Saturday, August 25, 2007

School daze

School starts tomorrow at my university. I was not supposed to teach this semester, but I am “helping” two other people learn the software that runs our on line class. So, I am sort of teaching, but without the responsibility for grades and reviewing papers and such.

Speaking of school, Max started kindergarten last Wednesday. Things went pretty well, though he did have one problem when he got confused and followed someone into girls’ lavatory. To prevent such a thing from happening again, he made a map for himself to take him to the boys’ room next time. This was not just a pencil line on a piece of scratch paper, I’ll have you know. He used different colors of construction paper to do it. Earlier this month, his mom had taken him to an open house at this school. It is a charter school that is very well run, fortunately (not all of them are). While mom talked to the woman who would later be Max’s teacher, Max walked over to a globe and started naming countries. The woman said, “I want him in my class!”

Our friend Karen, who was struck by a car back on August 13, is still in the hospital. She has four hours of physical therapy every day, and is on the brain injury floor now. They give her arithmetic tests and such and she finishes them quickly and hands them back to the therapists. They are pleased with her progress. Her hair is gone, though, shaved because of the brain surgery. She says she doesn’t care about that anymore. I was surprised to get a phone call from her tonight. She called to yell at me for cutting her grass. I knew she would be concerned about that, so I just went over and took care of it. Just in case, I let her son know so he didn’t come all the way over for nothing. She gave them orders to do it from now on. I am kind of relieved, since she has a much bigger yard than we do.

We had an office picnic last Friday. Only about half of the people from our office made it, so there were eleven of us. We drove out to a spot on the lakeshore about 75 miles away. Two women in our office each have double wide trailers out there. You’d never know they were trailers, since they look like small houses. Each one was beautifully furnished, with big decks outside, each one right on the water. We had a great afternoon, cooking on the grill, playing pool, yakking. We started off outside, but the 95 degree humidity drove us inside after a while. One of these women (who works part time) always opens her paycheck in front of me and complains that she’s only working for health insurance benefits. She owns a profitable dry cleaning business, three rental apartments and has this second home on the lake. I should be so poor.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Good news-Sad news

In the good news department, my friend Karen is out of intensive care and in a room on the floor. Turns out she had a fractured skull in addition to the broken tibia. She was starting to sound like her old self, though, when I called her on Friday. She was complaining that her hair was all sticky-uppy. She had asked the nurses if she could put some water on it or something to smooth it down, but they said no, she had too many stitches back there.

She must be feeling better if she is worrying about things like that.

As we talked, she told me the story of how she wound up in the hospital, but she had the day wrong. She told me it happened on Tuesday and of course it was Monday. So, she is a little scrambled, but that’s OK. It sounds like she will come back from all this.

More good news: my friend Bob who rolled past me on the sidewalk on a gurney bound for the hospital on Tuesday is doing fine. He was chafing at being in the hospital, since the last time he had that experience was when he was born. They ran all sorts of tests on him and discovered he had two blocked arteries. He now has stents holding them open, so he will be OK too.

The remarkable thing is that the ER nurse who happened to be in church when he fainted saved his life by insisting that he wait for the ambulance. You see, Bob officiates at high school football games. He would have been dead within a week or two of a massive heart attack , running up and down the field, if he hadn’t been treated so quickly.

The sad news is that our son’s divorce papers arrived this week. He let us read them, and they include phrases like, “the parties will go their own way, without encumbrance “ and live separate lives. He has been looking forward to this for over a year, so he is pleased. To us, though, it just seems so …desolate.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Two friends, two ambulances

We had a meeting of our church group on Monday evening. We had a pretty good turnout, though it was beautiful outside. After the meeting a group of us stood in the parking lot talking, and another member came up and told us that Karen had been hit by a car.

Karen is small, with red hair cut short, looks like a kid as she walks all over town, getting her exercise. She is forty-something, with three grown children. She is very active at church, involved in several groups with me and others. She’s kind of quiet but pitches in whenever we need help.

We got to the intersection just as the paramedics were loading her into the ambulance. We hung around for a while to get the story: A woman driver had struck Karen as she crossed with the Walk sign. The driver did stop, call 911 and then she took off. Two teenagers followed her to her home and told the police where to find her.

Two women from our group and I decided to follow the ambulance to the ER. They took her to a hospital a little further away from the scene, but one with a better trauma unit than the neighborhood hospital. We waited for about an hour an a half—not bad for ER time—and the social worker came out, met us, then checked with Karen. She returned to tell us that Karen knew we were there and had given her permission to inform us about her condition. She had an open fracture of the tibia and bleeding into her brain.

They were taking her to surgery when her son and daughter-in-law arrived. They have only been married a month, and suffered the loss of Karen’s mom three weeks ago, so the son was pretty upset.

Today, two days after the accident, Karen is out of intensive care and in a room on the floor. Praise God for that.

Tuesday afternoon, the very next day after seeing Karen loaded into an ambulance, I was walking the dog past the church and here comes another friend from our group, Bob, being rolled down the sidewalk and into a waiting unit. He had fainted in church and an ER nurse I know (how sad that I actually know these people on a first name basis) watched over him until the paramedics arrived.

I spoke to him tonight, and he is still in the hospital for tests. He is one of those people who has never been in the hospital, and so is chafing to be released.

After they took Bob away, I walked through that same intersection where Karen was hit. Her blood still stained the asphalt, pooled in the little cracks in the road.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

What a week I'm having

If you looked at a weather map of our area earlier this week you would have seen a big red blob over the city, as we had torrential rains for several days. It seemed like we were getting a whole summer's worth of rain in that short time. It hardly rained at all for the past two months and then wham! we got it.

Our basement had not flooded for seven years, but we did not escape this time. It happened after we had left for work, so the water had time to go back down the drain, but it was evident that we had had seven inches of water down there. Most of our stuff has been up on cinder blocks for years, but I did get lazy and leave a few things on the floor, so they got soaked and then thrown out.

The victims? An ancient suitcase full of dance costumes from Kathy's youth was the most important item washed away in the flood. Some files from my book writing, and some old bank statements I'd been meaning to shred. Not too much else really.

This time we had the air conditioning running, so the mopping up was not the sweaty, sticky job it used to be, though I was pretty tired after a couple of hours chasing puddles around the cellar. It just irks me that this happened again. A real estate agent told us that if it's been longer than seven years, we don't have to report it during a sale. I was hoping to keep it dry down there in the event we do sell this house some day. I don't know what the rule was in 1980 when we bought the place, but certainly no one ever mentioned that little detail about the basement's proclivity for flooding to us! It also kills me that the neighbors on either side never have this problem.

This Saturday afternoon Kodiak and I went for a walk around the block a little earlier than usual. Some kids on the next block were running up and down the sidewalk, but stopped when they saw the dog. “Can we pet her?” “Yes, but he’s a him.” There were two boys probably 3 and 4, and girl about 4 or 5. The girl said, “OK, you can go on your walk. We don’t need to pet him that much.” So we went on our way and she called, “Are you going around the block?” “Yes.” “Are you going around twice?” “No.” Guess they still wanted to pet Kodiak.

After the dog walking was done, I went off to 4:30 p.m. Mass, where I wound up lighting the candles, proclaiming the readings and then served as a Eucharistic Minister. After Mass, one woman came up to me and said, “I love it when you have the readings. I want you to read at my funeral. I’ll give you a call!”

Kathy’s sister and her husband came over tonight so she could use our computer to fill out an on line application. When she was done, we ordered takeout from Ruby Tuesday and wolfed down some great food. Well, OK, we were starved, but still, their food is pretty good.

We have someone leaving work and moving out of the state. She has been with us for nine years, running a reading tutoring program. Her supervisor decided we needed to do a “This Is Your Life” video for her. Guess who wound up with the project? Her friend gave me 55 photos and I scanned them all, edited them all and popped them into a Powerpoint over this weekend. I”ll play Pachebel’s Canon over the slides and voilá—a video presentation is born. Hope it works on the big day.

Oh darn, I just realized that I left a thick pile of papers I have to read for work on my desk downtown. Guess I'll have to do something else with my Sunday.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

Cool kid, cool house

This past week was the annual conference for my professional organization. We had some terrific workshops, great food and lots of fun, once we were finished with the executive board meetings. I am the treasurer now, for the next two years. We had a two hour conference call about the budget, and that was where I finally learned how things work. Then, at the conference, we spent four hours on Sunday afternoon poring over the same budget, wrangling over the thing line by line.

I was able to catch up with my friends around the Midwest and get all their family news. My friend from Missouri has a son in Afghanistan now, so she is upset about that. Other friends are having babies or having babies graduating from college. There were lots of new members at this conference, so I was able to convince some of them to get involved in the organization.

My plane was not leaving until 8:00 p.m. from Indianapolis to O’Hare, which meant I would not be home until after 11:00 p.m., so I tried going standby on some earlier flights. I had not done that since about 1969, when I was flying from Columbus to New York and wound up spending the night in the Columbus airport. This time, though, I was able to get the last seat on the two legs of my trip and got home at 5:00 p.m., about seven hours earlier than I was originally scheduled!

While I sitting at O’Hare, this Indian guy sat down next to me and asked me what the area code was for California. He had just arrived in this country for the first time and he wanted to call his brother to let him know he was OK. There are many area codes in California, so I asked him which city he needed. San Jose. So I called information on my cell phone and got it for him. Then he told me that he was in a masters program for computer science and that was why he came to the United States. Turns out he starts school at my university in a few weeks! We spend the rest of the next hour talking about the town and the school and things he would need to do, and what he could expect. He promised to come to my office with sweet treats from India. What a great thing to have happen---meeting a student fresh from India like that.

Last week a friend of ours called to tell us that she had seen our grandson's name in the weekly paper, and sure enough, he and the rest of his T-ball team were listed in the sports section. So he ran around saying, “Look! I’m famous! I’m as famous as Harry Potter!” So now we have a celebrity in our midst. We went out to Kathy's sister's house for some swimming on Saturday morning. While we were there, her husband brought out a robot that grandson Max used to be afraid of. He was still a little leery, but gradually got braver and learned how to work the robot’s remote control. At one point he took some paper towels and dusted the thing off. Then he kept on dusting the living room, the balustrade of the staircase going to the second floor, lamps, tables, everything, remarking that he was for hire, in case she needed more work done.

It was hot and humid here the whole week I was gone, and the air conditioner was not working. Poor Kodiak was panting away in his own house, and usually he is OK. We had the same problem as last season with water leaking out of the ducts and onto the control panel. I had to shut it off the night before I left. Kathy didn’t want the repairman around if I wasn’t going to be here, so we waited until Friday to have the guy come out. He had it running inside of fifteen minutes and even showed me how to fix it if it happens again. I guess we saved a lot of money by not running it all week, but then it ran for eleven straight hours to cool the house on Friday. It sure is nice in here now.