December 30, 2008
We Have PHONES!
This morning, the electrician came as promised and restored the electric box to its rightful place on the side of the house. Not without issues - it was windy as hell today. At one point the ladder was up against the house and the two guys doing the work were down on the ground when the wind took the ladder and blew it over! I think we'll have some broken bushes, but at least it didn't go through a window or something like that.
Since I knew this was the only thing holding back the phone work, I headed out to use my cell and call the phone company. Truly I didn't expect to see them before Friday - after all it's the holidays. The woman I talked to told me she would try to get someone out ASAP and not make us wait, but I wasn't given a time.
They showed up tonight at 8pm!!! It was really dark out there.
It took them about 1 hour and 45 minutes and lots of work on the lift, and my phones are back.
I must give kudos to Verizon for getting out here and getting the job done so quickly. I am amazed.
Since I knew this was the only thing holding back the phone work, I headed out to use my cell and call the phone company. Truly I didn't expect to see them before Friday - after all it's the holidays. The woman I talked to told me she would try to get someone out ASAP and not make us wait, but I wasn't given a time.
They showed up tonight at 8pm!!! It was really dark out there.
It took them about 1 hour and 45 minutes and lots of work on the lift, and my phones are back.
I must give kudos to Verizon for getting out here and getting the job done so quickly. I am amazed.
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December 29, 2008
Lines
The electric company guys were here today to put the lines back up on the house.
Yay!
Took them about 45 minutes.
Tomorrow the electrician comes to put the box back up. After that I can call the phone company and get my phone lines back.
Life shall then return to its normal state of chaos.
Whew.
Yay!
Took them about 45 minutes.
Tomorrow the electrician comes to put the box back up. After that I can call the phone company and get my phone lines back.
Life shall then return to its normal state of chaos.
Whew.
Posted by: Teresa in
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December 28, 2008
Baby Cakes
Yesterday Sissy and Tuck's beloved kitty, Baby Cakes, slipped away from this world on soft kitty feet.
I have tried, without success, to think of some comforting words for them. Unfortunately, I am not finding any.
The most difficult thing we face with pets is the fact that their stay with us will be so very short. With Baby, the loss was sudden and very unexpected.
I had met Baby on several occasions. A lovely kitty, most regal. He even favored me with a stroll across my lap once. I will always remember him fondly. May he be happily catching many mice and cavorting with all of our dearly loved pets that have gone before.
I have tried, without success, to think of some comforting words for them. Unfortunately, I am not finding any.
The most difficult thing we face with pets is the fact that their stay with us will be so very short. With Baby, the loss was sudden and very unexpected.
I had met Baby on several occasions. A lovely kitty, most regal. He even favored me with a stroll across my lap once. I will always remember him fondly. May he be happily catching many mice and cavorting with all of our dearly loved pets that have gone before.
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December 11, 2008
The Patriot Guard
In my last post I talked about the woman who has been my sister's friend for so many years and helped us so much over the last few days. Well, you probably will not be surprised to learn, she is also a Patriot Guard Rider. Actually, both she and her husband.
One of the first things she did was get in touch with the Guard and arrange for them to be at the funeral home and to ride escort for the funeral.
On visitation night, they arrived at 4pm and set up an Honor Guard. They stood outside in all that freezing rain and wind for 4 hours! This is all on their own time!!!
The next day, they arrived to serve as pallbearers and escort us to the church then down to Jefferson Barracks Military Cemetery.
They did a wonderful job and I was able to take a moment to say thank you to them - but it will never be enough. When I tried to thank them, every one of them said it was their honor to do this.
How does one sufficiently thank them for doing this service? I can't begin to think how.
Also at the cemetery were volunteers from the VFW to perform the salute. With the Patriot Guard, the VFW, and the 2 young men performing the flag ceremony - it was such a wonderful thing to see.
All of these volunteers perform this service when requested, often several times a week. For those like my father, for homeless vets, those we lose on active duty, it doesn't matter. Their dedication is astounding and I am not able to describe how honored this family was by their actions.
I wish I had better words, but they escape me.
Once again - I want to thank them publicly for doing something so wonderful.
One of the first things she did was get in touch with the Guard and arrange for them to be at the funeral home and to ride escort for the funeral.
On visitation night, they arrived at 4pm and set up an Honor Guard. They stood outside in all that freezing rain and wind for 4 hours! This is all on their own time!!!
The next day, they arrived to serve as pallbearers and escort us to the church then down to Jefferson Barracks Military Cemetery.
They did a wonderful job and I was able to take a moment to say thank you to them - but it will never be enough. When I tried to thank them, every one of them said it was their honor to do this.
How does one sufficiently thank them for doing this service? I can't begin to think how.
Also at the cemetery were volunteers from the VFW to perform the salute. With the Patriot Guard, the VFW, and the 2 young men performing the flag ceremony - it was such a wonderful thing to see.
All of these volunteers perform this service when requested, often several times a week. For those like my father, for homeless vets, those we lose on active duty, it doesn't matter. Their dedication is astounding and I am not able to describe how honored this family was by their actions.
I wish I had better words, but they escape me.
Once again - I want to thank them publicly for doing something so wonderful.
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We're Back
Haven't had much time the last couple of days. Visitation day, even though it generally brings many people who you want to see, is very long indeed.
Some of the cousins, aunts and uncles I haven't seen for well over 20 years. A couple of guys stopped in who had worked with my father 45+ years ago!
But it was basically a pretty small group because he had lost touch with just about everyone over the last 10 years.
Visitation night was dreadful weather too. It was cold, raining/sleeting and just downright bad. I was prepared to see almost no one - yet some of my mothers relatives came all the way over from Southern Illinois. Many of my sister's friends from work, one of my husband's friends, and several neighbors made it over. It was nice because it would have been pretty bad sitting around talking to ourselves. (one has visions of knock down drag out fights because there's nothing else to do...)
I have a special post with regard to the Patriot Guard. They were spectacular and deserve separate recognition.
Another person who deserves recognition is a woman who has been a friend of the sister who lives with my parents since first grade. This woman has done so much for my parents and to keep my sister on track, especially over the last few days... I begin to wonder if I can petition the Pope to make her a saint. All of this is in the face of an irrational dislike my mother has developed (no one knows why - but I put it down to progressing dementia). I don't know if half the stuff would have gotten done without G's active help.
The day of the funeral was cold and windy, but sunny. It was also a small funeral, but very nice.
And so, he's sitting on Fiddler's Green drinking with all his old buddies. I would say I will miss him, but in reality, I miss the man from over 10 years ago, before his health started to deteriorate so badly and his deafness made it so very difficult to communicate. I know he's at peace now and that's what counts.
Some of the cousins, aunts and uncles I haven't seen for well over 20 years. A couple of guys stopped in who had worked with my father 45+ years ago!
But it was basically a pretty small group because he had lost touch with just about everyone over the last 10 years.
Visitation night was dreadful weather too. It was cold, raining/sleeting and just downright bad. I was prepared to see almost no one - yet some of my mothers relatives came all the way over from Southern Illinois. Many of my sister's friends from work, one of my husband's friends, and several neighbors made it over. It was nice because it would have been pretty bad sitting around talking to ourselves. (one has visions of knock down drag out fights because there's nothing else to do...)
I have a special post with regard to the Patriot Guard. They were spectacular and deserve separate recognition.
Another person who deserves recognition is a woman who has been a friend of the sister who lives with my parents since first grade. This woman has done so much for my parents and to keep my sister on track, especially over the last few days... I begin to wonder if I can petition the Pope to make her a saint. All of this is in the face of an irrational dislike my mother has developed (no one knows why - but I put it down to progressing dementia). I don't know if half the stuff would have gotten done without G's active help.
The day of the funeral was cold and windy, but sunny. It was also a small funeral, but very nice.
And so, he's sitting on Fiddler's Green drinking with all his old buddies. I would say I will miss him, but in reality, I miss the man from over 10 years ago, before his health started to deteriorate so badly and his deafness made it so very difficult to communicate. I know he's at peace now and that's what counts.
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December 08, 2008
So Far...so far
After only a minimal (by my travel standards half an hour is nothing at all) delay, we arrived in Chicago yesterday late afternoon, rented a car, and drove down to the St. Louis area. Only a leetle bit of snow along the way. Otherwise it was uneventful.
Luckily my sister from New York arrived today. My mother and sister who live here are... let's just say it's a tad difficult to deal with them. And let's just say I've got a gift for understatement of the century. (don't worry neither of them are online so they won't be reading this).
My mom has absolutely no short term memory left. So she asks the same questions every 5 minutes. And once she gets hold of some idea - she keeps asking about it until you want to scream. One of the biggies tonight was dinner. She started asking us about it at 3:30pm... after a huge effort, we finally managed to distract her until 6pm and then took her out to dinner. But it was headbangingly bad.
The other major meltdown point was when my sister had all kinds of pictures out on the dining room table. My mother was insisting that they needed to be put away (or there would be no place to eat dinner!). Soooo... we had to go pick up my other sister who was flying in from NYC... For some reason, the first sister had this ridiculous idea in her head that all she had to do was tell my mom to leave the pictures alone... you would think she hadn't been living there for the past 15 years. heh.
The woman who doesn't remember ANYTHING for more than 5 minutes. She is going to remember to leave the pictures alone while we're gone... sure. Okay. Right.
While we were gone to the airport - my mom took ALL the pictures and "put them away". When we got back they were nowhere to be seen. When we tried to find out what she did with them, we got various responses from "your sister is not going to be happy, I cleaned up the table" to "well, I don't know where they are, your father has too much stuff in this house"... *sigh*
It took a while, but we found the 3 places she managed to stash the various pictures. Now they are on a different table - so she isn't worried that there will be nowhere to sit down and have dinner.
In the meantime, the sister who lives with her is about to have a major meltdown. I wonder why she expects rational behavior from someone who is clearly beyond this. Whatever my mom is talking about is CLEARLY something that needs to be taken into account. Just telling her "don't" is not gonna be effective. I have no idea why this is hard for her to comprehend, but there it is.
I used to work in nursing homes so I have dealt with this before. Often. The big difference is that at the end of 8 hours you get to go home from the Nursing home. It's really enough to make one take to the bottle. Sadly this may be where I'm eventually headed. So be prepared. Heh.
Tomorrow is the visitation, and Wednesday is the funeral. My sister who lives in the area is best friends with one of the Patriot Guard riders - so one thing she was able to easily set up was a Patriot Guard escort which I think is a wonderful thing.
Now, after a couple glasses of wine, I'm ready to take out my contacts, climb into the bed and watch the end of the Monday night football game with my husband. It's very odd to be in the Central time zone again where the game actually ends at a reasonable human time.
Luckily my sister from New York arrived today. My mother and sister who live here are... let's just say it's a tad difficult to deal with them. And let's just say I've got a gift for understatement of the century. (don't worry neither of them are online so they won't be reading this).
My mom has absolutely no short term memory left. So she asks the same questions every 5 minutes. And once she gets hold of some idea - she keeps asking about it until you want to scream. One of the biggies tonight was dinner. She started asking us about it at 3:30pm... after a huge effort, we finally managed to distract her until 6pm and then took her out to dinner. But it was headbangingly bad.
The other major meltdown point was when my sister had all kinds of pictures out on the dining room table. My mother was insisting that they needed to be put away (or there would be no place to eat dinner!). Soooo... we had to go pick up my other sister who was flying in from NYC... For some reason, the first sister had this ridiculous idea in her head that all she had to do was tell my mom to leave the pictures alone... you would think she hadn't been living there for the past 15 years. heh.
The woman who doesn't remember ANYTHING for more than 5 minutes. She is going to remember to leave the pictures alone while we're gone... sure. Okay. Right.
While we were gone to the airport - my mom took ALL the pictures and "put them away". When we got back they were nowhere to be seen. When we tried to find out what she did with them, we got various responses from "your sister is not going to be happy, I cleaned up the table" to "well, I don't know where they are, your father has too much stuff in this house"... *sigh*
It took a while, but we found the 3 places she managed to stash the various pictures. Now they are on a different table - so she isn't worried that there will be nowhere to sit down and have dinner.
In the meantime, the sister who lives with her is about to have a major meltdown. I wonder why she expects rational behavior from someone who is clearly beyond this. Whatever my mom is talking about is CLEARLY something that needs to be taken into account. Just telling her "don't" is not gonna be effective. I have no idea why this is hard for her to comprehend, but there it is.
I used to work in nursing homes so I have dealt with this before. Often. The big difference is that at the end of 8 hours you get to go home from the Nursing home. It's really enough to make one take to the bottle. Sadly this may be where I'm eventually headed. So be prepared. Heh.
Tomorrow is the visitation, and Wednesday is the funeral. My sister who lives in the area is best friends with one of the Patriot Guard riders - so one thing she was able to easily set up was a Patriot Guard escort which I think is a wonderful thing.
Now, after a couple glasses of wine, I'm ready to take out my contacts, climb into the bed and watch the end of the Monday night football game with my husband. It's very odd to be in the Central time zone again where the game actually ends at a reasonable human time.
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December 05, 2008
My Dad
My father passed away this morning. As you may know if you have read my blog for any length of time, he's been steadily going downhill for a while now. Well, the pneumonia he recently developed was a little too much for him to overcome.
The last 15 years or so have been tough on him. He went deaf and with that deafness, he lost his ability to communicate easily. It rather cuts you off from people and he refused to use any of the available aids to make things better. One thinks it was with the idea that... if I don't acknowledge there is a problem, it will eventually clear up and all will be well again.
It would be like him.
He was a happy go lucky Irishman. He grew up in a large Irish Catholic family. He was one of the youngest of eleven children. His father (who had a decent railroad job) died of pneumonia when my father was 10. After that, the family struggled along - it was the middle of the depression. I never did know all the details, he never talked about it. For that matter he seldom talked about the past. For him, it was always better to look to the future. Times could always get better.
He was a veteran of WW2 - Army Air Force. It was only recently I heard some of what he really did during the war.
All he'd tell us when we were growing up was that he worked on "radar" and that he and a buddy got busted down to private when they decided to go AWOL, hop a plane and check out the party in Paris after the liberation. heh.
He told my youngest sister that he had been part of the aircrew on one of the larger airplanes, she didn't recall which one. It crash landed somewhere and they had to destroy the remains for security purposes, but they got back to base. He decided then that maybe flying wasn't for him and moved over to the MP's. It was safer to ferry around the payroll than fly.
He loved people though and having a good time was high on his list of things to do every day. After the war he married my mom and was a cop for a few years, but he got on someone's bad side... thus ending up having a Molotov cocktail being thrown through the window of their apartment. My mother still has a bookcase that has burn marks on it.
Deciding that maybe this wasn't the job for him, he went to work at Western Electric - they sent him to school for a couple of years. He worked for them for the rest of his career - going through various jobs as it was a large company. He didn't like company politics, but at least he didn't have people trying to burn his house down.
He was involved in so many different clubs over the years it's almost hard to keep track. As I said, he loved people, so he did things to keep busy and have lots of interaction.
He was a Toastmaster and has several speaking trophies. He was a member of the Eagles club which was a shooting club back in 1960's Chicago suburbs. I remember him taking the case with the gun out on those nights, he earned a few shooting trophies. He loved bowling and had some big trophies from those days.
Of service organizations, he was a member of the Kiwanas, the Knights of Columbus, and helped start the YMCA in West St. Louis County where he was the first Chairman of the Board. He was a member of the VFW and participated in their activities when he was older. In 1974 he was given an award for community service, he was very proud of that and he worked very hard to earn it.
As kids, he'd take my sister and I out to camp grounds where he was setting up programs for underprivileged kids. We got to help clean the place up before they came and after they left. He told us it was a break for kids who didn't have all the good things we had. My sister and I used to wish that for once we were the underprivileged so we could have some fun instead of cleaning up - heh.
He taught me and my sisters to drive. Basically he got in the car with us, sat there and said "okay, drive". That was it. He didn't yell or panic if we looked like we were going to do something wrong. He was very calm about the entire thing. That's very difficult to do. He did it well.
When I was in college, he bought a beat up run down 1969 Cougar. He and his buddies rebuilt the entire thing - he had such a great time doing it. He gave it to me for driving down at school. Then some idiot woman ran a stop sign and totalled it. It was one of the few "things" I've lost that actually broke my heart. He worked so hard on that car and it took one old lady who should not have been driving, to smash it up beyond repair. *sigh*
All in all he had a pretty good life. He worked hard to provide for his family. He worked hard to give back to the community. He liked to enjoy himself and people liked him. Would that we all could have such a full life.
The last 15 years or so have been tough on him. He went deaf and with that deafness, he lost his ability to communicate easily. It rather cuts you off from people and he refused to use any of the available aids to make things better. One thinks it was with the idea that... if I don't acknowledge there is a problem, it will eventually clear up and all will be well again.
It would be like him.
He was a happy go lucky Irishman. He grew up in a large Irish Catholic family. He was one of the youngest of eleven children. His father (who had a decent railroad job) died of pneumonia when my father was 10. After that, the family struggled along - it was the middle of the depression. I never did know all the details, he never talked about it. For that matter he seldom talked about the past. For him, it was always better to look to the future. Times could always get better.
He was a veteran of WW2 - Army Air Force. It was only recently I heard some of what he really did during the war.
All he'd tell us when we were growing up was that he worked on "radar" and that he and a buddy got busted down to private when they decided to go AWOL, hop a plane and check out the party in Paris after the liberation. heh.
He told my youngest sister that he had been part of the aircrew on one of the larger airplanes, she didn't recall which one. It crash landed somewhere and they had to destroy the remains for security purposes, but they got back to base. He decided then that maybe flying wasn't for him and moved over to the MP's. It was safer to ferry around the payroll than fly.
He loved people though and having a good time was high on his list of things to do every day. After the war he married my mom and was a cop for a few years, but he got on someone's bad side... thus ending up having a Molotov cocktail being thrown through the window of their apartment. My mother still has a bookcase that has burn marks on it.
Deciding that maybe this wasn't the job for him, he went to work at Western Electric - they sent him to school for a couple of years. He worked for them for the rest of his career - going through various jobs as it was a large company. He didn't like company politics, but at least he didn't have people trying to burn his house down.
He was involved in so many different clubs over the years it's almost hard to keep track. As I said, he loved people, so he did things to keep busy and have lots of interaction.
He was a Toastmaster and has several speaking trophies. He was a member of the Eagles club which was a shooting club back in 1960's Chicago suburbs. I remember him taking the case with the gun out on those nights, he earned a few shooting trophies. He loved bowling and had some big trophies from those days.
Of service organizations, he was a member of the Kiwanas, the Knights of Columbus, and helped start the YMCA in West St. Louis County where he was the first Chairman of the Board. He was a member of the VFW and participated in their activities when he was older. In 1974 he was given an award for community service, he was very proud of that and he worked very hard to earn it.
As kids, he'd take my sister and I out to camp grounds where he was setting up programs for underprivileged kids. We got to help clean the place up before they came and after they left. He told us it was a break for kids who didn't have all the good things we had. My sister and I used to wish that for once we were the underprivileged so we could have some fun instead of cleaning up - heh.
He taught me and my sisters to drive. Basically he got in the car with us, sat there and said "okay, drive". That was it. He didn't yell or panic if we looked like we were going to do something wrong. He was very calm about the entire thing. That's very difficult to do. He did it well.
When I was in college, he bought a beat up run down 1969 Cougar. He and his buddies rebuilt the entire thing - he had such a great time doing it. He gave it to me for driving down at school. Then some idiot woman ran a stop sign and totalled it. It was one of the few "things" I've lost that actually broke my heart. He worked so hard on that car and it took one old lady who should not have been driving, to smash it up beyond repair. *sigh*
All in all he had a pretty good life. He worked hard to provide for his family. He worked hard to give back to the community. He liked to enjoy himself and people liked him. Would that we all could have such a full life.
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