Back Again

I feel like I have ditched class for months and have just come back. You have to start somewhere after not posting for a long time.

A lot has happened since the last post. My grandmother passed away on January 22. She was with it to the very end. Yesterday would have been her 98th birthday. I just got a call from one of her nieces who didn't know she had died and was trying to call her in the nursing home. It makes me feel like a complete heel that I didn't let her know, but there are so many people in the Russell and Hiebert families, it is almost impossible for me to contact everyone.

I realize how much my grandmother was helping me with my mom. Grandma Fay was my eyes and ears at Sunny Acres. My mother can't speak, so grandma watched over her and let me know what was happening. Now I'm alone and it is a lot harder. It is even difficult to visit my mother. Most people when they lose a loved one who was in a nursing home never have to go back after they clean out the room. In my case, I have to go back and back again because my mom is in the same room. I shouldn't be complaining because my poor mother has had to face the loss every day, whereas I can come and go.

We had a service for Grandma Fay at All Saints' Episcopal Church. The flowers were beautiful and my friends and lots of nursing home staff were there with our family.

Somehow I have to pick myself up.

Peace,

Susan

Back to Blogging Due to Flu

It is a wonder that anyone can keep up a diary/blog. You have to give a hand to Samuel Pepys http://www.pepysdiary.com/ A lot of what we know about his time period is because of his meticulously detailed diaries.

I'm back, but mostly because I now have been felled by H1N1, formerly called "swine" flu. I realized the last time I had flu was before I was married in 1975, so as I said on facebook, that means I should be good until I am 93.

Why do I feel that Congress is fiddling while we all burn? They are dithering about a healthcare bill, while people who could have been vaccinated if Congress had appropriated enough money for vaccine or getting terribly sick and some are dying. (Note: I am not dying of the flu.) I honestly don't care if we spend money on making vaccine (someone will have a job) and some people don't get vaccinated (I wish they would, but I do not support forcing vaccinations). It is unforgivable that preventable disease is occurring. Vaccination is one of the few absolute ways to stop contagious diseases. Anyone who wants to be vaccinated should receive the vaccine. Period.

I'm tired now and need to get back to Day 4 of my flu. More later.

Onward and upward

Is it Summer Yet?

Rain, rain, rain. It has been raining almost every day since June (or maybe May). July has been declared the rainiest July ever and the weather reports say whatever you have had in July will continue in August. Depressing.

I have been busy with the Chelmsford Farmers' Market www.chelmsfordfarmersmarket.blogspot.com So far we have been lucky and the clouds have parted for us from 2-6 pm.

What else is on my mind. Lots. Too much. Will a health care bill finally pass? Will we have universal coverage in some form or another? I'm sick of waiting. The naysayers have had my whole life time to have it their way and it didn't work. It is time for a change.

What is really rich is hearing the right attack Obama for the economy, the war, the whatever. W had 96 months to crash everything and anyone who disagreed with him was virtually labeled anti-America. Now Obama is in office for 6 months and they are saying he is a failure for not fixing every thing and there are the nutcase "birthers" trying to "swift boat" him.

Listen up everyone, W and company drove the bus into a very deep ditch and getting it out isn't going to be easy or quick.

More later.

Nursing Home Blues

Two years ago in June, we moved my mother and grandmother to a nursing home in Chelmsford. Although it is a beautiful place and they have a beautiful room with two huge windows at the end of a wing, it is still a nursing home.  My grandmother is 97 and chipper.  She reads the newspapers, watches her third new team - The Red Sox (after her real home team, the San Francisco Giants, and her interim team, the Kansas City Royals), and very sadly, she watches her own daughter suffer from a stroke, seizures, and now a broken hip.  My mother fell and had "an in place fracture of the left femoral neck".  A wonderful surgeon place pins in to hold the bone in a 20 minutes surgery.  Everything looked great until an aide at the nursing home was moving my 114 pound mother from the bed to a wheelchair and somehow my mother feel on her knees.  The pins held, but the bone is now displaced and she has to have a partial hip replacement.

Now mom has to go through a major surgery.  She is aphasic and not with it much of the time.  I know she understands a lot, but how I am going to explain this to her isn't clear.  I can't leave her in the hospital by herself with strangers before the surgery, so Monday will be a long day for both of us.  I just don't want her to be afraid.  She was always a stoic person; I only saw my mother cry after she had dealt with a crisis, never in an emergency.  Who knows how she felt inside?  Who knows how she feels inside now? How I wish I could take this on for her so she didn't have to suffer.  My younger brother and I and our father were her whole life.  We can't go back, but if I could have anything for my mom, it would be to have my dad back and for them to be together again.  I have to try very hard to be in the present and not look back.  Easier said than done.

For the present, laundry is calling, so I'm off. 

Newspaper Disaster

I am heartsick over what is happening at the Boston Globe.  I love newspapers.  I love everything about them, the paper, the ink, the advertising (not the stupid color inserts, the real advertising), the fact that I can carry them around with me and tear out the things I want to keep or remember, and most of all the news reported by real trained reporters.  I worked for the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal as a "New Assistant" more than 30 years ago.  I saw how the best reporters in the business did their jobs and how intelligent they were.  From what I see happening at the Globe, those days are long gone.  Now all we hear is how in trouble the Globe is (along with lots of other papers in this country) and about layoffs, cutbacks, boo-hooing about how the internet is cutting into the readership, blah-blah-blah.  Well, after the latest boneheaded move by the Globe, I am ready to cancel my subscription, although I know I won't because I can't bear to be without the paper.  

Awhile back the Globe decided to publish its "Weekly" editions on Thursday as well as on Sunday.  (First bad move.)  My guess is that they did it to compete with the Community Newspapers which are published once a week on Thursday in the surrounding towns.  For example my paper is The Chelmsford Independent.  These papers print the same kind of stories the Weekly editions printed.  Maybe this move looked good at first, but clearly it didn't work because they have just stopped printing the Globe NorthWest and have divided us all up between North and West.  Smooth move Globe guys.  Now Carlisle, which is contiguous to Chelmsford, and Concord, which shares a state representative with Chelmsford, are in the GlobeWest and Chelmsford is in the GlobeNorth.   When you look at the towns and how they were split, it certainly looks like the division was made by someone who doesn't remotely know the area.  

Here's another gripe.  I called Customer Service because I received the GlobeWest instead of GlobeNorth today, the roll out day for this new and decidedly unimproved paper.  Guess where the young woman was who took my call?  Manila.  As in across the Pacific Ocean.  Now I'm really angry.  We are not talking a multinational corporation.  We're talking the Boston Globe which thinks it is the paper of the Hub of the Universe.  ARGHHHHHH.

I have no idea who is making these lame brain decisions at the Globe.  Here are two things I think they need to take into consideration:

1.  Who is their readership?  Stop looking at all the people who say they read newspapers on-line.  Look at who is really buying and reading the paper.

2.  What do they want to read about?  I want to read about my community and the communities surrounding me.  I want news about state and local government and information about community activities in my town and the surrounding towns.   

The Globe is driving me away from the newspaper by taking away the local news that I need to know about and getting rid of the local calendar info and putting it all on-line.  There is no doubt that getting information on line is fast, but nothing replaced having that paper to stick in my bag and carry around.  As an aside, my huge fear is that movie theatres will all stop advertising in the paper.  (The Tyngsboro AMC  stopped advertising.)  BIG mistake.  There are many times when we are out and either a show is sold out or we decide at the last minute away from the house to go to the movies.  I whip out the trusty PAID listings and look to see where we can go.  This does not mean that lots of people aren't taking out their phones and looking things up (I have an IPhone, but I still want that newspaper and will pay for it).  It means there is more than one way to deliver information.

It almost seems as if the people who own newspapers want them to fail.  Maybe the shake-up in our economy will bring about a renaissance or maybe that is just the romantic in me speaking.   Time will tell.

How can anyone keep up? Here comes Lent

How anyone has the time to really keep up a blog isn't clear to me, unless they really want to be a writer/commentator.  There are so, so many issues in our families, towns, states, countries, the world, the universe that it is impossible to stay on top of it all.

Lent is coming right up.  It is a chance to reflect and try, very, very hard to not be distracted by the unnecessary.  Yesterday afternoon my husband and I were talking at lunch.  We were discussing current events and he asked, "What is important in life?"  (We were discussing big philosophical questions over tacos.)  Without a lot of thinking, what popped out of my mouth was, "Love yourself, love your family, love your neighbor, take care of the animals and the plants, the earth and the sea.  That pretty much says it all for me."  You can decide for yourself what is important if you go back to those precepts.

Peace.

Where Have I Been?....

Once again life got away from me.  This blog is just an electronic diary that someone may stumble on via the ether now (or later) rather than by digging through all my old books when I'm dead and gone.  I suppose most people blog or write a diary for themselves, not really for anyone else.  It is the one place there isn't any editor/English teacher looking over your work and you can say pretty much whatever you like.

The last month has been mostly working on getting the opera Hansel & Gretel up for Illumination Opera.  It took all my waking hours, but now it is over and there is more music to learn, Christmas is almost upon us (Lessons and Carols Sunday - my favorite service of the year), and all the dreary house chores are still waiting for me.  How I wish with all my heart that I was like Martha Stewart.  I have suddenly realized that I have such a great imagination that I have imagined how nice the house could be so well that I don't feel like I actually have to DO anything to make it happen.  It is pretty daunting anyway when you have to do it all yourself.

There are so many things to write about seriously, but I just can't today.  Here's what I want to know now:  Why is Jennifer Aniston in our face everywhere, everyday?  She must have the greatest publicist on the face of the planet.  I have not seen any indication this woman has any real talent at all.  Other than having snagged Brad Pitt and having had the incredible good fortune to be on Friends, she has done nothing of merit that I know of, but she continues to be thrust in our faces.  I sure wish the little boy in the Emperor's New Clothes would show up and point out (I started to say that she was naked, but apparently she just posed nude for GQ, so that would be pointing out the obvious) how little talent she has compared with thousands of other actresses. After World Peace, Ending Famine, etc., my wish would be for Editors all over the world to come to their senses in the new year and stop featuring JA or anyone else whose fame is just being famous.  Don't tell me about how JA has become a great humanitarian because there are lots of people who have been walking the walk for a very long time who are more deserving of press.  

That's my rant for the day.

Onward and upward