Today is Halloween, and I’m driving up to Albany to attend a retirement reception for my former (female) boss, whose favorite holiday also is Halloween. So the reception is “come in costume.” You can bet I am, including a mask. When I get back this evening, I will try to post a photo of me as “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant…..the wisest woman in all of Europe with a wicked pack of cards.” (from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.) I have printed out business cards with the above quote on one side and one of the Tarot’s Major Arcana on the other. I will hand them out at the reception. My former secretary, who is going as the Grim Reaper, will know who I am; it will be interesting to see if anyone recognizes me.
ADDENDUM:

With the recent death of his only aunt, my four year old grandson is starting to ask questions like “why do people go to church?” My daughter and son-in-law, both devout agnostics, are preparing themselves to deal with the god question that is surely soon to follow.
We raised both our kids without any belief in god or any religious affliations. We did, however, impart a belief system, through what we said and what we did, that resulted in their both offspring living lives that many so called Christians would be wise to emulate. They are guided by a sense of social justice and personal morality that is based on the Golden Rule. Very much in the spirit of “Jesus.”
Tonight’s PBS program with Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason featured Catholic novelist Mary Gordon and atheist philosopher Colin McGinn. I found the perspectives of both of great value to one of the big questions of our times:

No, I’m not saying that Fascists are great. I’m saying that Fascists rule our county today. I mean, even a group of senior citizens carrying boxes of donuts as symbolic statements are being rousted by police. I got that story from here, in a post that also cites blatant tyrannies of our government leaders.
Of course, in the little picture, I live with a 90 year old fascist dictator who refuses to cooperate or doing anything that she doesn’t want to do. I often can understand why some institutions medicate older people into obedience. The alternative is that their behavior is dangerous to themselves and frustrating and exhausting for everyone else.
So, I’m doing some research into using essential oils (inhaling, applying, and ingesting) on her as a non-intrusive way to help her focus, calm down, and find some kind of joy in her complaint-filled existence..

Of all our senses, the sense of smell is the most intimately connected with the brain. In spite of this, the sense of smell is very complex in how it functions. The mechanism by which the odor receptor cells interact with odor-causing molecules is still unknown, but studies of odors and the structure of the odor-causing molecules has revealed some correlations.

Fragrance inhalation through the nose goes directly to the brain where its neurological effects can alter blood pressure, pulse and mood, as well as having sedative effects

I have heard that the sense of scent is the last to leave a dying person’s consciousness.

Some things you just don’t want to miss, such as:

Despite my mother’s being in an “don’t leave me alone” frame of mind, I managed to get some time in at Ronni Bennet’s Elderblogger PhoneCon yesterday. Some 25 bloggers showed up. Only two guys, as far as I know. But that was OK because the women who chatted all had fascinating and/or funny things to say. I think I spent every minute that I was on-phone laughing. The biggest chuckles were the result of the hilarious one-liners from lovely Golden Lucy, 84 years old and good enough to have a career as a stand-up comic.
She stands in contrast to what my mother was at 84 — which is only a little more coherent than she is now. We took a ride today to visit my father’s grave and have lunch with her three remaining living friends. I think the whole trip was too much for her. While she was looking forward to seeing her friends before we went, on the way home she asked who those people were. She sort of knew and sort of didn’t. Just like she sort of is and sort of isn’t.
The one thing about blogging is that there is no end to the friends you can make. Over the PhoneCon, everyone admitted that they would love to meet each other in person. With Claude Blogging in Paris and the rest of us spread all other this country, it’s just a fun fantasy — although recently Claude did visit Ronni in Maine.
If you go to Ronni’s post about the event, there are links to the other participants, including Joared, who just used to leave comments but inaugurated her first very own weblog yesterday.

Tomorrow is the Elderblogger PhoneCon set up by Ronni Bennet , a premiere elderblogger in her own right.
I don’t know who else will be there, but I’m sure looking forward to finding out.
On Wednesday, we’re taking my mother for a ride down to our home town, where my Dad is buried. Wednesday is his birthday, and we’re going to visit the cemetery. And then take my mom to visit with the three old time friends of hers who are still alive and still living in Yonkers.
Wednesday is also my son’s birthday. Somehow he managed to get born on a day that made him the perfect birthday present for my Dad. They used to celebrate their birthdays together. Now my son lives across the country in the Pactific Northwest, and my Dad has been dead for more than 25 years. October 25 will be a bittersweet day.
Wonder Women, all.

If you thought this post was disturbing, think about the results of a new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which was reported in various newspapers yesterday.

The newspaper reports state that the study predicts:

a future of nasty extreme weather [that] also includes fewer freezes and a longer growing season….extreme events are the kinds of things that have the biggest impacts, not only on humans but on mammals and ecosystems…the scariest results had to do with heat waves and warm nights. Everything about heat waves — their intensity, length and occurrence — worsens.

That’s the big picture. There are little picture disasters happening right heer not far from Mother Mountain. In my local newspaper today is a piece about an alien (to this area) species of turtles (red-earred slider) being dumped into various park lakes and ponds because those who owned them didn’t want them anymore.

Home for red-eared sliders and other dumped species is south and way west of the Catskills. Right now, no one knows what kinds of diseases those turtles might have brought to this brave new (for them) world. All kinds of weird domino-falling stuff happens in nature.

That’s why scientists insist you not expose native species to invaders. Too much isn’t known.

One naturalist suggests that:

…some turtles, like red-eareds in Chinatown, are kept in unsanitary pens covered with visible fungus …. Fungus has been linked worldwide with the death of frogs. Harriman State Park’s native endangered northern cricket frogs are almost gone.

Could it be that the fungus introduced by turtles from Chinatown was what did in Harriman’s cricket frogs?

As a city girl from Yonkers who never owned anything that grew and needed to be fed until I was in my twenties, it sometimes amazes me what an affinity I have for the natural environment. When I moved here to the middle of the woods, I spent my first fall digging up naturally growing ground cover and flowering plants and moving them closer to the house.
Often, as I stand outside and absorb the forms of things out here — fallen trees and broken stumps, stones from boulders to rocks — I see them as natural sculptures. The esthetics of the natural environment. Sometimes I think about moving this limb here, that stone there — creating my own nature-based formations.
Alongside the long, steep driveway, there’s what’s left of the bottom of a tree that fell long, long ago. It’s looks like a four foot high spire rising out of the debris of the seasons. One side of it has rotted away on the inside, down to six inches from the ground. I’m thinking that, in the spring, I will try to find some flowering vine that tolerates shade and plant it in the hollow dead trunk — a combination of nurture and nature, the living and the dying.
Appropriate for this place, this time.

Uh oh, the cat’s still outside, I say to her as I walk over to open the door. She comes running after me, calling Who died? Somebody died? Who just died?
She gets mad when I shout so she can hear me. When I don’t shout, she keeps asking What? What?
What? What? is what I said when I got on the scale this morning. This is the most I’ve ever weighed, including when I was pregnant. I eat when I’m bored. And I’m bored almost every evening when all I can do is sit and watch television with her. And shout so that she can hear me when I try to explain what’s happening on the small screen in response to her periodic assertions that she doesn’t understand.
Stop! Stop! I’ve got to stop eating so much. And I’ve got to stop shouting so much. It gives me a headache.

On the news today, a report of a stingray leaping into a boat and piercing an 81 year old man with its barbed tail. Imagine that — a fish several feet wide just flinging itself out of the water into a boat! Not very natural behavior for this graceful ocean dweller.
Yesterday, a herd of wild elephants went on a rampage and killed a sleeping family of five in Bangladesh.
Today, our government announced that the precious ozone layer above the Antarctic is the largest ever — 10.6 million square miles.
Personally, I believe that we humans are hell bent on destroying our planet. I found an interesting article that lists many of the environmental catastrophes that we are currently instigating by our assumption that we have the right to rape and plunder this planet for immediate gains in personal comfort and wealth. (The article also attributes these catastrophes to breaking “god’s” laws about how to deal with the natural world. I’m igoring that part of it all because of my non-belief system. But for those who believe, it makes sense as well.) I quote below the best of “Our Dying World.”

The elderly usually don’t have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do.

I have to admit, there are things that I regret not doing. I think I would have regretted not taking care of my mother.
POST SCRIPTS:
UN reports increasing ‘dead zones’ in oceans

The number of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in the world’s seas and oceans has risen more than a third in the past two years because of fertilizer, sewage, animal waste, and fossil-fuel burning, United Nations specialists said yesterday.

Loss of species that pollinate is cause for global alarm, researchers say.

Birds, bees, bats and other species that pollinate North American plant life are losing population, according to a study released Wednesday by the National Research Council. This “demonstrably downward” trend could damage dozens of commercially important crops, scientists warned, because three-fourths of all flowering plants depend on pollinators for fertilization.

Every year about this time of year I wind up with a sinus infection. This is the time when the windows get closed and the heat gets turned on. We have forced air heat, which makes things even worse. And then there’s also all of that leaf mold being blown around outside.
It always starts with a drip down the back of my throat. I start to feel the glands under my jaw getting larger and tender to the touch. Then my sinuses start to get stuffy. Within four days, I am at the doctor’s office getting an antibiotic because, although the whole thing begins with allergies and a virus, all of that yuck in my head is a great breeding ground for bacteria as well. I have, in the past, been laid up for almost two weeks.
This year I was ready. I was ready with Vitamin C, Echinacea, Oregano leaf and oil, Goldenseal, Zicam swabs and Zicam mouth spray, and saline nasal spray. At the first sign (the scratchy throat) I quarantined myself for one day and spent the day dosing myself every three hours with all of the above. In the morning and at night, I added a Benedryl to the drill.
The mouth spray pretty much kills your taste buds for the duration, so the orange juice I consumed throughout the day tasted like metal. As did everything else I ate. But that’s a small price to pay for avoiding being miserable for two weeks.
The kalilily cold cure means having a day with no stress — a day when you can rest, drink all the juice and tea you can stand, and dose yourself every three hours with immune system strengthening products. Over the course of one day, I ingested about 3,000 mg of Vitamin C, 1300 mg of Enchinacea, 900 mg of Oregano, four droppersfull of Goldenseal extract, and a quart and a half of orange juice. At night, I rubbed Vicks on my swollen glands and wrapped my neck in a towel.
That was yesterday. Today, except for some stuffiness in my sinuses (which I tend to have all winter) I am feeling fine. Well, also except for the stubborn cold sore, on which I’m using Abreva. What I should have done at the first sign of the cold sore is start taking L-lysine, which is an amino acid that that makes one’s system inhospitable for the Type 1 herpes simplex virus (which is what causes cold sores). My mother takes it to prevent a recurrence of shingles.
For the rest of the week I will continue to take daily doses of all of those substances, but cut them down to 1/3 of what I took yesterday. And I’ll keep using the saline nose spray all winter.
I discovered an interesting product called Xlear — a saline nasal spray with xylitol, a sweet-tasting substance that discourages the growth of bacteria in the nasal passages and throat. That got me through last winter with no sinus infection at all. I need to start using it as soon as the heat gets turned on. Obviously, I neglected to do that this year.
So, if you’re prone to colds and sinus problems, set yourself up with an arsenal of immune system strengthening products, megadose yourself the first day you feel symptoms starting, and avoid the misery that so many of us are confronted with each winter.