Jan 6, 2008

Happy New Year!

Late, I know. And yes, we still exist. Jo Heath pointed out to Gary that though I had told all about the journey to my mom’s for Thanksgiving, I didn’t say a thing about making it back. Well, we did. To help pass the time of the trip, we listened to a recorded book we’d checked out from the library. James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” That was a mistake, because we found it mostly boring :-) An entire disk (if not more) was devoted to the description of hell – even hellish descriptions can be boring after a while – and another disk was devoted to a discussion by the book’s characters of the definitions of aesthetics and beauty. Gary still said he’d be interested in seeing the movie version of the book, so we got that from Netflix. We thought it better than the book, but only because it was shorter. :-). We must be literary neanderthals. On the “Modern Library” website, they list the top 100 novels of all time. #1 is Ulysses, #2 is The Great Gatsby, and #3 is Portrait of the Artist. We had earlier rented out the movie version of Ulysses. Gary couldn’t finish it he found it so uninteresting, but I stuck it out (just to say I had). I wasn’t motivated to try the book. And all I remember about Gatsby is there’s a rich guy in it, and a tragedy, and Gatsby was played by Robert Redford :-) (never read the book).

We took a trip to Gary’s sister’s (Norma) in Houston for Christmas, his entire family descending on her, so that there were twelve of us altogether (plus Jake, the cat, whom I finally got to meet. Sorta. He pretty much stayed in the bedroom or out in the garage; my cats would’ve been out in the back woods except to sneak in at night for food). We drove to Houston, taking two days. The only real traffic problem was that we ran into a jam east of Baton Rouge, due to big traffic accident. Gary did seem to always manage to time it so *I* was the one driving through the big cities (Mobile, Baton Rouge). While Gary was driving, I, as usual, worked on my novel on my laptop, but while I was driving we listened to a recorded book. But we had learned our lesson. We went for a Dick Francis mystery novel. After Thanksgiving I had taken to listening to recorded books while doing my therapy exercises for my knee, and had gone through Francis’s “Dead Cert,” which I enjoyed. So, I picked out another one of his for the trip, “Decider.” It wasn’t nearly as quickly paced (thought it could use some editing), but Francis writes in such an interesting way that I was content. Also on the trip I also listened to Frank McCourt’s “Teacher Man” on audio book while doing therapy exercises at the motels. I had mixed feelings about the book. His honest account definitely made me wonder how a person could stand to be a public school teacher in a large city (he was in NYC). Sometimes he came off as very much the drifter through life, but occasionally he’d say something that indicated his students were inspired by him. Perhaps part of the problem was that he was performing the audio reading himself, and maybe he found that awkward. I also kept getting the feeling that there were gaps in the narrative, that it jumped too much, and I later realized it was an abridged recording. I regretted renting the audio book, as I would’ve liked the whole picture but am now not sure whether I’ll spend the time reading the book, knowing there are parts of it I’ve already heard. I did very much enjoyed his previous book “Angela’s Ashes,” though.

I also finished Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” while on the trip, and started on a book called “Between, Georgia,” a humorous novel dotted with eccentric southern characters (two feuding families) – I read those books while taking my walks and when in the bathtub. Speaking of those walks, next to the motel in Houston was a short length of road. At its end, to one side was some kind of factory and to the other was an enclosed field with an iron gate. The metal at the entrance to the gate was formed into the words, “Old Settlers Cemetery.” I guess I must’ve been blind, or maybe all the tombstones were off in the distance behind an old white structure I saw, because I didn’t see any of the tombstones. All I saw was a “trees donated in memory of” marker and the white structure, yet when I checked on the web, I came across a bunch of pictures of the place. See http://www.webspawner.com/users/brooksidekate137/index.html
(I only saw views encompassed in the first three and the last pictures.)

I enjoyed the book “Between,” but I’m not sure Didion’s book was a good one for me to read at this point in my life. It brought back all those feelings I had about wanting to encase Gary in bubble wrap and keep him safe on my shelf, since Didion’s book is all about her first year after the death of her beloved husband (the “magical thinking” part is that even though she knew it irrational, she would behave in certain ways because at some level she expected her husband to return at any moment).

Enough literature for now :-). When we first arrived in Houston (never promised this would be chronological), Gary was slightly lost and we stopped for directions. Good thing, because we were traveling down a road in the opposite direction we should’ve been. As we got closer to Norma’s, I sang, “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” Tipperary being the name of the street we had just turned onto. All the streets in Norma’s area apparently have the names either of counties in Ireland or of golfing terms. (Gary investigated, and no one has a street address on Bogie Way – only the backs or sides of houses are on that short street.) Upon arrival at Norma’s, Gary’s brother Donne bumped Gary up the step into Norma’s house (as either he, Wayne, or David did all during our stay). Norma had cooked a delicious welcome meal, and she also cooked a superb Christmas meal (turkey and all the trimmings, finishing with that famous southern dessert, rhubarb pie, and for anyone who doesn’t know, the “southern” is a joke; midwestern, definitely; anywhere else?). I can even attest to the greatness of the meals with authority, because I have found that in the last year I have been able to eat small amounts of foods other than the rice and zukes I lived on for about a decade. The other mealtimes while we were in Houston we either had leftovers at Norma’s or we went to restaurants – Mexican, Italian, fish cooked Louisiana style. I would generally split something with Mom Gruenhage and supplement with “safe foods” I’d brought for the trip (aside: I always get a kick out of Mom G. She takes everything literally, making it impossible to tease her or to make a joke at another person’s expense in her presence.) On those evenings we’d go to restaurants, Gary and I would head straight to the motel afterwards. The other evenings in leaving Norma’s place we’d have to trail this long line of Christmas light gawkers to get out of Norma’s neighborhood. That is, we trailed them until Norma told us a back route. Her area is famous for its Christmas lights (or should that be “Holiday lights”?), and it was quite a show. Norma and Wayne had their place all lighted up too.

The Gruenhages are into games. Gary gave Norma a game I think was called “Memory Madness,” if I’m remembering correctly. I liked it because my team (me and Gary) won. A category was named (for example, vegetables that start with “P”), and we would go around a circle, each team having to name an example until a team got stumped (30 sec time limit). The pressure was on when your team had to start – it seemed much easier to think of something when you didn’t have to go right away, and even easier after the category was over! Gary and I once had to start off with “names of U.S. cities that have a color in it.” We couldn’t think of a one! Until way after time was up. Gary thought of one about 18 hours later. Auburn, Al. Duh.

My favorite answer was when the category was “dogs with ‘hound’ in their name,” and Norma said Huckleberry Hound. There’s thinking outside the box. In general, though, Norma gave up too easily when challenged on an answer. Had I been her, I would’ve been upstairs at the computer searching on the internet to justify my answer, no matter how long the others had to wait while I searched ;-). A couple of times, I should’ve been more gracious and not challenged an answer, but my competitive juices were roused (amusing Gary with my hopping around). And, by the way, there are such things as dried nectarines. Sorry I challenged you, Megan.

The next day we played a different game, called Outburst. It was similar, but we divided into just two teams. One team selects a topic card, and everyone on the opposite team yells out simultaneously everything they can think of that might be listed on the card under that topic (in some cases, the responses were unlikely but hilarious, as for example “sushi” being “a food item found at a sporting event”; apparently the sporting event was sumo wrestling). My team lost on this. I know I personally found it hard to think with everyone yelling out stuff!

They played another game another day, named something like “Man Laws and Woman Rules,” but I was gamed out (might’ve had something to do with having an aversion to the title).

Oh, I forgot -- there was another game. A very sadistic one, it would seem. Up to four players each have a hand control. You watch a little button that is flashing red, and when it flashes green, you press your hand control. The last one to press their hand control gets a nasty shock! Yes, Gary and I actually played this (Norma said her estimation of the intelligence of those gathered went sharply downwards) -- I was, perhaps unjustifiable, confident of the speed of my reflexes. Remember, I am the one who made the amazing catch of a flying frozen fish went it went sailing over the fish counter at the grocery store. Anyway, I went through two rounds without getting shocked, but the way those who got shocked cried out and dropped their hand controls persuaded me not to press my luck any further.

At some time during this holiday get-together there was a conversation about California community colleges (Donne is the chair of a guidance department at one such). Evidently someone’s decided too many people are failing out of California’s community colleges, so the answer is to fund basic classes. Which means, college professors would be teaching these community college students courses that are grade school level English and math. Yikes!

In recent years for Christmas each member of the Gruenhage clan would draw a name from a hat (in reality, someone else would draw it for Gary and me or anyone else who wasn’t in the presence of the hat) and that would be the person you would get a present for. But this year we went back to the tradition of getting something for everyone. That was fun. Many gifts were serious, but some were humorous – like the T-shirts and sweatshirts Donne and Phyllis and Carissa and Justin gave. Bob and Gary got “CSI BOISE” and “CSI AUBURN” respectively. I got a sweatshirt that read, “Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel,” which I thought hysterical as well as appropriate. I opened it up soon after I had opened one of Gary’s gifts, the equally appropriate sleep mask with the words “Working on my novel” written on it. But when Norma got a beautiful watch from Wayne, I teased Gary by hitting him on the arm and saying, “And all I got was a lousy sleep mask.” (I personally didn’t want a watch, I then assured him.)

(We of course took in a second Christmas haul from my side of the family.)

Nephew David, Norma and Wayne’s son, decided to do something extra special, and he got us all tickets to the play “A Christmas Carol.” So we trooped off to the center of Houston for that on the day after Christmas. It was an enjoyable production. We did have a bit of a problem in that the air conditioning was blowing on us. I was cold, but Gary was even colder (might have helped me that I had three layers of shirts on). Gary was shivering away next to me (their “handicapped seating” meant sitting in the aisle in the last row, but that was fine because we had a good view), so at intermission I went to our van and got my poncho and two sweaters I had. We put the poncho on him, draped one of the sweaters around his shoulders and put the other on his lap. He said he probably looked dumb but was too cold to care. He didn’t really warm up until we went to the restaurant afterwards (which, conveniently, was across the street) and he got something hot in him.

I also kind of worried about where he was sitting during the play. He had his brakes on, of course, but I had this little worry that someone would stumble over him in the dark and his chair would get pushed down the step. So I had one ear cocked for someone moving in our direction. Call me paranoid ;-).

Speaking of heat and cold, it took us a couple days to figure out that to work the temperature control in our motel room, we needed to flip open this little box on the wall, not just push the button on the outside (which obviously wasn’t doing anything). I was okay because I had brought my portable heater (always be prepared) but Gary was on the cool side until this discovery, him being a man and not wanting to come right out and ask the motel staff if there was some way to adjust the heat in his room ;-)

The entire trip lasted a week – 4 days of it traveling – and the weather most of the time was on the cool side with some rain (sheesh, if I’m going to go to the effort of traveling, the weather can at least cooperate and be nicer than back at home). I was happy get back to my own bed. Had the usual motel disturbances while away, of course ;-), Santa and his reindeer having a good ol’ time up on the rooftops. A couple nights during the trip I was so tired that I forgot to turn Gary’s lights out after getting him settled in bed (I was in a separate room), and he had to yell at me to come back. Fortunately, my ears are good, so I heard him (I feared the entire hotel had ;-)) and came back from down the hall to rectify the situation. My other motel mishap was that a blew up a peeled hard-boiled egg in the motel microwave. I guess heating it for an entire minute was too long. Naturally I didn’t do this in the privacy of my room but in the hotel dining area, so all the other guests could jump at the “Boom!” and stare at me. I said, “Oops, I blew up an egg.” They did not seemed amused. Bah, humbug. Which reminds me of another motel story, a different morning of the trip, a different motel. A woman was seated at a dining table with her husband. I had waited at the elevator with him earlier, and he seemed a nice gentle old guy. Turned out I had also met his wife at the elevator after that, she going out, me going in (I was loading up stuff into the car), and for some unknown reason she’d scowled at me. So now I see her with her husband at the table, she talking on her cell phone. She spoke sharply. She ended the call, made another one. More sharp words, then an ending to the call, the another one made. After a few brief introductory words, she said, “You’re the third of my children who isn’t coming. Is this how I raised you? What did I do wrong?” I bet they could give her an ear-load if she really wanted to know ;-) (And why do people on their cell phones think the rest of us want to hear their conversation? Although, I admit, this one had entertainment value.)

It was a bit of a bummer that Gary got another UTI during the trip. Not sure why – it’s been three months since he’s had one. Maybe the stress of travel or the change in diet (he ate more sweets than usual)? He was out of practice in keeping the condom catheter secure, and as a result we had to change his trousers a couple of extra times.

The UTI has cleared up now.

My knee and back did better on this trip than they did on the previous ones, so that’s progress. I fear I am going to end up having to have surgery on the knee though. It’s not healing, and it prevents me from doing so much. I dread surgery.

We’re continuing to enjoy Netflix. Recent movies have been the Irish movies “Once” and “Intermission.” The first is a story about a male Dublin street musician and a female Czech immigrant who meet and have an eventful week, dancing about on the edges of love. Very interesting, the story moved along by songs – and there are some really good ones there. The second is a dark comedy, also set in Dublin, the plot involving romance, betrayal, kidnapping, bank robbery. It mixed romance, crime, and farce. We enjoyed it. But don’t forget we labeled it “dark.” Also recent was “Black Book,” a German-language WWII thriller about the last days of the war with a protagonist of a Jewish singer who hooks up with the Dutch Resistance.

We do love our English subtitles or “for the deaf” options on the DVDs. Right now we are taking a break from Netflix and watching a PBS Masterpiece Theater production I taped over the holidays, “Prime Suspect,” a British police procedural. The first night we watched, especially, we had to keep stopping the tape and ask each other, “What did s/he say?” Do wish those Brits would speak English. :-)

The kitties were glad to see us when we got back. Or at least Tigger was. I suspect Blackjack only cares he has someone to fill his bowl. As a result of Tigger’s bout of UTI problems, we (read “I”) am supposed to feed him special food. He is not thrilled with it. Four times a day I have to stand near him while he eats. When he starts to walk away, I go over to the bowl of (canned) food and stir it with my finger. This magically makes it taste better to him (my massage therapist theorizes that this releases the aroma of the food, and says she does something similar to get her cat to eat the food that’s been sitting in his bowl a while). After I stir it, Tigger starts in on it again. Stops. Peg stirs food again. Cycle repeats. Occasionally Peg tried to spice things up with added blue cheese salad dressing or canned sardines or Gary’s homemade chicken curry or bits of fish or meat (the cod liver oil and the oyster sauce were utter failures). The length of the cycle shortens with each repetition until it reaches zero (at which time Tigger is going out the cat door to escape my next attempt to put the bowl in front of him; I worried that my trying to “force” him to eat more in this fashion would completely turn him off to the food, but it hasn’t seemed to have had that effect). This encouragement of his eating is done because we are having trouble keeping his weight up.

I usually try to feed him while next to my laptop or with a book in my hand so I’m not simply “wasting” my time watching him for the length of time it takes him to eat. One problem with this special treatment of Tigger is that Blackjack feels deprived (HE doesn’t get the expensive food coming out of a can which surely is better than his ol’ dry food and HE doesn’t have his mommy encouraging him to eat more), and if Tigger wanders off and I’m too absorbed in my other activity, the next thing I know there’s a black cat devouring the food. Blackjack does not need more food. He is a bottomless pit and I fear the next time I bring him in to the vet she is going to say he needs to lose weight. I tried putting him behind the locked cat barrier when feeding Tigger on the other side of the house, but he scratches and yells. I think I will try my older sister’s technique and feed Tigger up on my desk, which Blackjack can’t jump up on (he can barely make it up the bed sometimes). I don’t know if this will be much of an improvement, for I am sure Blackjack will probably still holler and look betrayed. My sister, by the way, has a cat with severe allergies who is on a diet of special food. Before, it was kangaroo meat. But when there was that tainted cat food scare, it turned out the kangaroo meat was affected, so now he’s on untainted duck meat. What we do for our pets. Reminds me of the story Donne (Gary’s brother) and Phyllis (Donne’s wife) told last summer of the vet telling them they could have an MRI done on their parakeet to see why it kept falling off its perch. They declined. (If I remember correctly, a diagnosis would’ve in any case been unlikely to save the bird.)

I made two New Year’s resolutions. One was to go back to eating only fresh food. After Gary’s accident, I got in the habit of eating soup out of a can (I’d found one “health food” soup I could tolerate without much food reaction) and I picked up a rice cake addiction. So now I’m making my veggie soup fresh. It may take me longer to wean myself off the rice cakes. My second, related, resolution is to see if I can tolerate more foods. This hasn’t been quite as successful, as I’ve ended up with some tremendous allergy headaches from reacting to something I’ve eaten. As yet I haven’t been disciplined enough in my testing to only add one ingredient at a time. Still, I know I’m doing better that a few years back – I don’t feel like ripping my guts out at night, every night.

Because my knee doesn’t allow me to walk very fast, I finally decided to get in some aerobic activity by taking up the hand cycle, which is what Gary has been doing. I started in late November. I’m following the program Gary has been following, trying to maximize my distance in a certain time, and after three times of reaching it, increasing by one minute. I started at five minutes, got to six, but then the school break closed the exercise room. I tried starting right in at six minutes again yesterday, and it went all right. I am really puffing at the end. Afterwards, I go to the track, which is a very short distance away, and walk for a half-hour. That’s MWF. The other days I walk in our neighborhood for fifteen minutes (I tried going up to thirty minutes on those day, but got shin splints, it being hillier around our place).

Gary is continuing to progress in his exercises, both the weight and the hand cycling (I think he is at nine minutes, maybe ten, on that). He has his trainers all impressed. And he’s got great delts. He plans on going to the Spring Topology conference in Milwaukee, making the trip without me. Piotr Minc has, unasked, volunteered to accompany him during the trip (they will take a plane). Gary is one of the keynote speakers :-)

Gary is also planning on changing the company that services his wheelchair. The one he has been using has moved their branch out of the area. Gary spoke to a different company about an hour away, and they seem knowledgeable enough. He will try them the next time he needs service.

I continue to spend my time (when I’m not going to therapy ) working on my novel. I am going to give it another pass (to further develop the female lead; I’ve got the male lead pretty much where I want him). Then I will look into the arcane world of agents and publishers. After or during that, I plan to try to turn part of this blog into a book. The spinal cord injury part, I mean. Don’t know if anyone wants to read about my kitties.