The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Today is my mother-in-law’s funeral. She was a beautiful, bright soul, and I’ll miss her a lot.
She was an accomplished organist, and The Wife has always told me that she played a mean Toccata and Fugue in D minor by JS Bach. I never got to hear her play it, but in her honor, here’s someone else playing it:
This meme-thing has been sweeping through Facebookatopia the last few days, with everybody and their brother getting tagged constantly. It’s just your basic “write X things about yourself” things, and I figured I’d cross-post my Facebook version here, since this blog is really my main homestead in cyberspace, as it were. Facebookatopia is a fun place to have a summer cottage, but Blogistan is always home!
Anyway, here are my twenty-seven things. Long-time readers of this blog already know some of this.
1. A new realization: I don’t much like air travel at all, but I find airports to be utterly fascinating places. I think there’s a story in there somewhere.
2. For the first time since high school, my regular wardrobe includes blue jeans. I still don’t wear them that often, but I’ve got ’em. I didn’t even own any jeans in college; in those years I lived in sweats, Zubaz pants, and occasionally my dressier khakis or whatever.
3. My first musical instrument was the French horn, in fifth grade. I switched to cornet a year later, and made the final transition to trumpet two years after that. (The cornet is virtually identical to the trumpet, except the tone is softer, although not quite so soft as a flugelhorn. The playing of each instrument is identical, though.)
4. Vegetables I hated for years, until the last few years: mushrooms, squash.
5. Vegetables I still hate and plan to until death: broccoli, asparagus.
6. I first discovered chicken wings as a food item in themselves when we moved to Olean, NY in 1981. However, the place we always went for wings, a little working-class bar across from a factory called The Roxy, didn’t do Buffalo-style wings, so I didn’t learn what those were all about for a while. The Roxy’s wings were breaded and served plain, with the hot sauce in a little paper cup on the side.
7. When The Daughter was born, the first time I touched her was the brush her cheek with the back of my index finger. I think I did that to prove to myself that she was real.
8. My mother-in-law was a private music teacher and an organist for several churches. She was, in my estimation, very good on the organ.
9. Alan says he can compartmentalize his work life from his home life very well. I can’t, and anymore I make very little effort to try. If something is seriously bothering me in either realm, it affects the other. I can’t see expending the effort to separate myself into two people or lives. (Not to quibble with Alan’s ability or suggest that he’s wrong to do so. I just can’t be like that.)
10. Extra-virgin olive oil is one of my newest great loves. I rarely eat bread with butter on it anymore; I dip the bread in the oil.
11. As a kid I tended to get unmercifully made fun of for many things, one of which was a tendency to suffer from, well, plumber’s butt. To this day I’m paranoid about plumber’s butt. Hence the overalls, which solves that problem very nicely.
12. The Wife and I dated five years before getting engaged. Yes, I know the test drive was ridiculously long, but she had to make sure she didn’t think I was a complete dingus.
13. I don’t spend enough time writing.
14. I love to cook, but I gravitate toward recipes with fewer ingredients. I get tired of cutting, chopping, mincing, dicing, cubing, and all the rest of it.
15. About the only genre of music I can’t name a single song or work from that I actually like is rap. I don’t think that rap is “noise”, nor do I disparage it by saying that “rap isn’t music”, but it is so generally not my cup of tea that I can’t name a single rap song that I’ve ever heard and liked.
16. I root for the Buffalo Sabres because they’re the local team, but I don’t know a thing about hockey, to be quite honest. So scant is my hockey acumen that I actually liked it when they superimposed that blue dot over the puck during telecasts of hockey games.
17. I discovered my favorite (living) author, Guy Gavriel Kay, by virtue of one of his books having a stunningly beautiful dust jacket.
18. Being in college in Iowa at the time, there were no Buffalo-style chicken wings to be found in town when the Bills played in Super Bowl XXV (the first of the four they lost). So for that game I made do with a large box of Hot Wings from KFC. For the next two years, I made my own wings with the deep fryer I bought. By the fourth time, I was at home again, but I decided that maybe the factor was my eating wings that kept them from winning. Thus I consumed no chicken wings during Super Bowl XXVIII. The Bills lost anyway. So, I decided that the real factor was nothing that I was doing, but just that the Bills for some reason didn’t play very well in those games.
19. For all my love of sophisticated comedy with sparkling wordplay, I love some well-done slapstick as well. A pie in the face always makes me happy.
20. But oddly, despite the facts that I love good slapstick and pies in the face always make me happy, I’ve never much been fond of the Three Stooges. Abbott and Costello, however, bring me joy — maybe because they combine sparkling wordplay WITH visual slapstick.
21. The two teevee shows whose cancellations vex me to the highest degree are “Once and Again” and “Firefly”. And I didn’t even watch all of Firefly until five years after it got axed…but really, that’s all that FOX would give it?
22. I’ve been growing my hair out since early 2000, when I left the restaurant job where short hair was required of men. Since then I’ve only had a handful of maintenance trims.
23. I’ve had the beard since April or May 2004, when I was working for The Store and realized that I could grow a beard. I’d had a beard in college, but it had been a scraggly affair back then, with no mustache to speak of. Now I have the whole deal. I keep it trimmed myself.
24. My religious “problem” is that I’ve yet to find a religion that doesn’t strike me as having SOMETHING very wise and worthwhile to say about humanity, the world, and our place within it. How can one be right and all others be wrong? I have no idea how to resolve this spiritual crisis, either.
25. Dogs scare the hell out of me.
26. I sometimes think that my entire life is an endless quest for something that makes me feel the way “Star Wars” did back in 1977, or “Lord of the Rings” did back in 1983, or Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique” did in 1986, or Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 did in 1989, or Mark Camphouse’s “Elegy” did in 1990, or “The Fionavar Tapestry” did back in 1994. I’ve come close a bunch of times and found a lot of wonderful stuff along the way, but I’ve never quite replicated those feelings.
27. All you men who have done this meme-thing and included the obligatory thing about your wives being the greatest women in the Universe: knock it off. Mine is. You’re all a bunch of pretenders!!! (But seriously, the percentage of all of my happiest memories that don’t include my wife as part of them is really, really tiny. And my goal is to make that percentage as tiny as possible with whatever time I have left.)
No tagging. If you feel like it, fine; if not, also fine.
“Doktor Muething,” Willem said. His skin tingled; he felt cold all over. “You missed a variable.”
“What?” Doktor Muething said, in the listless tone of someone not really listening.
“Listen to me!” Willem grabbed the Doktor’s arm. “Uncle Gunther wrote that vampirism is balance. Life and death together. But there are other opposites that can be in balance, aren’t there? You never switched the vials!”
Doktor Muething stared at Willem, and then at the dead girl on the ground. Finally the light of realization formed in his eyes as well. “I only injected the men with blood from the male vampire….”
“And the women with that of the woman vampire! But the most reliable accounts in all your research are those of male vampires turning women, and woman vampires turning men. Vampirism isn’t just a balance of life and death; it is a balance of male and female.”
The Doktor glanced at the young woman’s body, and then turned back to Willem. “Get a syringe,” he said.
Willem sprang away and into the laboratory, where he quickly found a syringe and filled it with the very last of the blood from the male vampire. Then he ran back outside, to where Doktor Muething knelt beside the young woman’s body. Sirens and klaxons began to blare.
“Air raid,” the Doktor said. “Perhaps being out here isn’t the best idea.” There were explosions in the distance, but they were still much nearer than they had been in recent days. The Allies were coming. The Doktor lifted the woman’s arm and tapped it, looking for a vein. “And these are hardly the correct conditions…Here, I have a vein.”
Willem slid the needle in and depressed the plunger, sending male vampire blood into the young woman’s body. The Doktor then kneeled over her and began chest compressions.
“Masculine and feminine,” the Doktor said, shaking his head. “I must be blind.” He continued the compressions, forcing the vampire blood through the woman’s body.
“Get out of the street!” a soldier shouted from the sidecar of a motorcycle that rumbled past. Willem and the Doktor ignored him, for the transformation had begun.
It was less violent than the previous two. The dead woman began to slowly writhe and moan. Her flesh filled in and took on an appearance of health. The gaping wound in her back healed as though it had never been there at all. Her hair, roughly shorn by the impersonal barbers of the Reich, became long again and more lustrous. Then her eyes opened. They glowed with a pale, green light. Willem and Doktor Muething moved back as the woman climbed to her feet. She was unsteady in her stance, and her eyes flicked around nervously.
“My God, it is so beautiful.” There were tears in the Doktor’s eyes.
“What do we do now?”
“She is weak. She will need nourishment.”
Willem looked down at the woman. The look in her eyes was most definitely hunger, the same look he hadn’t been able to recognize in their previous failed experiment. How could he have missed it, surrounded as he was by hunger on a daily basis? The woman stared imploringly at Willem and Doktor Muething, but she would not come more than a few paces closer. Willem remembered the Crucifix around his neck. If not for that….
“MUETHING!”
It was Commandant Reger, who was approaching from the Officers’ Quarters with two guards in tow. His uniform was muddy and his hair was unwashed; he had obviously not been to bed in some time. Willem recognized the two guards; these two men – boys, really – had stood attention beside him on his first day in the camp.
“What is it, Commandant?” the Doktor asked pleasantly.
“You know damned well that the Allies will be here tomorrow,” Reger snapped. “It is time for you to leave – who the hell is this?” He gestured to the young woman, who was staring up at him with wide eyes. “Herr Doktor, is this prisoner troubling you? And what is a prisoner doing here anyway? I ordered them gathered and taken to…no matter, I will deal with her myself.” He unsnapped his holster and drew his Luger pistol.
“She is no trouble at all, Herr Commandant,” Doktor Muething said as he stepped forward and grabbed Reger’s arm. “Do not shoot her.”
“Get back, fool. I should shoot you as a Jew-lover.” He shoved Doktor Muething aside and raised his pistol – but then the woman was on him. His pistol dropped to the ground as he grabbed her wrists. She bared her teeth and panted horribly as she grasped at him with white fingers. Her strength was as unnatural as her new life, and it was all the Commandant could do to keep her at bay. Her eyes glowed brighter, and it swiftly became apparent that she was too strong for him. She forced the Commandant down to his knees, and terror filled his eyes.
“Shoot her, you idiots!” he screamed, and the two boy-guards awkwardly whipped their rifles around to shoot the woman. After a few seconds of handling their guns as though they were live snakes, both boy-guards fired. One rifle shot tore into the woman’s leg; the other bullet grazed the Commandant’s forehead. The woman barely noticed the wound, which healed over almost immediately. Blood streamed down the Commandant’s forehead.
“Relax, Herr Commandant,” Doktor Muething said as he stepped in close behind Reger and laid a hand on his shoulder. “She cannot harm you when I am this near to her.” As if on cue the woman shrank away, repelled by the crucifix around the Doktor’s neck.
“What have you done here, Muething?” Commandant Reger wiped blood out of his eyes with the back of his hand, and then he stared at the woman.
“I think you know,” Doktor Muething said.
“It’s not possible,” Reger said. “They don’t exist. You’re a fool and you’ve wasted your time on a fool’s task.” The woman panted even louder, and the Commandant lost his temper. To his guards he shouted, “Would you two PLEASE KILL HER!”
Willem shook his head silently. These boys had never once seen death this close. Willem had seen enough for a lifetime. They raised their rifles….
“Don’t,” Doktor Muething said. In his hand was the Commandant’s dropped Luger pistol, and his hand was steady as he leveled it at the two boy-guards. “I assure you, my young friends, I have no desire to kill the youth of the Fatherland – but I will do just that if you don’t put those guns down and get away from here.” And then he raised his other hand in a fist and brought it down, hard, on the base of the Commandant’s skull. Reger flattened to the ground, moaning. “Go, boys,” the Doktor said. “You do not want to see what is going to happen next.”
Willem glanced at the two boy-guards who stood beside him now, just as they had two months before. He remembered their names at last: Georg on his right, Herbert on his left. The young woman stared at them, eyes gleaming, as they nervously pointed their rifles at her. Willem took a quiet step back, and then two or three steps away. The woman crept closer to the two boys, and they dropped their rifles at the same moment and ran. The woman rose to follow them, but Doktor Muething called out to her.
“Don’t go, my dear. I have what you need.”
She turned back to Doktor Muething, who had tied the Commandant’s arms behind his back with the Commandant’s own belt.
“Muething,” Reger mumbled. “What are you doing?”
“She needs sustenance,” the Doktor said. There was a strange look in his eyes. The Commandant began to struggle, but Doktor Muething appeared to have far greater physical strength than Willem had ever given him credit for.
“No!” The Commandant’s eyes were wide and he kicked and squirmed to no avail. He could not get away. Willem’s flesh went to ice.
“Come, my dear!” Doktor Muething’s voice was calm, malevolent. “Your first meal awaits you.” He stuffed the Luger pistol into his belt and lifted the Commandant to his knees. Willem’s eyes were wide as he looked on. He saw the Commandant’s pants become wet inside the legs.
“Muething, no!” Reger’s voice, always so arrogant, now sounded of nothing but childlike terror. “You can’t do this to one of your own!”
Doktor Muething laughed at that. He actually laughed, a deep-throated laugh from the depths of his belly that was still harsh and without the slightest hint of mirth. “One of my own, Reger?” He stopped laughing suddenly, and his eyes glistened as he leaned forward and said through clenched teeth: “She is one of my own.” And with that, he shoved the Commandant forward. The Commandant landed with a thud on the ground just two or three paces from the woman. She looked up at the Doktor, who nodded once and then took four steps back. The woman sprang then, and Commandant Reger could do nothing but scream as she took him in her arms, pushed his head back, and sank her teeth into his waiting neck. His shrieks only blended in with the blaring klaxons, the air-raid sirens, the distant exploding bombs, the reports of gunfire from the newly-consecrated execution fields. Reger’s screams as he perished at the hands of a vampire were just one more voice in a fugue of death.
The Doktor turned away from the woman who fed on the Commandant and grabbed Willem by the elbow. “Come, young Schliemann. We will not be welcome here with either our own or with the Allies.”
Willem obediently followed the Doktor, finally managing to tear his gaze from the vampire they had created. “Switzerland?”
“The only remaining haven in Europe for men such as I,” the Doktor said. “How fortunate that I was assigned to the camp nearest the Swiss border, don’t you think? My mother’s diamonds were able to buy me that much.” A knowing smile played at the edge of his lips, and Willem understood.
“We murdered one of our countrymen,” Willem said.
“As I said before, he wasn’t entirely my countryman. As for yourself, I am sure the feelings of guilt will fade in time.”
Instead of going inside the officer’s quarters, Doktor Muething led Willem around the building to a low maintenance shed. There, under a tarpaulin, was a fully-fueled motorcycle complete with sidecar and two packed rucksacks.
“So my worldly belongings are in the end reducible to one of these bags,” the Doktor said. “Oh well. I shall start anew. It seems a good time for it, at any rate.” He pulled on a leather jacket and a helmet, and gestured for Willem to do the same. “You drive.”
Willem climbed onto the cycle, and the Doktor boarded the sidecar. Willem looked at the Doktor for a moment, and then he shrugged. “Reger was a pig,” Willem said. “The Allies would have executed him anyway.”
Doktor Muething gave Willem a squeeze of the shoulder. “Drive, Willem.” he said. “You are not so young anymore, I think.”
Willem kicked the motorcycle to life and drove off. They went unchallenged through the camp gates; there was a lot of coming and going these days. Willem knew the roads around here very well, and soon they were headed south. He took the smallest roads, the ones that wound up into the mountains and through tiny villages where he had come with his uncle to heal the sick. Eventually they came to the border, where a single guard merely nodded and opened the single wooden barrier across the road.
Anonymous-looking Germans heading to Switzerland were common enough, it seemed. Willem and the Doktor rode through the gate, out of Germany. Neither would ever return.
Realms of Fantasy, one of my favorite magazines and one to which I’d eternally hoped to one day sell my work, is shutting down. There are fewer and fewer markets out there for short fiction. I’m frankly starting to think, the hell with it, and just put all of my own stuff up right here and let whoever finds it, find it.
Oh well. I always enjoyed reading Realms, and I’ll always have my stash of back issues.
UPDATE: Check out Warren Ellis’s headline for this news.
Yeah, it’s a crappy photo. I took it with my phone while watching the episode on my laptop when we were approximately 25000 feet in the air, winging over Indiana or Illinois or one of those states somewhere in the middle, between Boston and Phoenix. Not the best logistics for watching this show, either: my laptop isn’t one of those small laptops, and the guy in front of me insisted on reclining his seat, so I had to tilt my computer so the screen was on my lap and the keyboard was against my chest. But I wanted to see what happens next, so I sucked it up.
As for the plot machinations, I was sad to see Tony’s bad-guy ally bite the dust, as he was an interesting character, if villainous. Could they be sowing the seeds of another fall from grace for Tony Almeida somewhere down the road? And how will the First Husband get out of the mess he is in, since there are two bodies in that apartment now that have his fingerprints all over everything, even if we know that he’s innocent of their murders? Did I miss it, or was there an explanation of just how Bill and Chloe, Jack’s CTU compadres, just happened to have handy some clothes to give to Agent Walker, now that her old clothes are all bloody? How long can it be before the Bob Gunton character is revealed to be the bad guy? (Because Bob Gunton is always the bad guy, which kind of stinks because Bob Gunton is one of my favorite character actors working today and I’d love to see him in a role where he’s not the jerk or bad guy. The best he’s had, in a memorable episode of Star Trek: TNG, was a good guy who’d gone horribly awry due to emotional trauma.)
What I’m really thinking about in this picture, though, is how I’m sitting there in a passenger jet watching an episode of a teevee show in which the terrorist bad guys make their point to the President by using their techno-gizmo to hijack the nation’s air traffic control system and crash two passenger jets together in mid-air, killing everybody and making a nice big fireball in the sky that’s visible from the Oval Office window. This kind of made me think of the scene in Airplane! where the in-flight movie starts off with a depiction of a very fiery plane crash.
If I ever go on a cruise, I’m watching Titanic.
I didn’t learn this until two days later, but last Friday was National Pie Day, unbeknownst to me until two days later. (Oddly, The Wife and I managed to inadvertently observe National Pie Day anyway without realizing we were doing so. Lucky, huh?)
But as awesome as pie is, deserving of a National Day, someone’s decided that pie is too awesome for a single day. Some woman named Olivia Munn has decided that there needs to a National Pie Week, and she’s decided to act: she has a petition going where if she can get 10000 signatures by this coming Friday, she’ll jump into a giant pie. Of course, the Internet being what the Internet is, she’s already well past 26000 signature as of this writing.
I have no idea who Olivia Munn is, but this is what she apparently looks like:
She doesn’t look like the kind of person who spends a great deal of time consuming pie in the usual manner, does she? Hmmmmm.
Anyway, I was going to mention this in the upcoming Sunday Burst of Weirdness, but it’s time-sensitive and I’m not sure if I’ll even get around to a Burst of Weirdness this week. But National Pie Week isn’t a terrible idea, anyway.
Thirteen hours, spent on three different planes. That’s how long we were traveling yesterday. I know, I know — when you have to throw together a cross-country flight plan literally the day before you need to be in the air, you’re going to have some very odd hops across the nation. But it still defies imagination that in the 21st century, with however many hundreds of flights exist in this country on any given day, getting from Buffalo to Spokane, WA can involve first flying to Boston, MA — five hundred miles in the other direction. Ye Gods.
:: The flights themselves weren’t too bad, all things considered. Buffalo to Phoenix was on a small commuter jet, so The Daughter and I were sitting together behind The Wife, who was seated beside some guy from Canada who noticed her ringless fingers (she opted to not wear her rings because she’d likely swell up and have them be hard to remove later on) and proceeded to hit on her. I’ve never been able to watch anyone hit on The Wife before; it was kinda-sorta interesting to behold. Of course, I don’t wear my rings very often at all*, and yet, somehow no women ever hit on me. I must therefore conclude that by sheer luck I managed to marry the one woman on Earth who finds me attractive. Yay, me!
:: Until yesterday, the longest flight I’d ever taken was five hours. Then we had a six-and-a-quarter hour flight from Boston to Phoenix, AZ. That was just sheer hell. I can’t believe how long that flight was.
:: It was night-time, and therefore dark, when we were flying into Phoenix, so I got to see the entire city from above, all lit up. Very pretty, but Phoenix strikes me as a very unnatural city, even from the air at night. The streets are laid out in the most perfect grid I’ve ever seen. For someone used to northeastern cities, whose streets are often in a radial pattern or, in cases like Boston, actual remnants of the old horse trails from four hundred years ago, seeing a perfect grid of a city feels a bit unEarthly.
:: Due to headwinds, we were late getting into Phoenix, and that was going to be our shortest layover anyway. As it was, by the time we got off that plane, we had all of ten minutes to get to our next plane. Luckily, the next plane — the one from Phoenix to Spokane — was literally across the concourse. We had to go from gate A-7 to gate A-6. Yay!
:: Of course, due to how short we were cutting it for that flight, we were nervous about our luggage making it onto that last flight. Here we were saved by the screaming child. In front of us, on that plane, was a Hispanic family that spoke no English, and their little boy, who was no more than three years old, was having himself a massive temper tantrum. He would not sit down in his seat and get buckled, he would not sit on his mother’s lap, he would do nothing other than run back and forth, screaming in Spanish. For some reason his parents refused to do the obvious thing — grab him, force him into the seat, buckle his ass in and go with it — so the flight attendants very nearly gave that family the boot from the plane. This all took a while as neither flight attendant spoke Spanish, so they had to grab another passenger to do interpreter duty. Finally, as they were just about to be kicked off the plane, the parents managed, with the advice of the Spanish-speaking passenger and a can of apple juice offered by one flight attendant, to get the kid to calm down and let himself be buckled in.
And then, for the remainder of the flight, that kid didn’t make so much as a peep.
:: Living in the Eastern part of the country, one gets used to things being not so far apart. You’re never more than an hour or two from the next big city. It’s not like that in the West, which is something I tend to forget a lot. After the six-hour-plus jaunt from Boston to Phoenix, for some reason I figured that Phoenix to Spokane wouldn’t be that long of a flight. I nearly burst into tears when the pilot came on and said, “Our flight time will be two hours, twenty-eight minutes.” Ugh!!!
:: The Buffalo-to-Boston flight, being on a small plane, had only one flight attendant. She was a very bubbly black woman who giggled her way through the safety lecture, even mussing up the lines at one point. But she was very friendly and nice. The flight attendants from Boston to Phoenix were also nice, but not so bubbly; they were the stereotypical “flight attendants”, who in my experience smile a lot and are nice and professional but also give the air that they’re not going to take any crap. The flight attendants from Phoenix to Spokane were both older men, one of whom looked positively gruff as he dealt with the family with the potential problem-child. It was like having your flight attendant turn out to be Ed Asner.
:: I hate it when food places, knowing that you’re a captive audience, charge through the nose for simple things. Our lunch yesterday was three pre-made sandwiches, three bags of chips, and three bottles of water from a joint in the Buffalo airport. This all cost thirty-seven bucks and some change. WTF?!
:: I’ve decided that while I don’t much like flying at all, I find airports to be incredibly fascinating places. The part of Boston’s Logan Airport that we saw was quite an attractive place. We didn’t see enough of Phoenix’s airport to have any impression of it at all. Spokane’s is pretty small, but they call it an “International” airport, so I imagine it must have some flights into Canada.
* I haven’t been wearing my rings for two main reasons: one, they’re very loose right now owing to all of my weight loss over the last year or so. I’ll be getting them resized sometime soon, but for now, they spin around very freely on my fingers, and I’m always terrified they’re going to fly right odd. Second, in my job, I tend to do a lot of physical work that involves power tools, carpentry, equipment repair, and things like that where I’m afraid that my rings could get damaged by a glancing hammer blow. I may get a chain at some point so I can have my rings at work, around my neck.
Sometime in the next day or two, or even in the next few hours, this blog will look odd, because I will have hit the data transfer limit on the third of the Earthlink e-mail profiles I use to store the images for my template. I’m not really in a position right now to do anything about this, though, being in Idaho for my mother-in-law’s upcoming funeral. Well, yeah, it’s all cyber-stuff, so technically I could do something about it, but I can’t see there this is a priority right now, so make it a priority until I’m back in Buffalo at the end of next week. Luckily, the transfer limits re-set at the beginning of the month, so on Sunday the blog should be back to its normal appearance. Sometime in February I plan to make a permanent change when I sign up with an actual hosting company, but for now, the blog will have to look odd.
In the meantime, please enjoy a glass of your favorite sparkling beverage. Thank you.
In summer of 2005 we traveled to the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho area for my sister-in-law’s wedding. This photo is Little Quinn on the wedding day, asleep on his grandmother’s — The Wife’s mother’s, my mother-in-law’s — shoulder. This was taken at a very pretty park where the wedding photos were taken.
Over the last year, my mother-in-law became ill. She endured many treatments, lost a lot of weight and a bit of hair, but still mostly kept her spirits up. The Wife talked to her mother just two days ago.
But the end came this morning, very shockingly and very suddenly. She was only sixty years old.
Obviously, we’re making arrangements to travel now, so blogging will be intermittent for a while. I’ll have the laptop with me, but other than that, who knows.
Time for linkage. Click and receive ultimate pleasure! Or just some good stuff to read. Your call.
:: Since I would like to be making music when I’m in my 80s, I was rooting for them every second.
:: It’s official now – I am older than the President. (I haven’t got there yet. Maybe not even the next President, especially if that happens in 2013. But I expect that by the time we get to whoever takes over in 2020 or 2024, I may be older than the President.)
:: This thing took my entire lifetime to happen. This cycle lasted nearly fifty years.
:: Ford looks like a manufacturer that is starting to get it. (Alan is a car enthusiast. I’m a “Does it get me from point A to point B” enthusiast, but Alan’s longtime theory is that maybe Detroit’s car companies are in trouble because they simply don’t make cars that people much want to drive. That’s a pretty sound hypothesis; in my experience, people don’t buy what they don’t want to buy. Crazy, but true.)
:: Paterson’s kung fu is pretty impressive.
:: I ran this before a couple of years ago and it still hasn’t happened. There should be a star on the Hollywood Walk-of-Fame for John Candy. (He doesn’t have one?!)
:: The phrase is “All present *or* accounted for” not “All present *and* accounted for.” (Really? I confess that the latter sounds better to me.)
All for this week.
