Dealing with Technology

Blogging pal Grandma L. of Pet Peeves and Other Ramblings posted her frustration with technology failure, wondering if there is something in the atmosphere that could account for it. It set me to thinking about my screaming yellow 2002 Dodge Neon. Over the past couple of years it has developed some idiosyncrasies for which there seems to be no easy fix.

About two years ago the tachometer in the Zonker (as in Screaming Yellow) began to act erratically. When it’s been working perfectly well while I’ve been driving it will spin around and hit the top peg when I turn off the car. This can last several minutes. Nine times out of ten the tach won’t work when you restart the car for as much as two weeks, then suddenly one day you start the car and the tach is back. On a long trip it will work until I stop for more than five minutes. Leave it more than that and it will just lay there. It works about four days per month. It’s okay since I know when to shift, but it is kind of weird.

Then there is the radio. I like the sound system in the Zonker. I can pull San Francisco at night with the radio and the CD changer has four slots. I fill it when I’m headed on a long trip and there’s no need to change a CD until I get to the beach. It’s really very cool. Not only that, but it has a tape player which is nice because I still own tape cassettes. The problems started out with the volume control. If I have the volume cranked up to listen to tunes as I fly down the road, turning it down when someone else gets into the car proves difficult. When you turn the volume control to the left, which ought to be down, it is just as likely to go up and continue doing so until at some point it begins to go down. You might think that turning it to the right would make it go down if left makes it go up. Wrong. Right just makes it go up no matter how much you twist the knob.

And then there is the sound system and the weather. It does not like the hot. If it gets hot and stays that way for more than a day or two the sound will cut out and you will be left with nothing. It may not work for days and days and then suddenly start working again and not be a problem for a year or more. Finally my husband took it to some shop in Tacoma who said that it would have to be replaced. Since our sound system was an upgrade after market we are unlikely to find one that fits the car from a wrecked Neon and the chances of finding one with a tape player and 4 CD changer is remote. After not working for a couple of weeks it appears to be working now. Maybe our rainy cool weather was just what the doctor ordered.

The Worst Vacation Ever

I have relegated the last week of my time away from school and the first week of my husband’s vacation to the “worst vacation ever” category. It started out well enough at our beach house with a visit from my father’s little sister and husband. Although my mother got weird and refused to come to the house while they were there (my parents divorced when I was 18), we enjoyed two evenings and one whole day with them that included dinner out at the 42nd Street Café in Seaview to celebrate our anniversaries. The fun ended when we waved goodbye to them the next morning.

Even before my paternal aunt and uncle left, I had been called by my maternal aunt in Seaview to come to the house she shares with my cousin to try to persuade the cousin to go to the ER because she was in pain from a lower digestive complaint which reoccurs from time to time. I found her to be less than rational and totally unwilling to go get help so I walked her dog for my aunt who is frail herself and went back home. Not long after we’d waved goodbye to our company the next day I was summoned to my relatives’ house again for the same purpose. My aunt was clearly upset by the behavior of my cousin which was not rational, but clearly indicated that she was in great pain. My cousin suffers from a host of autoimmune diseases which had been somewhat under control, but had spun out two days before.

After forty minutes of cajoling and threatening to call the medics I got my cousin into the car and into the ER at Ocean Beach hospital. Thus began a stint of eleven hours at the ER waiting to speak with a doctor and listening to my cousin implore God for relief in between bouts of diarrhea. Every time a nurse or attendant came in to check her vitals I asked when we might expect a doctor and I received a shrug and the information that they had several critical patients and only one doctor. They took body fluids, some given freely and others by force, for testing and x-rays were taken. All the while my cousin seemed either a zombie or writhing in pain. Beyond calling her mother who was at home and her brother who was at work in Vancouver, there was little I could do besides read and pray that we’d get help.

Eight and a half hours into our ordeal a doctor appeared, cheerfully ticking off the list of tests he had ordered and the results which showed that my cousin was in good health. I starred at his unearthly white teeth which seemed too large for his mouth and tried to fathom what he was saying. I also knew that she was too ill to go home for my 85 year old aunt to care for.

It came down to that he thought her problems were mental. If I had as many illnesses as my cousin I’m sure I’d have mental problems, but I could not believe that it was her mind that was calling out for help from God. “What about the pain that she’s crying out for help with?” I asked him. He then questioned my cousin who seemed confused about the location of her pain, but finally she laid her hand on her lower abdomen. Dr. Power Smile left and soon my cousin was taken away for a CATscan. Half an hour later she was returned to the operatory and I learned it would be another hour before we received the results. I did manage to get a nurse to hook up some IV fluids for my dehydrated cousin who had had nothing by mouth for two days.
More than another agonizing hour had passed when Dr. Power Smile returned and informed us that my cousin had an inflamed bowel due to her Lupus. After eleven hours they had decided to admit this obviously very ill woman to the hospital and I could go home.

The balance of my time on the coast was taken up with seeing to my cousin’s dog until we could get him boarded with the Humane Society, visiting with her at the hospital along with her brother who had arrived from Vancouver, and meeting a very nice doctor who seemed genuinely to understand autoimmune diseases and to be willing to help my cousin recover. I was not able to return to Gig Harbor on the day I had intended to as I promised to take my aunt to do her first of the month banking and bill paying. My cousin was released from the hospital much earlier than expected and probably due to her desire to return home where she could smoke and to get her dog back with her. Murphy was overjoyed to see her.

All the while this was going on my husband was left to paint the North side of our house and feed himself and my daughter. In the midst of this we had dear friends arrive for the weekend and what a blessing their presence was! They helped me shop for my mother and aunt and buoyed up my spirits.

My cousin seems to be recovering from this latest bout with the ugly symptoms of her illnesses, illnesses that many doctors do not even acknowledge as legitimate. For now she and her mother are making their lives work in a drafty 100 plus year house from which they refuse to move and I am back at school and to a semblance of a normal life and finding time to write again.

Health Care Hoopla

I’m on a broom about health care. The well insured white right is engaging in fear mongering of the first order. It seems to me that the people who are screaming the loudest about “Death Panels” and health care reform are those who have good insurance and don’t care that the insurance companies are already deciding their health care. Just try to get a procedure or medication your insurance doesn’t want to cover. Even if they are willing to cover it, costs are still high.

My daughter-in-law is in a Catch-22. She suffers from bouts of tachycardia which sometimes sends her to the ER. While not life threatening, they can be terrifying, leaving her exhausted. Her last trip and six hours at St. Joseph’s ER cost $3,000, little of which was covered by her insurance because she was never admitted, just spent the day in the ER. Now she could have a procedure—an ablation to her heart nerves, some of which her insurance would pay, that would probably fix her problem, but even with insurance it would run her around $7,000 out of pocket. She is having to look into having it done in Brazil because their health care is considerably cheaper (and just as good) as ours.

My mother, who has Medicare plus some supplemental insurance, is convinced that Barak Obama is going to kill her and her friends just to get them out of the way. She’s perfectly happy with Medicare and the status quo, but the “rethuglicans” (fellow blogger Lorraine’s wonderful word, not mine) have got her scared spitless that if we all had some form of Medicare she’d be standing there with Sarah Palin’s mother and special needs son before Sarah’s so called “Death Panel.”

My youngest child has no medical coverage. He’s never had a job that offered it and he’s too old to be covered by me or his father. If he were to have a catastrophic illness his Baby Boom parents would probably bankrupt themselves to care for him. What sort of system is that? My oldest son pays $500 per month to cover his family and it does not include dental. That comes out of their pocket. It smacks of feudalism to me. If you are under or self employed you stand before the American medical system’s “Death Panel.” There ought to be basic health care offered to every citizen and then if people want and can afford more coverage, let them pay the insurance companies.

The system is broken. Why should the greatest nation in the world have some of the least accessible health care? What does that say about us?

Eight Cousins

Here we are, eight cousins together again after thirty years. That's me with the babies.

As a child my cousins rivaled my parents in claim to my love and attention and getting to all be together again at our family reunion in Shelton was divine. We are the quintessential baby boomers. Initially there were five of us born between 1945 and 1951 (four between 1950 and 1951) with three more, the babies, born during the 1960s and the youngest of which is only two years older than my own oldest child.

It had been thirty years since I’d seen my oldest cousin Steve and I’d never met his lovely wife Linda. She’s a wonderful addition to the family and I am only sorry that they live so far away in Tucson and that we are not free to travel as most of our family is. Most of us are old enough to be retired while my husband and I continue to work “as long as they keep paying me.”

Ours was the generation that had home movies and we enjoyed looking at ourselves as babies on my father’s and my uncle’s movies while eating my grandmother’s pineapple cookies. Uncle Dick was the family historian having put a lot of actual leg work (pre Internet) into tracking down records and graves from Pennsylvania to Missouri and in books even back to England although none of us have gone there. That’s one of my dreams along with visiting Jamestown where our very first ancestors stepped ashore in the New World on the resupply ship for that tiny colony. His daughter Janice has stepped into the breach left by her father’s passing. She has all of his computer records and keeps track of all of us. She also brought pictures her father had identified for her before his passing four years ago.

My cousin Rick helped me straighten out in my mind the whole first cousin, second cousin, first-cousin-once removed thing. It has always confused me and is likely to again since I can’t remember a thing fifteen minutes. Besides solving that mystery, this lovely man, knowing that I’m not big on the beef or pork that was being barbequed for dinner, just for me cooked some of the salmon he’d caught in Alaska. He and his wonderful wife (another Sped Paraeducator) live entirely too far away in Missouri, but Dave and I discovered that it is possible to get to Branson on the train and that’s close enough for them to come get us thus fulfilling my husband’s desire for a train trip and mine to spend more time with them. They live in a house on a bluff over Table Rock Lake, situated so that when on their deck you feel as if you are in a tree house.

Janice, the only other girl in the pack of us and Rick’s sister, was as dear as a sister while we were growing up. Then her parents took her off to Missouri at the end of our junior year and we’ve been playing catch-up ever since. She’s in Idaho now which really ought not and should not be a problem. Now she has a married son in Vancouver, Washington so I hope our state will again claim more of her attention.

Mark, together with his older brother Steve, were always fun when we were altogether at our grandparents. Having no sisters they were unaware that tormenting was the order of the day. They were amiable companions and a distraction to Janice’s brother who delighted in nettling us. Both of them contain their father’s gentle heart and he was a favorite of mine.

It was a big deal when the babies came along. I was nine when Danny was born. Bobby came along two years later and Tommy only two years before my own daughter. Unfortunately I don’t know them as well as the four others, but on the occasions that I am able to be with them and to see their children (and now even a grandchild) I am glad to be related to them and wish I saw them often.

Steve commented that he might not be available for another reunion if we wait 30 years. I hope we do not. My grandson is likely to be an only child and my hope for him is to have wonderful memories and relationships with his cousins. I know how important that will be to him in the years to come.

Be Careful What You Wish For

The children have taken over cooking dinner, a dream come true for someone who has been cooking dinner for forty years. We’ve yet to see what sort of dream it is and how long it lasts. My son, his wife and their five-year-old son have lived with my husband, my special needs daughter and me for nearly six years.

As a child my son did little cooking beyond toasted cheese sandwiches. Since then he has become a good cook. His wife, who was raised with maids in Brazil, knew nothing of cooking when she came to this country, but has learned a lot in the past 20 years. Something that I sought to model as the chief cook and bottle washer in my kitchen is the necessity of economy. Ana admits that the notion of shopping with more than one meal in mind and reading the ads before hand is difficult for her to learn. She is accustomed to thinking of something she’d like to have, go get the ingredients from the store, cook it, eat it and whatever is left over becomes a science experiment.

So when they asked if they could cook in order to teach my home-schooled grandson math, nutrition, etc. I had dollar signs in my eyes since it upsets me to throw out moldy food. Since they aren’t learning by example, I thought, maybe more practical lessons were called for for more than little Gabriel. I assented.

It was nice that first night knowing that I didn’t have to do more than tell the children where I’d put the zucchinis our cousin brought to the family reunion. I could read, write, and watch the evening news.

Now when they cook their own dinners for themselves, Frank and Ana are likely to eat late. They live their lives with a rather laid back attitude. Maybe it is the fact that they are rather disorganized or maybe it is Ana’s Brazilian background. That first evening the news, both national and local, came and went and although delicious smells wafted up the stairs, there was no call that dinner was imminent. Finally at 8 PM I called down the stairs and asked if we were going to eat soon. Yes, it was ready.

Now the ratatouille the children made was wonderful, but it had taken them four hours to prepare. At that rate they were going to tire of this quickly and we would starve. Actually, once school starts and I am back to work this sort of schedule is not going to work for me. I get up at 5 AM and so go to bed pretty early. I have a routine of dinner, the news, walk the dog, call my mother, watch the previous day’s Daily Show and Colbert Report, sleep. I can be a little bit flexible, but now where Jon Stewart is concerned.

Night two was black beans and rice, a Brazilian mainstay with the addition of some Costco brats. We ate at 6:55 PM. The next day my daughter Amy and I left Gig Harbor to go to the coast and here we are eating at times more reasonable in my estimation. The children are coming tomorrow and they’ve a new ratatouille recipe they want to try!

Cat in a Box

So our black cat Zeke started limping and went to the vet. He’s got two compressed discs in his back and is partially paralyzed. Whether this is the result of a new injury or an exacerbation of an old injury from three years ago is hard to say, but the vet was very emphatic that the cat has to be in a crate for three weeks.

Zeke is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he has a very sweet personality. His method for coping with puppies and small children is to just lay there and play dead. They get bored and go away. He loves to be petted, but it is on his schedule which is early evening. He purrs until he drools. I would not have said that Zeke has a resentful nature as many cats do, but he clearly resents being in a crate. He gets to come out to go potty and be petted, but since the doctor is concerned that he not climb on anything from which he might jump. Further injury could mean complete paralysis. He has already lost an eye due to a tangle we assume with a car three years ago.

It’s going to be a long three weeks and I hope he's the same sweet kitty he was.

Frieze Family Reunion

On Saturday, August 8th, the Frieze Family reunion was held at the home of my Aunt Sandra and Uncle Jerry Hard of Shelton, Washington. Twenty-six children, grandchildren, great-grandchild, nieces, nephews, great-nieces, great-nephews and great-greats were present for a barbeque, home movies, and lots and lots of talk. The first reunion in thirty years for some members who had come from as far away as Arizona and Missouri, there was much to talk about and catch up on.
Eight cousins together again!

Second Cousins, once removed, play while the grown-ups catch up.

Those members who were not present were not forgotten. They were represented in favorite recipes, pieces of jewelry, and the faces of those who loved them. The family hopes that there will be more such meetings without such a long interval between.