Ugh. Wednesday. I've been here for all of fifteen minutes, and I'm ready to go back home now. On the plus side, our group decided to treat us to doughnuts and juice this morning, so maybe the sugar will kick in and I'll feel like actually working. I'm trying to conserve energy for this weekend. Tomorrow night and Friday night I have choir rehearsal for the performance with the Philharmonic Orchestra on Saturday at church. The songs are interesting - "Freedom" from Riverdance, "America the Beautiful", of course, and Paul McCartney's "Freedom". As usual, we're more like backup singers than a choir, but that's okay too. Gives us plenty of time to rest while we're standing on stage grinning like idiots. And after we're finished, Pastor Dave will give his thirty minute talk, then there will be fireworks and watermelon. Sunday morning we do a modified version of the program - the Riverdance song gets dropped, and we add Lionel
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What a fun day. I HATE the end of the fiscal year crap. Always have, even when I was in business for myself. Everyone frantically trying to spend every last penny allotted to them in the budget, but all of it MUST be invoiced by TOMORROW...to hell with whether or not the product ships before friggin' December - we've got to have it on the books NOW. So anyway, I walk in and there's a note on my chair: We've gotten together and 'discovered' enough money to pay for 42 flat panel monitors (including 3 for me and my staff) at $329 apiece. Well, great. That would be a fabulous thing, if I could get them for $329. Pomeroy has them at $352, but I'm not ordering anything else from them, EVER. So I check with CDW and get a bad case of sticker shock-itis. Best my boy there can do is $468. Now I'm on the phone, playing the vendor game, wherein I confront him with the fact his competitor is eating his lunch, but letting him know I don't want to order from them -
Well, here we are, boys and girls. Survived another weekend, back for another week of fun and frolic. Went to the pub Friday night, played darts, listened to Irish music, got drunk - not necessarily in that order. Cleaned house on Saturday, then saw Van Helsing , which I liked, Saturday night(Go see White Chicks . It's the absolute best comedy of the summer - I could not stop laughing). Sunday I went to church and choir practice, then spent some time in front of the ol' DVD player catching up on movies I somehow missed, like Good Will Hunting , followed by Dungeons and Dragons to clear my brain. I'm behind on my pleasure reading and my studying, but maybe I can get back on track tonight. Oh well. Break's over....
Friday. I need more coffee, but it's upsetting my stomach, so I'll sit here and drink a diet lime coke instead. I think I'm addicted to them. Nothing else tastes good anymore. It's a lovely, gray, rainy day, which suits my mood perfectly. I have a meeting to go to where things will undoubtedly escalate into a poo-flinging contest, but I have to go anyway. I would try not to say anything at this meeting, but my boss asked me for input about problems we're having with support from this other area, and lo and behold, my input became the agenda. I guess I'll get through it, but I don't have the heart for this kind of confrontation right now. I'll probably end up kow-towing to save face, since I don't want to break down in front of these guys. It's already been a stressful morning, since today's the last day to order stuff on this fiscal year's budget, and my boss came in at 5:30 last night needing two color laser printers and five laptops ord
Fortune cookie for the day, courtesy of iVillage.com:
In order to have great friends, you must first learn to be a great friend. Get yours at http://predictions.astrology.com/fc/ .
Writing fortune cookie sentiments must be great fun. I've seen some odd ones, and I once kept a collection of my favorites, but I threw them all out in a cathartic purge of my desk, with the exception of one that I left on my pencil holder: Idleness is the holiday of fools . It reminds me that in order to be a great employee, I must first learn to do more work, and less web-surfing. I usually keep it hidden so I don't have to think about it ;)
What does it take to be a great friend? What is love? What is the meaning of life (yes, I know the answer is 42, but why?!)? I think I'll spend the rest of the day pondering these and other imponderables while I catch up on my paymentnet logs.
Welcome to Wednesday. Wednesday has always been my least favorite day of the week at this job, because Wednesday is meeting day. At 10:00, I get to troop over to points north (it's a moveable feast, this meeting - you never know until Wednesday morning where the heck it's going to be held, and there's nothing like hiking all the way over there, only to discover you can't remember what the room number is this time) and sit with my co-workers, my compadres, and a couple of my worst enemies. The meeting used to take forever, but due to personnel changes, there are now days when it takes longer to walk over there than it takes for the meeting to be over with. Which just punctuates the fact that most of this, since it tends to be informational rather than conversational, could be packed up in an e-mail and sent to us, thereby saving us the trouble of blocking out an hour or so in the schedule. But just when I was starting to like the short format, management threw me a curve
It feels very much like Monday. I'm back at work, back for the first time since last Wednesday afternoon, when I left early to take Heather to the doctor. The cup of coffee left on my desk had dried out, turning into a 1/4 " thick sludge. I had been monitoring my e-mail, so at least there weren't 100 unread messages, but I'm still feeling very uncentered. I don't know what I should be doing. I can't find a routine, a groove, something repetitive enough to occupy my brain. Thinking is painful. I wish I could have just stayed in bed, but that's no good either. I have to make the effort. I have to at least act like I'm functioning well. The problem with grief is that it is cumulative - each new heartache brings back memories of old heartaches, so that everything seems to well up at once, even things long settled in the heart. They all come back anew to haunt the soul.
I have never liked funerals, but overall this one wasn't too bad. Nana looked so peaceful in her periwinkle dress. There were some shining moments I'm sure no other family has ever had at a funeral, but my family is a little different to say the least. My cousin Allen got there about 30 minutes before things started, accompanied by his friend from Chicago where Allen lives now, making a living drawing anime cartoons, of all things. Allen was dressed in a white shirt and black pants, but he's at least 6'5 and 350 pounds, and he still looks like an overgrown four-year-old to me. His friend is also tall, but looked like something that walked out of "Goth-r-Us" - long, lank hair (think Aragorn with an extra quart added for good measure), unshaven face, dark sunglasses, wearing a black shirt, black pants, God-awful huge black boots with straps and buckles everywhere, a dirty black Matrix-styled duster,and the piece-de-resistance, the yew walking staff with three pr
Elah Mae Cotham
Paris, TN
Age 87
Died Wednesday June 16. Services June 19 1 p.m. RIDGEWAY FUNERAL HOME Paris, TN
So states the obituary in the Tennessean; I sincerly hope the family will pay for a better on in the Paris Post Intelligencer. Nana deserves more than a four line blurb. Her life was far more important than that.
Around 11:00pm Wednesday night, my grandmother slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God (http://www.geocities.com/everwild7/highflight.html for the poem). Yesterday, the family planned the final arrangements, with my mother in absentia. She didn't feel like participating, and I don't blame her. I don't feel much like participating either, in that particular struggle or any other right now. I need a little time to collect my thoughts.
The doctor's changed his mind. He's decided to increase the level of antibiotics they're giving her. I don't know whether he has hope that she'll pull through or if he just did it to placate my aunt Sandra. Now I feel like a vulture because I want her misery ended, one way or the other. To me it seems pointless to prop her up with medication if there's no chance that it will improve her quality of life...
Still no phone call. I hate coming to work when all I feel like doing is sitting in the floor and crying. I feel like I should be there, with Nana, helping Momma, but I can't see my way clear to do that with all these other obligations. Heather has to be delivered to summer school each day by 7:45, so I can't sleep late and I can't go traipsing off to Henry County Medical Center. Miranda has to have her daily chat, and Stephen has to beg for money to stave off starvation while he's in Atlanta. I have bills to pay with money I don't have. I'm so frustrated and so tired...I guess I'm feeling guilty with a side order of feeling sorry for myself because my sister did take off work yesterday and did go sit with Momma and Nana. She tells me they think Nana had a stroke, but it's hard to tell and they won't put her through a CAT scan to see if there's any blockage. We just have to wait. And so we wait.
Against all odds, Nana's still holding on. They have her in a regular room, sedated with morphine, and they've said that today they'll remove the feeding tube. It's only a matter of time now, I guess. At least she's not in pain. I didn't go see her. Maybe I should have, but we visited on Mother's Day, and that's how I want to remember her. I've seen the tubes and the drug-dulled eyes before - I don't want to see her that way now. Perhaps that's selfish of me, but death with dignity ought to be free of the parade of people who circle like so many vultures. Besides, Momma will need me more afterwards than she does right now. So instead of making the trip, I spent the weekend in mindless movie watching interrupted by the occasional chapter of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to try to keep my mind off things. We watched everthing from Robin Hood Men in Tights to LA Confidential , with a side order of Tomb Raider and Kill Bill . So now
Now I'm in limbo. My mother told me last night that Nana had a relapse and that the medical staff truly felt there was nothing else they could do. I made her promise to call me as soon as she heard something. No call. I call my sister - she hasn't heard anything, but she has the waiting room phone number. The waiting room has been a week-long wake/redneck party that Momma hates to have to witness, but there's been a steady stream of family camped out in there since Nana was readmitted. Today no one answers the phone in the waiting room. Thanks to HIPAA, I can't call the hospital and get her status, because there's no way to prove who I am over the phone, since I don't have the secret numeric code which will let the front desk know that I'm a family member. I cancelled a trip to visit my son in Atlanta because I don't know what's going on. And the phone in the waiting room just keeps ringing...
Today and tomorrow I get the dubious honor of attending Microsoft security training with my fellow LAN Managers. Should be a hoot ;) We're all in fine form these days, now that we know we are actually going to get raises, and we have an idea of how much. Most, like me, have probably already calculated to the penny how much more we can expect in the old pay-snub, and how close we are to being thrown into the next tax bracket. You know, it's hard to be a democrat and have money too...
Another day in Paradise...
Still no word on my grandmother. But I hit the ground running this morning, boy-o. I didn't even get my first cup of coffee before I had to help someone get into their e-mail after the mail team moved the mailbox, then I had a dead power supply to contend with. It's only a little after 9:00 and I've already done brain surgery on a PC. The operation was a success, the user is happily pounding away on her keyboard, and I'm exhausted. I've also gotten a call from my boss telling me I've been volunteered to work on yet another project. I take it as a compliment, but it mostly means more meetings to attend. If one's importance is gauged by the number of meetings one must attend, then I'm moving up in the world. I love my job; my work is my livelihood...
They say no news is good news, and maybe they're right. But just the occasional update would be comforting. Silence can be devastating - left to its own devices, the mind can dream up some terrifying scenarios which have no basis in fact, yet are just as real to the thinker as the memory of what he had for breakfast. It's probably this capacity to believe the imagined to be true that makes horror stories such a delight to read... but I digress. It is so hard to stay focused when your heart just isn't in what you're doing.
My grandmother is dying. I realize that's not so unusual, because we all die eventually. I also realize she's had a good life, at least in terms of how many years she has lived. She is 83 or 85 - we're a little uncertain because she lied about her age on some official form early on, and now no one knows for sure.
She married too young to a hard-drinking man, had five little stair-step babies during the depression when no one had the proverbial pot to piss in. The oldest daughter went blind early; the second-oldest daughter, my mother, became the de facto mother for the remaining three. My uncle was born next, followed by an aunt who was so premature that she shouldn't have lived but somehow managed to, and then another aunt, who, true to baby-of-the-family expectations, has been wild most of her life. They were all wild, really, with the exception of my mother, who somehow rose above all the chaos to be the only one to graduate from high school.
My grandmother is