2024: A Lovely Thanksgiving

This was a rare Thanksgiving without my mom. I cooked while watching or (more accurately) listening to the Macy's parade and the dog show. I missed mom a little bit, but it was so comforting knowing that she had a random new caregiver who didn't know my phone number. Ahhhh.

Our friends came over with their dad, who is 88. He is really dear to me. We'll call him Murray. When I get to spend time with him I get all of the coziness of hanging out with older people without the judgment and overt disappointment that my mom makes sure I enjoy when I'm with her. It is awesome.

Murray told us his story about getting Jackie Robinson's autograph when he was a kid, and I mentioned the story that *I* knew about 15-year-old Murray winning a local tv station's baseball trivia contest. He told us that the prizes included a set of luggage (which he took with him to college) and a wall safe. I guess they expected the winner to be an adult.

My gal pal and I both made pumpkin pies, and she and mrguy put candles in them for her husband and my recent birthdays, which are a few days apart. And when we all had a slice of each and I said "I think I like yours better," she said "Well you ought to!! I put a lot of elbow grease into that!" and I laughed until I almost cried. She's a sketch.

We heard from the caregiver, who said that mom had a busy night.

And I do not care. 

I have asked the agency for caregiver coverage on Christmas and New Year's. I have told my sisters that I no longer care whether those caregivers are skilled or not, only that someone is with mom and it isn't me.

The Joy of Solid Food

If by solid food you mean a scramble of an egg, shredded cabbage and goat cheese.

I just changed out of my Kiffness shirt after 2.5 days.

Can I go back to bed now? Still feeling the body aches. I have cancelled my plan for the day which was to see a Godzilla movie with a friend. He really knew how to lure me in a few weeks ago, telling me that the film had been pretty much thoroughly repudiated.

Anyhoo, I certainly wouldn't want to pass along whatever this is, so I'm going to take a little Alka Seltzer Gold and go back to bed with the wee beastie. Maybe I'll reappear Punxatawney Phil-like later in the afternoon.

Cut Down In The Prime of Life

Not really, but kinda.

It's birthday week, and I took today off in order to go to a food festival. Instead, I have some sort of flu. I haven't been sick since Covid, a year ago, and I stood next to little kids for several hours on Weds, so maybe this is to be expected.

Oh my gosh. Wednesday was amazing. We went to a club and saw my favorite YouTuber, The Kiffness. Mrguy bought me a t-shirt and everything. I drank some beers and a free bourbon, and stood for three hours. Met very many nice people who like kitties (and The Kiffness) including nice moms who brought their little kids. Mrguy is now a The Kiffness convert (not that he wasn't before) and is at this moment enjoying going down the rabbit hole of memes that Kiffness builds his songs around.

Me? I'm down for the count. I woke up the next day not feeling excellent. Then I took a bath and had five or six or ten watery poops before I realized that I wasn't going to be able to go to work. I did a fair amount of work while sitting on the sofa, and it wasn't until right before therapy that I started to feel exceptionally poorly. I thought of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and if you miss the reference, that's ok.

This was followed by a phone call with my sister about problems with the caregivers. I truly sympathize with her, but have a hard time hearing her woes explained to me in her particular tone of voice. She persists and persists, telling me that she lost her temper with our one caregiver who keeps changing her schedule and then in the same breath tells me that she's a really nice person and a good boss and that she's being taken advantage of. In addition:

"Nobody who isn't me can understand how difficult this is."

Apparently so. I know that she's suffering, but she likes to share the suffering. She also suffers on behalf of others, telling me that she doesn't sleep at night because she worries that something will happen with a caregiver and it will affect me. She seemed to be insinuating that I am responsible for her suffering on my behalf. It's twisted, I tell ya.

In conclusion, then we argued about something and she quasi hung up on me and then sent me a conciliatory birthday greeting a few hours later. With love.

Sure.

Standard Time

It's Standard Time, and I guess that I'm liking it. The light seems more delicious and I can enjoy a cozy blanked at the same time as feeling a cool humid breeze drift in from the open window.

There were delights this week.

Clam came over to catch up pre sumo, which starts this weekend. We ate very many snacks.

I took the day off work, learning to navigate transit with my phone app so that I could go to an cookbook author q&a. I arrived early and ate a sandwich on the steps of a church while reading my new book. 

As I ate, grey haired ladies such as myself began arriving in groups, and filled the church. My people! The sound was problematic (they had mic'd everybody but the author perfectly), and I could see lots of folks fiddling with their hearing aids to adjust to the volume. The smartest thing I heard her say was that she'd been asked to be a judge on Top Chef, and they'd tried to lure her by saying "It'll change your life!" Before this she'd been on the fence, but since she didn't want her life to change it became an easy no. After the event I did not stand in line with the hundred or so folks who wanted a photo opp. I know I was there. 

The clouds were gorgeous and puffy as seem from light rail.

I had to see my mom this week because a caregiver suddenly needed $1400 and someone asked me if I could deliver it that day in person. Sure. Mom, who I promised myself just days earlier that I would NEVER see again because of her general evilness, was smiling and sweet and held my pink hand with her blue one. On the way out of the facility, I got to see darling Joan. She grasped my hand gently, covered my arm in kisses and told me that she loved me. I love her too.

And on Friday we finished the acquisition of the personal archives of one of our company's founders. A project long in the making, we had boxed the material years ago and waited for him to finish his book. Then the pandemic happened, and this year he let us know he was really ready. Due to the march of time and very small mammals, we brought fresh boxes to his house in Friday's final installment. We decanted the material into the new boxes, cut our circa 2014 labels off of the original boxes and taped them to the new ones. Our Facilities guys brought the van over to their house and hauled the boxes out of the basement for us, while stopping to say "Thanks for making Hammerslag!" "I'm pretty proud of it," the founder replied modestly. All in all a great day.

Of course by the next morning I was back on mom's chain gang, dealing with urgent caregiving and sister stuff. All in a day's work.

For MrGuy -- Nobody Else Really Needs To Read This

This post is for the benefit of mrguy, after a week of mom stuff.

Monday -- relatively fine

Tuesday -- my sister loses her calendar. Realizes that she hasn't told me about upcoming caregiver days that we need covered soon. I tell her to start using the Google calendar. She says that she will. After lunch I have to leave work to help the caregiver. My mom is acting out.

Wednesday -- took a personal day because this is hard. Alzheimer's support group in the pm.

Thursday -- a caregiver bails on us and I learn (via text while I'm in a meeting) that we suddenly need coverage for Friday. I leave a phone message with the agency. Then I go back to work in the collection and get pulled into a different meeting. Then I learn that the hillside near our house is on fire. My sister also calls the agency. Then I text her to say please stop. I am on it. Then I get a text from her saying that we no longer need a sub, and I get *back* in touch with the agency and tell them that we don't need help. The fire on the hillside is out. I ask my sister to let me be the contact with the agency. She is hurt. Elapsed time: 1.5 hours

Friday -- mom is behaving well. Mrguy and I get Covid vaccines and are feeling poorly for the next few days.

Saturday -- mom is behaving well.

Sunday -- I'm the contact for the caregiver, who lets me know that mom's mood is getting ugly. I put on my pants and go over there to intervene. I walk into the memory care neighborhood and hear her yelling "Nooooo!" She's reaching around to hit her caregiver, who is dealing with it really well. I get my mom's attention and tell her to stop. She growls '"What are you DOING?!" and I tell her we're going back to her apartment. I have brought a cart full of supplies with me. She latches onto the end of my cart, so I pull the cart and drag her back to her apartment with the caregiver pushing from behind.

Once in her apartment, she's still having a fit. She says that her caregiver is trying to hurt her (all while flailing her arms and trying to hurt the woman). We get her onto the sofa, and she quasi relaxes. By relaxing, I mean that she's no longer flailing. Instead, she's grabbing my arm and pressing her fingernails into my veins declaring "She's hurting me!!!! You don't love me. You don't care about me. All you care about is yourself!!" I tell her I love her, and I try to comfort her. She starts punching whatever that big muscle is on the topside of the forearm, and I think "That almost feels good!" It is not lost on me that she is hurting me while telling me that I am hurting her.

Whatever

She starts talking about sex again. She says that she'll tell the world that I like sex. She starts taunting me about how I only love myself *and* how I don't like myself. She rubs her hands up and down her midriff over and over while telling me that I like my body. 

Honestly, this does suck. What do I owe her?

Monday -- another week. The same flaky caregiver asks for a random day off this week, and I add it to the schedule for the agency to figure out. I write an email telling my sister not to come for Christmas if it's for mom's sake. My sister emails me to say that the caregiver now says she doesn't need the day off after all. I tell the agency.

My sister still hasn't put the dates in the Google calendar.

Explore The Silence

The prompt was to explore the silence.

But what if there is never silence? Or stillness? The birds are cheeping after a brief shower, and the sound of 90s rock bands drifts up to me from downstairs, where the husband is digitizing 4 track tapes in the man room. There's tinnitus and traffic. But the sound that I carry around with me most is not the sound of breathing or internal organs but my internal music. I have an internal jukebox that is almost always spinning snippets of familiar songs.

The inner jukebox currently features the songs of The Kiffness, a musician who autotunes memes of funny animal sounds as the basis of musical collaborations. His songs are devilishly catchy.

Currently playing: Hold Onto My Fur

But my head could be conjuring any song or part thereof. The theme from Suits. Or Jerry Lewis singing "I'll See Your Light". This is a pop song that a friend who died sent me summer before last. Every time I think of him I see the youtube video in my mind, where a fervent and sweaty Jerry Lewis gives it his all, wearing a cherry red golf sweater, on Hullabaloo. He looks like he might have some artificial energy going on there...and it is really compelling.

Sometimes I don't even know the songs are there. I find my foot jiggling in a certain rhythm and work back to see what my brain is doing. Or my fingers are working a specific pattern and I find I'm typing out a lyric to a song I didn't even know was in my head.

I'm not sure I'm cut out for silence. Or stillness. But I'll look for some today.

Things I Like: A Single Item Food Festival

We're going to Pittsburgh. Don't know when, but we are. I don't quite understand why I've felt drawn to it other than mrguy's grandfather had a shoe store there, and it's an industrial town. But I've had my eye on Pittsburgh for a while. One of my favorite auction houses is there, and I've come to learn about some artists from there, like Virgil Cantini and Lucille Kleber.

I told a friend that I was going to Pittsburgh and she told me how much she liked it, and I hold her opinion in high regard, and she told me that there is a Heinz Museum.

And this led me to knowing about Pickleburgh, the Pittsburgh pickle festival. OMG. I love a food festival centered on a single food item. Too bad it's held in the height of summer.

Corn Festival
We've been to a corn festival, which was the site of my last heat stroke! Also, frankly, not enough corn. There were only 4 or 5 corn booths, and the folks doing henna tattoos didn't even have a corn design on offer. Poor showing, but the corn from that area is stupendous. I'll buy it at the store.

Rice Festival
We've been to a rice festival in Honolulu, in the shadow of one of my favorite modernist buildings, the IBM building, by Vladimir Ossipoff. Here is a guy dressed as a Spam musubi. Another hot one, but worth it for the photo opp with a guy in a Spam musubi costume.

Asparagus Festival. Repeat Offenders!
We've been to the Asparagus Festival in 2019 and 2022, tying some genealogy in while we were at it. The asparagus margaritas were really tasty. And the location of the festival had a dirt track for racing, which I didn't think was a thing you could find within three hours of there.

Butter and Eggs Day -- Technically Two Food Items, But Little of Either
And *this* year we went to Butter and Eggs day, but they were really devoid of butter and eggs, if you ask me. I goofed, and the local deviled egg contest was on the Sunday, not the Saturday.

Krautfest 2016
And then there was the one that got away. In 2016 I heard a news item about a lack of entrants for the title of Kraut Queen at the Racine, Wisconsin Kraut Music Fest. I self-nominated and would have absolutely gone to Wisconsin in order to do my duty. Here is my cover letter:

"Melanie R.
Kraut Queen/Princess Coordinator
[address redacted]
Racine, WI 53406

Dear Ms. R. and the Kraut Queen Committee,

It was with great interest that I read that the Kraut Fest was looking for Kraut Princess and Kraut Queen contestants, and with great sadness that I then realized that there is no category for a more mature Kraut Royalty Applicant. I beg you to rectify this omission and expand your royal court to consider kraut lovers of a certain age.

I am emboldened to suggest this expansion of your pageant categories because in 2016’s nonsensical electoral cycle, where anything goes, self-nomination in the currently non-existent role of Kraut Matron / Kraut Dowager doesn’t seem terribly out of place.

My qualifications are:

1) I can and do eat kraut.

2) In 1994 I personally helped increase the public knowledge of kraut juice by sending a kraut juice label to my friend, [name witheld], a writer, who was inspired to write about kraut juice. His article about kraut juice helped popularize kraut juice in the 1990s.

3) For many years my kitchen featured a display of a dozen Meeter’s Kraut Juice cans. Had other brands been available to me on the West Coast, I would have included the brand of your sponsor, Frank’s, in my display.

4) If selected, I will write and perform a kraut-themed song for you at the festival (ukulele and vocals)"

Despite their zero entrants, they rejected my application. I feel like this was such a missed opportunity for all. I would have *rocked* the whole Kraut Matron thing. Oh well, my preferred brand, Meeter's, is from Oconomowoc, anyway and they have a kraut festival (sometimes, when it isn't being shut down due to corruption).

Mandarin Oranges, Anyone?
This week, at the height of the mom nonsense, I went on the lookout for food festivals to look forward to. I was rewarded for my research, and in a few weeks we are headed to a mandarin orange festival. Who knew?

I will report back

Halloween

My joke for today was that my mom was her own Halloween costume: angry old woman who wants to chop you up with a knife.

By the time I got to her place this afternoon she had been raging for hours -- breaking furniture (no really), swearing, hitting. My sister called me to see what could be done about her episode of mania and wanted to have her taken to the hospital. She was sad to hear that you can't have someone committed unless they are a danger to themselves or others. Because mom is pretty useless from the waist down, all someone has to do is to step away from her and they're safe. Sadly she doesn't fit the criteria for hospitalization. We would all love it if she'd get locked up permanently but that's not going to happen. The only thing I could do to change things was to leave work and go over there to try to interrupt the mania.

By the time I left her, mom was feeding me chocolates. Whew. And in between, I draped my arm over her shoulder on the sofa and patted her leg while she told me how she wasn't going to leave me anything in her will. Except maybe a little stuffed scarecrow that's in a potted plant in her room. "Isn't it cute?" I suddenly had an image of having her cremated with it if she loves that thing so much, and I burst out laughing.

I admit that I baited her a bit for part of my visit, because I'm tired of being nice. She kept saying that she knew something about me that the caregiver didn't know: that I like to fuck, and that if she were dead I could do it wherever I want. So then I made a game out of pointing out various places in her room, asking "Should I do it there?" "Over here where you're sitting?" This was amusing to our caregiver, and that was partially the point -- she definitely needed some levity.

But today started out even better, this morning, with an apology from my sister that we need fill-in help for one of the caregivers in a week, and that she'd forgotten to tell me. She wrote it down on one of her pieces of paper and lost it. And she was so proud that she'd started a new paper calendar but put it in a place so special that she couldn't find the calendar (like why would you tack it to the wall, or anything normal like that?). She was so distressed by her failings this morning that she was taking a pill to feel better. I told her that pills were good but calendars were better and she needs to start using our effing shared Google calendar. I know she can do it!

This is after the weekend, where I started planning caregiving for the holidays, and my sister told me of her plans. She's been invited to Christmas at our nephew's house, and she's thinking of taking my mom with her. Out of her secure locked mental environment, on a 3 hour drive to a relative's house where they will share the holiday with family? I mean what could go wrong? This is partly because I said I wouldn't take care of my mom on Christmas myself, but the cure may be worse than the original affliction...

This has been mrsguy's late night ramblings about her embarrassing family.