the modernity ward

Tough Gets You So Far

My grandpa is in the VA hospital right now. He has a lot of medical issues -- diabetes, myasthenia gravis, pneumonia, skyrocketing blood pressure -- and he's nearly 90 years old. Children of tough old midwesterners will appreciate how fitting it is that he finally collapsed while driving his tractor. Thank goodness my cousin was with him.

He survived a turn in the Pacific theater of World War II that he won't talk about much; he practiced law until maybe ten years ago. He built a barn himself out behind the house; it's where he keeps a couple of tractors, arc welding supplies, table saws, drill presses, whatever ditch witch or other mechanical project he's working on. He chiseled stone into remarkable likenesses of my grandmother, himself, and a few Easter Island heads, and taught me to do the same (not nearly as well). He built a large stone waterfall by the back deck that you turn on with a switch. For the grandchildren he made a small truck powered by a lawnmower motor (we were allowed to drive it all around the property, but needed a grown-up to start it), a rubber-tired wagon my cousins used to ride down the creek bank, and a genuine hand-turned Ferris wheel.

Oh, and he was in at least one plane crash, which resulted in him nearly developing gangrene on the day my sister was being born (my dad wondered where Grandpa was, and found him passed out at home with an anaerobic infection in the arm he'd injured).

All this to say: there is nobody like Grandpa in the world. My childhood was absolutely magical because of him. I wish I were there beside my mother and grandma. I don't know what will come of this latest, but I know that for all of us, a world without Grandpa is an impossible thing to contemplate.

 

 

Diagnosis: The Stupids

It's not that I don't enjoy reading literary fiction; it's just that catalogs and DVDs of True Blood are more my speed right now. I can't even make the excuse of school using up all my processing power, because this early in the semester it's basically eighth grade (although A&P lecture finally starts tonight, yay!). No, I just have a raging case of The Stupids.

Maybe not raging. Maybe more like a lead apron -- you know when they put the lead apron on you in the dentist's chair? It feels like that. But on my brain.

Here's some good news: Sophia had a great time at her new dentist! She begged to return the next day, even. So hooray! And in terms of official follow-up from the last time, I got the letter that our complaint had been officially received. Officially! Received! So, you know, all better.

Daphne is pretty good at playing by herself. Also good. And! It's time to register her for the sweet little neighborhood preschool for next year. Preschool/daycare in Nashville is shockingly expensive (like, comparable to the Northeast, what the hell) but this one is extremely affordable and right down the street. Two days a week only, but for the next year that ought to meet our needs -- after that I guess we'll go with a real day care, provided that I am in school. And I dang well better be.

How are you? Do we all have the stupids? Can we blame the weather or lack of sunlight? Will it go away in April? What do you do when you get the stupids? (Or am I the only one who does?)

 

 

Oh, Heck.

Because it's not bad enough for hell. No, steel yourself for a litany of petty grievances, the usual stupid shit:

-Somehow I managed to spend triple my grocery budget last month. I have no idea how. Not buying anything unusual; maybe more ricotta than usual? Because...

-I latke'd my way to a seven to ten pound weight gain, and usually I'm all health-at-every-size blah blah, but this was the clear result of my multi-batch latke bender with sufganiyot for dessert. Astonishing quantities of oil and white flour and potato went into my mouth, and a good amount of it decided to stay on, in the vicinity of my midsection. Therefore,

-I am on South Beach, because the thought of Atkins was just too much. My days of dipping turkey pepperoni into Rondele are over. But after dropping back about 4 or 5 pounds, here I sit, broken-hearted. And my GOD I want those M&Ms that I am using to bribe Daphne to sit on the potty.

-I am doing a great job not eating sugar and doing some portion control with my trigger-y foods but still. And I'm running and I know part of that weight is muscle mass (my recent low point came after total sloth/having my jaw wired shut, so I was all skinny and weak) so that's good but it's frustrating. It brings back many bad memories of out-of-control blood sugar.

-So there's the matter of the enormous grocery-heavy credit card bill, helped not at all by the stupid furnace repairs and my textbook purchases. The gas bill was a whopper ($200! OHMYHELL and I slept in a sweater!) because it stayed below freezing for two weeks and I paid my tuition in full and Sophia's tuition in full so at least that's done with but UGH. I hate feeling panicky about money, and I do right now.

-Compounding that issue is my recent attempt to do some math, of the what-if-we-wanted-another-baby variety, and if you take into account my questionable fertility and my advancing age and the fact that even if I get in on the first try school is three years full-time starting in 2012, that puts us in 2015 and me at thirty-eight (and in hock up to my eyeballs) and I'm just not going to count on that. So it's either soon, and inconveniently and penny-pinchingly, or...not. So that's looking like not. And I'm not entirely at peace with that. But I'm not at peace with the alternative.

-Also my sciatica is buggin', and I can't afford to go back to the physical therapist right now.

-And here I've stayed up too late again, stressing out. We don't have a printer so I had to handwrite an assignment for class and I feel like a fucking seventh-grader.

See? I told you. Petty shit. White whine, if you will. Don't think I won't use that as yet another reason to kick myself around the room for a while.

The Standards Committee: Out for Inclement Weather

A week ago it snowed in Nashville. A "big" snow by Southern standards, the four inches of perfect feathery powder provided ample sledding opportunity -- and compacted into ice when people didn't shovel or plow or salt it. A cold snap kept the temperature below freezing all week...and kept Metro schools closed. All goddamn week.

By Wednesday most streets were fine, save for the shady bottoms of hills or tops of ridges, but when you have a huge half-urban half-rural county all balled into one school district, some sillly shit is bound to happen.

At first I let the kids watch TV a lot and felt all tied up in knots about it because of the stuff I wasn't doing. Then I let the kids watch TV and felt better about it. Finally I figured out the way to do it was to fill the house with people, which did wonders for my mental health and the general whine quotient (mine and theirs).

 

And...you know? This post is boring me silly. I apologize for subjecting you to it. The girls alternately bicker and play beautifully, and when they play it brings back every happy memory of being a kid with sisters. I wish them a lifetime of collapsing teary-eyed from utter hilarity. The house still stands, despite our penchant for holding family dance parties directly above the rotten spot in the main girder (it's on the list for spring!), and the furnace...well, it blows. Mostly hot air. Let's leave it at that.

In a good year Tennessee makes up for a tropical breathless mosquito-thick summer with a January warm enough to do yardwork. I transplanted trees just a few days before Tu B'Shevat, made a few more stone paths and a lot of plans.

Sophia told me today she wished she could get stitches without having to get hurt. Because the stitches part was awesome, she said. "You mean you liked the numbing shot?" I asked. "Well, yeah," she told me, "but mostly just the stitches. And seeing what the doctor was doing." I totally get it, of course -- it's my favorite thing about tattooing, even more than the finished product. I didn't tell her that part though.

Daphne is growing up like crazy, having pretty much weaned (it was a joint effort) and making her way towards being potty trained (two poops forward, one poop all over the inside of a pair of pants). Sometimes she crawls into bed at bedtime and...goes to sleep. Without rocking. Voluntarily.

And this semester I have three classes (A&P, lab, and nutrition), all with homework, and we have a regularly scheduled babysitter for that and another in the works for weekends, because holy heck, Sean and I just do not SEE very much of each other even though we're not splitting shifts -- he comes home and we do bedtime together and then he works at home until late, almost every night. And weekend afternoons he grabs a few hours here and there. Vandy couldn't ask for a more devoted professor, and the girls couldn't ask for a more devoted father -- and honestly, I couldn't ask for a more devoted husband. He's ever considerate of me, he cleans, he does bedtime two nights a week by himself. I am looking forward to many long years in a retirement home with him, playing Castlevania.

Somehow it all gets done but it feels like sledding down a big hill -- so much fun and over so fast, and at some point you know you're going to have to slog back up that hill (or, you know, deep clean the house or sleep for a week or whatever). Which reminds me: we went sledding, during that perfect snow, at the municipal golf course near our house, and the girls went down a huge hill together, just the two of them, and then -- at the bottom of the hill -- I saw Sophia motion for Daphne to get on the sled. And Sophia pulled her little sister back up that hill. Sean and I almost died (and then we went to help). Beautiful.

 

 

A Band-Aid in My Pocket

One of the many preachers in my family had a favorite story to illustrate God's Midwestern roll-up-Your-sleeves eye-on-the-sparrow all-up-in-your-daily-business attitude. It seems this preacher was dressing one morning, and upon fastening the collar of his shirt he did hear the voice of God Himself:

"Put a Band-Aid in your pocket," said God.

"But God!" argued the preacher. "Why? What could I possibly need with a Band-Aid?"

"Just put a Band-Aid in your pocket," said God. If it had been me speaking to one of my offspring, I might have tossed in a silent goddamnit, but in this case I guess it would be redundant. Or maybe God in His infinite post-Pentateuch patience is untroubled by constant belligerence. Anyway.

Dubiously did the preacher man tuck a Band-Aid into his shirt pocket, and off to the church he went to prepare the week's sermon. And sure enough, before the morning was out, why, he'd sliced his finger bloody on the very paper he used to type his sermon!

So there you have it. Proof that God speaks to us still, in the flat twang of the middle west.

* * * * *

It was either a similar divine guidance or just the good sense to realize that if every damn other thing in the house was tottering on its last legs, the furnace probably wasn't any different, that let me to set up a service appointment for the furnace. When we moved in it was February, and we assumed of course --  of course! -- the annual maintenance had already taken place. I hadn't got around to doing it before Christmas, and everything seemed to be working fine, but as soon as we pulled in from Virginia, I was on the phone to the HVAC people. The niggling fear that if something were to go wrong, it would go wrong so spectacularly and so inconveniently, drove me to take the next appointment even though I usually put off appointments as long as possible.

And wouldn't you know it, I was awfully glad for that Band-Aid in my pocket.

By now I'm used to workmen surfacing from the crawlspace bearing spiderwebs in their hair, shellshocked expressions, and alarming pictures on their iPhones. This guy came up with a capacitor that was incapacitated, a safety switch that literally crumbled to pieces on the table, and a picture of a blower fan that looked like it had been hauled up from a shipwreck.

The previous owners of the house evidently performed ZERO maintenance on that unit. For the past decade. I am shocked -- not at their general heedlessness, because by now I've been living with their every bad decision for almost a year -- but that the furnace was still working. And not on fire.

We got it all tuned up, and now the faint wheeze of warm air is a jet blast of hot air, so that's good. There's still the little problem of how to keep the warm air in, but reinsulating and adding a vapor barrier is on the Fall 2011 list, so we'll just have to wear slippers for another few months. It's not as good a story as the preacher-relative's, which does bring up certain thorny theological issues such as why didn't God just tell him to watch his thumbs around the legal-size, but if it keeps us from having a mini-Chernobyl in the crawlspace, I'll take it.

 

Hash

1. Daphne has started napping again. Better still, she has begun announcing "I tired! Go apeep!" and asking to "Go apeep in car?" Who can resist either the cuteness or the possibility of an hour without being bodily assaulted by a 29-pound mess machine? Developmentally it went down thusly: Daphne doesn't talk much => Daphne stops sleeping, day and night => Daphne starts talking like crazy =>Daphne sleeps again. Brains! How do they work?

2. Semester is about to start, this time with Anatomy and Physiology and its lab, and Nutrition (mercifully available online). Beginnings are always dicey at TSU, who despite having been paid in full for Spring 2011 before effing Christmas sent me a warning letter from the bursar's office. Where the phone rang twenty times this afternoon. It looks like I'm all confirmed and enrolled and what-all in their system, but you just never know with TSU. I just hope it doesn't lose its dingdanged accreditation before I'm done with it.

3. Also we have a new LLL meeting (and a toddler meeting!) starting up in Nashville! If you live East-ish, email me, I'll give you details.

4. This is just in time for me to be 99% done nursing Daphne. Seriously, I cannot STAND how it feels. She's pretty good about not asking, and keeping it to 10 seconds a side, but I'm not quite willing to be done entirely. It's such a good Band-Aid, you know?

5. New all-ages minyan too!

6. Sophia got stitches (note to kids: NEVER climb the side of a grocery cart, particularly not when your mother's back is turned). She was a champ. I got a perm, and was also a champ.

7. So this spring, it's looking pretty booked up, right? That's why I spent an hour this morning atop a heap of seed catalogs, plotting the wholesale redevelopment of my backyard. There are lists and diagrams. There are going to be fig trees! And maybe a persimmon! And chickens! And a gravel patio! Sure, why not?