To Halloween or Not

This is last year's Halloween photo.  Such a joyous little face.  This year two of the grandgirls came over and carved pumpkins.  I didn't take pictures right away and they spoiled in an untimely fashion, pre-Halloween.  Collapsed actually, and grew black fuzz.  That's never happened before.  Piffle.

Last year we got a few dozen of high school or college age kids at the door, our neighborhood is two blocks from Whitman College.  Disconcerting to be looking up at the trick or treater, and they couldn't be bothered to make a feeble attempt at dressing up or putting a mask on.  I feel a Maxine moment coming on.  Oh yes, and then there were the large vans with lots of little Halloweeners being trucked in from miles away, how do I know? I asked.  I can't be po'd at the kids but something about that bothers me.  Some of the dentists in our area have taken a note from the police and are doing a buy-back, giving the kids $ for their candy or a toy.  Last year I gave out Halloween bubble bottles and plastic Halloween "jewelry."  The tall trick or treaters didn't seem to enjoy that so much.  Yup, I am definitely channelling Maxine.  I guess I will drive down to K-Mart and get some candy.  Those little ones are so cute, and shy.  Maxine and I will survive.  Maybe I should wear my black spook cape and a mask myself, nothing too scary, really don't want to scare those little ones.

By the way my favorite Maxine quote today is "At my age strappy shoes means sandals with velcro." 

It's a nice if chilly day today.  My clematis has grown up the side of the garage and out onto the phone line back  towards the house.  It the afternoons  it looks like red stained glass.  I'm going to try to catch a picture of it tomorrow, I waited until too late in the day today.

I skipped the pain pills this morning so I could drive myself to the library, a short jaunt.  I got three DVD's and Dana Stabenow's "Hunter's Moon" to read.  The films I got are "The Book of Eli," "Elizabeth - The Golden Age," with Cate Blanchett, who is one of my favorites, and "Eat, Pray, Love," which got mixed reviews but I wanted to see it, and I love watching Javier Bardem.  It's a lot better than trying to find something on daytime television.  I was surprised how tired I was when I got home so I took a little nap.  When I got up I defrosted some of my homemade chili for dinner and started in on my book.

My friend Merry offered to loan me a new book she has, the latest Louise Penny, saying they "were trying not to read them too fast."  I can sure appreciate that, if I zip through them they are gone, like old friends leaving after a visit and not to return for a long time.  So I think I will follow her lead and read more slowly.  I know I was in mourning for awhile after I read all three Steig Larsson's "Girl Who..." books, in despair that there would be no more.  The upside is if my memory gets worse in the coming decades I can probably read them all over again like new books.

I woke up at 3 in the morning Monday with a terrible stabbing ache in my side.  Went to the Urgent Care at our local clinic and was given CT scan that found a large 3/8" kidney stone.  That one wasn't going to wash through so they gave me a shot of something for the pain and set me up with a urologist who scheduled me into surgery late that afternoon.  My dear daughter-in-law Heather took me to the doctor, delivered me to the hospital, returned me home afterwards, and stayed the night with me.  What a girl.  I am so blessed to have her in our family.  Her mother sent dinner over on Tuesday.

This is not going to be my best or brightest post.  I'm still on pain meds and am somewhat ditzy, but I'm feeling so grateful for family and friends who have shown me their care in many ways.  Thank you all.

Weekend

Sister Susan on our Alaskan Cruise July 2011

I'm looking out the kitchen window this morning watching the leaves slowly drifting down.  I like sitting at this kitchen counter with my laptop and gazing out the window.  I've been retired for awhile but still can't seem to get caught up with projects, and still the first thing I do every Saturday morning, is put in a load of wash like I had to go to work Monday.  This morning I got to the clothes hamper and...there was nothing in it.  Ack, now I'll be off all day.

I could start sorting through the photos of the Alaska trip Susan and I took with two friends.   I did one post once then forgot about it doing other stuff instead.  Still haven't put the roof on the first rooms of the doll house my grandgirl and I are slowly building.  I need to clean up the garden before it freezes, some silly little cherry tomatoes and some peppers actually managed to ripen even though anything resembling warm weather has passed.  Drain and roll up the hoses. Prune the roses and pile mulch under them.  Finish knitting a muffler.  Actually make a wreath out of all those pine cones I collected in SE Oregon.  Work on my painting some more. 

What do I do?  Read a lot, go the gym intermittently, volunteer with Art Lab this school year, an art program in the grade schools here in Walla2, visit friends, home school a granddaughter once a week, and go for walks.  This summer though I've felt like one the lilies of the field, "they toil not, neither do they spin."  I do portage granddaughters often so I do a lot of driving but get nowhere, ha, ha.  It never occurred to me I'd be a mom/taxi again with my grandgirls, but that's good, I like being in their lives.  Did I mention I read a lot?  And play on the computer, the new computer.  No more black screen of death.  Whoorah!  Now I can write up my blurb on an artist named Ming Fay for the Art Lab so the 5th graders we are taking on a field trip to the Walla Walla Foundry here will learn (I hope) something about a current, and successful, working artist, whose works have been made here.  I have an art degree and made most of my livelihood drawing airplane parts and working in technical publications. It supported me and my family so I'm not complaining.  Still, I get all excited about someone who has managed to make a living with their art. 

Yesterday, with book in hand, I went to pick up two grandgirls after school for an afternoon of snacks and pumpkin carving. I left really early so I could drop off other library books and get a good place to park in front of the school.  I thought I might read while I waited. I'm finishing up a Kate Sugak mystery by Dana Stabenow, an addiction lately.  Instead, I rolled the van windows down, let the mild air drift in and blow away fragrance of wet soccer shoes and socks, left the radio on a smooth jazz station and watched the trees in the sun and just chilled.  Wonderful.

Oh, and I do buy a lottery ticket now and again, and last week actually won $100, which I will spend on more Dana Stabenow books.  Life is good.

Transitions

Thank you Inkless Press

My old PC has served me long and well but I have been nursing and cajoling this one along for the last year.  It's XP, it doesn't have enough RAM.  It makes crunching noises, it stops and gives me the black screen of death.  It gets stuck and whirrs endlessly until finally I unplug it since you can't get to the shut down process.  The applications I use keep giving me messages, "we no longer support XP," meaning - you're on your own girlie.  I have finally given up and ordered a new PC.  It was supposed to arrive at the store (no shipping charges that way) yesterday but oops, it didn't.  Meanwhile I fill in at the library and on my little ASUS eee.  I suppose I could just stick with my tiny laptop but I have young girls doing on-line home school work on the work station, and I can see better on the big screen of my work station especially if I'm trying to watch a movie or Inspector Lewis.  No, I'm not wirelessly connected to my TV. 

I'm a retired programmer and recovered gadget junkie but I seem to be sliding slowly into technical oblivion.  I could download virtual books on my little laptop if I only could figure out how.  My main winter project is going to be to learn how to use the stuff I have.  Like remodel my blog page.  My son's Droid befuddles me and the screen is too small for my eyes but it makes me drool.  But I don't want to spend the money on it or pay the wireless phone people a fortune to get the connections to run it.  Doesn't fit in the budget.  I added up what I spend now to remain "connected" and almost passed out.  I have enough money but not a lot of extra.  Being able to gab online and with old friends is valuable.  Many are out of reach without a long ride in the car, some of them unable to drive far anymore.  Then there are my faraway blog friends.

Hope my PC arrives soon. 

Friday Statements

Now I'm going to the gym so I will the energy to keep writing letters and fending off what Paul Krugman called the "economic royalists."  Have a good weekend all.

By John Wagner for Hallmark

I received this from a friend of a sister and it cracked me up.  I actually did spend sometime last week thinking about the subject matter.  It's been over 10 years since I last updated my "Living Will" and some things are clearer to me.  I always thought I'd have a speedy, brief departure, and who knows how it will roll out in the end?  My designated burden bearers are my two sons.  I think it is somewhat of a burden, so I have tried to be a specific as possible to make it as easy as possible to do what dear old Mom asked for please.  Still, circumstances and laws change.  When I first wrote a living will, I imagined it would be no trouble to be doped up beyond pain if necessary while I wandered off to my final destination. 

Lately though, hospitals, doctors, and hospices, are under the gun not to deliver too much of those heavy-duty painkilling drugs, as though an 80+ year old enduring a painful, fatal disease would become a society destroying painkiller addict.  And there have been questions raised about "what if the level of comfort might kill the person," in my own case I say so what?  But since I have a lung disease, and opitiates tend to reduce the functions of the central nervous system, as well as being a tremendous balm for a painful end stage disease, it may be my problem too, even though I still say for myself, so what, assuming a bread truck doesn't get me first.

I found a generic form online for the State of Washington Living Will Washington State but it fails to address some other pertinent issues, such as if I am elderly and especially if I'm in ill health from other issues what kind if any surgeries or treatments should anyone be allowed to perform on me.  I have seen a fair number of my friends or relatives accept surgeries that killed them, right away or later, so they got some extra suffering tossed into the dying process.  Again, to be personal, general anaethesia is not a good event for an older person, especially one with compromised airways, I avoid it like the plague.  I stopped breathing during a minor surgery when I was in my 30's and now I am marching into my seventies.  Still if I was in horrible pain, and a little surgery would stop it, maybe it's worth the risk.

So this is more than just finding a form and filling in the blanks, I am looking for a better form, and making a list of considerations I didn't think about 10 years ago.

Do you have a living will?  What would be on your list of considerations?  And of course there is the assisted suicide question which is an option here in Oregon and Washington.  I doubt that would be my choice, but as I said you never know.

Girls' Night Out

Several of my grandgirls, our community binoculars, and I went on a bird walk last week in the early evening at the site of the old Whitman Mission.  Lovely afternoon with just a hint of fall in the air.  We and about two dozen others including several children were escorted by a naturalist and introduced to the possibilities of sighting migrating birds in our area, the Walla Walla Valley and Columbia Basin.  We did see some Canadian Geese and Wood Ducks in flight overhead but none settling down for the night.  On the ground at some distance was a black heron, a pheasant, and any number of magpies.  We could hear an owl, some songbirds, and quails wrestling each other as they settled in for the night.  And, Blackbilled Magpies.  Magpies for whatever reason do not get much respect.  They do at time raid the nests of other birds but not often.  They are quite common and belong to the same family of birds as the crow.  Many people don't like them, I do.  The girls collect their long attractive feathers.

Our guide pointed the Magpies out to us telling us that they served an important service much like their cousins the crows and ravens.  They are scavengers and they clean up what others have left behind, roadkill, leftover fast food, dead critters in the wild.  He told us something new to all of us.   Magpies build large nests each year that take them about 40 days to construct and they abandon them after the chicks fly off and build new ones in the following season.  The old nests are used by owls who, we were surprised to learn, do not build their own nests ever, not a stick.  If it weren't for magpies and hawks, crows, and herons our lovely owls would have no place to raise their young.  Owls do it turns out do sometimes toss the current residents out (or eat them) and use the nest. Sort of a hotel room with a mini-fridge.

It was getting dark and we could see a gorgeous sunset happening through the skinny clouds, very red through the ever present stubble burn smoke and dust from the surrounding wheat fields.  We scurried off a little early, we were late for a family dinner but we had seen most of what we came to see.  What a wonderful evening walking around the fields planted with the rye grass that used to grow all over here naturally.  We also saw a turtle nest.  There is an old mill pond here inhabited by turtles. Some turtle mom laid her eggs right next to a portion of ruts belonging to the old Oregon trail that goes through the Mission grounds here.  The naturalists have built a screened cage around it to protect it from predators.  We will go back to watch it progress, maybe we'll be lucky enough to see the babies.