Knitting, with Dogs

Iron Man (the movie)

Duuuuuuuuuuuudes..... duuuuddes...

Now THAT is how you make a superhero movie!

It's pretty kick-ass.  Go see it.

I aten't dead

Just busy doing other things right now, like channeling Granny Weatherwax.

We leave Monday for the annual "Take the dog to the beach" trip.  Pictures when we return.

Help a blogger, win a chance at a prize!

Danielle over at One Day at a Time has undertaken a couple of fund-raising ventures. She's doing both the Walk for Animals and an MS Bike Ride.  If you've got any Donation Dollars to spare, you can go here to read more and to get links to donate.

Donations (and blog mentions!) get you chances at prizes.   Mmmmm.... prizes.

And both are worthy causes.  So give if you can.  I'm broke, but I had a few $$ I could put her way!  I've got animals, and I've got MS in my extended family, so I can sympathize with BOTH causes.  Pick the one that appeals to you.  :D

National Poetry Month

Did y'all know that today is the first day of National Poetry Month?  If you're interested, you can go to the Random House/Knopf site and sign up for their daily poem e-newsletter.  (It only comes in April, so you're not inundated with poetry year-round.)  I think this is my 3rd year to get stuff from them, and it always comes as a nice surprise. 

I'm not very literary, really.  I'm one of those "I know what I like" gals.  I do collect poems, though.  I have a file on my computer and PDA of poems and quotations I've found in my wanderings through the internet and through books.  I was really surprised recently when I looked through my poems and saw how many of them dealt with death or loss.  WTF??  I hadn't realized I was so gloomy.

Anyway, here's a poem.

Meadowbrook Nursing Home

On our last visit, when Lucy was fifteen
And getting creaky herself,
One of the nurses said to me,
"Why don't you take the cat to Mrs. Harris' room
— poor thing lost her leg to diabetes last fall —
she's ninety, and blind, and no one comes to see her."

The door was open. I asked the tiny woman in the bed
if she would like me to bring Lucy in, and she turned her head
toward us. "Oh, yes, I want to touch her."

"I had a cat called Lily — she was so pretty, all white.
She was with me for twenty years, after my husband died too.
She slept with me every night — I loved her very much.
It's hard, in here, since I can't get around."

Lucy was settling in on the bed.
"You won't believe it, but I used to love to dance.
I was a fool for it! I even won contests.
I wish I had danced more.
It's funny, what you miss when everything.....is gone."
This last was a murmur. She'd fallen asleep.

I lifted the cat
from the bed, tiptoed out, and drove home.
I tried to do some desk work
but couldn't focus.

I went downstairs, pulled the shades,
put on Tina Turner
and cranked it up loud
and I danced.
I danced.

Poem: "Meadowbrook Nursing Home" by Alice N. Persons, from Don't Be A Stranger. © Sheltering Pines Press, 2007.

Match it for Pratchett

I've had a couple of times in my life where, for no good reason I can tell, I've resisted reading a popular author's book series.  The first one was Patrick O'Brian.  Once I broke down and read the first book (and got over the confusion caused by all the Age of Sail terminology), I was hooked, and happily followed Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin through the whole 20 book series.

The other author I resisted for ages was Terry Pratchett.  I don't know why.  I think I thought the Discworld concept was maybe a little twee (I hate twee) or something.  I finally broke down and picked Hogfather as my first Discworld book to read.

Well.  I knew the books were POPULAR, but nobody told me they were GOOD.  Pratchett has a keen eye for society and life, and a sharp and witty writing style.  He loves to riff on the idea of Story, or on stories about Story, and I eat that stuff up like ice cream. 

He's good, people.  If you like fantasy with humor and insight, read him.

Terry was recently diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's.  (He's only 59.)  He recently donated £500,000 (about $1,000,000) to Alzheimer's Research.  Now Pratchett fans are getting together to match Terry's donation.  I saw a headline yesterday that 10,000,000 of us baby boomers can expect to be affected by Alzheimer's in our lifetimes.  My dad was affected too.

So let's put some support out there for Alzheimer's research.  You lose your SELF with Alzheimer's, and that's ever so much worse than just losing your LIFE. 

Match It For Pratchett is one place you can go to donate.  In the US, you can donate at the Alzheimer's Association site.  In the UK you can also donate to the Alzheimer's Research Trust. 

It could be any one of us facing this disorder, and it's not nearly as well funded as cancer research.  Older folks tend to get short shrift where medical research is concerned.  But EVERY ONE OF US will be OLD some day (barring accident or other disease), so it behooves us to support research like this.

Do it for Terry, and do it for yourself.

He came, he saw, he got shaved

Today was the day Dear Robert got his head shaved for St. Baldrick's foundation. 

It started out as a motivational thing for his store.  They had a particular metric they were trying to meet, and Dear Robert said if they met it, he'd shave his head.

Well, they met it, but instead of just shaving his head, he decided to use the event to raise some money to fight children's cancer.  Thus, St. Baldrick's, which is a fund-raiser. Folks donate money in support of people who have their heads shaved in solidarity with kids who have cancer.  The money goes to cancer research.

Ok, here are the pics.  At the site:

He's been letting his hair grow.  This is a very 80's look on him.  :)

First cuts:

About this time, I was thinking, hmmmmm... not sure if this look is going to work.

Fortunately, it looked better almost right away.  I thought he was starting to look like the little man on the poster.  :)

And voila!  I think he looks hot.  :)

Dear Robert's mom couldn't bear to watch what was happening.

There were a good many other folks there getting their heads shaved, including this guy who really got into the "wearin' o' the green" spirit:

And there was a family with 3 members involved:  the son and dad, who got shaved, and the daughter, who got 10" of hair snipped.  The son went first, and the barber let him help shave his dad.

All in all, a good day.  We then went into the pub and celebrated with Guinness and sandwiches.

Many, many thanks to all who donated, and if anyone missed out, there's still time to donate to Dear Robert!    He's almost doubled his initial goal!

Back home, and a fundraiser

I got back home to Dear Robert and the dogs Sunday night.  So another stage of the process is done.

For the fundraiser:

Have y'all ever heard of  St. Baldrick's?  Folks volunteer to have their heads shaved in solidarity with kids with cancer, and to raise funds for children's cancer research.  Dear Robert has decided to participate this year.  He's going to have his head shaved on St. Patrick's Day (March 17) this year, and is looking for donations.  He's letting his hair grow out, so it there will be a pretty dramatic change when he gets his head shaved.

If you're interested in helping out, go to Dear Robert's page and make a donation. 

There may even be prizes available.... (hint, hint)

A slow continuing

The simplest of bridges, a promise
that you will go forward,

that you can come back.
So you cross over.

It says you can come back.
So you go forward

But even if you come back
then you must go forward

I am always either going back
or coming forward.  There is always

something I have to carry,
something I leave behind.

I am a figure in a logic problem,
standing on one shore

with the things I cannot leave,
looking across at what I cannot have.
--Girder, by Nan Cohen

We've spent the week cleaning and sorting through my dad's things, starting to get all the paperwork in order, tossing lots of old stuff.  The man apparently never threw away a birthday card or Father's day card from any of us.  We've found cards we gave him in 1976.  (He dated some of them.)  We've found a bazillion old pictures, most of them in moderately bad shape.  We've scratched our heads trying to figure out which of his sister this old picture might be, or if that young man was one of the folks from Florida or was he from the Griffin bunch?

Most of the time I live in a little bubble of present time.  All this retrospective stuff has really brought my age home to me.  I realize now in a way I never did before how close to the end of WW2 I was born, and how long ago that was.  I'm one of the oldest of my family still alive now.  I remember things that even my close-in-age brother doesn't remember. 

It's a little daunting.

We've got most of the house and ground sorted through and ordered now though.  My sister will go back home today, and back to work tomorrow.  My brother will go back to work next week too.  I'll stay down at my dad's a little longer and tend to a few things that are left, as well as keeping an eye on the house.  When we finish this stage of the process, it'll be sad again.  Just one more ending to go through, another stage completed and finished forever.

I'm about 4 rows away from finishing the Adamas shawl.  There are a lot of errors in the knitting, I think, but I'm going to leave them.  It'll stand as a memory of the time I sat watching beside my dad in the hospital, and in the time we cleaned out his house after he died.

He would have been 84 today, March 2.

Thank you all so much

Many, many thanks to everyone for all the kind words and good wishes.  I apologize for not replying to each comment individually, but it's been a hectic few days.

When we all got home last weekend, it was obvious to us that Daddy wasn't feeling as well or doing as well as he said he was.  My sister got him an appointment with the doctor.  The doctor actually called us at home at about 8:00 that night and told us to take Dad to the local hospital that night.  The bloodwork values that he saw were so anomalous that he thought there had been a testing error.  Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

My father had suffered a fairly rapid recurrence of the prostate cancer he'd struggled with for the past 10 years.  (In mid-December, his P.S.A. was 11.  That's considered moderatly elevated.  Last week it was 51.)  His prostate was significantly enlarged, and caused a backup that damaged his one remaining kidney.  The doctors tried what they could to relieve the backup and restart the kidney, but apparently the damage was too severe.

Me, my brother and his wife and daughter (Daddy's only grandchild), and my sister were with him pretty much 24/7 from about Tuesday evening through Saturday morning.  (We did take breaks to run home and put on clean clothes, etc., but at least two of us were always with him.)   His younger sister was with us much of the time also.  On Saturday morning, the nurses came in and said they could see from the heart monitor that his heart was starting to falter.  He died about 5 minutes later, very quietly, without any struggle or stress, with his children around him.  I washed his face one last time, and we sat with him until they came to take him to the funeral home.

If there's anything that can be said to be good about the whole experience, it was the way we all just did what needed to be done.  Dad's doctor said he'd seen situations like this either pull families apart, or put them together, and he was happy that we were pulling together.  We spent a lot of time sitting around his bed and talking over old memories and good times.  Our aunt told us stories about her childhood with my dad that made us laugh, and gave us insight into how he became the man he was.  My brother and I are only 16 months apart, so we both could remember a lot of the same things.  It was a blessing to all of us.  And though my dad wasn't obviously aware of very much after Thursday afternoon, we all had the sense that he could hear us, and was comforted by our presence.

Dear Robert was a tower of strength to me.  Starting Wednesday, he made the 160 mile round trip from home to here every day, going home at night to take care of the dogs and bring back anything that my sister or I might need from home.  I can't say enough about how wonderful he is.

He was buried by our mom, on a bright Monday morning, with the first spring flowers starting to bloom.

Everything's different now.  Nothing will ever be the same.  We loved him, and will miss him always.

I have always known...

I have always known
that someday
I would take this road
But yesterday
I did not know
that it would be today.

My dad passed away at 8:15 am, Saturday 2/23.  He was 83 years old.