September 2003 Archives

Today is my parents' forty-second wedding anniversary; my dad now has spent both his 65th birthday two weeks ago and his anniversary today sedated to unconsciousness in the hospital.

I'm back from Richmond, and I'm beat, after only two days. I'm not sure how Mom deals with the stress as seemingly well as she does, being much more directly faced with Dad's hospitalization on a day-to-day basis; she does break down in tears every now and then, but I don't see the same kind of physical manifestations I'm starting to see in myself--restless nights and grinding teeth, acid reflux, chest pain, backache, flagging libido, etc. I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed again by the confluence of factors from work, home, car and family, similar to what I felt two years ago when I had the layoff, car accident, and family health problems all at once, which turned into a depression of sorts. Until just the past couple of days I'd felt like I'd been retaining a sense of perspective and ability to function, but now I'm beginning to feel like my coping skills might be over-taxed. At work it's been a struggle to retain my tact and calm, skills my boss normally recognizes and for which she counts on me; at home I've been avoiding taking phone calls from anyone except my mom, my sister and Jeff. And I'm guessing that Jeff is just too polite and tactful himself to be honest about what a drag I'm being, given my level of fatigue, distraction and general whininess.

On the positive side, Mom regained power at her temporary apartment in Richmond on Friday, after just over a week without. She's much more comfortable now that she can wash her clothes, keep food in the refrigerator and cook in. And I left a laptop with her so that she can check her email, at least.

Dad's temperature, which earlier I had reported had returned to normal, actually still continues to fluctuate quite a bit, though at least it is no longer hitting the very high spikes of a week ago. Mom also is encouraged that he is shrugging his shoulders slightly and occasionally, insistent that this means the paralysis is retreating. I'm less convinced, unsure that this is truly a sign of recovery already or just a result of his being less sedated now than previously; I'm not sure that the paralysis had ever fully engulfed his shoulders, and it certainly had never involved his neck, which he has been able to move back and forth, when agitated, except when in the very deepest level of sedation.

On the less positive side, when I arrived Saturday morning we were kept out of the CCU because a sputum specimen taken from his lungs showed a very, very minute possibility that he also had contracted TB. Skin tests have continued to show negative, but the doctor says that while he doesn't actually believe that Dad has TB, "a couple of cells on a slide containing three to four hundred looked slightly suspicious," enough so that they needed to take the precaution of moving him to a negatively pressurized, isolation room. This has the effect of requiring us to put on robes (though by yesterday afternoon they had dispensed with that requirement at least), masks and rubber gloves when we visit him; it also results in much less traffic into the room even by the hospital staff, so that Mom now feels even more alone--and, I think, a little claustrophobic--while visiting.

And my car started experiencing problems again on the trip down and back, to the point that I'm now walking to work and will likely have to rent a car to get back and forth between here and Richmond the next couple of weekends until I can buy a new car. Toyota now is reporting that demand for the new Prius is much higher than anticipated and possibly higher even than is planned for production; 10,000 (of only 36,000 slotted to be produced) already have been pre-ordered by previous Prius owners, and the wait for new orders will be on the order of months. Since I now need a car more immediately than I had hoped, and both of my first choices--the Prius and the Mini--have months-long waiting lists, I need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new, less desirable but more available choice that I might be able to purchase more readily.

And I still haven't done anything about getting the heating and cooling system in my condo replaced.

Unless I find something worth audblogging over the weekend, I'll be incommunicado on the net this weekend. I'm travelling down to Richmond again this weekend to keep my mom company and to visit my dad who remains hospitalized indefinitely. I'm taking the laptop to leave behind with Mom, but at the moment she's still without electricity a week after the hurricane, so I don't know if power will be restored while I'm visiting. The apartment complex where she's staying temporarily has had water service since Sunday, so she's been able to bathe, at least, and my sister brought her a cooler of ice (which my aunt and uncle replenished when they visited her on Wednesday) and a battery-powered radio with weather and tv bands when she drove there this past Monday.

Dad's condition is mostly unchanged, though his temperature has returned to normal, which is hopeful news vis a vis the hospital-acquired pneumonia. His blood pressure also has stabilized. Earlier in the week the doctors discovered that Dad was losing blood, so in addition to giving him a couple of units they had to do both an endoscopy and colonoscopy to try to find the cause; during the latter procedure they did find a couple of intestinal polyps, which they cauterized, and they are hoping that that has taken care of the bleeding. The nurse has reported a small amount of blood since then, but that could just be from the procedure itself. I'm hoping that Dad will begin to have some periods of consciousness while I'm visiting.

Otherwise, I'll be reading by oil lamp and candlelight, and chatting with my Mom, away from any possibility of Internet, computer games and TiVo. And missing Jeff terribly, since I'll be away not just this but most weekends for the foreseeable future, and he is away next weekend as well, vacationing on the Cape.

Tonight's the night. Jeff and I have tickets to see Stephen Lynch at the Birchmere. As I've noted before, it's search engine requests on his name and for his lyrics (which do not exist on this site) that bring significantly more visitors to my blog than any other search term.

Tonight is also Jeff's and my first return to the Birchmere since our very first face-to-face meeting (though not yet, at that point, clearly a "date") centered around a Kinsey Sicks concert there on June 22. So tonight's a kind of anniversary of place, if not of time.

Last October I began as a beta tester of The Sims Online and became very addicted to it for a time (I've posted about that and some of the other angst associated with my off-and-on online habits in a previous entry) and later to another online community, There.

Even before Jeff and I started dating, though, I'd pulled way back from both TSO and There; by April of this year already I was rarely on TSO, and by early summer my attention to There similarly had diminished. There wasn't costing me anything, but I was still paying for two monthly TSO accounts. Even though I wasn't accessing the service, I was finding it difficult to actually cancel my accounts and end the lives of my virtual personas.

Last night, though, I finally thought about it again and decided to start cutting the cord; I logged onto my secondary account and transferred that character's cash and belongings to another, and then called and cancelled the account. My primary character will be more difficult to resolve; not so much because I'm still as attached to the Sim itself, but because of the time, thought and passion I put into developing the property he owns, a beautiful park. Even as I type this, though, I realize that I really do need to just let go of that Sim and the property, and I'm not feeling any real anxiety about it. I need to arrange with Roger a time for us both to log on so I can transfer the property and all its contents to him.

I am keeping the There account, though, even though it's moving to a pay model (albeit a very affordable one, since as a beta tester for it I'm eligible for a lifetime subscription with a single payment of under $30).

Toyota sent me another email about the new 2004 Prius yesterday, announcing the EPA-estimated fuel ratings: a pretty impressive 60 mpg city and 51 highway for a combined city/highway average of 55 mpg and the highest fuel economy of any mid-size car. The email also announced that the Prius will begin arriving at dealers on October 17.

With the Saab experiencing yet more problems--yesterday the knob for controlling the air flow location, which I just paid way too much to have repaired a month ago, started to break again, for example--I really need to plan to unload it and try to acquire a Prius instead... soon. I will miss the convertible top, especially since right before the hurricane we were having such beautiful weather for a change, but I won't miss the expense and hassle of the particular lemon of a car I ended up with, or the smug criticism, money-hungry attitude and general unhelpfulness of my dealer over the past year.

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.

-- Stanley Horowitz

Today, as Jeff also has noted, is the autumn equinox, also known in the pagan calendar as Mabon. Today is the day of equal light and darkness; from now until the winter solstice the nights will begin to lengthen as the days grow shorter.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

-- George Eliot

August is my favorite season of the year. I relish the crisp tang in the air and deliciously musty smells of fading leaves and rising smoke, the cooling temperatures as the heat and humidity of the DC summer begin to abate, the opportunity to break out my turtlenecks and sweaters (though I miss my camp and Hawaiian shirts), the beautiful fall colors, crisp apples and yummy yams, and Halloween. I truly feel more alive in October and November than any other time of the year.

There is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

An article in today's Washington Post notes that:

While the United States fiercely debates the issue of allowing same-sex marriage, marriage for gay men and lesbians in the Netherlands has become so commonplace that today, two years after being legalized, it is hardly recognized as different....

[M]arriage registry records show that 7 percent to 8 percent of marriages in the country are between gay men or lesbian partners. "It's going smoothly," [Henk Krol, editor of Gay Krant (Gay Courier) magazine] said. "Once people are used to it, there's no problem whatsoever. It's not an issue anymore. As long as you don't have it, it's an issue."...

To Dutch same-sex couples, the fierce opposition in the United States seems misplaced. "It's sad," said Hans Blommaert, 38, a fashion editor of a men's magazine who was celebrating his two-month wedding anniversary with his husband, Michel Ferreira, 25, a university student. "It doesn't make my opinion of America any better."

Here's a picture of Jeff and me at Busch Gardens last month, as promised in my comment to his blog entry earlier today.

My mom's response after seeing this picture (and after already having been told about the 15-year age difference) was "Thom, I've always thought you look younger than your age. But standing next to him... well, he looks very young."

OK, so maybe it's a bit too trendy, but I have to confess that I quite like [sour] apple martinis. Jeff and I were having dinner at CPK the other night, and I ordered one and began critiquing it, comparing it to one I'd had at Fuzio several weeks earlier, and he suggested that I begin a search for the best appletini or variant.

Of the two in recent memory, Fuzio's is the clear forerunner. Their sour apple is described in the menu as "Smirnoff Citrus Twist Vodka and apple liqueur." It was served in a deliciously sugar-rimmed and stylishly funky martini glass with a slice of Granny Smith apple, and sold for $7.95. It was really very good.

CPK's apple martini (not listed on their web site's beverage menu), however, was extremely disappointing; Jeff and I have learned that one does not go to CPK for its bar drinks. Frankly, now that the neighborhood CPK has stopped serving Dr. Pepper, and with the flavorless bread and bad service we've received there several times, I'm not sure what one goes there for, though every now and then we still get cravings for their pizza or, in my case, for their Szechuan Slaw that comes with the vegetarian focaccia sandwich. Listed on the menu at $4.99, but appearing on the bill at $5.49, their apple martini was served in a small plain martini glass with no seasoning on the rim and with a single maraschino cherry--sans stem or skewer--as garnis. Quel dommage.

As the search continues, I'll keep you updated. This follows on previous, non-documented searches for the best crème brûlée (so far, probably the rosewater brûlée at Rubicon in San Francisco I had back in the mid-90s) and best banana split (I'm still waiting to try the sinful sounding Grillfish's Black Russian Hot Fudge Banana Split before making a determination; come to think of it, their Cheesecake Brulee with Butterscotch-Caramel Crust sounds like a contender for the other category). I may need to re-open those cases.

Sunday morning I was sharing with Jeff a dream I'd had the previous night. I can only remember bits and pieces of it, but basically I had discovered a way to travel among parallel universes. I had reached an alternate Earth, and found myself captured and imprisoned in what seemed to be a cross between a jail, a mental institution, a spaceport and a military base. I discovered that on this world the scientific-military leadership also had discovered a way to move long spatial distances in a split second by travelling interdimensionally. However, the people they sent on these trips, though arriving near-instaneously, experienced in their minds the full amount of time it would take at light-speed to travel the real distance; for example, a person sent to Alpha Centauri and back would appear to the observer to flicker in and out, yet would experience eight subjective years of travel in a featureless void, all alone. These travelers were all returning with various degrees of mental anguish, hysteria and, in the severest cases, complete catatonia.

My interdimensional arrival had been detected, and upon discovery that unlike them I did not experience this subjective travel time I was captured and I presumed that I was going to be experimented on to discover why. One of the orderlies in the institute, though, gave me an ID badge that had been hacked to make me appear invisible, or at least other than my real identity, to the automatic scanners throughout the facility. He offered to help me escape if I would help him with something first. It turned out that his sister was being kept in a secure isolated ward; she had been one of the first travelers, and had been sent tens of thousands of light-years in a single jump. My new friend wanted me to try to get his sister out of the facility, and he had me pose as her husband, carrying a bundle that looked sometimes like a bouquet of roses and other times like a baby wrapped in blankets.

I made it through the checkpoints, and had finally reached her bedside when a troup of humanoid robots, metallic and featureless but for a facial slit and two sensors that looked like eyes made out of buttons (thanks, Neil Gaiman, for that image from Coraline), surrounded me.

And that's when I woke up.

This morning I remembered a bit of a dream from last night in which I was able to polymorph both myself and others. At one point, I came across a fox who started following me around. In this erotic dream, I remember first turning myself into a vixen and then later turning him into a male human (gorgeously red-headed, lithe and energetic).

Another update about the past weekend involves my own health. Friday evening Jeff and I went briefly to Pentagon City after eating, but I started feeling very tired. When we got home, I had developed an increasingly uncomfortable and distracting headache in addition to the fatigue. I decided to lie down for a nap, but within an hour or so had developed excruciating pain--the most painful headache I can recall having, even including the migraines I experienced several years in my early twenties--and an increasing sense of restlessness and some slight disorientation. I nearly screamed aloud a couple of times from the pain--and I suspect I did moan once or twice--and also experienced some pretty intense visions (without the prophetic connotations, of course), first of a fully three-dimensional overflight of a forest with every leaf and needle clearly visible, and then of a beautiful series of cascading, rotating and soaring tapered cylinders of rainbow-colored light. A fascinating experience but for the pain.

As the headache worsened, I also began to feel increasingly nauseated. My first rushed trips to the toilet, though, as I began to feel that I was about to throw up, consisted only of vomiturition rather than any actual disgorgement. On my third trip, though, around 10:00, I experienced an explosive ejection of the entire day's contents of my stomach. After that I began to feel a little better, though the headache didn't entirely abate until I woke up the next morning, with an extremely mild queasiness that day the only sign that anything had been wrong at all.

Jeff was wonderful throughout. He brought me a cold compress for my head, sat next to me on the bed and held my hand through the worst of the pain. Considering all the things that have been happening to my family and me, I can't quite believe how amazingly wonderful things are with Jeff, and almost effortlessly so. But get that gift horse away from me; I just want to enjoy this relationship without questioning it or expecting disaster.

In my previous entry, I noted that my condo and I had been relatively unaffected by the hurricane. On Saturday afternoon, though, when Jeff and I went walking outside to get something to eat, we discovered that the front of the condo building hadn't been so lucky; three trees on the front lawn had lost a number of large limbs and were leaning badly. A crew was on hand to begin the process of cutting them down and removing them. And, at the end of the street a utility pole in front of an apartment building was leaning precariously. Deciding to drive to a diner rather than eating in the neighborhood, we found the first traffic light up the street not working and orange safety cones set out to prevent left turns onto that side street.

Today there are half a million people in the DC metro area alone still without power, so we really were very fortunate not to lose power or water. In Richmond it's even worse. My mother has running water but no power in order to boil it, as directed by the County; power to the hospital was restored on Friday, but they only restored water there very early yesterday morning. The utility company is stating that they only expect 75% of those affected to have power by this coming Thursday. Fortunately, my sister is driving to Richmond today, and she's taking Mom additional bottled water, a cooler full of ice, and a battery-powered radio; Mom's had only two candles and a single flashlight with which to weather the past four days. Yesterday, she was able to get her first cup of coffee in three days; she'd been drinking warm Dr. Pepper in the interim in order to keep her caffeine levels high enough to prevent withdrawal headaches. She started to venture out on Saturday, but there still were trees across the roads and no working traffic signals, so she parked the car at the hospital and walked the block back to the apartment.

Dad is doing ok. His temperature, from the pneumonia, has been up and down. Currently it's not terribly high, but several times over the past few days, especially without working air conditioning in the hospital, they've had to pack him in ice because his temperature had gotten dangerously high. He's not yet conscious again, but now that the storm has passed and they've restored power they're again planning to start bringing him back out of sedation. Mom reports that they took out the ventilator tube for a short time on Saturday, and while his breathing muscles were able to work a little (they're not, in fact, completely paralyzed), his breathing was so labored that they had to put him back on the machine.

All the doctors continue to stress that this is going to be a very, very long recovery process, so we continue to wait.

The television and Internet are showing me scenes of serious flooding and downed trees and power lines, and report that record numbers of people are without power in Virginia and that some residents of Alexandria and Fairfax County are being asked to boil their water before drinking or even brushing their teeth. My mom confirms that she is without power still at the temporary apartment in Richmond, and that the hospital is without power or water (though it does have generators keeping the essential equipment running, it has no air conditioning and no working bathrooms at present). Even other parts of Arlington have been reported to have been hit with power outages and property damage.

Yet here at elf central, you'd be hard pressed to know that there'd even been a hurricane through here last night and early this morning. Even at the peak of the winds, my condo building was nearly completely and almost oddly unscathed. We never lost power for more than two or three minutes at a time, and certainly less than a dozen times altogether. While I could see swaying trees down the hill in the townhouse subdivision next to my condo building, those in our courtyard seemed barely to move, and the dirt on my balcony--which during normal rain storms usually swirls madly around in the strong wind gusts that sweep along the back side of the building--wasn't even disturbed, even though it was the only thing there given that I'd removed all the furniture and plants so they wouldn't be blown off. The angle of the winds also meant that my vertical blinds only occasionally fluttered gently despite keeping the windows and patio door open; in fact, the blinds are moving much more actively now, with just normal winds outside.

I'm not complaining, exactly. I'm glad that Jeff and I were safe and comfortable--hell, even the satellite signal on the television only went out from rain fade a couple of times, significantly less than I expected, given that it normally goes out during more typical and ostensibly more gentle Washington thunderstorms. And I'm very happy that I have power, drinkable water, and that my phone, television and Internet connectivity are working now and continued to operate almost without fail throughout the hurricane. But I was perhaps expecting and hoping for something a little more thrilling.

Currently the temperature has dropped into the sixties and we're getting some steady rain, but the brunt of the storm is still several hours away from Arlington. The trees outside the condo are relatively still at this point, with only occasional mild gusting disturbing them.

Jeff stayed over last night, and today we're both still here at my place; the federal government, my employer, made the decision to close last night, and Jeff's employer made the same decision sometime between midnight and 7 am. At the moment, the rain isn't even heavy enough to disrupt my satellite television service, and as long as the power holds out we've got TiVo, popcorn, Hint-of-Lime Tostitos, Diet Vanilla Pepsi and dozens and dozens of DVDs for entertainment. I must confess to some excitement about the approaching storm; I'm also looking forward to hunkering under the covers and making love as the rain lashes the windows and the winds howl around us when the worst of the storm hits here this evening.

At least we don't have to worry about the possibility of some little Thom or Jeff arriving nine months from now.

Fortunately, Mom got into an apartment just next to the hospital this morning, so she was settling into it before the storm reached Richmond. She'll be there during the rest of Dad's hospitalization and recuperation, which takes a load off my mind. She's much more comfortable and self-confident once she's in one of those apartments, where she can save money by cooking for herself and where she has easy pedestrian access to the hospital rather than having to drive back and forth from the hotel in a much larger and relatively unfamiliar setting (though not so unfamiliar as once, given that she's spent several months living in Richmond over the past two years, while Dad has been hospitalized there off and on).

[Update] I only just posted this, and within a couple of minutes we had a very brief power outage and accompanying sound of thunder outside. It was so quick that only some equipment was affected: the TV shut off briefly, for example, but the TiVo and DVD player continued to stay lit. The UPS for the computer beeped indicating it had lost power, but the two digital clocks in the house are still showing the correct time, without having reset to the flashing 12:00.

While there seemed to be an attempt from the family as a whole to make Mom and me feel guilty about it, we did manage to do a little shopping together. We were out briefly Thursday morning so that Mom could pick up some things she'd forgotten to pack--sufficient underwear, deodorant, etc.--when the hospital called to get permission to insert the ventilator, upon which we rushed right back. However, I made the mistake of telling one family member that we were "at the shopping center," and every one who called after that seemed to know about it. You'd think we'd flown to London to shop for Prada while Dad lay gasping his last.

Mom was so upset that for the next day and a half we were nowhere except at the hospital or at the hotel or on the road driving between the two. I finally convinced her that it made no sense for us to sit staring at the waiting room or hotel walls for the remaining 18 hours when we spent every minute of the six hours we were permitted to be with Dad in his room holding his hand and talking to him. The hospital could reach us, if needed, on our cell phones just as easily at the shopping center--which was no further away than the hotel--as in the hotel room. And during Dad's other hospitalizations he's made it very clear that it upsets him if we do nothing but sit around the hospital; he's always encouraged Mom to get out and do other things while she's waiting.

So we finally did do a little more shopping Saturday evening, though I was so exhausted and headachy I just couldn't concentrate on and enjoy it as much as I usually do; this gay boy and his mother, always pretty close, usually bond particularly around the activity of shopping. Mom says that I'm the same way about shoes that she is about handbags; to be honest, though, I think I'm more extravagant about my camp and tropical print shirts than I am about shoes, though I did firmly but regretfully forego two gorgeous silk camp shirts in favor of a great deal on two fabulous and funky pairs of Steve Madden and Kenneth Cole footware.

Thanks for all the emailed and commented support, hugs, thoughts and prayers for my dad and our family. The bad news is that Dad's health has continued to decline over the past week, with a rapid progression of the Guillain-Barr黠the good news is that, so far, his new kidney, at least, has been relatively unaffected.

As I reported earlier, last Monday Dad was taken to his local hospital where over the course of the day the diagnosis of Guillain-Barr頷as made. Tuesday morning his medical team in Richmond from the Transplant Center ordered him transferred to the hospital there by helicopter and on Tuesday they began the first of five plasmapheresis therapies recommended for treatment of some autoimmune disorders, including Guillain-Barr鮦lt;/p>

I left Arlington for Richmond early Wednesday morning and, fortunately, was able to spend some time with Dad that day while he was still conscious and breathing on his own. By Wednesday evening the paralysis already had reached his arms, over which he had only gross motor control (e.g., he could flail his arms but not grasp things with his fingers). His breathing wasn't visibly labored, but the diagnostics showed that his oxygen intake continued to lessen.

On Thursday morning he was visibly gasping for breath and, within twenty minutes after Mom and I had left the hospital after morning visiting hours, the hospital called to ask for permission to put Dad on a ventilator. When we returned, he was still conscious and very distressed, grabbing at me and mouthing that he couldn't breathe. The nurse acknowledged that it would feel to him as though he weren't able to breathe--she said "It feels like you're breathing through a straw"--but assured him and us (and the monitors confirmed) that he was actually taking in more oxygen than he had been managing on his own. It was nonetheless a very frightening and disturbing experience to have someone you love pleading with you to help him, when you're helpless to do anything other than try to be comforting and assuring. For my mother's sake, too, I have to be the strong one.

Fortunately, the order soon came for sufficient sedation to calm Dad. He remained able to communicate roughly with us through head shakes and nods and eye movements only briefly; as the sedation deepened that afternoon he has appeared almost comatose since. The medical team tell us that he can hear us, but he has no way of communicating back and we have no way to know how much he hears or how much he understands.

Thursday evening we learned that he'd also developed a pneumonia, and they added antibiotics to the mix of anti-rejection drugs, blood pressure medications and insulin passing through a maze of IV lines. On Friday--the day that Dad turned 65, asleep and sedated in a hospital bed halfway across the state from his home--they inserted a feeding tube via his nose, and on Saturday began giving him nutrients through it.

Saturday we also met with the pulmonologist who recommended that a (temporary and reversible) tracheostomy be performed so that a trach tube can be used in place of the ventilator, given the sense that Dad is going to require mechanical breathing support for several weeks to months; that a PEG be inserted into his abdomen so that the esophageal feeding tube can be removed (thus reducing the risk of sinusitis, which frequently occurs with the use of feeding tubes and to which my dad, immunocomprised as he is, would be particularly susceptible); and that an arterial PIC line be inserted. These procedures are to be scheduled for the next day or so beginning tomorrow.

For our part, all we can do is sit and wait. The implication from our conversations with the doctors, our research into this syndrome, and Dad's presentation is that this is going to be a long illness and recovery, certainly on the order of weeks and very possibly months.

I stayed in Richmond with Mom through the rest of the week and into yesterday morning. Mom notes that this is the longest since before she and Dad married that they've gone without talking to one another. My sister will drive to Richmond tomorrow for the day, and I'm planning to spend my weekends down there, but I hate that Mom is alone there otherwise--while Dad is in the CCU, we're only permitted to spend three two-hour periods with him, two of us at a time; the rest of the time is exhausting and frustrating, especially for my mother there alone, in an unfamiliar and relatively quite large city, when she is accustomed to being almost continually surrounded by her husband, parents, daughter, grandsons, sister and in-laws.

Jeff and I were musing last night about what a chant would sound like if directed to a crowd of the indecisive or apathetic:

What do we want?

We don't know. What do you want?

When do we want it?

You decide. It really doesn't matter to us.

In the continuing saga of family health crises, car woe and appliance death, I offer up the past couple of days.

Saturday, for example, while downtown enjoying the nice weather with Jeff, I started experiencing trouble with the convertible top, which kept reporting an error when I tried to open it. I did eventually get it open, and got it closed again once home that evening, but it's been sluggish and recalcitrant since, so I've been afraid to try to open it.

Then I arrived home from work yesterday to discover that the heat pump that provides cooling and heating in my condo apparently has given up the ghost (after having been preceded by the refrigerator, dishwasher and computer monitor, in a race with the widescreen TV to see which would fail next). Given its age (about 20 years) I've been expecting this sooner or later, but I kept hoping for later. Fortunately it failed just as the weather has begun to cool, and I don't need its air conditioning or heat for the foreseeable future.

But as I was feeling sorry for myself about the state and presumed cost of repair or replacement of what are, after all, only just things, I got a real kick in the pants when my mom called last night to tell me that my dad was back in the hospital, just a few days before his 65th birthday and the same morning that my cousin and aunt both had outpatient surgery.

Yesterday morning Dad began to lose feeling in his legs; fearing at first that he had had or was having a stroke, he was admitted to the hospital. The progression of his symptoms, though, led to a diagnosis later that day of Guillain-Barr� Syndrome, an autoimmune disorder whose primary presentation is a rapid onset of weakness and paralysis beginning in the lower extremities and working its way up, often resulting in temporary paralysis of the breathing muscles requiring use of a mechanical ventilator.

Today at the request of his transplant doctor, he's been transported by helicopter to Richmond. Dad's sister is driving Mom there this afternoon, where they'll find a hotel room for the time being, but my aunt has to return home tomorrow. Since my Mom's sister, who shares much of the responsibility with my mom for caring for their own mother, who has Alzheimer's, is recovering from her own laparoscopic surgery from yesterday, my sister--as usual--is stepping up to help care for our grandmother while also taking care of her own family. So I'm taking the rest of the week off (ah well, there goes the rest of my leave; and my parents, sadly, now have to cancel their first cross-country trip) and driving down to Richmond tomorrow morning to be with my mom so she won't be alone there.

Happy, healing thoughts for my dad are appreciated. As are virtual hugs for me, too.

I was just looking at my referrer log, and someone recently was referred to my site via a Dogpile search for "how to steal and capture souls." Now, the page to which the search engine directed them here is just my photographs of myself, friends, family and travel, entitled "Stealing Souls"; fortunately for the acquaintances of this unknown searcher I don't actually offer a how-to manual on the process of capturing others' souls.

Other interesting searches that brought people here over the past few days--beyond the overwhelming majority who seem to be searching for lyrics to Stephen Lynch songs and a fair number apparently looking for shirtless pictures of Queer Eye's Kyan--included "forearm prominent veins," "contra dance naked," "manscaping" and, more times than I might have expected, "elf clothes."

Great. If it weren't bad enough that my email accounts receive more spam than real mail on a daily basis, today my blog received its first spam in the form of a comment containing links to all the spam world's greatest hits: online casinos, viagra, penis enlargement, lingerie, porn, etc. And unlike email spam, which feels rather impersonal to me since the marketers purchase lists of email addresses, commenting to a post on the blog was a much more deliberate action.

And what's the return on the investment here? It's not like I'm a major destination on the Internet, and I'm confident that my regular readers are not in the least interested in this junk.

The spammer left an email address, but I'm not going to post it since it's probably some poor soul who had nothing to do with this, but whose email address occasionally gets used as the reply-to for a spam mailing. However, the IP address did get logged; the originator was posting from a machine on the CHINANET Tianjin province network.

Last night while surfing DirecTV, we came across a Julia Child marathon on PBS You. During my irreverent running commentary (Jeff noted that it was like watching an MST3K cooking show), I reminded Jeff that I felt I had an especial right to satirize Ms. Child given my up close and personal encounter with her, and I realized that while I'd previously told him the story and had mentioned it in passing here, I'd never fully blogged the story. So, here is the saga of The Day Julia Child Ran Into Me:

The time: 1985.

The place: Somerville, Massachusetts. The old Savenor's Market.

The scenario: After college, I lived for a year in Somerville just a short walk from Harvard Square. Up the street from my apartment was Savenor's Market, a specialty meat (I remember they even carried such exotic meats as ostrich, rattlesnake and kangaroo, among others) and cheese market where Julia regularly shopped. Next to Savenor's was a laundromat where I did my laundry.

I had just finished several loads of laundry and was walking home. As I passed Savenor's carrying my stacked baskets of clean clothes, Julia came backing out with her own parcels as she conversed with the proprietor. I couldn't see well over my clothing, and she was walking backwards without looking behind her at all. Bang! Crash! Down I went, and down came Julia on top of me.

After I extricated myself from under her, I helped her up and we apologized to each other. It was only later, once I was home opening a box of Kraft Dinner, that I kicked myself, wishing I'd thought to suggest she might make it up to me by inviting me over for a meal.

[Note: I actually later met Ms. Child on several other occasions, as well as Fred Rogers, Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop (I even briefly wore the Lamb Chop costume at a Capitol Hill function on behalf of public TV), among many other PBS notables over the years that I worked in public television, but this first meeting had a special impact, as it were.]

During a particularly but not unusually giddy PoCo (a la PoMo, my new abbreviation for post-coital, the coinage of which arose during this same PoCo moment) conversation this weekend, "Dzheph" (not his real name) and I were discussing--in the context of his predilection for handwritten thank-you notes--a possible niche for printed greeting cards for just such an occasion. The following sentiment then sprang to mind:

My co-workers note I've been smiling all day.
Thank you for being such a wonderful lay.