ust for the hell of it, I went back and looked at the posts I made on this blog in August four years ago. I notice that I linked to a lot of other bloggers back then; I don’t do that very much these days. I just write. I guess that’s because I seldom have the time to read other bloggers — even the ones I really appreciate reading, like Tom Shugart, who is back after a too-long hiatus from blogdom. My life was so totally different four years ago. Just about everything has changed. And I can’t even remember the last time I linked over to Blog Sisters, where I was once one of the leaders of the pack.

he sleeps more hours during the day than she spends awake; she never bothers to get out of her nighclothes. At least that’s how it’s been for the last two days. I don’t know if she’s just recuperating from the stress of the hospital visit or if something else is going on. She eats and drinks, but very little. The diarrhea has reversed itself and now there’s nothing coming out. Something is happening. Her doctor is away on vacation this week. We’re on our own.
It’s a bizzarre feeling — all of a sudden having all of this time to myself. I spent hours this evening trying to learn more tips from Mandarin Meg’s website, looking up true type fonts, making some letters into images. I was unsuccessful in in putting in her codes that would let me put an image in the middle of text; I spent hours playing around with the her code, but I couldn’t get it to work. This is how I play when I’m left with unexpected free time.
This afternoon, while she napped, I went outside to check on my garden — do some watering and deadheading. Oddly enough, there are some tomatoes ripening on vines that are barely there, what with the plague of pests we’ve had all summer. Even though the bottom branches have been infested into ragged brown stalks, tomatoes are still popping up farther up on the wilting vines. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
Over in the back of the house, where my little statue of Pan (that I’ve hauled around with me through several moves) nestles among the leaves of melissa officinalis, the gregariously ubiquitous cinquefoil finds its way into Pan’s muddy crotch, providing much unnecessary modesty to the smooth stoney satyr and inches its way toward my patch of wildflowers, which I planted from seed and still doesn’t sport anything near a bloom.
I have been somewhat partial to Pan ever since I saw this painting at the Clarke Institute in Williamstown, MA. You can’t see the expression on the poor goat-footed guy’s face, but it is pure “panic.” He looks like he’s quite a bit concerned about what those nasty nymphs are going to do to him. Of course, my little cherubic Pan, chipped and bird-splattered, innocently playing his pipes to waken the fertile earth, will never know the neediness of nymphs. Nor will he feel the greediness of the creeping cinquefoil. He doesn’t know that something is happing.
It has taken me two hours to make this post because I was having trouble getting the photos to appear where I wanted them. Even now, they’re not where I wanted them, but at least they’re somewhere reasonable. One of my my best virtues is perseverence. One of my worst faults is perseverence. I have a need to hang in there until things happen.

That’s what’s keeping her going (or, rather, NOT going). I bought a sippy cup a while ago at a dollar store, just in case she might need it someday. That day has come, and she’s been sipping gatorade out of if all day. That’s all she’s allowed to ingest for two days — that and an a strong antibiotic, since so far they haven’t found anything apparent that is causing her diarrhea.
It was a bad morning, with her refusing to sit or lie down and insisting on walking, walking, walking. In desperation, I gave her some of my passionflower extract that I got from the health food store and that I use to calm myself down enough to fall asleep. Eventually, she actually relaxed enough so that we all could relax a little.
As for my toe, it’s better today — obviously just a bad bruise.
My garden’s not much for harvesting this year. I keep salvaging tomatoes, but unless I find the time and energy to water what’s there, the pickings will be even slimmer. My flower/planters are so dried out that I’m not sure I can save what’s in them. Too much sun, not enough water. Not enough time to do the watering.
It’s so hard to get all of those balances right.

In addition to a well encaspsulated report of the murder, mayhem, and madness going on the Middle East, today’s Harper’s Weekly listed a few other items of odd interest, excerpted as follows:
— in Minnesota people in zombie costumes were arrested for carrying “simulated weapons of mass destruction
— hot weather killed 141 people (as well as 25,000 cattle and 700,000 fowl) in California, at least 170 people in France, Italy, and Spain, and dozens of racing dogs in Oregon, and shut down MySpace
— two people in England were killed by a giant inflatable sculpture named Dreamscape
— a school headmaster in China burned down 10 classrooms when the dog meat he was cooking burst into flames
— Radiologists announced that many Americans were becoming too fat for X-rays
— a man in Sumatra was squashed by an elephant.
— poisoned pigeons rained down in Schenectady, New York
— Texas was overrun by butterflies.
— a man in Prey Veng province, Vietnam, killed a 76-year-old nun by strangling her with a krama, then attempted to assassinate a monk, while the victims slept at a wat
— an influential Italian banker and member of Opus Dei was found dismembered under a bridge in Parma
— doctors in India removed a 15-year-old dead fetus from a woman’s womb
—————
— a verbally abused 66 year old woman commits fratricide in New Paltz, NY while 90 year old mother sleeps soundly in the next room
The itme above was not listed. But it might be someday.

I’m sure, even as I write this, there are additional dead and wounded out there across the world from where I sit after a day watching my world as through a camera lens.
She walks. Dead woman walking. She hurts, all over. She needs to drink, but she gives us a hard time. She needs to sit or lie down, but she refuses. It’s as though if she stops, she thinks will die. Or maybe she thinks that if she stops, she won’t die.
The doctor says we need to consider taking her to the emergency room, getting her hydrated, getting a CAT scan to see if she’s got blockage in her intestines somewhere. The last time we took her to the hospital she got worse and worse until we signed her out “against medical advice.” We had her feeling better in a day.
Her bones are so fragile that any mishandling (which happened last time) might likely cause even more little fractures than she has. If she needs surgery, we wouldn’t risk it; she doesn’t want it. At her age, the anesthesia would probably kill her.
And this morning I had one of my front teeth pulled. The crown was loose (all the clenching, grinding, clenching), and apparently I shattered the root, which had a root canal anyway. So, I get home with a wad of gauze in my mouth, take three Advil, and sleep for two hours until my mother wakes up.
She can’t seem to communicate; I don’t want to. We both hurt, want it all to end.
She is sleeping, finally. She ate a little, drank some orange juice, took her meds.
I am not sleeping. When I sleep, I grind my teeth, wake up wounded. But not as wounded as she
And we not as wounded as they.

This has not been a good week. In addition to my mother losing fluids all week and becoming enraged when we try to get her to drink Pedialite, and my sib and I totally disagreeing on how to handle her and what to give her to ingest, I couldn’t figure out how to get into the chat room for Mandarin Meg’s memorial yesterday (so I missed the whole thing, and, while I finally got into the BlogHer Conference chat room, I found I had nothing to add to the conversation.
My mother has insisted on constant attention all week. I know that she’s not feeling well, but after putting up with sib’s disagreeing personality while at the same time taking care of my mother’s sanitation needs (which have been constant) I have nothing left to give her — not even the tenderness and compassion that she needs very much. I can’t be both her daughter and her home health aide.
We’re taking her to the doctor’s on Monday to get the results of some lab tests. I’m going to ask him for a referral to a local medicare-approved long term health care agency that provides nurse’s aides and home health care. It’s certainly not going t get any better. If we had been a part of that system already, she probably could have been getting intravenous hydration right here at home. And someone else could have been on call all day to help her into the bathroom and help her clean up. Then I would have had the psychic energy to do the hand holding and quiet talking, and maybe I could have smiled at her instead of frowning all day. I looked in the mirror and, I swear, the frown lines are now there permanently.
I’m hoping for August to bring some new energy into my life. We will be getting a visit from cousins coming by this way from Florida on their way upstate. I’m supposed to meet one of the college buddies (male) for lunch while he’s down this way visiting a buddy of his who has been ill.
I need things to look forward to. I certainly am not looking forward to getting up in the morning.

There are lots of those perspectives being shared over across the country at the BlogHer conference, and among them are Beth Kanter’s photos of some of the best feet being put forward. While I’m not at the conference (being committed to helping my mom through a very bad bout of loosing fluids), I actually figured out how to do IRC and hope to participate virtually tomorrow. Hopefully, when the time comes, I will be able to fall in behind Jeneane Sessum (as I have often done before). Of course, that all depends on how near I have to stay by my mom and her bathroom.
However, in keeping with the notion that one doesn’t have to be there to be there, I figure I’ll add my self-pedicured feet, in my much-too-expensive sandals, to Beth’s gallery.

And meanwhile, it’s almost like being there looking at these accumulating photos, referred to by Jeneane: Betsy Devine has started a Flickr photo pool for BlogHer pix. Watch the ladies strut their stuff. And schwag!

This idea did not begin with me; I got it from Molly Ivins, in her open letter to Dear Desperate Democrats, posted on Common Dreams. I quote it all below to make sure you read it:

This morning I have a little gem of time, as I listen to the thunder roll over the mountain and wait for rain and my mother to waken. The last two days have been a grueling example of how no good deed goes unpunished, as my mother recuperates from the family picinic with bi-polar bouts of crying and fits of terrifying anger.
So, while I have a few minutes, I sit here at my computer and take the time to actually read through a document to which I linked in my previous post, finding it full of gems of information I didn’t know,.
And among those gems is a rare one, indeed — reference to Marietta Holley, a little-known 19th century writer from Ellisburgh, New York:

What a blogger Marietta Holley woul have made in today’s culture! No doubt she would be a part of the BlogHer conference, to which Jeneane Sessum of Allied should be going this year, but — as life sometimes goes — can’t.
Wait until next year Jeneane. Maybe we can both make it.

At the family picnic last Sunday, one of my cousins told me about a book he was reading called The Mayflower, about which story the Washington Post said this in its review (as posted on Amazon.com):