Category: My Other Sites

Family Crises

After thirteen years on the other end of the country, it’s sometimes strange being so close to home again. There are small and inisgnificant aspects, like the fact that my mom tells me about sales at stores I can actually go to, and that we discuss local news stories on the same channels and in the same newspapers. There’s also the disorientation that comes when I realize that I’m living in the same general area where I spent so much of my early life, but not in the same city; my hometown is thirty miles away, and it still feels like a bit of a road trip to visit it.

The thing that’s hardest to get used to, though, is the fact that family crises have suddenly become much less abstract and much closer to my everyday exisitance. When a close relative is sick or has a problem, I’m expected — not just by my family, but by my own conscience — to be there and offer help when I can. It’s inconvenient and unpleasant, but it has to be done. That’s how families work; I know that if I ever have issues myself or with my own parents, my extended family will help me out as well.

Right now, it’s an uncle who had a stroke last week and clearly can’t take care of himself, but seems determined to do so anyway. It’s an issue that’s going to make my parents’ lives miserable for weeks and months to come. My uncle’s illness and my mom’s new computer have taken up a lot of my time over the past two weeks. But I guess it’s an investment; my turn for help might be next.

It was a lot easier being 3000 miles away, to be sure. All in all, though, I’m still glad to be home. And at least I’m far enough away that I’m not usually the first one called in a crisis.

Technology

My mom’s finally upgrading her original Bondi Blue iMac from 1998. OK, I’m actually upgrading it for her, which is kind of fun on some level, I guess. I get to configure a whole new computer without having to pay for it. And I get to move her off AOL once and for all, which is a huge bonus.

It was strangely surreal walking around the Apple store with my mom. There were no Mac Minis in stock locally, so we had to go to The Streets at Southpoint in Durham yesterday. It’s unfortunate that most Apple stores are in such repulsive, icky malls. The hipster fashion victim factor in this particular mall is way off the chart.

On the geeky homefront, I also finally got my phono preamp today, so I can connect the turntable to the computer and start digitizing vinyl. We’d been doing a bit of that before, but with a far more cumbersome system involving a component DVD recorder and a mini-disk unit. This way will be better and easier, and soon my considerable collection of 1980s New Wave and indy rock (not to mention obscure Top 40) will be comfortably enclosed in an iTunes wrapper.

FYI, right now I’m working on “Vertical” by Horizontal Brian.

Also, thanks to a really long set of AV cables (a Christmas present from my hubby), I now have my DVR connected directly to the computer for video input and DVD burning.

I may never leave my office again.

(Not) Home for the Holidays

What a very insane month. I’ll try to do better in December. Really.

The holidays in Fresno were very nice. We were well-housed, well-fed, and haad good company. The only big souvenir I brought back was a cold, but it was a mild one. As sucky as Thanksgiving air travel can be, I was actually pretty lucky all in all, and only had one really wretched flight, the return leg from Chicago to Winston-Salem on Saturday.

I didn’t have to spend too much time in San Francisco, which was nice. Unfortunately, most of the time I did spend there was spent walking around the Financial District, either looking for bathrooms or doing some emergency client work from assorted FedEx Kinko’s locations where I’d been employed several years before.

I’m home now, trying to catch up on the past five or six weeks, which somehow got lost in the shuffle.

More soon.

Busy

Horrendously busy couple of weeks, as I wedged lots of work and one funeral in between two big trips. I leave tomorrow for Thanksgiving in California with the in-laws, so don’t expect any exciting commentary for at least a few more days. And no, I don’t have those road trip pictures ready to go, thanks.

Anyway, may all your turkeys be happy ones, and may none of them turn out to be tofurkey.

Randomly Thursday

Random stuff for a Thursday night:

  • There is good and happy news in my health insurance universe thanks to these people. As one of the uninsurable masses, I’d been pretty worried about this over the past month or two, so I feel much better about life tonight.
  • Thanks to everyone who sent condolences and sympathy notes. There are nice people in internet-land.
  • With two projects up in the air, I probably won’t be any better about answering email for the next few days than I have for the past two weeks.
  • The holidays musy be close at hand: the Hardee’s on Cloverdale is already lit up like (pardon the expression) a Christmas tree.
  • Which are the bigger price gougers: guys who work on cars or guys who work on teeth? It’s pretty much a toss-up in my book.
  • So how ’bout all those bleeding heart liberals in Arizona? And Mexico? Damned activist electorate and legislators…

Aunt Lucille

Aunt Lucille was always one of my favorites. She was my grandmother’s sister and she was a member of of that last generation of semi-helpless and often rather silly southern ladies. But Aunt Lucille wasn’t like that. Unlike her sister and many of her contemporaries, she drove a car and had a full-time job all her life. She was independent. And she had a sense of humor, something that was also in short supply among southern women of her generation.

She was a sweetheart in every possible way. She was not overbearing; in fact, she even seemed rather humble, but she could exhibit a very refreshing sassiness from time to time as well, which I think the photo above captures. She didn’t like to moralize; she liked to laugh. I know she helped my mom through some very rough times as a little girl during the Depression, and I suspect my mom wasn’t the only family member to benefit from her presence.

Similarly, my generation of the family never dreaded being around her as we did with certain other relatives either. Aunt Lucille was firm, but she was also unfailingly upbeat and happy. She didn’t exactly “spoil” us, but neither did she spend all her time telling us what bad manners we had for not saying “yes, ma’am” in a snappy enough tone, or telling us how coddled we were. If you’re of roughly my generation and grew up in the south, I think you know what I mean here. We acted our best around her because we respected and loved her, not because we were afraid of her.

When Mark met her a few years ago, at the end of an arduous day of relative-hopping, he remarked that she seemed younger and livelier and happier than anyone he’d met that day, despite the fact that she was ten to fifteen years older than any of the rest, not to mention already in failing health. Aunt Lucille was never one to piss and moan and complain about her assorted maladies and aches and pains, even though she definitely had her share of troubles through the years.

I last spoke to her on Thursday. She asked about Mark and about the new house, and told me she loved me. When I saw her again on Saturday, she wasn’t talking anymore, but she still held my hand.

Aunt Lucille died this morning at 8:30. She was 89. I’m going to miss her quite a lot.

Randomly Wednesday

Sorry I’ve been busy and just haven’t had all that much interesting to say lately.

Consuming my time recently:

  • Turning twoscore and two years of age last Thursday.
  • Working on three new websites for hire simultaneously.
  • Brainstorming my own new site.
  • Picking the remaining meat (figuratively, and at a 30% discount) from the rotting carcass of Southern Family Markets.
  • Visiting Boone NC and realizing (a) that I’m not a big fan of college towns in general, and (b) that Boone isn’t a particularly good college town to begin with.
  • LibraryThing.com.
  • Pondering a midwestern road trip with the hubby this fall.

Reclaiming My Youth

My current task is to create some level of order in my new office. I’ve had mixed success.

I’d been holding off until I got a new desk, which I finally ordered last week for delivery on Thursday. So this weekend, I set about finding a place for it to land when it arrives. I thought it would be nice and easy once I got all the records organized and filed away in their new home in the closet, but there just keeps being more stuff.

The fact that I’m simultaneously trying to reclaim all the stuff my parents have been storing for me for fifteen years hasn’t really helped. But just look at this enticingly sexy sample of the stuff I’m finding in some of those boxes:

You should’ve heard the noises I made as I unpacked the above, along with a complete, unopened and unread Sunday Winston-Salem Journal from 1978 (with ads), and my collection of miniature Jungle Book figurines.

Pardon me while I re-live a childhood that may or may not have been mine…

Randomly Saturday

Random thoughts for a Saturday night:

  • For those of you who may have been concerned about this, the secret ingredient in Wednesday’s cake, while no particular improvment to it, also proved not to be particularly detrimental either. In other words, no one (myself included) really noticed.
  • I spent today in Columbia with my parents, visiting an elderly cousin I hadn’t seen in a good twenty years or so. This being the south, we’re ALL cousins here, so I’m not 100% sure of the relationship. She was my grandmother’s first cousin, which makes her (I believe) my first cousin twice removed. Yes, this being the south, people also pay attention to distinctions like that. Makes it easier to keep up with who’s off limits for breeding.
  • Is it just me, or do truck lane restrictions actually make driving on the freeway MORE dangerous rather than less? Around here, trucks are restricted to the right two or three lanes of urban freeways. In theory, I assume it’s supposed to make drivers in the left lane feel safer. In practice, however, it just makes truckers behave like assholes in lanes where other drivers expect to be moving at a slower pace. So you end up with big rigs riding your ass at 70MPH when you’re not even IN the fast lane because (a) they CAN’T pass and (b) they WON’T slow down.
  • Why is every freaking freeway interchange in South Carolina NAMED for someone? And why is it always someone with a stupid nickname in quotation marks, like Jefferson C. “Buzz” Dingleberry, or something similarly idiotic? As honors go, having your own memorial onramp must rank just slightly above having a toilet in New Jersey named for you.

Stuff

It’s off to Greensboro tomorrow to take care of some business for a friend and to install a new printer and scanner for my mom. I wanted to do this earlier in the week, but my life is sort of on hold thanks to the leisurely pace at which so many medical professionals seem to operate these days, particularly when it involves getting in touch with patients.

Of course, my aversion to technology which facilitates people getting in touch with me may be making this all a bit more difficult, but I’m comfortable with that.

This, by the way, is hysterical, and comes to you via here.