Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Pastiche - Or - The Sticky Sweet Smell of ... Dog????

Well, many thoughts.

I saw Nancy on Monday, in Trumansberg NY. Too wonderful! It had been 2 years since I saw her face in person, great to hang out. She took me into Ithaca, and I will go back. Fun, funky town and I had not been for some years. On the way, we stopped in Taughannock Falls - and I have this pic as proof!



She and I talked about life in California, her business (FullCalendar.com), our elderly parents. She said something that resonated with me - her parents think she's the same age and capability as them. So does my Dad! He'll say to me "Carole, I don't want you to have to walk that long hallway, so I'll meet you at the door." and I'm like, Dude! I walk 5 miles a day!!! (unfortunate lapse into ValleySpeak, but it illustrates the point.)He thinks I have the same (severely deteriorated) capabilities that he does. So Nancy's story tells me that this is an 'old parent' think, not just an old person thing. Note to Self.

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So I'm going to move up the schedule on replacing the flooring on the ground floor of the house. I want to Greg & Andreas' over the weekend, to help with getting ready to bring Mom there (!!!) and also to borrow the carpet cleaner. I was sure that the last time my carpet was cleaned (by Greg, yay for brothers!) that he didn't rinse and I was smelling carpet shampoo. Well, they had just done a rug in their house, and the smell of the shampoo was not the same. Hmmm. Greg said, "That sticky sweet smell? That's dog pee!" EEEUW!!! I had lived with a dog, long ago, but she didn't pee in the house. So I shampooed and rinsed twice and the smell is still there. That's it, the floors are getting redone. I had wanted to wait until I had earned some income this life but I can't even eat in my dining room as the smell is rising with the warming weather.

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Another fun thing I did this weekend was fight with Microsoft Works, Word and Excel. Andrea is the secretary for the Grandview Heights neighborhood association, and she is trying to get the newsletter out (while getting ready to move Mom into her house !!!) So I was trying to get old excel files to do a mail merge to print labels out. She's only got MS Works, and it didn't. So I ran back home, got my laptop, ran back to her place and set it up. Converted the names file into excel and finally figured out the mail merge. Had to install her printer drivers, and it brought my laptop to its knees three times. Needed a hard reset to get going again. But finally, we have labels. And I need to get a desktop machine. I want an OSX Mac. Again, was wanting to wait for income before I splashed out for the new computer. Oh well.

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At least I have been having lots of fun pushing metal around in the gym. That, plus Yoga plus the crazy busy days have led to my new jeans purchase. My Lucky jeans, size 10, were from before I went to Germany. A bit large so I went to replace them a couple weeks ago. Lord & Taylor in Eastview Mall carries that brand and I got a replacement. Here I am, wearing my size FOUR Lucky Jeans!!! Whoo hoo!!


Monday, April 16, 2007

Still winter in Rochester

But we are getting a break - there is a bit of slush in places but we have had no significant accumulation from this big storm. Good - because I am NOT shoveling snow again this year!

I am starting to find more things to do here. I have a lot of energy to get out of the house. I went to Happy Hour on Friday, and the Opera on Saturday - there's a world-class music school here, the Eastman School of Music. They put on Bellini's 'Capuleti e i Montecci', his Romeo & Juliette story. Beautifully staged, wonderfully sung. But I left at intermission. All the repetitive declaiming - She sings: O Romeo! My father will kill you! while Romeo sings: Oh Guiletta! I love you! Come with me! while her father sings: O Tybaldo! marry Guiletta and be my son! while Tybalt sings: Today I will marry Guiletta! Hah! death to Romeo! over and over and over. So when I am bored out of my mind and about to lapse into helpless giggles over the tedious earnestness of it all, it's time to leave.

I had a dinner guest on Sunday – my first non-family member. I met Bo in Munich, he’s Cita’s husband, I met her though the Ladies International Association. She was on the trip to France in the fall.

Well, the company that Bo works for in Munich has an office here in Rochester, and he was here for work, for the first time, this past week and next. We hooked up on the phone Sunday, after I was at a morning Yoga class. I said I’m drive downtown, where he was staying, to meet for dinner or he could come to my place and I’d make dinner here. He said yes, he’d come to my place. Yikes!!! it was about 1:15 p.m. I scrambled into the shower and zoomed to Wegmans to gather ingredients. I didn’t even stop to make a list. I was concentrating so fiercely on what I needed to get that I didn’t really see if there were other people in the store. I hope I wasn’t frowning! I was in & out in 30 minutes, back home by 3 to get dinner together by 5, when Bo was due. Well, as Rachel Ray says, I took a little help from the store. I made a great salad and chicken pot pie. Bought a chocolate cake. Thank goodness I had vacuumed the house the day before, and it was pretty well picked up.

Bo arrived and we had a great evening. It was so good to see him and absolutely wonderful to have a visceral reminder that yes, I did live in Munich. I had lost the sense of that recently. I am finding my center again as it’s been tossed about by all the change in my life. Not to mention proximity and almost daily contact with parents. Into my email box recently dropped this wonderful quote: “If you think you are spiritual and enlightened … go spend a week with your parents!” by Ram Dass. Ah yes. And I am getting much better and more patient with Dad. He’s mentally declining too, in part due to the Vicodin he’s taking for joint pain. Mom, she’s not even coherent anymore so it’s very easy for me to sit with her.

With the parents situation right now, I need to keep my schedule open, so no JOB. I will start looking for clients and smaller projects that I can do from home, so that I can keep driving Dad around as necessary, and helping Andrea with Mom. Oh, yes, here’s the latest plan: We're bringing Mom to Greg & Andrea's house on April 30th. It's just too much money for the care she gets - no meds, just feeding, changing, cleaning. Andrea would rather be getting paid for that than writing a $9K check each month to the nursing home. I will help out, of course. I'll relieve Andrea so she can do her life stuff, and I'll get Gavin out of the house for fun.

And I'll keep building my new life.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Small victories

I had not been working on the house much, but got galvanized last week to tidy up and resume painting. I have painted the upstairs bathroom, ceiling included, and replaced the lights that were there. The previous lights were a non-delightful pitted cheap brass. So went to Home Depot, got lights, a replacement vent fan for the bathroom to replace the one that sounds like a jet engine, an outside door to replace the one that is sticking/rusting and ripping apart, a set of plastic shelving to replace the wooden ones in the garage in the way of the door replacement (so they'll have to come down) and *poof!* another $500 transferred from my care to theirs. Amazing how quickly that happens.

I have been haunting the local Freecycle, but always seem to be too late to get an item that's offered. Oh well, garage sale season will soon be upon us. I have also been scoring some great clothes at the local Goodwill, I needed jeans and they had 'em!

I did have my sister-in-laws clan over after Easter brunch. 15 people in the house - I don't know how we all fit, but we did. It was great to see. It SNOWED that morning, so we were all inside. Greg had brought over some plastic chairs; good thing or we'd have been sitting on the floor. There are a couple little nieces, and they found it great fun to run around and around with Gavin chasing and/or hiding from them. Miraculously, no one got hurt.

I have been busy and getting busier. Not sure how that's happening, but some of it is the great Yoga classes. The gym I joined started offering 5 Yoga classes a week on March 12th, and I have been to most of them. Plus I'm doing weight training. Gotta keep up the body that Mike built. I'm skimping on the cardio a bit, hoping I can get out on a bicycle soon.

Time to get to the gym and push some metal around!

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Things looking up

Even though winter has returned - 26 degrees overnight, with a dusting of snow plus short snow squalls today - I am starting to feel better about being here. last night, at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) I attended a lecture entitled "Life is a Gnarly Computation". Who wouldn't attend with a title like that? How cool! The speaker was Rudy Rucker, a math professor and cyberpunk author, currently teaching at San Jose State! Doh! never saw him in the Bay area. The talk was great, and I am still puzzling over the concept of deterministic yet unpredictable computations. More at Rudys blog.

I have also met a couple of chums to go out with, have been to some local clubs both with them and by myself. The trick of getting to know the bouncers/doormen is time-tested, still working. It makes me comfortable in a club if I know someone knows me and I can go chat with them if I want. Plus, it turns out that a 'hello' from one, passed on to another can get the passer of the greeting into a club for free!

As winter is back, and I've been motivated by the liklihood of my brother's in-laws coming over to see the place after easter brunch, I have been working on the house again. I'm currently in between coats of ceiling paint in the second floor bathroom.

Here are a few before pics of the house:

Kitchen into Dining Room Before



Dining Room Before


Dining Room Before



Dining room into Kitchen





Don't have a saw? Use a drill!!



The view from my "office". Only the carpet has changed. I'm ignoring the American Football theme for now.