Friday, August 27, 2004

Dept. of Rise And Whine Well, so much for staying in bed all day. For the next two days I've been charged with the care and feeding of the forlorn wee gentleman to the right. Which means getting out of bed and doing things like putting on clothes (Ghod forbid!) and taking the wee dogglet for walks. My parents, with whom I live (the shame! the shame!), have gone to Norfolk, NE, where my mother's parents live. This weekend is the 70th anniversary of my grandparents' wedding; but my folks aren't visiting for a party. See, grandpa is 93 and grandma is 91 and they're both, well, a mess. Grandma has been suffering a series of small strokes for the last year or so and it's rattled her brain quite a lot. Grandpa has prostate cancer and just got done with surgery to enlarge his urethrea. On Thurdsay morning, Grandma, who's been in a nursing home for the last month after breaking her hip or ankle or something, called up grandpa and demanded that he go and retrieve her from the nursing home RIGHT NOW. When grandpa, who, according to my aunt had been sitting in his recliner half-naked and pissing into a jar, told her that he wasn't able to do that, grandma yelled "YOU DON'T LOVE ME ANYMORE" and hung up on him, leaving him sitting there, pissing into his jar and crying. Add to that their general difficulties with things like bathing and bladder control and getting around and you've got, as my mother would say (and often does), "a big fucking mess." (For my mother, the queen of anal retentive housekeeping, a "mess" is the absolute worst thing something could possibly be in the world.) But wait! There's more!!! Two weeks ago, whilst walking the shifty cur you see next to these words, my mother fell and cracked her ribs. Just a crack- nothing was punctured or moved around too much, which means that the only treatment is to medicate the pain. With painkillers. Narcotic painkillers. Vicodin. Vicodin makes mom drunk. Now,when my mom drinks, she follows a predictable curve- halfway through the first one she relaxes; by the time the first one is finished she's happy and chatty; by the time the second one is finished, she's chatty and MEAN. The Vicodin, near as I can tell, is worth about one and one half of her standard heavy vodka drinks. So, by the time she's had her first drink, she's gone straight to mean, word-slurring drunk. Honestly, I'm beginning to think my name is MAAAARRRRGRET!!!, because I don't think I've heard her say it any other way in a long, long time.. But then, I've always been the punching bag of the family. To quote my dad from an infamous night in high school when I was in my room watching Doctor Who and my sister was out on a date, "If your sister isn't home by eleven, you're grounded!" Like I cared. But still. Could the whinge possibly go on any longer, you ask? You bet it could, buckos! Dogglet, who responds to stress about as well as I have lately, has been taking his frustration out by having fits of diarrhea all over the living room carpets. This, of course, makes......wait for it........wait for it.......A MESS!!!! Horrors!! Which makes mom upset.....Which makes her drink.....Which makes everyone else in the house edgy....Which upsets the dogglet......and so it goes. What the hell am I doing here? 3:31:44 PM     leave/read comments []

Cool article about some cool folks. Weapons of Mass Mobilization. A quiet couple in Berkeley, California, got sick of being ignored by the system. So they built a new one. How MoveOn.org changed the face of fund raising, brought P2P to political advertising and reinvented grass-roots activism. By Gary Wolf from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 1:32:02 AM     leave/read comments []