Totally Worth It

For Christmas dinner this year, we decided to make a prime rib roast.  It was a significant investment - not just in the cost ($10.98 a pound, 9 pounds), but in braving Gartner's Meat Market to pick it up.  Gartner's is kind of a Portland tradition - best meat market in town, but around significant holidays, they have to hire parking guides, rope off areas, etc...  When we got there, the "take a number" sign was at 26, and they were just then working on number 93. It was organized chaos though - we spent maybe 30 minutes there and got out with our skins, our sanity, and some of our wallet.

It was worth it though - the roast was delicious, we had leftovers for a couple of days, we made the best beef noodle soup I've had in a long time with the bones, and now Moose, Daisy and Dancer are trading off bones and having a marvelous time.  Just for the fun that Dancer is having rolling around on top of "her" bone, it was totally worth it. 

Is It Cancer Or Just The Flu? Call in the Moose.

I've been under the weather for the past few days - running a fever, chills, general achy blah... One of the uncomfortable drawbacks to Hank's occupation of my uterus is that I can't tell if it's just a side effect, or if I've got the flu.  Either way, there's not a lot I can do other than just ride it out and indulge myself in puppy therapy. 

Fortunately, Moose is the best.  I can lay down under my fluffy purple blanket and he's right there, curling up on the lower end of my spine, just like a little hot water bottle.  After 10 years together, he knows just where to settle for maximum comfort.  Of course, he also knows just how to get my goat, and he tends to move around a lot, but still...  he's the best anyway. Daisy and Dancer occasionally try to sleep with me as well, but frankly, we need a bigger bed if it's going to be a three dog night. 

Ear Trauma

I went and got my ears repierced today - I had them done back in the 70s, but my holes grew over, so... I'd talked it over the night before with Mom, remembering the bad old days, when they would hold a cork on the back of your ear, heat up a needle by running it through a candle flame and shove it through. I was feeling very grateful for modern conveniences, having scouted the internet and found a piercing artist who was a certified professional yada yada...

So, showed up, and it's a head shop.  Half piercing studio, half vape shop, run by a woman who I'm pretty sure followed the Dead for a while.  Purple dyed hair, she makes Victorian lampshades, she gave me organic instructions on how to care for the ears, the whole shebang.  I was doing ok until she had me sat down in the hand chair (see above), prepped up and pulled out... yep.  You guessed it.  Cork.  But on the other hand, she gave me a stuffed monkey to hold onto while she pierced me, so we survived.

(Must Be 18 To Read This Post)

It's been an interesting evening here at the house.  Daniel is going off to his "Boys in the Woods" pot luck tomorrow, and he's making dessert - froot loop rice krispie treats in a lovely rainbow theme with tiny candy penises on top.  He's making an effort to be inclusive - he's got 36 white chocolate (with pink tips, of course) and 12 chocolate ones.  Contrary to urban legends, they're both exactly the same size, although Daniel does claim that the chocolate ones taste better.  I'm staying out of this one...

Memory Well

Mom brought me a gift from Grandma - she was going through her papers and found a caricature of me, circa the early '80s, sitting on a horse with a cowboy hat, claiming that there was a $1,000 reward for my arrest for horse stealin', cattle rustlin' and cowboy carousin'.  I'll see if I can manage to get it scanned in somehow, but the odd thing is that I can't remember it, at all.  No clue when it was done, don't remember ever seeing it before, it's just a complete blank.  Odd...

Really Belated Self-Realization

Tonight was the last night of my mandatory "weight management" class (don't get me started on the hoops I'm jumping through), but I suddenly realized why I'm having such a hard time with dieting.  Everyone else had goals like "look good for my reunion" or "be able to play with my children" or "go for a walk with my wife".  My goal was the same goal I've been wrestling with for the past year and a half - get this damned cancer out of me.  It's a good negative goal, but I need to think about a positive goal.  Anger is one hell of a motivator, but it's hard to keep up for long distances.

Hank Sucks.

I've been doing ok lately, whistling past the graveyard and pretending everything is smooth.  But every once in a while (like today) I get reminded that I've got cancer.  Ok, not that I've got cancer.  That I've got what is currently incurable cancer.  With a really lousy survival rate. I'm really, really good at denial - World Champ, as a matter of fact.  But this tumor that I call Hank is going to kill me. 

But that doesn't mean that I have to let him win.  I am not just this collection of skin and bones - in fact, that's not the most important part of me.  I can still create something that will last for others, and I can still polish the most important parts of me - the ones that I believe live on beyond this world.  My relationships with my family and friends, my intellect, my compassion, my dreams...  Hank can't take those if I don't allow him to.

He's been winning the war so far by limiting my movements outside the home, by tiring me out, by screwing with my emotions.  But I'm going to start fighting back again. 

Thanksgiving Prep

We're doing a (relatively) small dinner - turkey roasts rather than a whole bird, stuffing, yummy potatoes (that's what my family calls them - yours probably calls them funeral potatoes or if you're not from Utah, heart attack on a casserole dish).  I'm doing up a spinach casserole/quiche-y kind of thing, Daniel made deviled eggs for a starter, and (of course) Dixie salad.

If you're from anywhere other than Washington, Utah, you've probably never heard of Dixie salad, but it's a staple with my family.  The tradition started back in the '90s (that would be the 1890s) - salads were very elegant back east, and apparently, my ancestors found a recipe for Waldorf Salad in Godey's Ladies Book or somewhere. It called for lettuce, apples, walnuts, and mayonnaise  - which sounded frankly disgusting.  My people being a practical bunch looked out at a landscape with a distinct lack of lettuce or walnuts and put together a concoction of apples, pecans, pomegranate pips and whipped cream - it was a hit, and we've been eating it ever since. 

Some members of the family (heretics) have added bananas or other fruit, but we're purists.  We used to get the pomegranates off the trees in Grandma and Grandpa's back yard (same with the pecans), but lately, we've been forced to make do with substandard store-bought.  It's not the same, but we adapt - we're Adams women.  Harvesting the pips today, I remembered when Grandpa taught me that it's so much easier if you do it underwater - the juice doesn't get everywhere, the pips sink to the bottom of the bowl and the debris rises to the top and can be scooped off easily. We've also sunk to the level of using Cool Whip rather than whipped cream, but hey - I figure all those Cool Whip containers in Grandma's cupboard (and fridge) had to come from somewhere, and if it was good enough for her, it's good enough for me.

(Sidebar:  In searching for an image for Dixie salad, I found one poor deluded soul who actually included grapes and strawberries.  That's just flat wrong.)

Rough Week Ahead

Dixie in her normal habitat - under a blanket

That photo there - that's my sister.  My mother's constant companion for the past 12 or so years, Dixie Lynn Adams.  She was a rescue and the rescue place maintained that she was a pure-bred dachshund, but in her prime, she had a four-foot vertical leap, so I suspect there may have been some south of the border influence.  We don't talk about it, though. We just love her the way she is.  

She is definitely a dog with a personality.  I'm sure that at one point, she was a puppy, but she's been a crone so long that I can't really remember her puppyhood. She was born to be a crone - set in her ways, sure that she's right, ruler of the roost.  She even had making grumpy old woman noises down pat (and there's nothing more disturbing than hearing "gruntgrowlgruntgroan" coming from about a foot off the floor in your bedroom around midnight - it was just Dixie making her rounds, ensuring the safety of the family and the lack of any available unsnacked-upon food in the house.)

She put Mom through a scare a couple of years ago, when she lost her right eye to glaucoma, but it didn't slow her down.  She just accepted it as part of her pirate personae and kept on grumbling on.  But now, I think she's finally hit the end of the road.  For the past three or four months, she's been having trouble eating, and she's been losing sight in her good eye.  Now this past week, she's been confused (she got lost under the dining room table, unable to find her way out from the legs), and disoriented.  Mostly, though, she just seems to be frightened, and we think it's time to release her soul back to the universe.  We're going to try to give her a good send-off, though.

 

Bagby Memories

There's got to be a word that describes things that you don't need to put on your bucket list because you've already done them years ago.  Maybe the memory well list?  At any rate...

I saw this picture of Bagby Hot Springs today, and it brought back happy memories of when I was young, in shape(ish), and foolish enough to stay out all night.  This was back when I was part of the Clinton Street Cabaret group and performing at the Rocky Horror Picture Show every Saturday night.  There's only so many times you can go hang out at Lyon's after the show (although that number is startlingly high), so eventually we ended up piling into several cars and driving out past Boring, past Estacada, out to BFE, and then hiking up a 1 1/2 mile trail (in the dark, mind you) to Bagby - a natural hot spring that has been tamed to flow into cedar tubs up on top of the mountains under the stars.  It's really beautiful - especially when you can look up and watch the stars and just relax with 15 or 20 of your best friends for the night - although I would recommend bringing flashlights.  We tried it one night with a single glowstick, and it was not a good time hiking. 

Voting Day Thoughts

Of course, I don't agree with any of this, but it made me laugh (especially #4).  We all have voted, so that's two male votes to one very vocal female vote (Daisy and Moose are both strictly non-partisan and under 18, so they care not for this silly political season, but they would like people to know that they can be bought for a bone or two.) 

But for those of you who think that your vote doesn't matter, or that midterms are not important - a couple of years ago, there was a local school bond measure that passed by exactly 3 votes.  I'd like to think that it was the three votes from this house.  I tend to vote for all local school and library bonds, even though I won't have children, because I look at "government" not as a separate entity, but as all of us working together to get important things done that we can't or won't do separately.  We build our society by our votes, and I want an intelligent, well-read society. 

Saturday Grandma Thoughts

Thinking about grandma this morning... I was lucky growing up - I had 4 different grandmothers still alive when I was born, Grandma Lova (mom's mother), Grandma Clara (dad's mother), Little Grandma (Kate, Grandpa Dewane's mother) and Grandma Lula (Lova's mom).

I spent the most time with Grandma Lova as a kid - Mom had me at 17, and was divorced from Dad by the time she was 20, so she needed all the help she could get.  I spent a fair amount of time with Little Grandma too, since she lived right down the block.  I didn't realize until I was an adult that Lova must have been frustrated with that arrangement - living right down the block from your mother-in-law can't have been an easy way to spend a marriage.  But she made it work.

I remember when Grandma would come home from work (usually about 3:00 - she worked the early shift at Kellogg), she and I would have a little ritual.  She would fix us each an english muffin pizza, and we would sit at the kitchen table and count her tags for the day.  She did piecework - sewing zippers into tents or sleeping bags or whatever. She's the one who passed down the deep satisfaction of statistics to me.  You know, acknowledging each piece, watching the pile grow, occasionally comparing yourself to the others in the group, but mostly just trying to beat your own personal best.

She also instilled a love of the company of women.  I find myself hanging out with the guys most of the time, but there's something to be said for the comfort of just sitting down with a mutual project (usually a quilt, but sometimes making rolls, or canning, or whatever) with a group of women.  It's best if it's a project that's fairly repetitious and not terribly taxing mentally so that your fingers can just go ahead and fly while your brain and mouth can just enjoy spending time with friends.

And then there's the fear of throwing out anything...  Yep.  I definitely got that from Lova.  One entire closet in the basement was filled from floor to ceiling with nothing but fabric - mostly yard-ends that she grabbed from the dumpster at work.  And there was the food cellar that had canned goods (both home canned and store bought) from the 1950s on up.  She could easily have ridden out a zombie apocalypse just from her basement - it might not have been all that pleasant an experience, but she would have come out of it with some nice new quilts.

Happy Halloween

I'm the one on the right

Halloween on a Friday - I used to live for this confluence of events.  I mean, I love Halloween any way that I can get it but on a Friday, when I have two days to recover... it can't get better than that.  I used to have some epic costumes, too.  Always home-made - back then, Walmart hadn't started doing its "Fat Chick" selection of costumes (not that I would have anyway, but still - a big ol' FU to WalMart anyway.)  There was the year that I put 14 pounds of product, an entire bag of bobby pins and some major pink hair spray into my hair, piled it up on top of my head in a major faux hawk, along with a homemade pink tutu and some little pink Chucks and another 14 pounds of gold chains and went as Mr T's Fairy Godmother. Or the year I wore black fishnets, a black skirt, a white bustier and a bunny tail and ears, along with a fake AK-14 and went as Hugh Hefner's worst nightmare. 

At any rate - this year, I'm going as myself, circa 20 years ago.  The me that had just met Roger a month ago, and wasn't sure about him yet, but thought she might be falling in love.  The me that still went out and painted the town red whenever she wanted to, rather than staying home with my husband and puppies (not that there's anything wrong with that.)  The me that laughed - a lot.  Sometimes over really inappropriate things.  So Roger and I are going out to see Lewis Black at the Arlene Schnitzer Auditorium tonight - hey, the 29 year old me appreciated comfort and classy surroundings too - she just couldn't afford them. 

Hope you all have something to dress up as too... enjoy yourselves!  Happy Halloween.

Ok, enough death already

I just found out that my friend Terri from my cancer support group passed away.  This death... this death makes me angry.  She was a wonderful woman - funny, loving, open hearted with lots left to do in this life.  Her husband is a terrific man who was devoted to her, and I know his heart is broken, her children are great kids, but they still need a mother's guidance - heck, even some of her son's friends looked on her as a mom-substitute - they're going to be missing her as well.  Cancer is a senseless, frustrating, terror of a disease, and people have to deal with it every single day.  Why on earth Ebola gets all the attention is beyond my comprehension. 

At any rate... goodbye, Terri.  I will miss your hugs and your smile and your sense of wonder with the world.  You were the kind of teacher I would like for every child to experience, you were a wonderful wife and you were an instant friend.  I hope you are pain-free and have a pleasant garden to wait for Carter in.

Back Home - not quite ready to process the funeral itself yet.

Snippets from the trip itself, though...

Roger was amazed to find that there were places in the United States where the speed limit went above 75.  I think he took it as a personal challenge.  Let's just say that we made it from Cedar City to Vegas in under 2 1/2 hours - and that was with parts of I-15 down to just 1 lane.

He did take time to question some of the naming choices made by my founding fathers - or at least the pronunciations thereof.  For example, Hurricane and LaVerkin rhyming, Kanarraville, Virgin...  I brought up Kalamazoo and Hell in Michigan, not to mention Willamette, Couch, Champoeg (that's pronounced Shampooy for you non-Oregonians).  That last one shut him up.

The Tuscany Suites in Las Vegas were... adequate.  I think if we had gotten in sometime before midnight, I would have like them better, but while the concept was cute (a bunch of villas arranged around a main house), the toilet was about 6 inches lower than I am used to (I'm spoiled) and clogged immediately.  Not something you want to deal with after 6 hours of flying a sub-Greyhound airline and arguing with Hertz.  Oh, and in the 6 hours we were there, I heard at least 7 police sirens.  Admittedly, you don't generally to go Vegas to sleep, but it would have been nice to get at least a couple of hours.

There's No Place Like Home

I'm heading back to Washington, Utah tomorrow for Grandma Lova's funeral.  Well, sort of - turns out that there's no room at the inn.  They're holding the Senior Games in St George, so the hotels are all completely booked.  Somehow, the fact that there's no room for me in my hometown seems... a little too Morrisettish. 

It's not really my hometown anymore, anyway.  The Washington that I knew and drifted in and out of for most of my childhood isn't there anymore.  It's been overtaken by snowbirds and Californians, and land that struggled to provide for 400 or so farmers and ranchers now has over 20,000 residents.  Quentin Niessen's general store is long gone, and I'm betting that they don't show movies on a bedsheet in the wardhouse courtyard on Friday and Saturday nights anymore, either.  Grandpa's ranch is filled with condos now.  I'm not saying that it's a bad thing - just that it's not what it was when I was born.

Maybe that's why they say you can't go home again.  When you do, it's not there.  And I'm not sure why I'm feeling so nostalgic - lord knows I don't miss the 118 in the shade with no air conditioning, or the red dirt dust that clogged everything.  I do kind of miss them testing the air raid siren every day right at noon, though.  And the bookmobile.  I really, really miss the bookmobile.  And the knowledge that everyone in town knew me as Lova and Dewane's granddaughter - you know, LaRae's girl.  There's something very validating about roots that stretch back a century or so.  But when a town grows like lightening, those roots tend to snap.  Maybe that's what I miss.

801-673-2296

That was home base for me when I was growing up.  We moved around pretty much constantly, but 801-673-2296 - that was Grandma and Grandpa's home number, and I knew that I was always
welcome there.Things do change - eventually, it changed over to a 435 prefix, but it was still a constant well into my third decade.

Nothing lasts forever, though.  I just got the phone call from my mother that I had been expecting/ dreading/hoping for.  I know that sounds strange, but for the last few years, my grandmother has been trapped in a haze of short-term memory loss, with one of the few conversations that kept coming up every 15 minutes or so being "I guess God doesn't want me".  It broke a little bit of my heart every time I heard it, and I was hoping for Grandma to know she was wanted, and loved, by the God she was so faithful to.  I hope she's going on to eternal glory with Grandpa - or at least a pleasant cottage where they can be together and get on each other's nerves enough to know that they love and are loved by each other. And I'm also dreading knowing that those of us here are going to be without her love for a little while.  But that's the way life is, I suppose. 

Happy Autumnal Equinox

Today was a perfect Portland autumn day - cool, just a little drizzly, with a nice, fresh scent to the air after the scorch of Summer.  I ended up going in to work (the latest updates from ACE-IT bricked my computer - it was taking up to 5 minutes for each keystroke to register), and took a little bit of a spin around downtown (nice to renew my acquaintanceship with the various oddballs you meet on the street.) 

The one thing about mostly teleworking - when I do get into the office, I end up spending a lot of time reconnecting.  Schmoozing, helping out...  putting the fear of Deci back into a couple of people who needed reminding that I've forgotten more about the programs that they're using than they will ever know (and damn it, stop trying to insert tables and pictures into the contract writing system!  I told you and told you that 19 times out of 20, it might work, but that 20th time, it's going to freeze you solid, and there's nothing I can do about it because CACI is just going to smugly point out the KB article that says not to ever do that - ok, end parenthetical rant.) 

It was bittersweet, though - I loved being back, but my body reminded me why I don't do this everyday anymore about 1:30 or so, started up the whining, big time.  My mind - my mind is totally there and wanting to dance the night away, but my body has become a grumpy old woman who is just there for the early bird special. 

It's funny, though - I'm sort of following a tree's course here.  I've spent my summer's course of being a solid mass of indistinguishable green, and am breaking out into vibrant fall plumage (in my case, purple rather than red or yellow, but vibrant nonetheless), before dropping into the decay of my winter.  People are telling me that I look better than ever, but I can feel the winter of my cancer creeping in.  Not just yet though.   I've still got lots of leaves to lose before I get there.

Why I Enjoy My Job

So, one of the aspects of my job is that occasionally, we have to notify Congress of projects that are about to be awarded.  It might be so that they can take advantage of it in the local press, maybe so that they know our money is being well spent... 

At any rate, out of 25 years, I've only had one action where I got a question back down the line.  And I thought you guys might appreciate the question...  "Are you sure you meant to say "tainter?"  Yep.  Tainter gates.  To quote Wikipedia "the Tainter gate is a type of radial arm floodgate used in dams and canal locks to control water flow. It is named for Wisconsin structural engineer Jeremiah Burnham Tainter."  And don't even get me started on the erecting studs, or the butterfly sexer.

What can I say?  You've got to find your fun where you can.  In September, it's good to remember the little things.

Doctor Visit Result

Not particularly satisfying result...  my weight has gone up some since last time, and my A1C has not gone down enough (it's 8.6, which is down from the 9.4 it was at, but...)  We're going to be talking again in 2 weeks, but we discussed a possible second option (Plan B), which would be taking the tumor out vaginally.  It's not optimal, but if I can't get to the point where they can do the hysterectomy, this is another option.  She's also going to check again with the morbid obesity guys - she put in a request to them 3 months ago, but there doesn't seem to have been any movement on it yet.  I'm feeling a little down, but at least this time it's just a two week wait, rather than another 3 months.