Sunday, December 23, 2012

Family situation

I haven't talked much about it because there really isn't anything anyone can do with a waiting game. My maternal grandmother was in the hospital for two and half weeks with an intestinal blockage and having some mental reactions to her medication withdrawal. She remembered I was me (instead of becoming someone else) but I was told to get the horse back down the street where it goes. She was in the ICU but thought she was in the nursing home. Mosquitoes are constantly eating her up. Fun stuff like that.

She got better when they started her meds again, and the hospital sent her back to the nursing home Thursday. Friday, while being transported to her dialysis treatment, she was thrown out of her wheelchair in the van. Her legs were scraped up bad enough to be mistaken for puncture wounds. She's on Plavix, which makes it so easy for her to hemorrhage. Luckily, it wasn't punctures and luckily it wasn't an artery that was damaged. She's back in the hospital again, looking so much worse now.

I didn't go today; Mom went alone. And Mama tells her that a man stayed with her all night, her best friend because he finally got rid of all the mosquitoes and roaches, but she never saw his face. Mom got the conversation off the mosquitoes because she's been going on about them for a month at least, and Mama was sharp enough to follow the Saints game. But then she pointed to another chair in the hospital room. "Oh he's back."

Nobody Mom could see was in the chair.

My cousin Savannah was visited by deceased family members that she could only see before she died. Mom saw her Uncle Dot the day he died. All my paranormal research points to more visitations than not.

Mama's body is shot to hell. A pacemaker and dialysis is what life support she has now. She's not listed in critical care by the hospital as far as we know. But she's eighty-years-old, you touch her and it hurts her, and now this. I don't know when her end is, but it is looking pretty damn close.

Read Free!
The BookWorm

Monday, December 17, 2012

If Christmas is code for everything breaking, then yes

it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

First up, I bought the Dark Knight Rises two-disc DVD and watched the movie again, put the special features disk into the DVD player, and forgot about it for a week. When I got the inclination to watch them, the player couldn't read the disk. The computer did, so that ruled out a bad disk. The player refused to play any DVDs. Time for a new player.

My parents gave me money for Christmas and early to boot, and blu-ray players were on sale at Best Buy. Upgrade time instead of spending the money on a bill like I've been doing for how many years in a row? But first I had to go sink another $220 into the car on top of the over $300 I put into it at the first of the month for new tires. Bought the player, decided against buying any blu-ray movies since the inner accountant was still pitching a fit about the money spent on the car. (Yes, we did the math before leaving home but that didn't change the reaction.) I also bought the upgrade to BookCAT so I could finish the update to my book inventory and a video game for the rest of my Christmas.

Sunday became laundry day by default since I spent so long in town on Saturday. Started the load, worked on editing, turned CNN on for the Conn. shooting coverage, and it was about an hour before I went to swap the load. Mustard streaked into the house a little freaked out.

Now the washing machine has been on a slow death spiral for ages now. It leaks between loads if you leave the water on to it, so I developed the habit of always turning the water off. This time it decided to never move off of the fill-up-the-tub portion of the cycle, and half the yard was watered by the time I checked. Then I discovered it was watered with hot water because Uncle Scott changed the settings the last time he used it.

"Why do you get jealous every time I have to spend money on the frakkin' CAR!"

Side benefit to semi-rural living, nobody hears you when you yell at inanimate objects. I borrowed Mom's washer to finish, and sorta priced new washers. And by that, I went to one website and twitched so hard at the prices listed, I didn't look anywhere else.

I stayed up too late last night finishing the book list in BookCAT with CNN on. Luckily, my book diet meant that I didn't have that many to add in. Now I have to make corrections to the list from the last backup. Mostly authors' names and title goof-ups and a few duplicates.

Read Free!
The BookWorm