January 2009 Archives

Every year, at the end of January or the beginning of February, the sailors in the Chicago area get a break in the winter weather and are treated to a convention for those who are addicted to sail boats. The harbors in the City of Chicago are open from May 15 to October 15, so this gathering falls just about halfway through their deprivation. "Strictly Sail" is held on Navy Pier, where there is an exhibit floor with all things pertaining to sailing, including some of the newest models from the major sailboat makers. Books, magazines, memberships to associations, equipment, clothing, jewelry, luggage, chairs, food, you name it, and they have booths for it. There are also seminars on a wide variety of subjects.

I used to make the trek with Dear Husband, but now, I let him go on his own, and I get to have a day all to myself, There's a baby quilt and a few gifts I want to finish for friends. I can stay in, if I want, or go out. I could even take in a movie! Ahhhh....isn't it great to have an unstructured day!? Thank you, Strictly Sail!

I have a very old black cat by the name of Edward Scissorhands. Ed adopted us about 17 years ago, during the height of an extremely cold winter. He found his way into our unheated garage and curled up on the seat of the lawn mower. I discovered he was there, and immediately worried that he would freeze. Dear Husband was against letting him into the basement, so he put a little heater out in the garage. Hmpf! Like that was going to do much.

The weather got worse, and DH had to put that heater on the back of the loft bathroom to make sure the pipes didn't freeze. Ed got to go to the basement, and he's been directing our lives ever since.

I originally put a litter box in the bathroom off the bedroom hallway. Ed is an indoor-outdoor cat, and virtually never needed the litter. It was just "in case." But, in the past three years, the cat has aged to the point where winter weather in not as easy to bear. I was sure he was dying the first year he chose not to go out. What else could it be? After all, THIS was the cat who much preferred to be outside, who ran to the door to signal his need to be OOOOOOWWWWTT! Admittedly, it was cold outside. I suppose he was just being a smart cat!

The unfortunate side to staying in, is that the cat needs to use the litter. I have a litter pan in the basement, but Dear Husband tells me that it needs to be changed more frequently than once a month. (Out of sight, out of mind). And, this cat is a champion at filling a litter pan.

Ed's kidneys are going bad, and he drinks a great deal of water. You know the deal. Water in, water out, or something like that. I can change the litter pan, use a new litter liner and fill it with litter, and I SWEAR he can fill it in twenty minutes! I can scoop for one day, but every other day we need to start fresh.

And the litter.....there are little granules of litter everywhere. I had to move the litter out of the bathroom to make things safer for my mother, and the only other place we could put it on the main floor was the mud room. Ed is doing his best to make the mud room live up to it's name. After he's used the litter, he paws at it, and dumps some of it over the side. Then he walks through it, and tracks it past the pantry and into the kitchen. I've found it half the house away, on the seat of the secretarial chair at my computer in the living room!

I love this cat dearly, and I know we don't have a lot of time left together, but couldn't he just be a LITTLE NEATER!???

I received a note from my youngest sister, frankie, with the command: BLOG!

And so I am. I've thought of two dozen entries to make in the past week or so, all when I can't get to my computer. Frankie and I were talking about the phenomenon of the perfect sentence for a blog entry, which pops into our heads when we are in the shower. and can't write it down. It's really aggravating to know that I'll forget that perfect sentence before I can get to a notepad. Darn it all!

So today is a pastiche....a collection of short comments, if you will.

Elegante Mother is doing better! YEA!!!! She is speaking in complete sentences, and her voice seems to be getting stronger. She is lucid, focused, and appears to understand where she is. She also understands that she needs help to get better. AND, she is clear that the food stinks! She's lost ten pounds. On my next trip to see her I will take an avocado, or some guacamole, and I'll stop at Culvers for a milk shake. Mechanical-soft fattening food, coming up!

EM and I bird watched while we were on the way to appointments. This week, I saw TWO hawks. One was sitting on the top of a light standard over the roadway, and the second was holding it's position in a stiff breeze over a field...no doubt watching for a mouse to appear. They are amazing birds

Friends traveled this weekend to Starved Rock about an hour west of us along Interstate 80, to watch the eagles. I think they said they saw 100 eagles! What a great way to spend a Saturday in January. The eagles also winter on the Mississippi south of Rock Island, Illinois. We're blessed with big birds.

One of my nieces has been my house cleaning guru while we have lived in this house. She came last week to help me take down and box up Christmas. I HATE to take down the decorations! Left to myself, I'd probably leave them up for months. The only advantage of all this is that we did some spring cleaning in Elegante Mother's rooms, and I was able to get several hours of filing done in the office. My niece's son joined us to carry things to the basement, and to do a little high cleaning. He's 6'6", so those high jobs are easy for him. My house is ready for spring. Where the heck is it!?

Well...I've finally made the binding for Dear Husband's quilt. I could possibly get it finished in time for Valentine's Day. There's hope yet.

I was thinking that we might start an American book meme. Adele pointed out that the children's books on the meme I posted earlier made her think that the meme had originated in the U.K. I think she's right. I'd offer to do the meme, but I'm not a regular enough poster to be well read. Shall we encourage Joy, or Patty at Texas Trifles to start a meme for us?

I dragged my feet on making dinner tonight. I wanted to be under a quilt, near a roaring fire (it's bitterly cold here). I made chicken planks, an Uncle Ben's mix of rice, wild rice and orzo with chicken broth, peas, French bread with mozzarella cheese melted over the top, and a green salad with dressing from Olive Garden. The point was to use up things in the freezer, or things that would go bad in the fridge, if we didn't use them up. It took thirty-five to forty minutes from getting off the couch to serving dinner. In all fairness, I should say that DH made the salad. A piece of French chocolate served as dessert. YUM!!

And that's about all the trivia I have to share with you at the moment. I'll have more posts once I download some pictures. I hope you have a great week!

This entry starts with a reposting of a comment I made on the entry titled "Theft!" It's in response to a joking comment made by my youngest sister, who has been visiting with us this weekend. (What a joy....more to come on that!)

"Sniff!??? And, do you not qualify as a "Baby Boomer," too?

What's really eating you is that YOU are the teacher of English and Literature in our family, and as such, you feel that you should have by-passed me on this, as you do in SO many other things! *G* I think I just had the benefit of schooling in a different high school, and I have a few years on ya.

I've printed a copy of the list and checked seventeen books that I will begin to add to my book orders, to expand my reading. And this morning, the editor of the crossword puzzle blog that I visit suggested a book by Amos Oz: "A Tale of Love and Darkness," which I might look into.

Heck...this is turning into an entire entry, so I'll just go post."

Frankie and I chatted (very briefly) about the list of books in the last entry. She's right in that it is not a definitive list of literature from the past several hundred years. I have no idea how this particular list came to be. I've seen others like it, or perhaps even this list in past years, and just accepted it as a list of suggestions gathered on someone's blog. I know the American Film Institute has lists of the 100 best movies, or the 100 best dramas, or the 100 best comedies, and so forth. I wonder if there is a site that gives a similar compilation for literature?

As Frankie pointed out, there are genres which are not adequately represented here, but a "Personal Favorites" meme would not be concerned with that issue. I was astonished to find any science fiction, and that classic children's stories were on the list.

We both, Frankie and I, need to learn more about "memes," from how the word is pronounced, to a definition of the term, to how one gets started and passed around. Can anyone fill us in?

I came across this Book Meme at Moment After Moment (thank you, Adele!), and just SWIPED IT! I love books, but I can see that I need to get serious about my reading. If I counted right, I've read about 42 of the entries. I need to think about what I've been reading, and what I might want to add to a list like this.

Book Meme

I came across this Book Meme the other day and just couldn't resist it.

Instructions
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (No, but I've seen the film - that's enough for me!)
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (I think I might have read this one...a very odd book, if I remember correctly..)
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (I think I've read this...)
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Elegante Mother is definitely the Comeback Kid! After seven days in a hospital bed or a nursing home bed, she woke up yesterday to smile at Dear Husband and me, and eat a bowl of applesauce! I'd just about counted her out, and here she is, acting as though nothing had happened.

Of course, she can't remember the past fifty years, and doesn't know who her children are, but she recognized a picture of herself from about 35 years ago.

Dear Husband drove me to the nursing home yesterday because we had had an overnight snow and the roads were just awful. We arrived around 10:45 or so, and as we rounded the curtain to her bed, EM looked up and smiled, apparently happy to have visitors. She seemed to have remembered DH, and repeated his name when I said it. I wasn't sure she knew who I was, but when my oldest sister talked with her today, she talked about going home, and mentioned my name. She may recognize me by name, but I don't think she realized that I am her daughter. She is very firmly mired in the past, and we think that past is now b.c. (before children).

I was astonished that she let me feed her the applesauce, and when I asked if she had eaten any breakfast, she muttered that she would when they gave her something she liked. They'd offered oatmeal and scrambled eggs. I could have told them she wouldn't eat that. But...she eats chocolate chip cookies now, after a lifetime of disliking them.

I was relieved to learn that My-Sister-The-Nurse found Elegante Mother sitting in the dining room this morning. She had allowed the aides to dress her and get her into her chair, and take her out of her room. I see that as a major step in her care.

The weather is going to be daunting this week. We've had easily 6-8 inches of snow in two days and we are expected to have more during the week. Our high on Thursday is supposed to be -2F. I had planned to visit EM several times a week, but I may be waylaid by the weather. I hope she continues to make progress, even if I can't be there to watch.

For those of you who feel as though you know Elegante Mother, and those of you who have actually met her, I have some disheartening news. EM is facing some medical problems. We had to call the paramedics on Saturday morning to take her to the hospital.

She is resting comfortably, and is in the care of good doctors. Unfortunately, she is not clear on where she is, or who we are. It's likely that Elegante Mother will go from the hospital to a nursing home. She will need more care than I can give her, even with caregivers to help.

This is a very difficult time for us. EM has lived with us for the past 19 years, and she lived in an apartment next door to us for another two or three years. It's a long time to care for someone else, and even though Dear Husband and Second Son are here, the house is strangely quiet.

I hope that you will keep her in your prayers, or send positive thoughts her way.