I had a new icon yesterday and I have another one today. I saved a few more so you may see some more new ones, eventually. I go poking around in my icons every December, because I have so many I don't even know what all I have. They're kind of a record of my years at Livejournal, really - baseball, Buffy (TONS of Buffy), Harry Potter, m15m, WoW. Kingdom of Loathing - that last one goes back a while, especially. I've deleted a few over the years - usually the ones that I most rarely used, anyway - but there are still lots of old ones there. (I saw "NaBloPoMo 2007" for one, and I doubt that that's the oldest one still here, either.) The first one I remember having as my default was one of the m15m Harry Potter ones - I think it was Snape saying "sit down and shut up." Actually if you look at my userpics page, they seem to have the current default first and after that they appear to be chronological, so if I'm correct about that, the Snape one IS actually the oldest, or the oldest that's still there, at least.
If I'd found a good Daredevil or Jessica Jones one first, though, you might be seeing that instead. (I did eventually find a couple of them but half of them were Luke/Jessica and I'm not into it far enough yet to be invested in those two as a couple.) We just re-started Netflix a month or so ago after a LONG hiatus - like, a couple of years - and the main reason we re-started it was for the Marvel stuff (and Stranger Things for Rob, but we haven't gotten around to that yet). We finally got through season 1 of Daredevil last night and we watched enough of Jessica Jones after that to determine that we did in fact want to watch it. I was pretty sure I would, but I wasn't sure about Rob - then once we got really rolling I realized that this is right the heck up Rob's alley. It's practically a horror movie, or at least it's creepy-as-hell suspense. Anyway, we're only two episodes in and we haven't even really seen David Tennant's face yet, but we're pretty into it. We're both off tomorrow so hopefully we can get at least one ot two more in.
I hear Daredevil season 2 is not as good as season 1, which is disappointing because I really, really loved season 1. We may watch season 2 eventually but I figured it'd be nice to see if we could catch up with at least Jessica Jones & maybe Luke Cage too before any more Defenders stuff comes out.
Music-wise, I looked up the Billboard list like I linked to yesterday, and it's no surprise that the top 2 songs are Beatles songs - I Want To Hold Your Hand and She Loves You - because that was the year the Beatles hit the US in a big way. I can't say that I remember much about that at the time, although we watched The Ed Sullivan Show regularly when I was growing up so it's entirely possible I saw the episode they were on. If so it didn't make much of an impression.
I've already told you the big event of my life in this year, that we moved, but actually we moved twice. Even the first time was a big deal to me because up to then we had been in the same little house all my life. First we moved into a nice new house where we were for my fourth birthday - and then only a couple of months later my dad got a sales job and got transferred to the Texas Panhandle. My parents sold the nice new house and we lived for the rest of that year in a rent-house in Snyder, Texas, which is a little town really out in the middle of nowhere as I remember it - although we loved one thing about Snyder, and that was that it had a prairie dog town right near where we lived - I mean, a fenced-off one for show. (You could also find wild ones without much trouble, I think, out in the country, in those days.) That school-year (64-65, that is) was the only year of my childhood that my mother didn't work - we moved too late for her to get a job. So we were very poor - relative to the rest of my childhood when we always had that double income, I mean - but she was home all the time, which we loved.
Anyway, let's stick with Mary Poppins for today's music advent song. I promise I'm not going to do kids' songs through the entire 60s, though.
I had the most lovely dream about my mother the other day, that's kind of stuck with me. Half the time when I dream about my mother she's fussing at me, in that way that mothers do. But this was a dream about wandering around a museum. I think she just kind of turned up halfway through it, and we wandered around the museum and then went shopping. My mom was always big on shopping, and we did a lot of that, in real life. And we also did a lot of touristy things like museums. And this dream was kind of the best of that, and it was kind of holiday-themed, too, like there were Christmas lights everywhere. Really that was the best of my relationship with my mother, right there.
I've been kind of slacking on Holidailies. Actually I've been slacking on the holidays in general. I've got to do something about Christmas cards. I should probably do that tomorrow, because I don't have the work computer so I have sort of an unexpected day off. I should probably take advantage of that while I can! Other than cards, I'm basically ok on Christmas - I have the gifts I need to get and so forth. I talked to my aunt today and we're all set on the family stuff, so it's just cards that are an issue. We'll see what I manage to get done tomorrow.
Sometime around 1990, my mother and I went to see the touring production of Les Miserables. And my mother hated it. Apparently she thought all musicals were supposed to be all sweetness and light and Rodgers and Hammerstein and so forth, and she didn't seem to have gotten a clue from the name, either. I loved my mother, but she had odd ways of thinking sometimes - sort of a mental block, I guess, that didn't let her change her mind about some things come hell or high water. And apparently this was one of those. The only part she liked was "Master of the House" because it was funny.
I thought of this because I more or less dragged Rob to see the movie today, and I was a little nervous about it. But he liked it. I was relieved. I was pretty sure he wasn't going to react like my mother did, but still. I didn't really think he would utterly hate it, but I didn't really expect him to actively like it, either. He even expressed willingness - unprompted - to go see it again later.
I was going to say more but I'm sleepy. Maybe tomorrow.
I was sitting in the bathtub earlier, thinking about what I was going to write an entry about - I was thinking about Livejournal keywords, to start with, but that will probably be a topic for another day, because my thoughts wandered then to my most-often-used keywords. I suspect that my actual most-often-used keyword might be "meme" although I haven't checked to see what LJ says (and the whole topic of memes might also be another topic for another day) - but certainly a couple of them, over the years, have been "family" and "mom." (My keywords are sort of partially broken, which was the original topic that I was thinking about - but that also means that the keywords you can see at the side of my page now are not necessarily reflective of what I was using back before they were broken.) I don't think I started using "mom" as a keyword until the last year or so of my mom's life, anyway, but if I had been using it every time I mentioned her over the years, it might be the top keyword hands down.
Background, for those of you who don't know this stuff already: my mom and I were really close. We made quilts together. I went over to her house just about every Saturday for many years - usually we had lunch and went shopping a bit and then worked on quilts, that was the normal itinerary, anyway. And well before I started journaling online, in 2001, she was diagnosed with cancer. Then in 2004 she was diagnosed with a different cancer (which might or might not have metastasized from the first one - that's never been clear). The second one was a brain tumor - I wrote a whole entry about the tumor one year as my introduction to Holidailies, which is partly why I assume that a lot of people know this story already. (It was an attempt at dark humor. I'm not real sure how successful it was.) Anyway, the brain tumor worsened kind of abruptly in the last part of 2006 and she died in early 2007 - and then I spent most of that year and into the next dealing with her estate, so that's another year-plus of mom-related entries. It's probably only after Hurricane Ike late in 2008 that I stopped talking about my mom constantly, one way or another.
So actually this is my first Christmas as an "orphan" - a 50-year old orphan, but an orphan nevertheless. I haven't spent Christmas with my dad for many years, and my mom has been gone for a surprising number of Christmases now - this will be six, I guess - so it doesn't make all that much difference, in an immediate sense. But it's still weird, no matter how old you are.
Added: I mentioned writing about my father in order to vent, and there's certainly a lot of that, if you poke around (some of the venting entries are still friendslocked but others are not), but I feel like I have to point out that I did my fair share of venting about my mom, back in the day, too. I adored her, but she was still my mom and she sometimes drove me crazy, as moms tend to do.
I don't know if many of the people who read this have been around long enough to remember the days when my mom finished a quilt practically every week. It's been a couple of years now, although in 2005 she still managed to make a good many. Mostly her big productivity years were before the brain tumor announced its presence in the 2nd half of 2004. For the five years or so before that, she spent a really major amound of her time sewing. She gave a lot of them away, and she even sold some (mostly for far less than they were worth), but when we started pulling quilts out of the closet today, we pulled out nearly a dozen bed-size quilts that she had made. Seriously. And that wasn't counting the wallhangings and small quilts. We didn't even get to the closet upstairs where most of the smaller ones are.
The one in the picture took more than a week to make, I think. She called it "Ted's Stars" - I think because she was working on it when her brother Ted died in late 1999. I told my aunt (that is, Ted's widow) that she could have it - it's a good thing I didn't look at it before I told her that because I would've been tempted to keep it. It's prettier than I remembered it was.
It occurs to me that most of you have probably never even seen a picture of my mother, and I came across this one. This was shortly before she got sick, I think.
Strangely, I am better today. Well, I suppose there could hardly be a worse day than yesterday (short of, y'know, a chance meeting with Ted Bundy or something), so it almost had to get somewhat better. Still, I seem to be ok. I may go back to being a basket case later, but for now, I am not too bad.
The funeral is not till Wednesday. Some sort of problem with the church. I didn't realize until we were on the way home that that's Valentine's Day, but oh well (as I seem to be fond of saying lately). Luckily, V-Day was never my favorite holiday anyway. I am just a bit worried about the big flower arrangement I was going to get, given the timing, but I have put off thinking about it until Monday. By the time we got it all straightened out it was too late to do anything today. I was not intending to do red roses in any case, so surely they can find me something decent-looking.
Thanks everybody for the good wishes. I haven't made any attempt to reply, for the most part, but I read every one of them, and I really do appreciate it.
Oh, did I say that my mother apparently wanted to ban black from her funeral? (So my sister says, anyway.) This amuses me no end. I have a new black shirt I was intending to wear, but now I am really tempted to wear red. Or bright pink. We will see if I have the nerve.
My mother died this afternoon. I got there with about an hour to spare. Nobody had called me to say she was worse, and so I was "dawdling" around (i.e., eating lunch, calling the lawyer, etc.) and I would have felt terrible if I hadn't gotten there in time. It wasn't a pretty thing to watch, though.
I am exhausted. The funeral home guys (who turned out to be girls, as a matter of fact) got caught in an especially horrid traffic jam and took a couple of hours to get there. In the meantime I talked to everybody in the world on the phone - at least it seemed like it. Let's see, it was: Rob, my aunt, my sister (both of those two were loong conversations, too), my dad, my dad again, my nephew and my ex-brother-in-law. Oh, and the funeral negotiator and the lady from the church. And then at least two people came in to see my mom, not having heard yet that she was dead. That was sort of traumatic. I spent the afternoon veering wildly between calm, weeping, and cracking bad jokes. But oh well.
I'm going to be interested to see how I manage tomorrow. Right now I just feel tired and sort of numb. I just hope I don't have nightmares about watching my mother struggle to breathe. Tomorrow: more phone calls, meeting with the pastor about the funeral, etc. Rob took off work, for which I am profoundly grateful. He can be my chauffeur; I don't really trust my driving right now.
I guess somebody probably ought to post something on the two forums - TOG and TUS - and explain what's happened. Col or Falaria, can one of you take care of TOG? And I asked Anth to post something at TUS because she had PMd me today, but if she hasn't in the morning, will somebody take over that duty? I have been playing GW in a desultory way since I got home - I had to do something! - but I haven't spoken to a soul. I didn't have the heart.
I don't think that many people who read this are close enough to consider coming, but the services are tentatively set for Tuesday, at the Lutheran church in Nassau Bay, Texas. I will know more tomorrow.
I really think there must be something in the water. Not only is Texas requiring the HPV vaccine (and even more surprisingly, offering to pay for those who can't afford it), but now Florida is abandoning paperless voting.
I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but my mother's first round of cancer (diagnosed about 5 years ago, well before the whole brain tumor business) was apparently related to the HPV which my father gave her. So I take this whole vaccine thing a little more personally than I might otherwise.
I sat and held my mother's hand for a couple of hours this afternoon. She's pretty much completely nonresponsive, but they apparently have been getting a small amount of food into her, which is good. I am feeling really guilty about not being over there more, but the fact is that Art probably doesn't want me hanging around all the time, and I don't really want to be there all the time, so I really need to cut it out with the excessive guilt. At least I keep telling myself that. It's not doing too much good, though.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Apparently Merck has been spreading its money around really wisely, because our ultraconservative governor just signed an order requiring girls to have the HPV vaccine before they can start 6th grade. Wonder how much of a shitstorm this is going to stir up.
There has been no further bad Mom news today, at least so far. Oh, I don't guess I told you guys yesterday's bad news, which was that she wasn't eating. The hospice nurse says unless she starts again, that means we have about 10 days. I probably should have gone up there this afternoon, because I have been having to restrain myself from calling to find out how she's doing. (Which would probably be fairly useless, because Art wouldn't be home and never keeps his cell phone on.) I am going tomorrow, anyway.
So (deep breath) we are now dipping our toes into the wonderful world of funeral planning. We have gotten as far as deciding on the basics: cremation, memorial service at her church, etc. She has a plot next to my grandparents, if we decide to bury her ashes, but it seems like something of a waste to me. We are going to see what options the cemetery will give us. (Apparently my grandfather gave very generously to the cemetery association, so hopefully they'll be appropriately grateful to his family.) I was thinking that planting a rosebush or something by my grandparents' grave and putting her ashes under it would be rather nice. Also, the hospice nurse gave us a phone number for a guy who negotiates with the funeral home for you, and I haven't called him yet, but I think I'm going to on Monday, because I sure don't want to be dealing with those people by myself. I told my boss that I was going to try to work half-time next week, depending on how things develop. I don't think I can just sit at Mom's bedside all day, anyway.
On my way to see my mother this afternoon, the check engine light on my car came on, right smack on the very top of the causeway - meaning about as far from anywhere as you can manage to be in a mostly-urban area - and before I could get to a good stopping place, it was smoking like crazy. If the engine has not blown up again, I will be amazed.
But you know what? I don't care. That car had clearly outlived its useful life, and we will just have to get another one. One thing about it, I seem to be in the way of inheriting a bit of money soon. (Quite soon, I'm afraid.) I had them tow it back up to the dealer, and Rob came and got me, and we went by to see my mother and Art immediately volunteered the loan of the (other) Honda - the one that we're supposed to be giving to my sister, whenever she bothers to come down and get it - and so I have something to drive for the moment, and we'll worry about the rest later.
My mother is in what the hospice nurse described as a "semi-coma" - she is still eating, though, if somebody feeds her pureed-type stuff. Art had called and told me yesterday that she wasn't eating at all, and that sent me into a tailspin that lasted most of the day today. It turned out not to be quite as dire as he made it sound, but it's bad enough, I suppose. Last weekend when I went in, she didn't really acknowledge my presence but she held on to my hand really hard. Not now. She might have sqeezed it a tiny bit, or it might have been my imagination. I'm not sure. In any case, it wasn't much.
I went over to my mom's earlier - to her house, actually, for the first time in over a month. Art brought her home for the afternoon, and we decided that we will start doing that once a week for now. She didn't seem all that excited to be home, to tell you the truth, but at least it was something different.
We ate pizza and watched football while we were there. The Texans won, giving them six whole wins for the year. Last year they had two, so that was a big improvement. The Longhorns ended up winning yesterday, too, so it was a fairly good football weekend, although the fact is that I forgot to turn the Longhorn game back on after we got home, so I completely missed the big comeback.
I don't do resolutions, incidentally, because I never ever keep them when I make them, so you are spared having to read that. I have no particular desire to go over the year in any detail, either. It wasn't that great of a year. So let's just hope 2007 is better for everybody!
I made a list this morning at 5:00 when I couldn't go back to sleep.
5. Barb - lunch with Bridget?
9. Figure out if there's any gifts I'm forgetting.
gift certificates: Parker, Art, Barbara?
Let's see, #1 is done - Rob picked me up at the front of the hospital so that let us get home a little earlier than we have been. The problem there is that the office closes at 5:30 on weekdays in the winter and it's hard for us to get home in time. I believe we had six packages waiting. Or it may have been 7. Amazon, Amazon, Amazon, Hancock's of Paducah (quilt shop), Exposures (photo doodads), and, uh, I forget what else. Maybe more Amazon.
One Amazon package was a book for my mother, and the quilt stuff was for her, too, which is good because Amazon screwed up the order I placed this morning and sent it regular shipping instead of two-day. Idiots. I sent them an indignant e-mail, now I'm going to be interested to see if they fix it.
#2, the Wreckers CD for my co-worker Alison, was a bit of a problem because Wal-Mart didn't have it - maybe I should've expected that since it's not new and not a huge best-seller. But I think I fixed that by buying an iTunes gift certificate instead, because I know they have it. I downloaded one of the songs off of it a while back. (And I didn't like it that much, actually, but that's Alison's problem.) Anyway, that one I did have to do today because we're exchanging gifts at lunch tomorrow, tomorrow being the last day we're working this year. (Hooray for that!) We go back on the 2nd.
I bought most of the other stuff on the list, except I didn't get all the fudge ingredients. I know I'm going to be going back to Wal-Mart at least one more time anyway, so I'm not worried about that. I got Wal-Mart gift certificates for my nephew Parker (he buys video games with them) and for Art (I don't know what he buys, but it's his preferred gift) but not for Barbara, my stepmother. She might be okay with a Wal-Mart gift card but I thought I would go for something a little more classy. Macy's, maybe, that's pretty safe. I still don't feel like I know her all that well.
I did actually feel pretty decent all day today. Didn't sneeze, didn't even cough much. Yay for small miracles.
My mother's 20 days of rehab that Medicare is paying for are up sometime next week, too, and so we will have to make some sort of decision about that. I guess I will talk to Art about it tomorrow. I can't see that she is in good enough shape to go home. So I might end up having to take off an afternoon or something next week to go deal with all that, anyway. Maybe I can work some shopping in, if I have to go to Clear Lake anyway!
Mom and Art are apparently talking about going to Art's son's house for Christmas dinner - if they do that Rob and I may go up to my aunt's for one night, go up Christmas Eve and come back Christmas day. That's where I would prefer to be, because it just seems more like Christmas with the kids around and family and everything. I would rather Mom came too, but I don't think that's possible, so if she has somewhere else to go and she won't be sitting around the nursing home, then that might be the best possible division of things at this point, I think. The fact is, she doesn't seem to have much sense of time any more, anyway, so it doesn't matter so much to her.
I am feeling a little better today - just mostly very tired. I still have cold symptoms, of course, but not near as bad as yesterday.