Letters From Home

I’ve been watching the show “Fun Shui” on HGTV. Usually the “feng shui” people who do TV shows are just too artsy-fartsy for words. But this lady seems to know what she’s doing and she knows how to explain why the changes she wants made, need to be made. It’s never explained just who pays for the curtains and furniture they use, which is what has me giving the show the fish eye from time to time, but so far the advice she’s given seems spot on, and the rooms look wonderful once she’s rearranged and repainted.

According to the show I watched last night, what we did in moving the office back here was the right thing to do. The couple in that episode had a cramped, poorly laid out home office in a small upstairs bedroom. The host had them move the office down to a rarely-used formal dining room in the back left corner of the first floor (viewed from the front door). Apparently, that is the “wealth corner” and is a dandy spot for a home office.

Well, the “wealth corner” in our house is my son’s room (and a good feng-shui makeover in there would do absolute wonders for it, I have no doubt, but YOU try getting that past the occupant). But this room comes close. The lady suggested that they put in a “water feature” and paint the walls a nice pale lavender. The paint job in here isn’t going to happen overnight (and I’ll have to think long and hard about the lavender) but I could, and did, put in a “water feature” of our own.

We have a little tabletop fountain that used to be in the livng room, where we never paid enough attention to it and it kept running dry. So, eventually we just stored it away. I got it out and cleaned it up and filled it full of distilled water (to cut down on the inevitable mineral deposits) and it’s happily trickling away on top of the bookshelf as I type. I dunno, maybe it’s wishful thinking, but it definitely feels right.

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Like most women, I’m always on the lookout for the Perfect Purse. I’m beginning to think that Perfect Purses fall into the same category as perpetual motion machines and world peace–nice idea, not workable in the real world.

The latest entry in my Purse Quest arrived today. It’s the Messenger Bag from Duluth Trading Company. The illustration is the khaki version. Mine is black.

The illustration’s a bit misleading because it shows the backside of the bag. But it’s otherwise accurate enough.

The bag’s a bit smaller than I’d pictured it when I ordered. This is a good thing in that it will encourage me to be better organized and quit hauling around so much junk, but on the other hand I can’t just stuff my big spiral notebook into this one when I’m off to class, as I did with my Victorinox mesenger bag, its predecessor.

Still, I’m replacing the Victorinox because it just wasn’t well enough organized. It’s just one big inner compartment and stuff not only got lost in there, it fell out. After my bus pass disappeared for the second time I figured it was time to take action.

Other good things about this purse:

• Nylon and therefore easy to keep clean
• Lots and lots of compartments, with zippers
• Built-in phone holder
• Cute little LED flashlight that snaps into the purse flap
• Expandable bottom gusset (a necessity since the top of the bag is comparatively small)
• Zippered compartment on the back that will be great for my card case

Things I don’t like so much:

• The aforementioned small opening at the top
• Magnetic closure (safe for PDA or not?)
• Designed to be carried over the left shoulder and not ambidextrously

I’m gonna transfer my stuff over to it and see how well I can fit everything in. I’ve been carrying around an unstructured bag from Marketplace of India when I didn’t want to haul out the big messenger bag, and I think this new bag will be the perfect in-between-those-bags replacement.

Whether it’s the proverbial Purse of Gold remains to be seen.

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Terrible fires burning all around Southern California. It seems we’ve formed our own “ring of fire” here. Nowhere near us, thank goodness, but near relatives and people we know.

I wanted to move to California, and we’ve had a good life here since we arrived with our overstuffed rental truck that day in June 1984, but I’m beginning to look forward to the day we can leave.

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No matter how much I fuss about it, I am still always on the lookout for good new WordPress stuff. Look around and see what I’ve added today.

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I just can’t tell you how delighted I was to read this morning that J.K. Rowling told the world yesterday that the most beloved elder in Christendom (and I use that phrase deliberately) Albus Dumbledore is gay.

Wow, who would have thought… generations of children mentored by a homosexual grow up to, oh, you know, get married and have children who save the world. OK, some of those kids turned out to be Crabbe, Goyle and Malfoy (two generations each) but you can’t have everything.

Some people have already expressed their dismay that she didn’t tell us about this from the very first opportunity. Sadly, in this day and age, she couldn’t have carried it off any other way.

The only way to protect herself from the inevitable firestorm was to wait till the series was finished and millions of people had already read it and loved every word. Because if the gay-haters knew about Dumbledore one second sooner, they not only would have started burning books immediately but the controversy would have insured that millions of people would never have laid hands on a Harry Potter book, much less read it.

This way, people who would otherwise have backed away in absolute horror at the very idea of a gay person being a major, beloved character who helps the hero save the world, read Dumbledore’s story–and liked him.

And now, if they have even two brain cells to rub together, they’re going to have to deal with the fact that gay characters don’t cause them any personal harm whatsoever.

It might just be the start of something good. Oh, once we get past the brimstone and bonfires, that is. Guaranteed, the Dark rhetoric starts spewing from pulpits tomorrow.

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I spent quite a bit of time upgrading my other blogs to the latest version of WordPress tonight, but I don’t know if I can do that with this one. It seems that my theme may be incompatible with WordPress 2.3.

And I don’t want to give up my theme.

The cautions on it just say that it might be a problem. Whether I want to go ahead and try the upgrade, and then possibly have to take it all out again and put back the old version… well, not gonna do it tonight, that’s for sure.

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According to the LA Times and other sources, Turkey is threatening to “cut off cooperation with the United States on a number of security fronts” if a resolution currently before Congress goes through.

The resolution refers to the deaths of more than a million Armenians in Turkey around the time of WWI as a genocide. The Turks claim it wasn’t anything of the sort, and besides, a lot of other people got killed at the same time.

If millions of people got killed at the same time and it wasn’t a genocide, what term should be used to describe it? Is Stalin guilty of genocide for having millions slaughtered in the USSR? Are the settlers of North America guilty of genocide for what happened to the native population?

Apparently the Turkish sticking point is that they don’t think they targeted Armenians in particular. I haven’t seen any statistics that show how many people of other-than-Armenian descent were slaughtered at that time, and I doubt at this late date that entirely accurate figures could be obtained… but still, if the Armenians were the majority of the victims, I doubt any rational person could claim it was just coincidence that it happened that way. Since when have Bush & Co. ever really worried about what anyone else in the world thought of us? Why is it all of a sudden so important to appease the Turks, when Bush policies have already pissed off so many other nations in that area of the world (and elsewhere)? Those guys don’t give a crap. The cynical person should wonder whose palm is being greased, and by whom.

Do we claim that what happened during WWII wasn’t genocide because it wasn’t just the Jews who were the target of Hitler’s insanity? (My grandfather and all his family died in a concentration camp, according to family tradition, because they were “Polish intelligentsia.”) Do we claim that the deaths of a huge percentage of the native populations in the Americas from the time of Columbus up to recent historical times was not genocide because so much of it was the result of ignorance rather than deliberate malice?

It seems to this outsider that the solution would be to let the resolution pass. It harms nothing to acknowledge something that happened nearly a century ago. Telling the truth sheds light on the problem And the current Turkish government should respond to the resolution by saying “That was then. This is now. The people responsible are long dead and we should let them and their victims rest in peace. They have received whatever reward or punishment they deserved. All we can do at this late date is to assure the world that nothing like that will ever happen again.”

Won’t happen, of course. I suspect the Turks and the Bushes have way too much in common to be logical.

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It’s been brought home to me, over the past few weeks, that (like most people, I think) I expect at least a few things in my life to stay the same.

One of the things I expected not to change any time soon was my mother’s independence. Up to about two weeks ago, she lived a fiercely independent life–to the extent of turning down a serious proposal of marriage a few months back. She didn’t want to change her life to that extent, no matter how she felt about her boyfriend. (Seems strange to say “boyfriend” about a guy who’s 83, but what other term is there?)

All of a sudden, though, her short-term memory completely conked out. And now she gets panicky and frightened easiliy when someone’s not there to reassure her. The doctors can’t figure out what went wrong.

Mom’s had a stroke, a heart attack and bypass surgery. I had read that bypass surgery sometimes causes mental problems in the year or so afterwards, but other sources say that’s just coincidence. Certainly my dad went downhill after he had bypass surgery and eventually died of complications of Alzheimers. Is this what’s happening to Mom? She’s had every conceivable test and nothing has showed up.

She’s aware of the problem and aware of what’s wrong, and can talk quite lucidly on the phone (at least when I’ve talked with her) but not being able to remember anything is scaring her. Understandably so.

But what’s to be done? Only one of the four of us siblings lives nearby, and that one is working two jobs, putting four daughters through school, and on top of everything else moving in with his father-in-law who’s seriously affected by dementia but refuses to move out of his home. My brother just has nothing left to give.

Another brother has flown in from California to take care of Mom for the moment, but he has to come back and get back to work because while he’s in Louisville he has no income. He’s talked about bringing Mom back to California, but we all know that’s not practical. Outside of her familiar surroundings, who knows what might happen, and the cost of housing in California is ten times what it is in Louisville.

Mom begs not to be “put in a home.” Given that she would only have Medicare to pay for long term care, that’s a reasonable concern. But what can we do if it should come to that? The four of us together don’t have the resources to pay for anything else. Unfortunately, our parents’ legacy did not include either lots of money or the will to get into lucrative professions.

We can hope that somehow, she’ll get better. It’s possible that she had another small stroke, one that wouldn’t show up on any scan. If that’s the case, it might be possible to re-route the brain cells and make daily independent life feasible again. But no one’s counting those particular chickens before they are hatched.

So, things have changed. And how we all wish they had stayed the same. We have to think of something. Mom can’t.

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