Preparing for a talk . . .

. . . that I am giving tomorrow on tubes, tonsils, and adenoids. It’s for the pediatricians. I’m giving another talk this March for the pedis and the GPs on ENT urgencies (nosebleeds, ear trauma, laryngitis, and so forth), but this one’s all about the bread and butter.

No, not me. Too much hair.

Just looked through my slides and (A) I’m worried I don’t have two hours’ worth of material, and (B) many of my slides are too wordy. And (C), not enough pictures.

These folks are human, after all. They wants to see lots o’ pictures.

I’ll make it up to them in March.

D.

Bragging rights

We got Jake’s first semester report card in the mail today: three As, three A+s, and an A- in PE. Based on the GPA, they clearly don’t count the PE grade towards the GPA. That’s nice.

I resisted the urge to pull the old family joke: “What, only THREE A+s??? Well I guess you’ll have to try harder next time.” Yes, we’re an obnoxious bunch.

The only question remaining (aside from what should we do to celebrate): should we send a photocopy of this report card to the public high school principal who didn’t think Jake could handle trigonometry? Are we above rubbing this jerk’s nose in it?

Probably a waste of time. With his ego, he probably tells himself that the Catholic high school has lower standards.

D.

What the Aughts wrought

The decade is winding down, so I thought I’d do a quick summary of what the Aughts meant to me and my family.

1. In 2000, if I remember correctly, we bought our beach house in Oregon, a fixer-upper that’s still being fixed up and will probably never be fully fixed up. We still own it. Would like to have sold it but the bottom fell out of the market, and it’s too precious a property to sell low.

2. Also in 2000, I had a year-long gig writing as an agony aunt for iVillage. My articles are still posted and folks still read them.

3. When that job ran its course, I had nothing left to write. This coincided (more or less) with my 40th birthday. Mildly dissatisfied with my job, I decided I would spend the next 20 years or so reinventing myself as a writer. I wrote that super-long SF novel (or trilogy, or whatever it was) and the romance, and maybe a dozen or more short stories, a few of which were published in minor zines.

4. I started this blog in 2005. Met lots of great folks here.

5. Jake was only four at the beginning of this decade. Wow! Put it that way, and ten years seems like a very long time indeed. So in all that time, he grew up, went to school, outgrew school, had his brush with the medical system (chronic headaches in 2005, which scared the hell out of us because at the time, a few kids with headaches had shown up in my office — with less than favorable outcomes, shall we say), got homeschooled, and ended up in, of all the unlikely places, Catholic school. And a fine young man he’s becoming, too.

6. Bad decade for Karen . . . her dad died (in 2004, I think), and her medical problems took a turn starting with a bad fall. Her already challenging life became a lot more challenging.

7. After ten years in North Coast country, we left for better things. Took a while to find better things, but eventually we did. And now we’re in El Bako, where in the summer you can fry an egg on your forehead, and year round the air smells variously of garbage, poultry farms, or cow manure. And we’re loving it.

I’m sure I’ll think of more. What did the Aughts bring for you?

D.

Unsettling and odd and not a little sad

My mother said to me, apropos of nothing (which is how she said most things, I’m afraid), “Your father really cares about me.” I heard a note of genuine surprise when she described how my dad had visited her in the hospital every day and had stayed with her for hours.

They’ve been married over sixty years, and she’s surprised he cares about her.

Was my father surprised at his own anxiety (which I suspect he’d now deny) when my mother was in the hospital? But it was there in his voice. Are they just now coming to appreciate one another?

Or perhaps this is all ignorance or presumptuousness on my part. Perhaps I’ve had blinders on because all I’ve ever seen of them is the bickering (which in my family involves screaming invectives at the top of one’s lungs). If I had to pick words to describe their interactions over the years, respect and sympathy and concern wouldn’t be near the top of my list. But have I been missing something all this time?

And then there’s my mother’s lack of bile, to put it mildly. This trip, she was pleasant. Really pleasant. Which isn’t like her. Is this part and parcel of her recent problems?

Does it take a certain level of mental faculty to harbor spite, resentment, animosity?

Needless to say, we find this all very concerning.

D.

PS: We’re trying to figure out what our turtles were doing in Chinatown. Supposedly, they were rescued from Chinatown. Were they being sold as pets, or proto-appetizers?

Turkey Day

We made it out of Bako by 9:15 and got to Barstow by 11:30. Seemed like we were making good time, but then we hit parking lot traffic on I-15 North just out of Barstow. About 45 minutes later, we passed the accident site. The tow truck was just then pulling around, towing away the wreck, and the cops were heading back to LA.

After that, we made good time, but it still took about 5.5 hours to get to my parents’ house. For Thanksgiving Day Dinner, they did the smart thing and bought precooked turkey breast and ham. Still way too much food, but isn’t that a Thanksgiving tradition? I mean, did we really need two turkey breasts, a ham, two pumpkin pies, and an apple pie? And my mother was pissed that my dad opted not to make the stuffing.

She seems fully recovered from what I can tell. She’s using her walker more, which is a good thing, and she’s talking to herself as much as ever. She has this way of starting one sentence and finishing another, but that’s nothing new.

Tomorrow we’re going to a mall, I expect. And then we have to convince my parents not to have dinner at a buffet.

How about y’all? Good turkey?

D.

Where the weekend goes

Hmm. Let’s see if I can reconstruct this.

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