Halloween

Today was pretty great. I had to do a thing in front of the company, which I did in concert with my colleague from the archives. My walk-on music? A harp. Pretty fab.

When I came home I watched the birds vs the dodgers, and it did not go well for us so we go to Game 7.

Then the phone rang with the special ring set aside for my sisters. I assumed it was my oldest sister telling me that my brother-in-law was dead, because he has dementia and things are rough up there. But no.

It was my middle sister, the one I call The Hammer.

I have been joking rather seriously for the last few years that I would like to own a big diamond that belonged to my grandmother, who thought herself quite fancy. This was her wedding ring for marriage #2. I had it appraised a while back, and started wearing it, while tabulating the amount of money that I was spending on my mom. Starting with plane tickets in 2017 and adding all of the things that I bought for her between then and her death I think it's around 37 grand or more (just looked --- $38,400).

So my mom dies and I ask my sister about the jewelry, because she'll want to let the estate attorney know about it. In the past years I've been wearing the diamond, which is hilariously large, but I know it's not really mine until after the estate settles. Or maybe that won't work out. Anyhoo, a while back my sister asks about the 1990s appraisal of the jewelry. She wants me to mail her paper copies. For some reason I didn't do it at first. It made no sense to me. I could have sent her the pdfs that day. I hate mailing things. I don't know what she did with the appraisal. 

A few weeks ago my sister calls to tell me that she's going to tell the estate attorney about the jewelry. Either then or during that weekend's vortex of power meeting she tells me that she's going to tell the estate lawyer that I'd found the jewelry in a box of documents or something. She let me know that I had to decide what the story was because I'd be telling it. Wait. She told a lie about me and now I had to participate in that lie also? I didn't tell her at the time, but if the lawyer asked me I planned to tell the truth. My sister's lie is not my problem.

She calls tonight at 10:30 her time. We are planning to have a family meeting tomorrow morning with the lawyer. My sister has called because she wants to know if we can talk in the morning. She wants to be able to take a Xanax or whatever tonight and go to bed knowing that we can talk in the morning. I asked if we could discuss whatever it is now, because now *I* wasn't going to sleep well wondering what the topic was that she wanted to discuss. I mean really! So I coaxed her into a conversation. It was about the jewelry, and what we were going to say about it. I can't recall all of what was said but I told her that I wasn't going to lie. She tried to manipulate me by saying "You can't possibly know how much I'm doing for the family" etc. I do know this, but the fact that she lied about whether my family had jewelry as part of the estate and now she wants to come clean and lay it on me has nothing to do with that. She said I was "un-generous" and "selfish" and that she was sorry that she had misunderstood what I wanted to have happen to the jewelry (or something). In the meantime, mrguy could hear everything that she was saying and was performing an extraordinary pantomime of self-sacrifice and such while I was on the phone. It was highly entertaining / distracting. I stuck to my guns and did not back down and there were empty silences in which I think she might have understood that I was immovable. Mrguy said he was proud of me. I was proud of me, too.

The Latest

This is what the candles looked like in the light of day. Very different from each other!

And now this is the latest: mrguy's most recent scans are in.

"IMPRESSION:

1. No evidence of metastatic disease."

The other stuff is still in the report, the things I call "old guy stuff". He has an enlarged prostate and some arthritis in his neck, and a cyst on his "robust pancreas". Even his original tumor site, the esophagus, shows only "Stable trace circumferential wall thickening" which makes it seem as if it might be returning to its pre-cancerous appearance? Dunno. Mind you, this cancer often snatches you back at the slightest hesitation. But this is great. Mrguy has been worried. I have not. 

He seems so good on his good days. This morning he made us an avocado cheese omelette using his new favorite pan, and I imagine that right now he's in the man room dancing the tarantella.

So Yesterday Happened

We left the home together! And we bought camel shaped pastries at the Italian bakery in the rain.

After a while, I started making pumpkin salmon soup in advance of watching Game 2 of the World Series. The Blue Jays are my team and I've been looking forward to this for 30+ years. So I got my ingredients and was cutting my many vegetables and listening to an interview with Roy Wood Jr. and Trevor Noah. I began to feel settled, looking out of my kitchen window with my headphones on, while making my cozy soup. Then the day took a turn for a worse.

I saw a woman and her dog pass from my side of the street to the island and deposit a huge bag of dog doo on the island, leaving it there and walking away. I snapped. I ran out of the house, grabbed her bag of poo and shouted down the street "Don't worry. I'll take care of your dog shit for you!!!!" Surprisingly, she heard me, came back halfway and said "I always do that and come back for it later". I turned my back and yelled "I've got it this time!!"

Not my finest moment, and I feel somewhat ashamed, but there I was making something yummy and if I didn't move the dog shit I was going to have to look at it. How did I know she was coming back, and WHATEVER. I regularly see dog doo bags in our front yard left behind by dog owners. And on top of it I was just thinking today about maybe planting something in the barren island in the middle of the street.

So I finished the soup -- and if you use this recipe it really isn't quite the same if you use celery instead of celery root (there was none at the store). But I was just thickening it and putting in the corn and salmon. Mrguy replayed the Canadian national anthem for me, and after the top of the first the power went dead.

The power company told us that the outage would last until 7:45, which would be the end of the game. I decided to pull out some fun candles -- the kind that turn colors as they melt. They did not give off much light, so I added a regular candle. And we listened to a Canadian broadcast of the game on SiriusXM.

The soup was delicious, but we lost Game 2 and are now tied 1 - 1 with the team that mrguy calls The Hated Dodgers.

Here's what caused our outage. 

Bot Fun

I wore out a bot who reached out to me last night while we were watching Game 5 of the ALCS. 

The bot reached out to me because I subscribe to a fan page of a musician I once worked with. In my experience he is a terrible tipper! 

Also we only played music, just so you know. This was my first attempt at bot torture. We have a friend who is really great at it, and that's what inspired me to engage when the bot wanted to talk to me. I made a point of not telling it anything revealing.