Archive for August 2011
Haunted Dreams
Earlier this week, I came across a commentary, by T. D. Mischke, in my local paper, The StarTribune, that resonates with the way I see things in this world. I remember having the same feeling that he relays, when I first saw the statistic that the drought and famine in Somalia has killed more than 29,000 children under the age of 5 in the last 90 days. This continues to happen right now, as you read this! It breaks my heart to realize that I remember similar news being reported from Ethiopia when I was young. There were campaigns, back then, aimed at solving the problem of world hunger. I think most people felt that would eventually happen, similar to the way humans have solved other health epidemics through the years. It makes the current story that much more demoralizing to learn.
Children are dying in a famine as we go on blithely about our lives
I hope you will take a moment to click the link and read his words.
There are plenty of comments following the article that offer different perspectives of ways to interpret this current situation, but I think tens of thousands of children dying of famine stands as a despicable reflection on the human race, regardless the finer details. Will we ever get it right? I have my doubts. Meanwhile, we have to go on about our lives, blithely, or not.
If I am who I ought to be, or who I one day hope to be, those dead little kids shall haunt my dreams tonight. T. D. Mischke
Kitty Watch
We are on Kitty watch at our house lately. It is quite possible that we are experiencing the last days of her life. Repeated visits to the veterinary clinic have yet to reveal any absolute diagnosis to explain her difficulties, which are all related to processing food. She may simply have cancer of some form. We have declined to purchase any invasive diagnostic procedures thus far, and are relying on the informed advice of the professionals to direct our care. Kitty is receiving some medication to calm her stomach, but the results of that treatment, thus far, are inconclusive.
She seems to have an awareness of her situation. For days, she ignored food. Since the medication, she has returned to her bowl a couple of times and timidly made attempts to eat. It only seems to come back up as vomit. It doesn’t appear to inspire her to try again after outcomes like that.
We are treating this situation as hospice care and doing what we can to make her comfortable. I find it a bit awkward to be assuming she is on death’s door without quite knowing for sure. Is it time to say my goodbye, or will she survive this and be back to her old self in time? I’m not quite sure. But the general feeling around the house is that she is closer to dying than she is to recovering.
It is noteworthy how much this influences the atmosphere of our household activities. Kitty has been a special addition to our family, despite my occasional grumblings otherwise. When she is not feeling well, none of us are, either.
What Vacation?
So here it is, Monday again. The past weekend was one of those, for me, that was wonderfully enjoyable (except the part where I worked Saturday morning). But, as enjoyable as it was, it wore me out more than a week of work. I need a vacation.
Even after sleeping in a bit (and not even getting out of bed until about noon on Sunday) my activity of the second half of the day, on top of the long day of activity on Saturday, however pleasant, left me exhausted by the end of the weekend. And this, just at the time that I must embark on another week at the day-job. I am ever so grateful to have the opportunity to work at my day-job, and to receive the benefits that come with having a job. Don’t get me wrong. It may truly be as simple as my being due for a vacation.
I didn’t get to go on my annual bike trip this summer and our planned trip to Portugal was canceled after Cyndie broke her knee. I never got around to replacing those losses with a plan for something else.
So, the next question Cyndie and I are pondering is, what vacation? On our tightened budget, due to her being out of work all summer, this will likely lead to a week-long visit to our paradise at her family’s vacation home in Wisconsin.
There is a new hammock up there that I have hardly had a chance to break in yet. At this point in my life, that is sounding like just the kind of activity I would like to take on for a week at the end of summer.
Stray Electrons
The mystery of the shocking news is resolved… sort of. I did not have the pleasure of being present yesterday during the visit from an electrician. By the time I got home, everything was solved. Just like that, …solved. I should be pleased, but I am frustrated. I have yet to receive a thorough explanation.
I did have a brief opportunity to speak with the electrician when Cyndie called me at work and put me on speaker phone. He provided me with the news that it wasn’t just the gutter that was energized. That’s almost funny, in hindsight. At first, it was remarkable that the problem wasn’t just the downspout, but it was the entire gutter. Now the electrician was telling me that the soffit and fascia was floating at the live voltage.
We decided on a plan where he would go up into our attic and look for a possible wire in the vicinity of the soffit. My thought, after I hung up the phone, was that the attic on this hot, humid day would be a miserable place. He must have had the same thought.
Cyndie explained later that he decided on his own to do some other investigating before climbing into the attic. He reviewed, once again, which lights, in which rooms, were being fed electricity by the wire on the circuit breaker which we had discovered was energizing the gutter. Then he began to remove the covers from the switches and outlets in the room with an outside wall. This is where it gets a little cloudy.
Somehow, he identified the wire that was feeding electricity to the soffit. He disconnected it and capped it off. Then he pulled in a new wire to replace the one he terminated.
So, it is fixed. All our circuit breakers are back on, and the soffit and gutters are not electrified. But I still don’t know where the (now dead) wire makes contact with something that is tied to the soffit, nor how long that situation has existed.
Something tells me I will be making a little expedition up into my attic in the near future. My curiosity is peaked. However, I’m not so curious that I can’t wait until maybe September to find out.
Exploring Between
Nestled subtly between the moments of life when we are actively engaged in preparation for an activity, or slowly winding down from the post-action review that people naturally do, there is a time that I label as ‘between.’ There is no shortage of tasks awaiting my attention during these times, but lately, I find myself more interested in exploring how long I can put off tending to any of them before my next spurt of activity.
It seems to me to be a lingering residual of the recent span of time when my back pain prevented me from participating in any of my usual activities. I have successfully completed a series of physical therapy sessions which relieved me of my back pain and released me to resume as much normal activity as pain allows. Yet, I hesitate. But I am not just hesitating to resume all of my former activity. There is also significant neglect, lately, for my daily therapeutic walk and exercises.
I’ve decided that I might as well explore this in-between place while I’m here. I keep looking for what the trigger will be that finally kicks me back into a more normal level of activity. I can’t help wonder about the one variable that is always changing in all of this. I keep aging. I’m not clear on how much a role it is playing in my current situation, but it does color my thinking on the issue. Maybe one of these times I’ll find that I end up never going back to something I did before.
There is another thing that complicates all of this. I tend to compartmentalize my work-time at the day-job from the rest of my free-time. I don’t have the luxury of any ‘between’ time to explore at work. In fact, the extremely heavy amount of business lately, (and the fact that I am covering for the owner’s responsibilities while he is vacationing) is an obvious influence on the level of energy I have for investing in the variety of my non-work activities.
Maybe it will all be as simple as, …I’ll pick up my free-time activities again when the work load at the day-job finally settles to a reasonable amount.
Could this whole thing be the result of having succumbed, this summer, to paying a young neighbor to mow my lawn, like ‘old’ people do when such chores become too much for them? Time will tell.
Relative Something 