rusty and I completed the whole ’round-the-mountain trail. Another one with Blue, for a couple of landmarks. I loved that trunk, and I’m sure everybody else did, too. It told the story of all those people who had passed it and stopped to mark their visit.

A few months ago, Blue and I rounded the corner and neared the trunk. It looked different, and when I got nearer I realized somebody/ies had vandalized it. They’d knocked the rocks off, kicked off some of the softer parts of the trunk, and just generally made a mess of it. The trunk itself still stood, although it looked forlorn without its dressing of little pebbles.

Of course, the trunk as metaphor came immediately to mind. People build up a community or a civilization one rock at a time, and then the Huns (or maybe Republicans :snickers:) come along and destroy it. It’s bad for a while, and then individuals come along and put down a rock. Somebody else comes along and puts down another one. And eventually, the thing is rebuilt. We like to think that things are rebuilt better than they were before; but I think that’s often wishful thinking.

This is the tree in a recent (pre-autumn, evidently!) state of rebuilding. Since I took this, a couple of new rocks have been stuck in the more flexible woody bits at the top, someone put a flat piece of wood to the left and set rocks on top of that. There are also lots more pebbles of all shapes and varieties placed all over it. It’s looking good again.

“You engineering types, related to me either by blood or shirttails (that includes you, Legge!), here’s a great project for you on these long holiday days when you have nothing at all to do!” said the old hag, trying desperately to sound like a perky cheerleader.

I need a jig that will hold shafts at 90 deg to the base I shall attach them to. Bases will vary from probably 35-40 cm to 4″; most will be in the 2.5″ to 3″ diameter size. It will need to work long enough for glues to set, anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour or two. The bases will most likely have holes either existing in or drilled through the center. I can drill holes at 90 deg, or pretty close to it, but there is likely enough slop that a shaft can be pushed to 90 deg if it’s off a tish. The difficulty is keeping it there until the glue sets.

Ready? Set? Go!

You really can find anything (and everything) on the Internet!

Merry Christmas, you’uns whom I wish I could see. Toast and hug yourselves for me.

I cannot believe that this happened. I have worked with sharp pointy knives (X-acto types, to be precise) for more time than any of my children have been alive and only once actually damaged myself. Yet somehow, the bloody (no pun intended) damn thing embedded itself in the back of my index finger today, a good half-inch deep. Probably could’ve used a suture, but butterfly bandages were made for borderline things. Honestly, how do these things happen?!? :gnashes teeth: