All's Right with the World

All is right in Sheila and Lizzie's world again.

The installers arrived at 8:30 and set up a workshop in our carport.

They started working in the living room.

The dogs, locked on the patio, were not happy.

Work was coming along nicely, with the pad down and the flooring starting to go in, by the time that I had to leave to meet Peach in Sacramento for our weekly visit with Kathy.

Peach and I sat with Kathy for about half an hour, but she had been given morphine, so she really was out of it, unable to focus her eyes or to get out any words we could understand. She was working hard at taking air in. When we left we each held her face and told her we loved her. It was the first time that she actually looked at us and said she loved us.

We went out to lunch to decompress and then headed in different directions. I stopped at the Davis post office to mail off a package to soldier Amanda and while there (around 2:30) got a text message from Walt saying that the guys had just finished the job. I came home to my beautiful new living room.

It seems almost criminal to start moving the rest of the furniture and all the "junk" back in here again.

But for the moment, all is right with the world, and Sheila is finally content again! (Me too!!!) Best of all, it smells like freshly sawed wood...not dog urine!!!

Dreams and Nightmares

Sheila is lying on my feet as I write this.

Sheila never sleeps on my feet.

Lizzie is spending her time pacing back and forth, making a bed in the cage, on Walt's chair, or on the patio.

Polly is spending most of her time in my recliner, as usual, but gets very nervous when I suggest that she and I go outside. She stands far away from me and won't come when I call because she knows I'm up to something, but she can't figure out what. I have not seen her pee outside.

The dogs don't have a clue what is going on in the living room.

Walt is just working himself to the bone, having now painted the room and then making arrangements for the Pergo installation, only the Home Depot rep said we would have to shampoo the rug before they would take it up because of the dog urine embedded. I can't say as I blame them.

We talked about the shampoo, but it would take a day to dry and then we would have to lock the dogs out of the room to make sure they didn't pee in there again until the new floor was installed. Finally, Walt decided it would be easier for him to take up the rug himself, so he bought a rug cutter and has been cutting it into manageable swatches and carrying them out to the yard.

As it turned out, it was probably a good thing. The rug was much worse than we realized, with almost NO areas that were not soaked with dried urine. I have felt very guilty watching how hard Walt has worked cutting up the rug, but it's all out in the back yard now and the cement slab is ready to receive the Pergo when it is delivered.

But the dogs aren't sure what to do, since their beds no longer exist. Lizzie used to sleep on the rug behind the couch, and Sheila, on nights when I slept in the family room, slept at the other end of the couch, hidden under the end table. Neither of them slept on the big dog bed that is in that room.

Tonight will be the first night with no rug in the room and it will be interesting to see where everybody decides to sleep...and where Polly will pee.

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We went to see a production of Midsummer Night's Dream by the fairly new Davis Shakespeare ensemble. It was basically a fun production but I have stated often that Shakespeare is not really my forte. I always feel lost through a good portion of whatever play I'm seeing, and it takes doing a lot of research afterwards to put together a review.

Others probably feel the same about Gilbert & Sulllivan, which I can review without batting an eyelash.

But I had particular trouble with last night's show. I've seen Dream several times so I kinda sorta know what's going on, but this production was kind of a salute to bicycles and in the opening scene Oberon, the king of the fairies is angry with Tatiana, the queen of the fairies about this figure made of bicycle parts which was supposed to represent someone that I couldn't figure out.

Well, when I checked my last reviews for Dream, and the script for the play, I still couldn't figure out what the heck this figure was supposed to be. I was tearing my hair out trying to put it in context and wondered ... was there an alternate version of the play I didn't know anything about?

I finally decided to admit my ignorance and sent an e-mail to my contact in the cast. Then I checked character descriptions and figured out that the figure was supposed to be a young Indian prince whom Oberon wants to train as a knight, but Tatiana refuses to relinquish her control.

OK. Now I felt stupid for having written the e-mail, but I sent a follow up saying "nevermind. I figured it out." But I hadn't really, because this scene opened the play last night and I even read the script and couldn't find it. But I went ahead and wrote the review without mentioning it at all and submitted it to the paper.

Well, then I got a reply to my note and learned that what was, in this production, Act 1, Scene 1, in the original is actually Act 2, Scene 1, but they needed to use it to set up the whole bicycle theme, since the figure is made of bicycle parts, so they reordered the scenes.

I'm not sure if I still feel stupid or relieved that maybe I had a good reason to be confused...except now I've aditted to the Shakespeare people that I'm not really all that intelligent when it comes to Shakespeare!

And now I have to rewrite my review.

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BTW, thanks to reader Ginni, I found out that Kiva is trying to raise money for My Charity Water, an organization trying to bring clean water to areas which have no water. Check this page for information. 100% of anything you donate will go toward the water project.

A Long Day

Walt and I both had long days today, at opposite sides of the state. Yesterday, we ordered our Pergo and Thursday Home Depot is sending someone to measure the room so all the cleaning had to be finished. He had finished painting the room (I love it) and moving most of the stuff out. The heavy pieces of furniture are left, but we are paying Home Depot to move those, so we don't have to wreck our backs trying to do it--we aren't as young as we were when we moved them all in here!

While I was gone, he got all the vacuuming and cleaning of all the rest of the stuff that he could done. The room looks so nice I hate to move the furniture and tsatskes back in!

As for me, the day started early, with driving to my mother's. Several things had to be done. The first was an attempt to thwart all these goddamn would-be thieves that are trying to steal money from her bank account. She's been dealing with them and the bank for so long that when she walks into her bank, a woman sitting at a desk across the room looks up and calls out "Hi, Mildred!"

Her stepson and I decided that we should finally change her telephone number to a new number that will be unlisted. She has had that telephone number for about 40 years, so this is a huge adjustment. But she finally agreed to give that a try, so by noon tomorrow, she should have a new number, it will be unlisted, her phone will no longer accept blocked phone calls, and when she calls out, her number will be blocked.

Now, granted this isn't going to catch those calls that just try random numbers, but she has had to change her bank account number four times in the past six months because every time she gets a call, even though she insists she does not give out any information whatsoever, suddenly ~$300-$400 is transferred out of her bank account (fortunately, the bank has been able to block the transfers because her account is flagged). The last time they were able to trace the ultimate destination for the money to the Philippines. Maybe this, and the police report filed, will finally stop it. We can only hope.

After the phone number was changed, she had a doctor's appointment. She had developed a bit of a problem and I have learned from past experience that you simply cannot let her go to the doctor alone. She thinks she can, but she gets lost in the hospital and then she can't remember any of the doctor's instructions when she leaves and it is very important that someone be with her to be her ears...or, more appropriately, her memory.

And it's kind of fun. Like they had her fill out a medical history supplemental form and when she came to the question about the date of her last menstrual period, we were trying to remember if it was 40 or 50 years ago. (We giggled)

It turned out she needed a minor surgical procedure, which was performed in the office, and then she needed to get antibiotics. She also has a follow-up appointment next week, which is going to be tricky because her appointment is 9:30 in San Rafael and I am doing an interview at 11:30 across the Bay in Berkeley. I am going to have to really hustle!

On the way home from the doctor's, we stopped at the bank to let them know her new phone number and to talk about the situation, which is apparently frustrating not only my mother but everyone at the bank. A woman about my age, who was waiting to see the account person, overheard our conversation and came to talk about how her mother had nearly been scammed by some of the same people and she talked about some sorts of things they had tried.

One problem is that with her technophobia, my mother doesn't understand the mindset of the gang that is doing this kind of thing and she feels that if she makes them feel bad for trying to defraud an old lady, they will feel guilty and give up. She feels the need to let them know that she won't give them any information. She can't just bring herself to hang up on them without saying anything. The callers identify as representatives of the bank or of Social Security and she goes along with some of their requested answers but when they ask about her bank account, she tells them to call the bank and hangs up. We have to get her to hang up as soon as they identify from one of these groups without saying a word.

But we've done all we can for now and I guess we just wait to see how effective it is. In the meantime, of course, she had to call everybody and let them know what her new phone number is. Which is a huge pain in the butt.

Never Forget

I don't want to stomp on anybody's grief or anything but somebody just dropped the straw that broke my back. For the past month, the hysteria leading up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11 has been bothering me. And then on 9/11 we saw endless back to back pieces about the attack and people's grief, and thousands of shots of people running through the streets of New York, in terror. There were news coverages, personal memories, talk shows, and the cable channels which have no live programming were running schlocky movies about personal stories of tragedy and heroism of that day)

(The only "new" story I heard was a 10 minute video narrated by Tom Hanks, which is well worth your watching)

People felt the need to relive it all again and again and again and yeah, OK. If that's what you need to do, fine, but does everybody have to repeat "Never forget" or "We will always remember?"

NEVER FORGET? That's like saying to a family grieving the loss of a child "You'll always remember him." Like we're going to say "Yes, we have three children. I think we used to have more, but I'm not sure."

This was the worst attack on American soil in the history of our country and everybody is acting like if we don't keep playing and replaying the same coverage that we have seen yearly for the past ten years, we might somehow forget about it.

We Americans seem to have the need to wring the most emotion out of every little thing, so when we are hit with an event of such staggering magnitude, everybody goes into overdrive, each network trying to outdo the other one in who can get the most tears, the most horror out of that event.

No, you don't want to let it rest, but sheesh...the only event that I've seen in my life that got more ridiculous coverage was the 3 day non-stop tribute to Tim Russert following his death. I respected Tim Russert, but NBC kept the grief going endlessly. In fact, NBC may have given Russert's death even more coverage than the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

I spent 9/11 with a NCIS marathon, after watching the ceremonies at Ground Zero. I didn't need to see the close-ups of survivors hands tracing the names of the loved ones they lost, or get close-ups of eyes welling with tears. I felt I had given the event all the attention it deserved, with the respect that it deserved, but I was not about to sit here and wallow in show after show, interview after interview, family grief after family grief just so I could be sure that I would "never forget."

Somehow I suspect that if I hadn't even turned on the television on 9/11, I might still have remembered the event.

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But in the good news department, we have ordered the new Pergo!!! They are coming out to measure the living room on Thursday and we'll set up an installation date at that time.

And I Said It Would Never Be Done

Before I write my entry, I wanted to make sure that you guys see this video. It's awesome...

Be still my heart!

Six years ago we moved everything out of the family room, painted it, and went to Home Depot to order Pergo laminate flooring, which a lovely crew of Russian workmen came and installed. It was gorgeous.

We only had 3/4 of the downstairs covered with Pergo because of the logistics with trying to find a place to put an entire house full of furniture. The plan then was that we would do the living room the next year.

Well, one thing and another intervened and before we knew it, six years had passed and we still had no Pergo in the living room.

This actually became a real problem because when we were raising puppies, I didn't worry too much about housebreaking them or really worrying about what they did in the living room, which, over the years, became the doggie bathroom. OUR dogs (except for Polly) were polite, but the visitors sniffing all that good ol' urine from years of peeing dogs, just followed suit.

But I figured it was no big deal because any month now we were going to be replacing the rug anyway.

Our dogs, with the help of others, started digging in the rug and there were bare patches down to the concrete slab floor and a HUGE hole right in the middle of the floor. We covered that for a few years with a red blanket, held in place by a broken secretary chair until Walt finally decided a year or so ago to get rid of the blanket and replace it with a cheap throw rug from Target, still held in place by the secretary chair.

Needless to say, we haven't had guests in the house for more than a few minutes, in years.

The morning after I got home from San Diego, Walt asked if I had looked in the living room when I got home. There had been no reason to look in there, so, no, I hadn't. He took me in there and lo and behold he had packed up the glassware in our glass cabinet and there was a stack of empty boxes waiting to be filled.

"You mean we're finally going to do the PERGO?" I shrieked. He said that we were.

So today we spent the day starting to pack up the tsatskes.

(note all the rug-cleaning and deodorizing products!)

As you can see there are lots of things to pack up. And it's like a trip down memory lane, not always a fun one. The card Ned's friend Brendan (who died this year) gave me years ago, the mask Paul made when he was in high school, things that I brought here from Gilbert's house, a Christmas ornament of David's, little things that Walt's mother brought to us from her many trips around the world, gifts from exchange students, now long gone.. So many pieces of junk, so many memories.

The frustrating thing was finding things and having no memory of who they came from. One little box had a lovely note from the person who gave it to me, but I can't read the signature.

It will be several days before we have all this stuff packed up. Then we're going to paint the room, which means I have to make decisions about color. I don't just want to paint it white again, but it's a dark room and you kind of need the white to brighten it up. (Suggestions happily considered!)

Walt has even agreed that it's time to replace the pane of glass that David and his friend broke, playing baseball in the house, when they were in grammar school.

I'm giddy with anticipation. It's been a long wait, but it seems that finally the wait is over!