phone home
Oct. 19th, 2005 11:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7So I baked cookies and then a pizza to round out a far too short and chilly day at home. (I did do a quick grocery run, so I didn't actually spend the whole day lounging about. Sadly enough.)
In the midst of the pizza preparations Mom called to yell at me for not having called home. I explained that she had in fact caught me as I was psyching myself up to do that very thing, and she said fine, call then, and hung up on me, which was rather annoying. No one has ever accused my mother of being diplomatic, however, and so I turned dinner preparations over to Z so I could phone home.
I had a pleasant conversation with Dad, who probably had no idea Mom had called me. However he may just have been being diplomatic. Which is something he is, actually.
In the conversation I learned that his doctor says his treatment options will probably be fairly simple and relatively un-unpleasant. I also learned that Uncle Brian has already undergone pretty much all the treatment they think he's going to need and is recovering, and is unlikely to require any more treatment. So he's pretty well cancer-free already, and is starting to consider whether to retire early or go back to work. Aunt Alison, on the other hand, is in the midst of treatments that are far more unpleasant than the disease. "They tell me I'd a 1% chance of having my hair fall out," she says, "and so of course all my hair fell out. And a 2% chance of developing skin lesions, so of course I have them all over." She's had a history of bad luck with health, although given that she's still alive (and so is her husband, who was given a matter of months to live back in '02 or so with severe hepatitis, but is still going strong and still working 50-hour weeks for Conde Nast) it's not that bad luck.
So I'm hoping Dad has more luck. He's always been healthy, unlike the other two-- Uncle Brian was always frail as a child and Grandma was forever fussing over him (up until she herself died in her late eighties), but Dad's really never been seriously ill. (His asthma has bothered him for twenty years now, but never enough to incapacitate him-- though damn close sometimes.)
I asked him what he wanted for his birthday-- he's turning 61 in 10 days-- and he said he hadn't even given it a moment's thought and he'd have to get back to me. I could be pessimistic and get him some good books and warm pj's, if he's going to be ill, but I think I'd rather be optimistic and get him new workboots or a flannel shirt for outdoor puttering, or something like that.
In other family news, Scout has Lyme disease-- but they only discovered that because of a routine screening test for heartworm (they have to test before they can put her on preventive medicine, and apparently they test for Lyme too while they're at it), so it's a matter of a simple course of antibiotics. Lyme's only bad if you don't catch it and it has time to fuck you up. So she's imperceptibly on the mend (given that she wasn't perceptibly damaged in the first place) and all is well with her.
And in still other news, Cousin Arthur (we've just always called him that-- dad's first cousin on his ... father's side, a professor of sports psychology or somesuch at UMass (?), deeply eccentric and wholeheartedly lovable) and his son came out for bow-hunting season, and got not one but two deer. We have 50 acres of property, ideally suited for outdoorsmanship-- lots of ravines and scrubby bits and real hunks of forest, all up and down and intricate sloping down westward to the Hudson, and we don't use it for much but raising trees and deer. Dad isn't actually all that fond of killing, but he likes tracking and patrolling a great deal, so he's happy enough to go out with Art and Art's friend Gary and their various sons. Art recently got divorced, and so is spending a lot more time hunting and the such, and his sweetheart of a son Andy has been palling around with him (it being a kind of abrupt transition at this stage of life). They've been coming to visit my folks because it is such a nice bit of land for hunting, and because we feed them and have good conversations with them about the old times and such.
So Art shot one, and they dragged it home, and went out again, and then Andy shot one and they couldn't find it. Art is passionate about being humane and respectful, and absolutely refuses to leave a deer lying, especially if he's not sure it's dead, and so they spent hours trying to find it. The next morning Mom and Dad joined them, and Mom and Dad did a routine line sweep while Art and Andy second-guessed themselves for a quarter-mile all around, and sure enough Mom found the carcass in some thick brush. The problem with deer is that they're built to run and can pretty much keep running even after they're dead. And it's awful and all that but they're just so damn tasty, and it's a better fate than starving or being hunted down by the coy-dogs we have on our property. (I've found carcasses they've left and it's really just not pretty.)
So mom and dad have "half of two deer" in the chest freezer in the basement, and had just eaten venison stew for dinner. Last year Z and I helped Art butcher one of the deer they shot, and it was actually pretty fascinating to watch him take the thing apart, lay it out, and bag it up by how the meat should be prepared. (We took the neck roast and prepared it for my cousins Maureen and Jessie one night.) Venison is just so flavorful.
And I'm so damn homesick. The leaves are starting to turn there, just starting to fall but still mostly green with a tree here and there color-kissed. No frost yet, but a warning for Friday. They're getting the wood in for the winter, harvesting the last vegetables, catching up on fall chores.
I harvested the last of my tomatoes, and made a white pizza with them and some herbs from the garden. I also made Amazing Cookies (i mislabeled them in the scan)-- huge cookies, and a zillion of them. Most of them are going to work tomorrow with Z, for his office-- he said they needed some pretty badly. One of the art staff had to take over from the absent Art Director to put the paper together and today was hell for her-- the A.D. would just have flipped out at someone (who would have deserved it), but her temporarily-promoted substitute just lacks the age and authority to do so (she's probably 24 or 25 and is quite mild-mannered and soft-voiced) and had to just patiently freak out all day. So I'm sending them cookies: perhaps I've already done my bit and more (esp. considering they ain't paying me nothing-- but had I flaked out Z would never ever have heard the end of it), but if I kept all those cookies at home they'd have to get eaten and that would mean I'd be back up to a size 16. Which'd be depressing, as I actually have a few pairs of pants that fit right now.
I also made myself a page of things I want for Xmas etc., because Z is working on that site for his family's gift exchange, and I remembered I'd started a Git List page months ago. It's absurdly over-HTML'd, but part of it was just me tinkering with the source code pane in GoLive to see if I could. I sometimes forget, I used to be a webdesigner. Not that you can tell from this page: I was all over the un-marked-up, clean-formatted black-on-white HTML. I should get a tacky background image to tile, though. :D That'd be sweet. And an animated .gif of something or other. Yeah...
In the midst of the pizza preparations Mom called to yell at me for not having called home. I explained that she had in fact caught me as I was psyching myself up to do that very thing, and she said fine, call then, and hung up on me, which was rather annoying. No one has ever accused my mother of being diplomatic, however, and so I turned dinner preparations over to Z so I could phone home.
I had a pleasant conversation with Dad, who probably had no idea Mom had called me. However he may just have been being diplomatic. Which is something he is, actually.
In the conversation I learned that his doctor says his treatment options will probably be fairly simple and relatively un-unpleasant. I also learned that Uncle Brian has already undergone pretty much all the treatment they think he's going to need and is recovering, and is unlikely to require any more treatment. So he's pretty well cancer-free already, and is starting to consider whether to retire early or go back to work. Aunt Alison, on the other hand, is in the midst of treatments that are far more unpleasant than the disease. "They tell me I'd a 1% chance of having my hair fall out," she says, "and so of course all my hair fell out. And a 2% chance of developing skin lesions, so of course I have them all over." She's had a history of bad luck with health, although given that she's still alive (and so is her husband, who was given a matter of months to live back in '02 or so with severe hepatitis, but is still going strong and still working 50-hour weeks for Conde Nast) it's not that bad luck.
So I'm hoping Dad has more luck. He's always been healthy, unlike the other two-- Uncle Brian was always frail as a child and Grandma was forever fussing over him (up until she herself died in her late eighties), but Dad's really never been seriously ill. (His asthma has bothered him for twenty years now, but never enough to incapacitate him-- though damn close sometimes.)
I asked him what he wanted for his birthday-- he's turning 61 in 10 days-- and he said he hadn't even given it a moment's thought and he'd have to get back to me. I could be pessimistic and get him some good books and warm pj's, if he's going to be ill, but I think I'd rather be optimistic and get him new workboots or a flannel shirt for outdoor puttering, or something like that.
In other family news, Scout has Lyme disease-- but they only discovered that because of a routine screening test for heartworm (they have to test before they can put her on preventive medicine, and apparently they test for Lyme too while they're at it), so it's a matter of a simple course of antibiotics. Lyme's only bad if you don't catch it and it has time to fuck you up. So she's imperceptibly on the mend (given that she wasn't perceptibly damaged in the first place) and all is well with her.
And in still other news, Cousin Arthur (we've just always called him that-- dad's first cousin on his ... father's side, a professor of sports psychology or somesuch at UMass (?), deeply eccentric and wholeheartedly lovable) and his son came out for bow-hunting season, and got not one but two deer. We have 50 acres of property, ideally suited for outdoorsmanship-- lots of ravines and scrubby bits and real hunks of forest, all up and down and intricate sloping down westward to the Hudson, and we don't use it for much but raising trees and deer. Dad isn't actually all that fond of killing, but he likes tracking and patrolling a great deal, so he's happy enough to go out with Art and Art's friend Gary and their various sons. Art recently got divorced, and so is spending a lot more time hunting and the such, and his sweetheart of a son Andy has been palling around with him (it being a kind of abrupt transition at this stage of life). They've been coming to visit my folks because it is such a nice bit of land for hunting, and because we feed them and have good conversations with them about the old times and such.
So Art shot one, and they dragged it home, and went out again, and then Andy shot one and they couldn't find it. Art is passionate about being humane and respectful, and absolutely refuses to leave a deer lying, especially if he's not sure it's dead, and so they spent hours trying to find it. The next morning Mom and Dad joined them, and Mom and Dad did a routine line sweep while Art and Andy second-guessed themselves for a quarter-mile all around, and sure enough Mom found the carcass in some thick brush. The problem with deer is that they're built to run and can pretty much keep running even after they're dead. And it's awful and all that but they're just so damn tasty, and it's a better fate than starving or being hunted down by the coy-dogs we have on our property. (I've found carcasses they've left and it's really just not pretty.)
So mom and dad have "half of two deer" in the chest freezer in the basement, and had just eaten venison stew for dinner. Last year Z and I helped Art butcher one of the deer they shot, and it was actually pretty fascinating to watch him take the thing apart, lay it out, and bag it up by how the meat should be prepared. (We took the neck roast and prepared it for my cousins Maureen and Jessie one night.) Venison is just so flavorful.
And I'm so damn homesick. The leaves are starting to turn there, just starting to fall but still mostly green with a tree here and there color-kissed. No frost yet, but a warning for Friday. They're getting the wood in for the winter, harvesting the last vegetables, catching up on fall chores.
I harvested the last of my tomatoes, and made a white pizza with them and some herbs from the garden. I also made Amazing Cookies (i mislabeled them in the scan)-- huge cookies, and a zillion of them. Most of them are going to work tomorrow with Z, for his office-- he said they needed some pretty badly. One of the art staff had to take over from the absent Art Director to put the paper together and today was hell for her-- the A.D. would just have flipped out at someone (who would have deserved it), but her temporarily-promoted substitute just lacks the age and authority to do so (she's probably 24 or 25 and is quite mild-mannered and soft-voiced) and had to just patiently freak out all day. So I'm sending them cookies: perhaps I've already done my bit and more (esp. considering they ain't paying me nothing-- but had I flaked out Z would never ever have heard the end of it), but if I kept all those cookies at home they'd have to get eaten and that would mean I'd be back up to a size 16. Which'd be depressing, as I actually have a few pairs of pants that fit right now.
I also made myself a page of things I want for Xmas etc., because Z is working on that site for his family's gift exchange, and I remembered I'd started a Git List page months ago. It's absurdly over-HTML'd, but part of it was just me tinkering with the source code pane in GoLive to see if I could. I sometimes forget, I used to be a webdesigner. Not that you can tell from this page: I was all over the un-marked-up, clean-formatted black-on-white HTML. I should get a tacky background image to tile, though. :D That'd be sweet. And an animated .gif of something or other. Yeah...
