Jen and I are hitching up the sled dogs and heading north into the wilderness for a belated Christmas with the Dugans this weekend. This is exciting for a couple of reasons—we haven’t seen them since Thanksgiving, it’s freakin’ Christmas, and this means we get to finally put all the boxes back in the basement.
Christmas with the Dugans is something I don’t think my wife is quite used to yet. My family tends to go nuts on the present shopping for each other, to the point where it becomes kind of obscene. Not that I’m complaining, though—the thrill of the sucessful hunt is the real payoff, and we love to surprise each other (my family has a certain way of listening to you talk in April about that thing you’d like to have, or making a list of odd household items you don’t currently own but could really use, and then surprising the crap out of you with them in December.) We also like to stretch the process out into a five-hour afternoon, complete with breakfast, champagne, and cookies—something speed-openers just can’t understand.
I always look forward to the holidays up north because I don’t see a lot of my family during the year, and it always makes me happy to see them. I think this year will be bittersweet for various reasons, but it’s been good to have something to look forward to after the “real” Christmas season ended.
Looks like I’ll have to pick one of these up for an inexpensive iTunes server to replace the iMac. Sweet. However, it looks like that rumored phone they were supposed to offer is not appearing, so I’m going to be looking into a new handset this week.
I posted a picture of Jen and her mother on Sunday’s entry, one that I saw and immediately loved. I think it shows how much happiness and love each had for the other (and two more photogenic subjects I’ve never seen.)
Some thoughts on our travels last week:
- It’s funny how funerals are often more about the family consoling the guests than the other way around. Well, maybe it’s not so funny.
- People in Ohio are surprised when the lower half of their state floods. I mean, how could a huge floodplain directly under lake-effect precipitation fill with water so fast? Remarkable! (We made it in directly under the wire—hours after we made it to the hotel, our highway was under water.)
- In a week when hard liquor was never needed more desperately by two people, Jen and I held ourselves to one Corona each, on the evening before we left for home. This is like Ted Kennedy going without vodka for a week, or Dick Cheney passing on his daily infusion of innocent children’s blood.
- People in Ohio love to smoke. Not like you smoke when you hit the bar on Friday night after a few beers—no, these folks take their lung cancer seriously, like Russian factory workers. In the one-horse town of Logan, where the town square is a block away from the local grain elevator, there are three cigarette stores, each with exotic names like “Smokes For Less” (a converted Shell station) and “Cheap Smokes” (in the deserted Ames shopping center.) They advertise prices in Ohio by the crate.
- West Virginia is absolutely devoid of life. It’s one continuous interstate, punctuated every four or five miles by a crumbling farmhouse set in a hollow. You can still see the paths they beat getting the hell out of that godforsaken place. All those jokes about Appalachia make sense to me now.
- There was a point where Jen and I seriously questioned our responsibility to her mother’s peaceful burial: it came about the time traffic stalled us directly in front of the two-lane bridge into town, where half the Ohio river was six inches from the bottom of the span, and whole tree trunks were floating past. I think we hit about Mach 3 going across that sucker.
- Ohio in January is sort of how I imagine Scotland in winter. But colder, and they have more teeth.
- I meant to pinch the purple magnetic “Funeral” flag they put on the Jeep, so that I could speed to and from work with my lights on, but they took it while we were graveside.
- Props to Jen’s Dad, for being a class act the whole way through. To Sara, for watching the house, keeping the cats company, and making a huge dish of lasagna for us the day we got home. To Jen’s extended family, for making a skinny Irish kid feel welcome in an emotionally draining time. To all our friends and relatives for keeping us in their thoughts and giving us help and support.
The past two weeks have been pretty tough. For a couple who have only been married a total of seven months, I have to say Jen and I held together pretty damned well. We attended three viewings, one mass and burial, dodged calamitous flooding throughout southeastern Ohio, met up with much of the extended Beck family, and went through a set of brakes and 2,000 miles on the Jeep without one instance of homicide. My wife’s strength throughout the last week has been incredible, between caring for her mother, helping her father make the arrangements, guiding the family through the week, and dealing with the pain of loss herself.
I learned many new things about my mother-in-law from friends, relatives, and family in the past week. While I may have had my differences with her in some places, I learned that she touched the lives of many people with humor, kindness, and love. Go in peace, Mrs. Lockard.
Mrs. Lockard is in a slow spiral downward. She’s up to about 2 hours between meds, which is a frightening pace, and she’s unable to use a straw. They are forced to squirt the medication into her mouth with a syringe. Then, sometimes, she spits it back out. Jen’s not sleeping well, hasn’t left the house in a week, and dangerously close to murdering a few family members. (Mercy killings, in my opinion.)
I’m going to head down there tomorrow afternoon, and do some shopping to stock the house with some food. Then I’m going to rent a room at the local Holiday Inn and check my wife in for a 12-hour nap.
Lest you think I’ve been spending all my time surfing the internet this week, here’s a pair of screen captures of this week’s work:
Tank 1 (the low-poly version for the game)
Tank 2 (which actually has treads.)
The treads I’ll paint next week.
Mrs. Lockard is worsening. The nurse administering the meds gives her a couple of days at most. Jen is exhausted from dealing with both the family and her mother, and fighting off a cold.
All By Myself. Whenever Jen is away, I seem to revert back to my bachelor ways, which means I eat whatever is left around the house. Last night my feast consisted of a PB&J sandwich, the rest of the Doritos from Thanksgiving (our house is so dry, they were not even close to stale) and a glass of grapefruit juice. Now, before anybody gets upset, this is not a cry for help: usually when I’m alone, I try to fill up my time with projects that wouldn’t normally fly while Jen is around. (Would you want your husband sanding drywall outside your bedroom door at 11:30pm?) Thus, there’s not a whole lot of time to fuss with food. Unfortunately, the hallway repair project is drawing out longer than hoped—the walls have been abused so much that it’s taking longer than expected to smooth out the craters. By the end of this week, though, we should have new outlets on both sides of the hall and on the stair landing, as well as primer on most of the walls.
Because of an inexplicable lapse in New Yorker deliveries, I started reading The Lovely Bones last night before going to sleep—it looks to be good so far. I was joined by three very lonely cats, who proceeded to hootch up on me so tightly that I was effectively stapled to the bed. We all miss Jen.
OK, and now for some humor. This blog is one I’ve been following for about a year now, and it never ceases to make me laugh. Check the archives, too- you’ll snort your Quik through your nose, I promise.
Quick links. Protect your privacy. | Tsunami | Bye, Jerry. | Finally, another creative use for the iPod.
Many thanks to the Cauzzis, who invited me over last night for yummy pot roast and trivia. An evening with friends was exactly what I didn’t know I needed.
10:41am. No word on Jen’s Mom this morning. The phone rings and rings, which means somebody’s on the other line and not picking up.
3:39pm. Holding steady, no changes. Jen is tired, and fighting off a cold of some kind. We’re spending New Year’s down there.
I’ll have to look into this a little further when I get the iMac music server back online: the free ShoutCast music server works with unlimited clients. How it works with clients I have no idea-if it’s a central playlist-oriented setup, I’m not interested, but if it’s a library-oriented setup, like iTunes, I’m very interested. The site is pretty vague about, well, everything, so I’ll have to set it up to try everything out. More on that later.
Jen and I loaded both our vehicles up with a new La-Z-Boy, six people worth of presents, one pie and two quiches, a dozen banana nut muffins, the coffeemaker, a gallon of homemade stuffing, and her brother sans luggage after his flight arrived late at Reagan National. We got into Pax River at about 9pm.
Mrs. Lockard is installed in the family room, in a portable hospital bed. She is pretty much immobile. Her sleeping, feeding, and waking are controlled by a pharmacy’s worth of medications, administered dutifully by the family, and recorded in a book. She’s mostly awake for a short while in the mornings, and then more pain medication is administered so that she can be moved from one side to the other. Moving her is a three-person operation, which involves arranging her legs, which she can’t control, her torso, which she can’t move, and her head. There is very little dignity. A specific method is used to arrange her feet, legs, and back, so that she can spend eight to twelve hours laying in one position. Mercifully, there is a catheter, so moving her to the portable commode is not necessary anymore. She spends most of the day in a twilight sleep on one side (laying flat is impossible now), drifting in and out as people sit with her. This morning, she did not remember opening any of her presents, nor did she remember anything else about Christmas day. We showed her all her gifts again, and she talked with her sister for a few minutes on the phone before tiring out. When I left this afternoon, she was drifting, but she made me promise to come back again so I could see her.
The rest of Christmas was as normal as we could make it: presents under a real tree, carols, a six-course Christmas ham, a shipping container’s worth of cookies, pastry, pie, and homemade 180-proof bourbon balls. I’m hoping my wife will bust out the gaulette iron this week and whomp up a batch. I’m going to have to bring a bottle of Four Roses whisky back down with me next weekend. I also may have to pick this up now that Christmas has passed…
At the risk of getting sappy here, I’m just going to ask everybody to keep a kind thought in your heart for Jen’s mother and her family. Gather your loved ones around you this holiday season, keep them warm and safe, and hold them close.
So the holidays are bearing down on us, and we are scrambling to get last-minute things done before the 25th. We erected a small fake tree last night (we’re not chancing a real tree if we’re not going to be around to see it) and decorated it with some of the ornaments from our collection. I bought some garland at the store last week, wired it together, and hung it over the entryway to the living room. There are some things, though, that we don’t have that remind me of the seasons of old…
- Pine. My parents had one of those old-time Sears humidifiers for the house, which was filled dutifully every night. Along with three or four buckets of water each evening, they added a capful of Pine-Sol to the mixture to give the house a decidedly original odor.
- Perry Como and Bing Crosby on vinyl. I have them both on the iPod, and I can pipe them into the stereo whenever needed, but there’s something old-skool about hearing LP’s on the big console record player my dad used to have.
- Tinsel. Remember when that stuff was big, and everybody had it? I’d bet a bunch of people still use it, but I personally haven’t seen it in the stores in about five years. I remember vacuuming the house in 1988 and finding tinsel from 1984 still stuck under the furniture.
- A Christmastime when every other commerical was not a diamond/jewelry commercial. Or was it always like that?
- The days before “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.” Corrolary: When “Band-Aid” was new, and it was cool to be an activist rock star.
- Big Lego sets for Christmas. Many a Christmas day I spent on the floor in front of the tree, building directions spread in front of me, ripping open little bags of plastic parts and assembling the kits. Legos still rock the world.
What’s Christmas to you?
After jointly checking out the gift for Jen’s Dad, we decided to upgrade to a different color and style. (It’s hard to accurately decribe a color and pattern over the phone.) After dinner and a few phone calls to check in on the patient, we decided to spread our private holiday out over the next three days by opening a gift each evening.
Sometimes I Forget. I’ve been slowly trying to get an online comic off the ground over the last month, and trying various work methods to see which one feels the best. I cut a panel with scratchboard, and scanned it. After testing out an intuos tablet and using the pressure-sensitive brushes, I went back to the old-skool method of making a copy and using a combination of white-out and black pen to refine the artwork. There are some things which just feel right, and I’ve gotten so far away from making art with my hands that I forgot how good it is. So if anybody needs a stocking stuffer idea for me, here are a few hints: some correction pens (fine point) and my black pen of choice (V7 Fine). At some point in the next month or so, I’m going to finally spring for a decent copier, and that will speed up the process. I’ll start posting some panels soon, promise.
Courtesy of our friend Dave (the Tunemaster), I’m grooving to Bran Van 3000’s first album, Glee. I had heard the single “Walking in LA” a long time ago, but never knew who did it until now.
I Feel Dirty. Point Your Missile…
Expectations. This year, instead of the usual dual-handmade J&B holiday offering, we’re keeping things decidedly lo-fi. Time is precious, and our attention has been elsewhere, so last night I took an idea from my first-grade teacher, carved a potato into a stamp, and made 50 cards while watching reruns of CSI.
Acts Of Contrition. Looks like my little hint yesterday went unheeded.