Taking my mom to visit with my grandson for the day. It’s almost a two hour drive each way, but I’ll turn on the NPR station that is the same here and there and become better informed. And I figure that my mom might as well enjoy her great grandson while she still can.
We’re off. I’m looking foward to the giggles.
Of the four members of my band of women who got together for a shared-preparation brunch last Sunday, two are retired and two are still working. The other (newly) retired one, who still works one day a week and is an excellent quilter, talked about now feeling something is missing in her life. Part of it is a chance to be among people, but the other part has something to do with needing to feel that she’s contributing something to society.
One of the group wasn’t there. She’s also retired and has been in Virginia for the past four months golfing, dancing, socializing, reading, and relaxing. When she’s back home, she pretty much does the same thing.
Maybe the rest of us are jealous of her affluence and freedom, but we all seem to feel that we couldn’t live a life that was all just play. I have heard her say that she’s playing now because she can, and who knows how long fate and aging will let her do that.
As much as I complain about caregiving, it does give my life purpose, meaningful work (if you can call looking for a “lost” wallet — again — in the middle of the night “meaningful”; what the hell happened to the beeper that I put in it??!!)
When my mom is gone, I’m sure it will take a while to adjust to having all that free time. Will I need to find something meaningful to do?
Is visiting my friend when she goes to Virginia, visiting my counsins in Florida, and visiting and playing with my grandson meaningful?? Heh. Do you think I’ll care??
You’ve just got to go over to Frank Paynter’s and check out his take on Pope Ratzo.
Amen, amen, I say unto you, if this doesn’t schism the Catholic Church I don’t know what will. I can hope, can’t I?
I got up late this morning because I was up late last night checking in on some of my blogging colleagues. Through Ronni’s Time Goes By, I discovered Old Horsetail Snake
From Time Goes By:
A newish addition to the Older Bloggers list is Old Horsetail Snake – 74-year-old Gene Maudlin by name – who blogs from Salem, Oregon about – well, let him tell it:
“I live in what is called, formally, an Assisted Living Community Center. That’s a euphemism for old folks’ home. There are about 60 of us, of varying ages, condition and intent (some came to live, some came to die). Our ages range from 67 to 102. The 102 is in better shape than the 67.
“‘So it goes,'” as Kurt Vonnegut said, often, in Breakfast of Champions. So, this is our story, one comic or tragi-comic piece at a time. And, for the record, some of these stories are true!”
I’ve always thought that weblogging would be a great hobby for older people who are confined for one reason or another. Old Horsetail Snake is a great example of how to keep yourself sane through blogging. And humor.
Ronni also mentions an innovative new service that could be a boon to older people (and others as well.)
Daylo is a new portal website that connects people who need a particular service to people in their neighborhood who can provide that service.
As Ronni explains:
Here’s how it works: You need some assistance, like Millie, packing for a trip. Or you need a lamp switch fixed or some IKEA furniture assembled. Maybe your computer is acting up and you haven’t a clue what’s wrong. If your knee has you laid up for a few days, you could use a dog walker, someone to do the grocery shopping, yardwork or even cooking. This is about hard-to-find help that isn’t listed in the Yellow Pages.
What a great idea!!! Hmm. I have an IKEA-type piece that’s sitting in the corner waiting for me to have the time to put it together. Actually, I can still do those kinds of things. I recently put together the neatest little butcher-block top kitchen workstation that has a place to hid your trash can. Well, it took me a while, and my mother kept coming over periodically to see what I was ranting about.
Mom gets her cataracts measured today in preparation for cataract surgery on one eye. One eye at a time. Maybe seeing more clearly will help her see more clearly. You think??
Can’t pass up sharing this great overview, which I’m stealing from Yule Heibel, who got it from the Toronto Star (to which you need a subscription to get to the article).
Succeeding in the Bush White House
Analysis: Dishing up wonky intelligence, low-balling troop losses and being a `kiss-up, kick-down’ bully are all good ways to get ahead
TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU
One will always live in infamy for gravely misjudging the cost of the Iraq war and the reception accorded U.S. troops, publicly underestimating the American death toll and blaming scared journalists for not reporting the war’s good news.
The second sat behind Colin Powell in the U.N. Security Council, nodding solemnly and sagely as Washington provided a dossier of inaccurate, fanciful intelligence to justify the Iraq war.
The third was described last week as a “serial abuser” — a bully who berates and intimidates subordinates and a U.S. unilateralist who once declared that no one would notice if the top 10 floors of the United Nations secretariat disappeared.
In the private sector, Paul Wolfowitz, John Negroponte and John Bolton may have been shown the door for their transgressions.
In George W. Bush’s world, they all received promotions, joining others who have been honoured, lauded and handed plums after dishing up faulty pre-war intelligence or mismanaging the Iraqi occupation.
Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary who said Americans would be greeted in Iraq as liberators, takes over as president of the World Bank on June 1.
Negroponte, Bush’s envoy to the U.N. in the run-up to the war, is headed to easy confirmation as the country’s first national intelligence director.
Undersecretary of State Bolton — a caustic purveyor of American muscularity who has emerged as the most controversial of all the president’s men (and women) — looks as if he will be confirmed in days as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
They join a long line.
Condoleezza Rice, who sounded some of the most apocalyptic pronouncements on Saddam Hussein’s imminent threat to Americans, is the secretary of state.
Alberto Gonzales, complicit in a memo that was interpreted as a green light for prison torture, is now the attorney-general.
Former CIA director George Tenet, who was famously quoted as telling Bush the case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “slam dunk,” was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as was Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq whose first moves were blamed for helping fuel an insurgency that has cost more than 1,500 American lives.
Defence chief Donald Rumsfeld was the most senior of Bush’s cabinet secretaries to retain his job in the second term. And the most powerful hawk of them all, Vice-President Dick Cheney, is wielding behind-the-scenes power as never before.
At a series of Senate confirmation hearings since January, Democrats have huffed and puffed, accusing Bush’s nominees of everything from lying to outright incompetence. But each of the president’s choices has so far been confirmed.
The Iraq war may not be a resounding success, but those behind it have found it a fabulous road to career advancement.
It appears the easiest route to success in the Bush White House was to be at the centre of a war that was waged under false pretences, then mismanaged from the day Saddam’s statue was toppled two years ago.
“That’s a fair assessment,” says Allan Lichtman, a political analyst at Washington’s American University. “But it’s not so much that you get promoted for messing up the war … you get promoted if you stay with the program.
“You certainly don’t get rewarded in this administration for being a voice of dissent.”
The U.S. confirmation process is the closest the American system has to a parliamentary Question Period, but like the latter, it is more theatre than substance.
The theatre was never more vivid than during last week’s Senate hearings on Bolton — a tenacious, abrasive, hard-line hawk and prominent proponent of the “weapons of mass destruction will be found” school.
Bolton sat implacably through the playing of a 1994 speech in which he infamously said there “was no United Nations” and no one would notice if the top floors of the U.N. building in New York vanished.
Rather than a U.N., he said, “there is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world — that’s the United States — when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along.”
California Democrat Barbara Boxer said Bolton had shown nothing but disdain for the institution to which he will now be posted and the ranking Democrat on the committee, Joe Biden of Delaware, added: “I’m surprised that the nominee wants the job that he’s been nominated for, given … the many negative things he had to say about the U.N.”
Bolton’s character has also been called into question.
He has been described as a “kiss-up, kick-down” guy who berated underlings and sought to have them fired because they did not provide the intelligence he wanted on Fidel Castro’s germ warfare capability in 2002.
Carl Ford, a former assistant secretary of state who was caught in the middle of the spat between Bolton and two analysts, said Bolton had “gone ballistic” over his underlings’ refusal to provide what he wanted.
“I left a meeting with the impression that, for the first time, I was being asked to fire an intelligence analyst for what he may have said or done,” said Ford, who has been with the government for 30 years and describes himself as a loyal Republican.
He said Bolton seemed incredulous that someone would challenge him, particularly someone so low in rank.
Conservatives have accused Democrats of character assassination.
“As the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton will speak truth to power,” said Howard Kaloogian, co-chair of the conservative Move America Forward.
“So far, we’ve seen nothing but inexcusable grandstanding from those still bitter that their party lost in the last presidential election, and they keep clamouring for a different foreign policy than was endorsed by the American people.”
Otto Reich, another assistant secretary of state who worked alongside Bolton, defended him in an op-ed piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, saying:
“Bolton deserves to be confirmed, but regardless of the outcome of the hearings, he has provided another valuable service — he has revealed Senate hearings to be the weapon of choice of vicious and anonymous staffers and their narcissist bosses to engage in character assassination and ideological vendettas.”
Wolfowitz was perhaps Bush’s most surprising choice, but he won global approval after initial European reticence.
No one questions Wolfowitz’s intellect — but he, like Bolton, is a proponent of the muscular American approach on the world stage.
“It makes you wonder whether all the administration’s words about mending fences with our allies are just lip service,” said Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. “After deputy secretary Wolfowitz’s repeated and serious miscalculations about the costs and risks America would face in Iraq, I don’t believe he is the right person to lead the World Bank.”
Negroponte has the most impressive resumé and his nomination has been sent to the Senate floor for an expected easy confirmation.
But for more than 20 years, he has been dogged by accusations that he looked the other way as ambassador to Honduras while death squads and human rights violations were rampant in that country.
And he had to admit last week that he was as surprised as anyone that those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which represented such a grave threat in his 2003 pronouncements at the U.N., had never been found.
Of course, much of the evidence Negroponte took to his U.N. colleagues had been delivered to the CIA by an Iraqi defector nicknamed “Curveball,” subsequently revealed as a well-known “fabricator” with a drinking problem who was often obviously hung-over in meetings with U.S. intelligence agents.
As I was driving around doing some quick errands the other day, I realized that I didn’t bring my bottle of water with me in the car, and I was getting thirsty. So I figured I’d stop and pick up some fruit for me and my mother and get something to drink while I was at the market. As I happened by the juice aisle, I noticed a bottle of pomegranate juice — ah, just what I need: something tart, thirst quenching and uniquely healthy. It was expensive, but I bought it anyway. Before I got back in the car, I took a big swig, put the cap back on the bottle, and put the bottle on the floor on the passenger side. Yup. As I turned a corner, the bottle tipped over. That’s OK, I thought, the bottle is capped. Nope. Pomegranate juice all over the mat and seeping underneath. Ever try to rinse out a filthy car mat soaked in sticky juice? It’s a frustratingly impossible job.
Sort of like caregiving. Especially when your phone rings at 1 am and she says she can’t sleep because she can’t find her white beaded purse. You say you’re sleeping and will look for it tomorrow. And then your phone rings again at 2 am. Come over here and sleep here she says. You know she’s afraid someone keeps coming in and taking her stuff. It’s either that or you’re taking it, she figures. There’s perfect denial on her part that it might be that she keeps forgetting where she put things. So you go and sleep in the bed next to hers, even though she keeps rambling on about who knows what until 3 am or until you fall asleep (whichever came first).
Pomegranates are full of seeds and also full of myths and religious connections.
spammers who use their free weblogs to create home bases? I emailed Blogger about the abuse of their service but haven’t heard back. Now that big Google owns what was little Blogger, I guess the personal service that Ev used to provide is not at option.
Bleh. I need a stiff drink. Except it’s still morning.
That’s what pomegranate juice is for.
Several years ago, one of my woman friends and I both read The Artist’s Way, which suggests that you sit down every morning and write, long-hand, for half-an-hour,your Morning Pages. I never was able to do that. But typing is different. I can type in ten minutes what it would take me a half hour to write. (Of course, the linking takes time; but what’s a blog without links?)
So, this morning I sit here in my nighshirt (I don’t like pjs), reflecting.
My mom likes to watch the sunset (some obvious symbolism there, huh?), so after dinner yesterday I took her outside and we sat on a bench near our building that faces west. We sat, quietly, each lost in our own thoughts.
Her feet and legs hurt when she walks. She can’t find shoes that look good (she’s still vain) and are still comfortable. She pretty much wears old shoes of mine that are stretched out and softened by wear.
I have a lot of shoes. That’s the answer to what women want, right?
I also have a drawer full of make-up. And a cabinet full of hair styling products. I’ve got to tackle both in the next few weeks and try to get rid of what I don’t use. The probem is, of course, just like with my clothes, I start figuring that I might wish I had them after I throw them out. Then I remind myself — hey! You’re going to be living in the woods. You won’t even have to bother getting dressed at all if you don’t want to.
I dread moving on to attack my mother’s 89 years of accumulated STUFF — in boxes in the back of the closet, filling dressers and bureaus and table tops. I’m determined to downsize my own belongings so that my daughter never has to go through this kind of purging for me.
But downsizing is really hard to tackle — most of all, of course, if it’s your weight.
Today I’m getting together with my band of women friends for brunch. We all bring something. I’m bringing dessert — a strawberry apple pie.
I like to cook. I just don’t like to clean. Or clean out.
Time to get dressed. And also compose the note that I always have to leave for my mother when I go out: where I am going to be, the phone number there, my own cell phone number, and the time I’ll be back. She seems OK if she has that kind of information handy in writing. Otherwise, she forgets. And then she panics.
It will be easier when we move next door to my brother. I hope.
Maybe a post a day will keep frustration away. It seems to work for Jeneane, who certainly has more do deal with then most of us — recent surgery; a plethora of baby hamsters; a bright, curious, and energetic young daughter; a husband who travels for his music; and, on top of all that, work.
It’s worth a try.
Woke up this morning to a phone call from my mom saying she can’t find her watch, her money, and her curling iron for her hair. I had already put small beepers in her purse, on her keys, and in her wallet. I keep the fourth, and then I can beep my way to their unfamiliar locations. But putting beepers on her curling iron and watch just won’t work. So those are still missing.
I’ll distract her today by taking her out to get a battery for an old watch.
Meanwhile, I wish a had a fairy godmother who’d come in and clean my apartment.
Now, where the hell are my keys? My watch?
No beeps for me — not yet, anyway.
A friend called me yesterday to see if I was OK, since she noticed that I wasn’t blogging. Then Betsy Devine pinged me and that sent me over to Frank Paynter’s evocative Spring post, which made me really yearn for those kinds of connections again. Not just to nature or Nature, but to those feelings of honoring small, everyday details of a life lived with joy.
The real truth is that I have nothing to write about. And forget any joy. My days are filled with helping my mom find the half-dozen things that she misplaces each day and insists that someone came in and stole — with giving myself a headache shouting so that she can actually hear me and repeatintg everything I say at least three times before she actually understands.
So we took a ride today, she and I, to where we will be moving in a few months. These are my views of the area near where we will be living, where the Catskill cliffs rise awesomely in all seasons and against all colors of sky.
The sky today was a definite early Spring blue even though the trees in those mountains have barely begun to bud. By the time we move, they will be lush and green and I will bring in bags of topsoil for an herb garden in spite of the shale and scrub.
Meanwhile, I share here a chuckle I got the last time I checked Ken Camp’s blog. He stole the following from his son, and I’m herewith stealing it from him because it reminds me just how crazy so many other people are and so I feel a little saner.
TOP TEN THINGS AMERICA LEARNED FROM THE SCHIAVO CASE
1) Tom Delay is a qualified neurologist.
2) Two dozen court cases weren’t enough to really figure out what’s going on.
3) Michael Schiavo is after money, which is why he turned down millions of dollars to sign over guardianship.
4) Right to life applies only when it’s politically expedient.
5) Medical diagnoses are best performed by watching highly edited videotape rather than in person by trained physicians.
6) Minimum wage-making nursing assistants are more qualified to diagnose a persistent vegetative state than experienced neurologists.
7) Fifteen years in the same persistent state is not really enough time to make an accurate diagnosis.
8) Marriage is the most sacred of all unions, except when it isn’t.
9) Interfering in a family’s private tragedy is a great reason for President Bush to cut short a vacation, but getting a memo that warns of a terrorist attack isn’t.
10) Right-wing pro-lifers are the most compassionate people on Earth, which is why they are robbing gun stores or offering money online to make sure Michael Schiavo dies.
