Then last year in April, he apparently had a stroke. He got out of the shower and couldn’t remember any of the words of a poem he had been memorizing. He went to the poem and couldn’t read or understand the words. He chalked it up to being tired, so he drove himself to play bridge. Halfway through playing bridge it dawned on him that he probably had had a stroke, though none of the symptoms remained. So, he drove himself to the Doctor who told him that it probably was a stroke. He put him on a blood thinner and an aspirin regimen and sent him off.

In June, we went out for Father’s day. At dinner, he pointed out the big bleeds under the skin on his hand (something that had grossed out my daughter). He pointed to this bleed/bruise and said, “What scares me about this is that this [and he pointed to his hand] could just as easily be this [and he pointed to his head]“. That sent chills to my soul.

Sure enough, in August he had another stroke. This one was more severe and it’s damages didn’t go away. He had a bleed in the back of his brain. At first it was really scary because he couldn’t recall anything, even Mom’s favorite flower. Eventually it got better, but it left him with slightly impaired vision and it affected his recall a bit. At the hospital, they surmised he had a slit murmur and possibly it was caused by a clot. They took him off the blood thinner but kept him on the aspirin.

He went from being totally healthy and independent to never being able to drive again. That was hard, but he took it bravely.

Early October he had another stroke. Another bleed in the same area. This was even scarier especially for him because it practically left him blind and seeing only black and white. They did more tests and determined he has amyloid angiopathy … Where plaque builds up on the inside of the veins, especially in the brain, causing the little capillaries to be brittle and break easily and naturally with age. It is genetic. There is no cure.

A person with this issue should NEVER be on blood thinners or EVER take aspirin because a break in a blood vessel will cause a big bleed!!!!

I have to say this makes me angry with the Doctors who treated him. They decided to treat him, with NO evidence as if his strokes were caused by what they are commonly caused by. Clearly this was not the case, and their lack of discernment was to his physical detriment.

They took him off all blood thinners and aspirin. He has gone a year without strokes, but his eyesight is severely impaired and his short term memory is bad…he also can no longer multitask and gets confused, disoriented and nervous in unfamiliar places. This man is the smartest, wisest, strongest man I have ever known. I HATE seeing him like this and my heart bleeds for him . I can’t even imagine this world without him, but as my husband’s uncle says, “it is all part of the process.”

May I say for the record, I don’t like this “process”.

It makes my own mortality all too real. I am not 50 yet, but in the last few years I have developed small age spots onmy hands (which my daughter is quick to point out). I have so much gray hair now,that sparkles like tinsel when it catches any light, especially sunlight, that I HAVE todye it every 4 weeks! I now am dealing with plantar fasciitis and weight is gaining in me…not to mention hot flashes!

I am really not liking this aging thing. It is one thing I will be asking God when I get there. I love God and I trust Him, so I know it all workout in the end. I am not afraid of dying because ikniwwhe I a headed and it is WAY better than here. I just have to say I am not looking forward to the process.

I hope our elected officials can start looking seriously at this and not take the easiest road. I am also hopeful that thinking citizens can call them to this. I have faith in our country and its people. 

But then I look at my own household and how we got here. I believed I was raising my daughter well. We were fortunate to be able to provide for her always. She has never lacked for anything. I also believe I was raising her to be thankful and responsible: saying thank you, saving money, working for things. And I see her do that around others, except our immediate family. Did we do too much because we could?

For example, I gave her a car when she was a junior in HS. It was wrecked in the middle of a pile up six months later. She needed a car for work and school so we replaced it. She pays for most of her car expenses and insurance. However, this year has been a big $  year for her car (battery, tires, alternator and spark plugs).  She is anxious about the reliability of the car.

So, I was thinking about my car. I was hoping to hold off until she graduated to get another. It has over 100,000 miles on it but is a great car. I just put about $3000 in it so it should be pretty solid. But given the economy and considering that is not likely to get better in the next two years and factoring in threatening govt regulations, I am thinking it might be wise to buy a new car now.

So I came up with this great idea that maybe I would give her my car and sell hers if I got a new car. The problem is that I told her what I was thinking.

She is away for the summer with an internship. About 3 weeks after I told her, she decided to come home for a party and because she was homesick (I thought).  That night I had a work event but left early because I was excited to see her and didn’t want her to spend time alone.

When we arrived home she had been home for a little while- – enough time to shower and start laundry. Within a few minutes she asked me about my car. Earlier in the week I had told her I hadn’t done anything with my car yet. Again I told the same thing ….I hadn’t had time and the dealers weren’t dealing yet. She then basically demanded I give her my car and take her car until I bought the new car! Um….no. Then ordered I would have to drive my car 5 hours up to her and drive her car back when I bought the new car. Again…no.

So she packed up her stuff and decided she would be staying with Grandma!

Wow. The sense of entitlement there was completely breath- taking to me.

Two weeks later, she joined me in Germany at my expense (something we had been planning for a while). At no time while there did she express any gratitude for the experience. Instead, all I got from her was criticism. One day she lectured me about my attitude when she asked me to carry her makeup bag and I asked why she needed it on our day trip.  Then she snapped at me to be quiet when I was quietly chatting about our trip when we boarded the train because the handful of others on the train individually weren’t talking (shortly thereafter chatty couples boarded).  And on and on including refusing to stand by me or talk to me when the tour guide denigrated the organization that was responsible for bringing me to Germany and I spoke up.

I have no idea how to react to all this. Clearly at age 20 there is not much MOM can do to correct it. I can address it and acknowledge it as best I can when it happens  and hope it is limited to me. She does not take correction well at this point- – just gets defensive and angry. I am hoping with maturity and experience, she will outgrow this and become grateful and courteous and loving.

One can hope, and I do have faith.

In that timeframe, gas prices tripled and the economy started to tank.  I knew at the end of the 3 years that my interest rate would definitely go up by its cap, so I did the right thing and refinanced.  I should have done that a year earlier, but oh well.

Now I know there were others out there like me, who chose a variable rate to take advantage of the low interest rate.  What I don’t get is those people who then are facing foreclosure because they are surprised that the rate is going up.  If I couldn’t afford this house, I wouldn’t have/shouldn’t have bought it.  I get that some people have lost their job and things have changed dramatically for them financially, but that’s not my impression of the majority of the people that the government is talking about bailing out.

It may be cold hearted, but as a taxpayer, I don’t think we can afford to bail out all these people for their poor decision making.  I don’t even think some of them will truly appreciate us paying for their bad decisions.  Given all the debt our government has, how can we afford this?? Bear Stearns?? CITI??  AIG???  This is neither wise nor prudent.

He married several times (cheated and divorced several times). He always remained the fair-haired child and Mom and Dad always bailed him out. Well, he died suddenly on a bike trail this year (he was late 40s, and very fit).

I felt awful for the parents — my parents good friends — and immediately brought food to their house. I baked a casserole and some dessert, and brought them over in my nice longaberger basket (easy to carry and looks nice). They were so appreciative (and so distraught). They met me at the door and whisked the food to the kitchen, came out and talked, and then I took leave (not wanting to impose). I didn’t ask for my basket back because I didn’t want to be a burden. I know they see my folks regularly, so I didn’t worry about getting it back (for those of you who don’t know longaberger baskets, a basket like this is almost $100. They are handwoven of hardwood maple, and are very sturdy, but nice looking).

Two days later, I met up with my Mom at the funeral and stood by her (there were no seats available). My day was playing the bagpipes for the service. At the front they had a display setup of some of his favorite things, and there was a table with his picture propped up ..against what looked like my basket!! I said to my Mom, “Is that MY basket?” She said, “Oh yes, they are holding his ashes in it.” Knowing my Mom, I figured she was trying to bait me into being appalled and upset (she likes to kid like that). I expressed my disbelief but she persisted. My dad came out to play the pipes and he marched toward the table with the picture on it. Mom SWORE he was piping to the remains of this guy — the ashes in the basket. I WAS starting to be appalled, but still refused to believe it actually was that.

(As an aside, the second time dad came out to play, the man in front of us put his fingers in his ears!! I couldn’t believe it. We were outside, and a single piper is not that loud in that environment…and my Dad is a good player! The pipes were in good tune and everything. I laughed harder later knowing this guy KNEW my dad — was a former neighbor of these people).

Anyway, I ran into the Mom after the service and wanted to express my condolences. She was quite excited to point out that she “honored” me by using MY basket to hold her son’s ashes!! NO KIDDING. She said they hadn’t thought about what to put him in and saw my beautiful basket and knew I would be honored!! Seriously!

I told my Mom I didn’t want it back!! A week or so later, they brought the basket back to my Mom’s house. She wouldn’t let it in the house and held it out her window to drive it to my house and put it back in the garage. It didn’t get back into my house, that’s for sure! A friend offered to take it off my hands even after hearing the story!!

Unbelievable.

There is a coworker of mine with whom I’ve been friends with for several years (6 or 7).  We’ve been close for the past 4 or 5.  She has had MANY issues through which I’ve supported her but tried not just to be the type of friend who simply agrees with her viewpoint but tries to be a voice of truth.  She dated this guy for 12 years who wouldn’t marry her.  The guy treats her like a doormat, always has.  She would not accept any direct criticism, but I at least tried to help her find her voice to stand up for herself. 

There wasn’t a week that went by that she wasn’t crying about something he’d done (something usually very selfish or insensitive).  Last spring he started to entertain the idea of marriage because he was 40 and she was about to turn 40 and he did admit he wanted kids.  The ups and downs there were almost unbearable.  At one point he suggested they try to have kids prior to getting married to be sure she could have kids!!  (Tell me you’d stay with someone like that).  His only real qualities seemed to be that he had money, a nice house and was very well educated (so he could carry on an intelligent conversation when he deigned to).

But for some reason she really loved this guy and would NOT leave him no matter what he did.   I sometimes thought he didn’t have the gonads to end the relationship so he was doing everything he could to make her leave him.

He told her they’d be married by the end of the summer… that didn’t happen.  Then they started planning to elope in the Fall.  He told her if she made him have a regular wedding with people there, he’d leave her on the altar for sure (she always had good excuses for why he didn’t mean that to be hurtful, but that he was nervous in front of people).  Finally, they did elope.  Even on the altar she wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to leave her.  He leaned over and said to have her remind him to talk to the priest afterwards and the thought crossed her mind that he was going to find out how to get out of it!

Well, turns out she did get pregnant a few weeks before the wedding.  She found out the week after the wedding..  I could have cried.  I didn’t know if I could actually live through all the turmoil this was going to cause.  Shoot, the guy wasn’t even working to get her moved in, and then was being stingy about what rooms she could use in HIS house!  How could they deal with pregnancy??  NOT my problem…but hard to watch.

Anyway, each phase of this pregnancy has been fraught with issues.  He dictates what she can and can’t eat or drink, etc.  He has told her she is going to be pregnant again this time next year and that she won’t be able to work, etc.  Then she decides for the ultrasound that she wants to find out the sex, but he doesn’t.  She does find out and he is telling her she won’t be able to keep the secret from him.  She was actually doing really well, and she decided not to tell anyone else.

Well, I made the unfortunate mistake of running her into the mall and seeing that she purchased something sex-specific for the baby.  I got so excited!!  Well, she got really mad.  She started lecturing me the next day about what Rick wanted and that he told her not to tell anyone.  At that point,  I had had it.  I was coming out of my supply closet and closed the door hard, said, “YOU didn’t TELL me,” and walked out.  I needed to leave or it would have gotten ugly, and I wouldn’t have been able to hold it in.

She came back into my office after I left that night (I had given her a key so she could store her lunch and supplies in my office) and she moved everything out and stopped talking to me.  I went to her room to get my key back, and she again started to lecture me about how in HER world, her husband would be the first to find out what sex the baby was!!  All I could say was in the REAL world, I DO happen to know the sex, and I can’t take that back.  It JUST happened.

So she stopped talking to me.  She did send me an email and it totally offended me.  She told me NOT to tell anyone…  I have kept SO many secrets for this woman.  That was too much.

So, she has avoided me and not talked to me for over a month now.  I figure since she isn’t allowed to work, this is the next step “in her world” for making it a better thing…justifying how it will be much better for her than staying in this place.

I have had so many close friends do really hurtful things to me that this is just one more in a long string.  I have taken so much, and I just can’t take it any more.  I’m sure that if I went to her and told her I miss her friendship (which I do), that she would then acquiesce within her rules.  The thing is that I am tired of always being the one to “give in”.  I did nothing wrong here.  So, I’m not cowtowing and going to her to make amends.

Will I regret it?  Certainly I feel sad (in addition to the hurt and anger).  I would just like for ONCE to have a friend who has hurt me come to ME and apologize.  Shoot, I’d like for once even if I WERE in the wrong for a friend to come to me to make amends!  I think I would pass out if that happened.

Somehow, though, I’ve got to let this go, and drop the hurt.  This is definitely no fun.

Edit

Sales Tax
Shipping and
Shipping TAX

I think I might have to seriously reconsider shopping online.

What the heck is shipping tax??  Good grief.  How many other ways can they find to squeeze blood out of a turnip??

Kills me the claim by the democrats back in 2003 when we attacked Iraq that the only reason we were doing it was for the oil!!  Now I’m WISHING we could benefit from that oil.  This is crazy.  And gas at $3.50 a gallon??  Don’t even get me started on how the gas companies are quick to raise prices 20 or 40 cents a gallon in one day because they are afraid of some sneeze by a sheik in the desert.  Yet when the sneeze turns out to be from a simple whiff of pepper and not some fatal disease, they don’t so quickly bring those prices back down!  It’s a royal rip off.  If there ever were an industry in the US to be federally regulated this is it.  It isn’t as if we could get by without oil…our health, safety and livelihood depend on it!

But back to snow days.  I do love them, but I think I now no longer like the early dismissal for inclement weather.  I understand that weather people can be wrong.  Typically, though, when EVERY weather stations is predicting 3 to 12 inches, then it’s definitely going to happen.  I don’t understand in those situations why you would make kids go to school, when you know that unexperienced drivers (teens) will end up having to drive home in the snow.

This ‘blizzard’ hit exactly as the predicted and then some.  We ended up with about 2 feet or more of snow.  That is a TON for around here.  3-5 inches paralyzes this city.  SO, we decided to dismiss at 11:30.  Couldn’t dismiss earlier (though we wanted to) because the buses were already committed elsewhere! 

 SO, I didn’t get to start heading home until noon.  By that time the roads were a MESS and there is no way home that doesn’t include a hill.  Sure enough, my car, which I dearly love (but is miserable in snow), got stuck.  I was able to pull into a side street and the lady that lived at the house where I parked drove me home because she has AWD.  How nice is that??  Sometimes calamity can bring out the nicest side of people.  When we went the next evening to pick up my car, they had even shovelled around it!!  That’s above and beyond the call of duty.

 Anyway, next time I think I’ll try to slip out earlier, or leave my car at school and catch a ride home with someone with 4wd or AWD!

 Prior to her getting her license, I worried about what insurance was going to cost me.  I’ve heard nightmares, even though she is an honors student with a good head on her shoulders.  So I took some counseling from friends and my insurance agent.  Also, the thought of her experiencing her first fender bender on my car (and what that would cost) made me even more anxious.  My insurance agent told me it would probably be better all around if I bought a 10+ old junker for her.  SO, I started looking around.

About that same time I was in casual conversation about this with some folks I work with and it turns out that one of them had bought the proverbial old man’s car so he could tinker with it.  This car was a 1989 2 door coupe (but not a sports car), with a perfect body, new tires, and only 30K miles on it!  The guy had been using it to have engine experience just because he likes to tinker.  So it, in essence, had everything taken care of in the engine (though it didn’t need it)…like spark plugs replaced, etc.

The only problem with the car was the passenger side view mirror (the old guy didn’t back out of his garage too well, and that was the only casualty — he only, of course, drove to church with it).  I was a bit concerned in this day and age that my daughter, who goes to a nice all girls school, would find it a bit beneath her but she loved it.  Even the bordello red interior.  She said it was the perfect first car that you have stories about that you tell when you are older as you are remembering high school!  (Good kid)  It cost me about $2000 — this was all a God-thing, if you ask me with the price and the timing.

When I gave it to her for her birthday, I later had a discussion about her first accident which is bound to happen.  I said, “Hon, when you have that first fender bender, here’s some advice.  Don’t hide it from me, don’t try to minimize it and don’t try to laugh about it when you come to tell me.  Be straight forward.  Let me know you are OK immediately and so is the other person, and be very serious and remorseful.  If you can cry…that will help.”

SO, reel it ahead to this weekend.  She was going to do a college visit with a friend. Left on Friday and came back over the weekend.  Yesterday, she sat in front of me with the cute smile on her face that said, “MOM…I’m cute, right?  So you’ll either give me what I’m asking for OR…you won’t be mad about what I’m about to tell you.”  Of course, my immediate response was, “What do you want??”  She started launching into the tale with a smile and a cute sing-song voice, “Mom…  you know we don’t have to worry about something now…we don’t have to worry about my first ding.”  To which I sat up, and said, “Kiddo, if you are about to tell me what I think you are, it is neither cute nor humorous.  Cut to the chase and tell me exactly what happened.”

 Apparently, she drove to her friend’s house and was going to drive with her to the college visit (this I knew).  Her friend’s dad told her to move her car off the street into the driveway so it wouldn’t get it (foreshadowing?).  She did that.  Their driveway is something like a sideways J.  Her friend then promptly backed out of the garage…and into her.  UGH.  I said, “Everyone ok?”   yes.  “Kiddo, when you spend a few thousand $ on something, learning you have to spend more on it is neither humorous or cute.  Did you find it funny when it happened?” no.  Right.

Got the estimate today…she drove.  I’ve never had an estimate that ended up being anything less than $1000.  She was lucky…it was only about $900.  She gulped when she saw that.  Yep… it’s not cheap.  It’s almost half of what the car cost, but that’s the way it works.  I’d almost consider not getting it fixed, but the body of the car was in perfect shape, so I think it should be fixed.  I’m a little surprised the parents hadn’t called me about it.  I’ve tried to call once to let them know about the estimate to be sure they are going to take care of it.  I’m sure they will.  This seems like a good family.

Just glad it wasn’t my kiddo’s fault.  Makes it easier to take.  Just another bridge crossed…

I’ve read other first blog opening posts.  I always find it funny that people have to start by saying something like, “OK, here I go” like they are getting ready to jump into a cold pool for the first time, or “Hello, World”.  I guess “Hello World” is this century’s equivalent to “Dear Diary”….

 So, Hello, World.  Here I go!  (more later…dinner needs to get going)