mellificent | Entries tagged with family

I am at my aunt's house and I have had several wine coolers and I feel mildly giddy. (I have been making the wine coolers very, very weak or I would feel more than just slightly giddy by now since I think this is my third one.) Half the time when we come here all the cousins are here and it is chaos, but none of them are here tonight. It's just me, Rob, Linda, and Linda's 90-something year old father. (94? I can never keep track.) Whatever his age is, he's very hale and hearty for it, although he has finally started noticeably slowing down in the last year or so - since around the time his wife died, actually, although that may be at least partly coincidence since he doesn't generally appear to be pining for her. Hard to really know, though.

We mostly ended up doing the packing at the last minute but we managed to get out the door only slightly later than we intended - a little after noon. We stopped and ate on the way, and also stopped at Target after we got to College Station, and still got to Linda's house not long after 5. At Target, I found a cute fleece hat and some black fleece gloves, because I'm pretty sure I didn't bring mine with me and I'm pretty sure I'm going to want some before this trip is over. That's about all we bought. Target was crowded but it didn't take us all that long to check out, so it wasn't bad. LInda made dinner for us - spaghetti - even though we told her that we probably wouldn't be hungry, and of course we ate anyway. Then we have just watched TV since then (TAR - Kint and Viksyn (sp?) had a very bad day, didn't they? and incidentally, Linda didn't seem worried by the pink hair but she wasn't at all sure about Kint. She thought he seemed a bit strange! And apparently she's never heard of Goths before.)

Stephanie has to work tomorrow so she is home, and all of the kids are having their Christmases with their respective dads tonight, apparently. (Three kids, two dads.) Tomorrow by lunch time people are supposed to be gathering over here, I'm told. I still have to go in the morning and buy Linda a gift certificate or something. I didn't think she'd be especially thrilled by a Target one. And then actually she told me she hasn't bought anything for Rob so maybe I will volunteer to buy him something at the same time.

And I can't think of much else to say. Except that hmm, I happened to glance at my profile page - yesterday I had 79 mutual friends and today I have 80 - I guess

aet has undeleted her journal again! (That's a lot of friends! I feel popular!)

I should be wrapping gifts and/or addressing cards - I am very behind on both. Probably the cards are more important, but we got a bunch of packages in the mail today and I have gifts on the brain, more. One of the packages was the one from The Land of Nod (which is actually the children's division of Crate and Barrel, I understand) - I am very glad those came because one was not a Christmas gift, it was a baby gift for my co-worker whose shower is tomorrow. (Cool retro bibs - and it better be a girl as advertised because I bought the flowered ones.... although I don't suppose the baby cares, come to that. But the mom might!) I also got an art jar for my 7-year-old cousin and a purple tutu - Rob corrected me on this, it's actually lavender - for the little one. I hope it's not impossibly girly but I thought it was really cute. I have my girly moments too, you know.

Oh, speaking of Crate and Barrel - that gift-wrap that I was complaining the other day was expensive? Is the most. beautiful. gift wrap ever. Seriously. I bought the ribbon and the little tree gift tags and I'm not even putting bows on the wrapped gifts, they don't need it. (There's red, too, but I don't think it could possibly come out as pretty as the green.)

(Later)

I just went and wrapped a whole lot of gifts, so I feel better about that. Not in the pretty green paper, but just mostly in bags, which is how I almost always wrap my presents, and have for years. It's faster, it still looks good, and the bags are reusable, which I like both because it's "green" and because it saves money in the long run - although this is not as much of a concern for me now as it was back 15 years or so ago when I first started doing this. Back then, money was always oh-so-tight and it was a gigantic concern.

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Y'know, it's funny. I am always saying I ought to be doing this, and I ought to be doing that, but that's mostly because I am not really good about doing the things I ought to do - or even the things I want to do, like sending cards. My sister, on the other hand, has done the things she was "supposed" to do (or at least that's what she thought) for all of her life, up 'til the last couple of years, and now apparently she's in full-blown rebellion against doing what she thinks she ought to do - or something like that. It's very hard to figure out what's going on, exactly, because of the way she attempts to communicate. I got a couple of extremely long e-mails from her today, the gist of which was, she's not coming for Christmas. She kept talking about "negative people" - how she doesn't want to be around these negative people, and while I'm pretty sure I know who she is talking about.... near as I can figure out, what she really means is that she's afraid those people will remind her of things she doesn't want to be reminded of. And it has to be things she also thinks she ought to have done, or she wouldn't be so afraid of them. She is running scared in a big way, that's what I think.

(Sorry to be sort of opaque about what I'm talking about, exactly, but I don't think I want to put that down in black and white. If you really are dying to know, you could probably go back and read the archives from a year or so, and it should become clearer. At least, I think it should. I'm not going back to read all that to see, because it's too depressing.)

The begonia that I brought home from Mom's house is blooming, no less. I don't know if it'll survive the winter - but actually, I suppose it must've survived last winter since it's been longer than that since anyone did anything but water the plants over there.

I divided the plants I had between the front porch (very shady) and the back patio (partial shade) more or less at random, but everything is hanging in there so far. I wasn't sure how anything would do. The porch in the old apartment got a lot more sun. We've had pretty good weather lately so I'm sure that helps.

I felt very tired and blah today and I decided we should just stay home. I have already had a meeting with the lawyer this week so I felt like I had already done my duty as an executrix for the week, anyway. I gave the lawyer the new papers that I found on the house and they should be able to finally file the inventory now. And other than that, we are mostly just waiting on the house to sell, which hopefully will happen in the spring. We should be able to get started with the renovating after the holidays, I think.

Rob & I have been going out to eat on Saturdays all year, on the way up to Mom's - actually, that's an older custom than that, since Mom and I went out to lunch on Saturdays for years and years, and kept doing it right up until she was hospitalized and couldn't go any more. So we went out to lunch today, too, even though we weren't going anywhere else. The habit seems to be kind of ingrained now. Eventually we won't have to go to Mom's on Saturdays any more, but I bet we keep going out to lunch! Not a bad habit to have, really.

I was thinking about how this year was different from the past several years. We haven't had a Christmas where a family member wasn't seriously ill in a long time - the last three years it was Mom - I guess it was coincidence that she always got sicker this time of year, but she definitely did; and somewhere in there my great-aunt Rae was very ill at Christmas also, I guess that was two years ago; and there was another year that that my mom was having chemo in December for her first round of cancer, before that, in 2001 (I remember saying, "Oh, this has just been a crap year all around" - little did I know); and a couple of years before that my uncle Ted was in the hospital at Christmas and he died right afterwards. Actually I think my dad had chemo in December a few years ago for his prostate, too, but that was after Mom had already gotten sick, and poor Daddy and his prostate got really short shrift. (I barely blinked when he told me. I was like, "Cancer? Oh ok... but the prognosis is good? OK, good, you'll be fine, then. Bye!") So I don't quite know what to do with a "normal" Christmas.

So in the interest of normalcy, we put up tree #2 today - this is less impressive than it sounds since they are both really small trees. The second tree is the all-white one, and I put a bunch of my mom's stuff on it. It's gold, silver and pink, and it looks really pretty. It's completely different-looking than the other tree, which (as you may recall) is a green tree with multi-color lights and decorations. I will have to try to get a picture of the second tree but I don't have a good track record on getting tree pictures that do them justice. With the lights and everything, it makes it hard.

I feel like there should be some lesson to all of this but I don't know what it is. My life is just in transition, that's all. I should probably get used to it.

www.holidailies.org

I went to Austin saying that the main thing I wanted to do - besides see my sister, of course - was shop, but we didn't actually end up getting any shopping done to speak of. Saturday we started out to shop, and I'm still not exactly sure where the whole day went, but the only place we actually went shopping was Waterloo Records. We did go see my nephew (and his dad), which is always nice. He is almost 17, which seems unbelievable. Pretty nice kid, though, on the whole.

I didn't realize that it'd so long since I'd been in Waterloo - when we walked in I realized that the last time I was there, most of the records were still on vinyl. I do think I'd been in the "new" location once, maybe, but most of the time I was in Austin, they were over on the other side of Town Lake, further down Lamar. Or maybe I hadn't been in that store at all - when did they move, anyway? I know they were there by the time I started coming to Austin more often, the last five years or so, at least. Before that I came so seldom for a long time that I'm not sure of anything.

We ate lunch at Hut's - which hadn't changed a bit in 20 years - and dinner at El Arroyo, as I said before. That was a new place to me, but it was really good, and it was nice to get to talk to

anjea, when my sister let us get a word in edgewise. Luckily (well, sort of) she went for a couple of long smoke breaks. (I've been trying hard not to say anything about her smoking. I don't think it'd do any good.)

I told Anjea that the worlds were colliding because she met my sister, who of course calls me by my real name, while just about everybody I know online (except possibly

karen_d) calls me Mel, even if they know perfectly well what my real name is. I never quite know what to tell people when that happens. When I meet the "online people" in person, they always say, "Well, which one do you want to be called?" and then I get all indecisive. I guess really, I'd just as soon be Mel. As I've said many times, I don't like my real name very much anyway. If we move to Austin when we retire - as we've been saying for a couple of years we're going to, and retirement for us is not all that far away - I may be tempted to just change my name. Not legally, because legally my name is already a mess - but I might just start calling myself Mel in general. I dunno, we'll see, we still have a good while to go, and I may feel differently about it by then. But it seems like that would be the best time to ever do it, if I decide I really want to.

My sister is trying to become an artist - by which I mean, one who actually makes money at it. She's always had a flair for design, and an original style, and she has developed a technique which does seem to be something a bit different, so it does seem like there are possibilities in this. I've only seen a couple of the pieces she's made to sell, but I really like some of them quite a lot. She's supposed to send me pictures and if she does I'll put some of them up. She has a website up already but she keeps saying it's not finished so I guess I shouldn't link to it yet.

I don't have to go in to work til after lunch tomorrow - if I wake up in time, I may go see if they can color my hair in the morning. I've never been in there in the morning, but surely they open by 10 or so, I would think. That ought to be enough time. I have big old gray roots that are driving me crazy - and it's only been two months since I got it done, I don't know why they look so bad already!

Well, it seems fairly appropriate, on the last day of November, to show you the Christmas decorations that have gone up so far in our house. Now you have to remember that I have a lot of my mom's Christmas stuff - I got rid of a lot of stuff (ours and hers), but we still have a ton of stuff too - and I'm in the process of merging ours with hers.

Here's the green tree - which is new and we bought because Rob wanted it - it's decorated mostly with the ornaments that we already had.

( More big pictures behind the cut )

aet was talking about families in the kitchen, and as it happens, I have a few pictures taken in my grandmother's kitchen - although like both Aet and

columbina, we always went elsewhere for "formal" pictures. But my family is generally a pretty informal bunch, and we never particularly minded having pictures taken in the kitchen, any more than anywhere else.

( Cut for big pictures, plus shopping, GuildWars, and matters optical )

I have had sort of an inspiration about what to do about Holidailies; I was worried I would burn out on writing daily before the end of December. (Although I won't really be able to write daily the whole month anyway - I'm not intending to try to track down a computer while we're on vacation!) I'm still not swearing I'll actually post every single day, even before the vacation - but I thought of a category of entries I can write that I've never done before, and hopefully that will keep me interested enough to keep posting. It's something that I've been thinking about writing lately anyway - and no, I'm not going to tell you what it is!

Pizza Hut ad I saw today:

A CORNUCOPIA OF CHEESE!!
(That means a whole, whole lot!)

It just makes you despair.

There's a quilt we've been looking for since Mama died - so what, almost 10 months now? I really didn't think it was there - we pulled out piles and piles of quilts and it wasn't in any of them - but I found it today. My cousin Stephanie is the person who is really sentimental about family things; I think I'm not going to say anything about having found it and I'm just going to wrap it up and give it to her for Christmas. What it is, it's a quilt my mother made out of her father's shirts. We've been calling it the "Papa's Shirts" quilt, because that's what we called my grandfather - although of course, since Mama made it, it says "Daddy's Shirts" on the label. I hadn't seen it in so long I'd mostly forgotten what it looked like, although I was around when she was making it. It says 1996 on the label, also, so it was before I started quilting, although not by much - otherwise I guess I'd remember more about it. But I still knew it immediately when I saw it. It was in one of those boxes we pulled out of the very back of the downstairs closet last week, which I didn't really look in too thoroughly at the time. I think I saw that it was quilts but the rest of what was in there was pretty uninteresting, and it was underneath. (On top was a really ugly sampler quilt that I also remember her making - I don't know what I'll do with that one.)

There was also that box full of papers we didn't look at last week, which turned out to be fairly interesting. There were a bunch of old deeds in it - to my grandparent's land and the business and stuff like that. Some of it was very old, 1920s, even. I didn't stop to figure out what it all was, exactly, but I kept all of the old stuff. Because I think it's interesting, not because I think it actually has any value. Although there's some mineral-right business which does figure in the will, and the old land deeds could have a bearing on that. (I have got to call and harass the lawyer next week, anyway - I let the estate stuff slide while we were moving, and I need to kick him into gear again. Nothing seems to happen if I don't, and it's time to get all this crap settled.)

I wrote this morning that it was raining and we might not go to Mom's at all, but the rain let up and we went ahead and went. I'm glad, I wanted to get it over with. I really need to get the rest of the stuff out, and I'm going to Austin next weekend and I won't be able to go there. (Remember the trip I put off in early October? This is when I rescheduled it to, a week after Thanksgiving.

It's looking more and more like there's not going to be Holidailies this year - at least, the site hasn't been updated at all, so unless there's a last-minute flurry of activity over there... It makes me glad I went ahead and updated daily for NaBloPoMo. I'm sure I'll taper off some again in December if there's nothing to remind me to write all the time.

I'm sort of half-watching Wings of Desire. It's so low-key it's hard to really give it 100% of my attention, although it's clear it would be rewarding if I would. I knew Peter Falk was in it but it still sort of weirds me out that he's there. I guess he's too American, it seems to me.

I am late to this party, I know, but I have discovered The Killers. I've got several of their songs on a mix CD that I've been playing in the car, and I have noticed that I perk up every time one of their songs comes on. Obviously I need to download some more.

I have been on the phone with the electric company. I had been all worried about transferring the phone and the internet service, and forgot all about the electricity. I think I will miss it if it's not there, don't you? Then for a minute I thought, "Oh, and I forgot the water, too!" before I remembered that the apartment complex pays for water. I am a ditz, but anyway, that's one thing less I have to worry about. I do wonder what other terribly important thing I'm forgetting, though, considering that it took me all this time to think about electricity.

Should I buy Rob a bust of Saruman for Christmas? I would get it like a shot if it was cheaper, but $50? I don't know. He does love him some Chris Lee and he would think it was great - and then he would put it in the china cabinet and forget all about it. Seems like a lot to pay for that.

My aunt e-mailed me - I hadn't talked to her in a while. She was talking about Thanksgiving and Christmas plans. We are definitely going up there for Christmas. I'm not so sure about Thanksgiving. I'm sure we will still be unpacking, and it'd be kind of nice to stay home. But I could probably be persuaded to go up there for one night, anyway.

I haven't talked to my dad, either, I suppose I should do something about that, but I don't really much want to, is what it comes down to. Sigh.

Current Music: When You Were Young

My dad at work, circa 1980
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

My dad was a man of many professions, have I ever talked about this? (Not that I can remember, anyway.) His father was a rice farmer, and so he grew up thinking he would be one too, but then his dad had a massive heart attack and died when my dad was only a teenager, and so somewhere in there the idea of continuing in his dad's footsteps got lost. But my dad did go to college and major in agriculture - I really need to sit my dad down and get him to straighten all this out for me someday, because I'm not clear if he was still planning on farming someday, at that point. But anyway, he didn't. He got an office job of some sort working for Olin-Matheson. When I was little we lived in Alvin and he drove into Houston every day to work. Then when I was four they suddenly transferred him out to West Texas and made him a salesman. We lived for a year in Snyder, Texas, and another year in Lamesa.

He didn't like being a salesman at all, so here the second career pops up: being a teacher and a football coach. (My mother was always a teacher, so I imagine she had something to do with putting this in his mind.) I guess this really started percolating during the year at Lamesa, because he got hired for the next year (which would have been 1966, the same year I started first grade) to teach in Lamesa. Then my parents went down to Houston for a visit and started talking to a cousin of theirs who was a principal in Channelview, near Houston, and he went and got both of my parents jobs in Channelview - meaning at the very last minute they had to get released from their contracts in Lamesa, move the entire household and kids all the way across the state, convince a stunned first-grader that starting school in a completely strange place was not a major tragedy, find arrangements for their pre-schooler.... It was crazy. But they did it. We stayed for one year in Channelview and then movied back to Alvin, where we had lived before.

My dad actually had three "careers" during these years - he drove a school bus in the mornings, then taught, then coached football (and track and sometimes basketball, I think) after school. He was the head junior high coach for quite a few years. Let's see, if he started teaching in 1966 and quit in 1974, I think... that's still 8 years he spent at that. A fairly long time.

Career #3 started as a summer hobby and grew. We had a neighbor at our first house in Alvin that was a shrimper, and Daddy started going out with him in the boat. The neighbor just had a really small boat, as I recall, and Daddy's first one was just our ski boat with nets and things added on, I believe. But then it got more and more serious, and the boats got bigger and bigger. He was already not always agreeing with the administration at school on how he ought to be doing his job, and finally they transferred him to another school, which he didn't like, and at the end of the year he quit to start shrimping full-time. (My mother was not entirely in agreement with this decision, I should say. There were many words exchanged about it.)

Actually, he was pretty much of a success at it for a long time. Paula and I went to college on the proceeds. But there were problems with overfishing, as I understand it, and the profitability of commercial shrimping - in this area anyway - slowly declined. Finally a few years ago he sold his boat and "retired" - so guess what he's doing now? Teaching again. He substitute teaches in a local high school. I hear he's highly sought-after. I guess he can make the kids think he'll knock their heads together if they don't behave!

Snow in Port Arthur, Texas, 1948
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

I didn't put this up when I was doing all the old pictures last week - this house presumably belonged to some of my dad's relatives, and it is labeled, "Our big snow - Jan 23, 1948 - 1.8 in of snow." Honestly, if they hadn't said there was snow there I don't think I'd've noticed!

(You have to bear in mind that Port Arthur is right on the coast, like Galveston, and any snowfall at all there is a big deal.)

Because I threw my back out again and it hurts to walk, I rode in with Rob and he dropped me off at the circle outside. The downside to this was that he left the house at 7. It was a really pretty drive today, though, and since I was the passenger I could look to my heart's content. The water was almost glass-slick - really unusual this time of year - and there were hundreds of pelicans in the water all the way up and down the beach, in small groups. They were right up on the beach, which is also unusual for them, but the fishing seemed to be good there. You could see them swallowing.

The weekend went pretty good, other than the back thing. My aunt seems to behave completely differently when the rest of the family is not around. We didn't get all that much quilting done, but we did do some. I trimmed my half-square triangles that I sewed at the retreat, and I sewed together a bunch of leftover green squares to finish the back for my green quilt. Each of those took a while - there are 80 of those darn triangles, after all! But between just talking and going to the quilt shop in College Station and my cousins coming over Saturday night, all of those non-quilting things took up a lot of time too. I started to work on the indigo log cabins late Saturday afternoon, and it just made me tired to look at them. I went and took a nap instead!

I made the drive each way in a little under three hours, which is surprising. I thought it would take longer. I was also worried about the traffic because it was graduation weekend at A&M, but it wasn't bad. I took the Beltway around Houston Friday afternoon - and finally got to try out my EZtag that I got after I bought the new car - but coming back I didn't bother because it was Sunday morning and I figured the traffic shouldn't be that bad. (Also, I didn't think about getting on the Beltway again until after I had passed the exit, which was a factor as well!) But it was fine, and I got home just in time for the Astros game, and Rob was happy to see me, so all was well.

Except for my back. Ow.

Normangee Tractor sign on Hwy 6
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

I'm too tired to do a real post, but I snapped this picture of a billboard for my grandfather's old business. It was a long way from Normangee, on the road up to College Station. Obviously business must be pretty good.

(You can see it better if you click through to the bigger version. Not that it's anything all that exciting, unless you're one of those people who get off on tractors -- don't laugh, they exist. -- And I did check out the website, it's not exactly exciting either. Except that it's my grandfather's business! The one where we used to like to go hang out in the office when we were kids.)

(aka, a catch-up entry)

Hmm, I don't even remember when I last made a substantial post. Maybe on my anniversary, which was a week or so ago. Oh yeah, and I griped about the construction on Saturday. Let's see, in between there, I got really busy again at work - thus the lack of posts - and not much else happened, that I can recall. (Unless you want me to talk about American Idol. Which I don't think I want to do right now, but could probably be persuaded later, if there is interest.) Friday I left work early but I think I did boring stuff like get my glasses fixed and enter things into MS Money. So that gets us up to Saturday and the construction. I did stay home Saturday, but the flip side of that was that since I was home, I convinced Rob that we needed to go out to eat somewhere reasonably nice as a late anniversary dinner. So we went to Landry's. I had filet mignon and he had stuffed flounder and lobster bisque for an appetizer. It was a very nice dinner. I haven't been in there in a while, I forget how nice the atmosphere is. We thoroughly enjoyed it.

Sunday I did get up early and make the circuit around the construction to get to my mom's house. I scanned a bunch of pictures, which are then going to somebody else or going in the trash. Some of them seemed to be from my dad's side of the family, so he may get them in the mail soon. Like this one:

That is my dad's Aunt Ida and Uncle Jack (in 1967, according to the back of the card) - he is definitely getting these because I only ever met them a couple of times and although I remember that I thought they were nice, that isn't enough to give me any great sentimental attachment to this picture. That one is not surviving the weeding process; it's interesting enough to scan but not interesting enough to keep the paper picture.

and now I am sleepy so I will spare you the account of the stomach ailment I have had since sunday night, at least until later.

I've had an ambien and I am hoping I will be able to go to sleep in a while, and then conceivably get my sleep back on schedule. Cross your fingers.

This may well be a sort of "bits and pieces" entry, since my mind is going off in a bunch of different directions, as usual.

I want to record something actually useful that I heard somebody say on CNN today. It was some expert talking about the evacuations in California because of the wildfires, but it would apply just as well to our kind of evacuations - it was what to grab if you have to evacuate in a hurry. They called it the "six P's" although there were really more than six. Luckily they said it a couple of times so I was able to get it all scribbled down:
-- people and pets
-- pills or prescriptions
-- papers, the important kind
-- plastic, as in credit cards, or money
-- your PC - I don't think they meant the whole thing, really, but your data burned to a disc
-- pictures

Also, I am watching "The Dresden Files" which I sort of like, although I don't quite understand why. It's not great, but it's oddly watchable. (I'm told that everybody does not agree with this opinion.)

Oh, and when I read back over what I wrote in the last entry, it reminded me that my 6-year-old cousin Laci really did not know what to make of the box of ashes yesterday. She has presumably been indoctrinated into some varation on evangelical christianity, and I know at least some of those types think that you have to preserve your body after death, because you'll get your same earthly body back when you go to heaven. (Which personally I think is a really appalling idea. Yuck.) Anyway, from the questions Laci was asking, it sounded like maybe she had been told some version of this story. Her mother had to explain to her that Aunt Billie Dell wasn't in that body anyway, she was in heaven and she had a whole new body which wasn't sick any more. Stephanie (the mom) also said later that she figured that my mom and my grandmother were up in heaven watching us and laughing. All I know is, if they were watching, she would be right. They would totally be laughing. Both my mother and grandmother had a fine sense of the ridiculous.

I don't want to go to work tomorrow. I want a day to recover from the weekend, dammit. But I guess I'd better go to bed, since I'm not getting it.

My mother's ashes are duly buried; we had dinner at a cousin's house and are now spending the night with my aunt. We are coming home early-ish tomorrow, so I will have time to get some GuildWars in, I hope.

Traffic in Houston was horrid. Apparently everybody in the world was going to Lake Conroe today, because once we finally got past there, it thinned out very abruptly. Luckily, we're not planning on coming back the same way we went - we went straight up I-45 today, because that's the direct route to get to my mother's hometown where the cemetery is, but from my aunt's house in Bryan it's easier to come back down highways 6 and 290. And we're leaving well before noon, so hopefully that will also help.

I would normally be bemoaning the time change, but lately my sleep schedule is so screwed up any that I'm not at all sure that switching to DST will make it any worse. It might even help. I can hope, anyway.

Art and I both wrote letters to my mother (Art said his was "more of a note") and we put them in the silk urn wrapper, along with a couple of things I found in her purse that I thought had particular meaning to her - one was a picture of Parker, her grandson; the other one was the Apostle's Creed, which may require a little more explanation. The thing is, she changed from Baptist to Methodist to Lutheran in the last 10 years or so of her life, and what you have to understand is that she had been a Baptist all her life, and Baptists don't say the Apostle's Creed. (Y'all know what I'm talking about, right? "I believe in the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth..." ? That.) Well, so she wanted to memorize it so she could say it along with everybody else, but for some reason she had a terrible time learning it. She would cut copies of it out of the church bulletin and places like that, and leave them strewn around the house. And she would make both me and Art quiz her on it. So when I found one of those copies, on a little strip of paper in her purse, I thought it seemed appropriate to put it in. Maybe, whereever she is, she'll find time to finally learn it.

Adding on to say that what I said in this entry - about how burying her ashes in the cardboard box from the funeral home might be the most environmentally sound option - turned out to be incorrect, because when I steeled my nerves and opened the thing up, there was a plastic box inside that, a fairly solid one, and pretty thoroughly sealed closed. I suppose we could have opened it if we had needed to (after all, what if we had wanted to scatter them?) but we didn't, really, so we left well enough alone. Funeral homes must have a standard size for these plastic boxes, becuase one was also sent along with the fabric urn, and the two were exactly the same size. So we just switched them out. She is buried in the plastic box from the funeral home with her name misspelled ("Stanley" instead of "Standley") with the beautiful silk wrapper that nobody will ever see again, in the plot next to my grandfather. My cousins dug a good-sized hole - about two feet square and two feet deep - in what we hope is the right place, and we took turns picking up handfuls of dirt to throw back in, and then when it was all filled back in, my aunt said a prayer (of course that's not my kind of thing, but it was my mother's kind of thing and that's what matters, right?) and that was it for the formalities. We did go wander around the cemetery, which is filled even more than I knew with great-aunts and uncles and distant cousins, not to mention my grandparents and great-grandparents on that side of the family. I think practically everybody in the cemetery was related to me to some degree. They could have some pretty good family dinners in that cemetery.

Current Mood: exhausted

George cemetery
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This seems very apropos right now.

Unveiling

In the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live,
my aunts and mother
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows,
almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planked table
at family dinners.
And walking beside
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don't feel sad, exactly,
just left out a bit,
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I'm not quite ready yet
to learn.

(By the way, the tombstone in the picture belongs to a great-aunt - my grandmother's older sister. Note the dates.)

On my way to see my mother this afternoon, the check engine light on my car came on, right smack on the very top of the causeway - meaning about as far from anywhere as you can manage to be in a mostly-urban area - and before I could get to a good stopping place, it was smoking like crazy. If the engine has not blown up again, I will be amazed.

But you know what? I don't care. That car had clearly outlived its useful life, and we will just have to get another one. One thing about it, I seem to be in the way of inheriting a bit of money soon. (Quite soon, I'm afraid.) I had them tow it back up to the dealer, and Rob came and got me, and we went by to see my mother and Art immediately volunteered the loan of the (other) Honda - the one that we're supposed to be giving to my sister, whenever she bothers to come down and get it - and so I have something to drive for the moment, and we'll worry about the rest later.

My mother is in what the hospice nurse described as a "semi-coma" - she is still eating, though, if somebody feeds her pureed-type stuff. Art had called and told me yesterday that she wasn't eating at all, and that sent me into a tailspin that lasted most of the day today. It turned out not to be quite as dire as he made it sound, but it's bad enough, I suppose. Last weekend when I went in, she didn't really acknowledge my presence but she held on to my hand really hard. Not now. She might have sqeezed it a tiny bit, or it might have been my imagination. I'm not sure. In any case, it wasn't much.

(Oh, and my aunt, with her usual sure sense of timing, picked today to e-mail me to talk about funeral arrangements. Gee, thanks.)

I ordered Rob one of those bumper stickers that says "1-20-09" (the last day Bush will be president) for his birthday, because we saw one a couple of weeks ago and he couldn't stop talking about it. I bet we end up putting it on my car instead of his, though, so as not to mar the pristine-ness of the Corolla. We'll see.

I also ordered him a pair of pants from Land's End, because he hasn't had any new ones lately and it's almost impossible to find his size in a store, especially in the chino-type pants like he wears to work. (He's six feet tall & very skinny - the only pants that fit him in most retail stores are the ones intended for teenagers.) The only other thing I've bought for him is the movie The Descent, which I found at Sam's. I know he wants that one. He had told me a couple of more obscure movies he wants that I'll probably order from Amazon. The other piece of his birthday present is traditionally the night we spend at the downtown Hilton for the marathon - that will be this Saturday. (Usually his birthday falls closer to marathon weekend than it did this year - the marathon is next Sunday and his birthday isn't until the Sunday after, which is good because my mother usually likes to have some sort of birthday celebration for him and we won't have to try to deal with that on marathon weekend.) Rob is taking his comp day from the Day of Mourning last week - because he worked the whole day that day - on the Tuesday after the marathon, and since Monday is MLK day he'll have two whole days to recover. Which is good. He'll be all of 44 years old soon and doesn't seem to recover quite as fast as he used to.

We didn't do much this weekend, except go see "The Pursuit of Happyness" - which was pretty good. I'm not usually too big on, you know, heartwarming single-father dramas in the normal way of things, but this one was not overblown and Will Smith was likeable but not quite as cocky as usual and, I don't know, it all worked. (I am just not a good movie reviewer. It's hard for me to put a finger on what makes a movie good or bad.)

I was going to meet my mom and Art at the house yesterday, but he called me to say that she couldn't make it up the two steps to get inside. Her right leg is just practically dead - she can't lift it at all. We are trying to get her back up to Houston to see the oncologist and get another chemo treatment, since the last one did seem to help. The two hospitals do not seem to coordinate their services very well, though. Something about Medicare coverage that I don't quite understand, apparently. I wish we had a Medicare expert to run interference on this, I really do. It's ridiculous.

I almost forgot to say that we are in an orgy of possession-purging, brought on by having to move bookshelves and stuff on Friday and again today, since they are coming back to finish the sheetrock. We are working on piles of stuff for Goodwill and another one for library donations - my god, do we have a lot of books. I found a whole box of books that I thought was Rob's old books and turned out to be mine. It had The Last Unicorn in it, as well as some old Larry Niven and some other stuff I thought had gone in some past round of book-purging. I started re-reading The Last Unicorn and apparently I haven't read it in so long that I can't remember what happens at all. I think, "Oh, yeah, I remember this," as I read, but so far I have completely failed to remember where things go from there. Makes it interesting.

Mila & Allium (and Irma)
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

I was thinking about what picture would symbolize 2006 for me, and well, the fact is, it's got to be GuildWars, because I spent an awful damn lot of time playing it this year. This picture is another one of the Wintersday quests. (Big version here.) That's Mila, my ranger, standing there with the bow as big as she is, and that's her pet flamingo in the foreground. (The flamingo is named Irma, and she's not just a flamingo, she's a combat flamingo, because that's what pets in GuildWars do. When you attack somebody, she goes squawking in, wings flapping and pecking away. Seriously, she does. She can do a fair bit of damage, too.) The big guy with the 'fro is Koss, who is one of the Nightfall "heroes" - a non-player character. And standing next to the giant stocking, looking very white indeed, is Columbine's necromancer Allium. There are characters called Margonites in the new game which are sort of shimmery and whitish (and transparent, actually) and we have been saying that Allium looks an awful lot like a Margonite in that armor.

I will have to look up how much time, exactly, I've spent playing this damn game, and report back. It's a lot. Well over a thousand hours, I think. But GuildWars - and columbina - were two of the things that got me through what was otherwise a pretty difficult year. So I spent 20% or so of the year in a fantasyland - so what. It's a lot better than just spending the year watching my mother go downhill.

Um, ok. On to cheerier things. Sort of. I went to see my dad today, which I don't always think of as cheery because he tends to sort of drive me crazy. But it went ok. It was raining when we left Galveston, and I was worried that we would be driving all across Houston in the rain, but it stopped, and the traffic was light, and we got there pretty quick. (Under an hour and a half, anyway!) We went out to lunch and the first two places we tried were closed, which was kind of odd. We ended up eating in a BBQ place on the freeway. I didn't like what I had (beef links - they used a very odd recipe, I thought) but everybody else's food looked fine, so I think I just chose badly. Daddy behaved himself, apart from a totally incomprehensible rant about that had something to do with Mexican flags, just before lunch. (Supposedly somebody somewhere took the American flag down from a flagpole, and put up the Mexican one. Anybody heard of this? Because I sure hadn't.) I try to just ignore these things, because it doesn't do any good to argue with him, anyway. And that was the only major weirdness of the day, so I could deal. He has gotten where he just gets us gift cards, which is fine. I got one to Wal-mart, this time which isn't exactly what I would have chosen but I'm sure I can find some use or other for it. And I had told him to get Rob an Academy one, and he did, so Rob is already planning another shoe purchase. (Running apparently makes you obsessed with shoes.)

We got caught behind a wreck on the way home - it seemed to be a chain reaction wreck, from what we saw - 3 SUVs, which means that probably nobody was seriously hurt. I mean, we didn't see the wreck, we just saw the mess afterwards, after wondering what we were caught behind for half an hour or so. After we got home I made some nachos and then (surprise!) played GuildWars until 11:30 or so. We have gotten to the Desolation, which means we got to ride sandworms just like in Dune. Or sort of like Dune, anyway. (Also, GW seems to have changed the spelling from worms to "wurms" at some point since I started playing. I was wondering if Frank Herbert's estate threatened to sue them or something.)

Rob & Jake
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

You may have noticed that you are getting the Christmas pictures at the rate of one a day. This is my way of dragging things out so that I can write about Christmas for a week. Although actually I don't have that much more to say about Christmas, it was fairly uneventful.

The only story behind the picture is that Jake, my aunt's terrier, apparently thinks that anybody who sits on the floor is there to play with him. I was watching Miracle on 34th Street in the sewing room, where there is only one chair, so Rob came in and sat down on the floor. Jake, naturally, took this as an invitation. (If you click over to flickr, there are a couple more pictures that go with this one. I think they are pretty comical as a set.)

(Oh, also, there are a lot more Christmas pictures than are public on flickr, but if I have you marked as a friend, you can see them. I am sort of random about the distinction between "friends" and "contacts" though, sometimes, so if you're on my contacts list and you still can't see them - and you care - let me know in comments and I'll fix that. Or if you're not on the contacts list at all and you want to be.)

I need to call my Dad and I've been avoiding it (for no good reason except that I'm lazy and a hermit at heart) and now it's too late to do it tonight. We were supposed to do something "the end of this week" - which is now really soon, one way or the other. He lives nearly a two hour drive away, on the other side of Houston, and I am really bad about avoiding driving up there. But I need to do it. I haven't seen him in ages.

You know, I sort of made a big deal in my mind about going up to Bryan for a "family Christmas" - because that was what it seemed like in my mind - but I completely failed to process the fact that nobody in my immediate family was there - the immediate family I grew up with, I mean. Rob was, of course, but my mother, father and sister weren't. Which is a little odd. Paula and my mother were invited, of course - Paula chose not to come, for whatever reason, and my mother couldn't. And my dad is not routinely invited since he and my mother got divorced, of course, since this is my mother's side of the family we're talking about. (Although he did come once, a few years back, when he was at a loose end between wife #2 and wife #3.)

(For those of you who haven't been following along with the saga of my sister, she is recently divorced and, well, more than a bit flaky these days. She has not been to any family thing since she left her husband, so I have stopped even asking why.)

Apparently I had more to say about Christmas than I thought!

Current Mood: apathetic

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Catchy Name Needed

version 2.0

Entries tagged with family

The eve of Christmas eve

Ought to.

Transitions

So, Austin

Christmas in November

The family in the kitchen, and other randomness

Papa's shirts

This & that

My dad and his many careers

Snow in Port Arthur, Texas, 1948

Monday morning on the beach

Normangee Tractor (dot com)

Where've you been?

This & that

Update from the wilds of East Texas

Linda Pastan, "Unveiling"

The short(ish) version

1-20-09 and other birthday gifts

2006: The Year of GuildWars

Leftover Christmas bits