Posted Graduation Day, 5-19-19 This weekend marks(ed) graduation weekend for hundreds of thousands of high school and college students throughout this great land. Long speeches and visions of wild success and grandeur (or perhaps freedom) streamed like Netflix reruns throughout football fields and gyms everywhere. One thing is also for certain: The familiar-to-Americans-part of “Pomp…
Tag: Sweet 17
Beating the East Wind
I am a huge fan of the BBC series Sherlock, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Mark Gatiss and Andrew Scott among an rambunctious, star-studded cast. In fact, a quick glance of the top of my desk will clearly reveal this love: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be…
Opening Day
Posted 4-11-19 Today, April 11th, marks the home opener for the Springfield Cardinals minor league baseball team. This year’s lovable birds enter their home debut with a less than lovable 0-7 record, making me wonder what the “magic” number is (already) for them to be mathematically eliminated in the first half of the two-part season….
Good Days: Past and Present
Posted 3-26-19 So much to write, such little time. 🙁 I have at least 10 articles in the works, but I also desperately need brain beauty sleep to wash my brain of worthless beta-amyloid plaques. Mom is doing much better again today. Peppy and genuinely pretty happy. She was a tad anxious, more than normal….but…
Interview With a Jayhawker
Posted late on 3-25-19 Nice trip down to see mom tonight. She is still tired…very tired…but happy and generally pretty darn good. She ate well in front of me with my stepdad feeding her, then we hung out for a while. She isn’t saying a lot these days, but on reflection I really feel like…
The Smaller they are, the Harder They Fall
Posted 3-12-19 One of the biggest challenges seniors face later in life is avoiding harmful falls. My mom has fallen several times since she had been in a memory unit (and before) and it seems to be a very common thing in her facility. (See this link to yesterday’s post of the Sweet 17 princess’s…
Sweet 17 Today
Posted 3/6/19 When mom first started experiencing more extreme (at the time) symptoms, I was agast. I had never seen an inflicted mom hunting and gathering papers, crayons, jewelry, and pickles in a purse, and I had no point of reference. I had never witnessed the panic walks and the deer in the headlights stares…
Shoes Off, Shoes On
Posted 2/19/19 Swung by to hang with mom for a while before the Sleetnado began. She was sort of melancholy and disoriented today. I wouldn’t say completely sad as such…more like empty. We spent 20 minutes playing the slow motion version of my favorite “take the shoes and socks off and put them on again”…
A Birthday to Remember
Posted late 2/18/19 We had the seniormost Sweet 17 princess celebrate her 102nd birthday this week. My kids are bewildered when I tell them of a world with no internet… Ms. E lived in the late 1910s. Lots of things weren’t around then. Her grandparents may have fought in the Civil War…Wowza. Mom had a…
Chain Gang
Posted early 2/17/19 Memory units are like….uhh…errr… lots of things. Yesterday, if you caught my post, you may remember that I was bragging about how sweet everyone was acting and that mom was doing just grand. I hung out several hours and even sat with the often docile Ms. W and talked all things teaching….