All this incessant blogging about politics, spiritual and secular, is just camouflage: I don’t really have anything that I can blog about that’s all that interesting, aside from several very personal family topics.
Well, rather than maintain complete radio silence (and rely too much on sources other than myself) I’ll try to tactfully refer to some of the things that are REALLY on my mind (and not on the diversions I find on the Internets Tubes).
Tomorrow, we’ll be spending much of the day at a nearby hospital, lending support to a much-loved family member who is undergoing surgery.
AGAIN. For the third time, even.
In spite of the fact that this is a repeat engagement, we’re all reasonably upbeat and confident, because there’s a great team in place and because the last time was more than 5 or 6 years ago, and due to constant! vigilance! this Third Time’s The Charm go-around was caught at a very early stage.
But it sucks that we all have to go through this again.
Donations are cheerfully browbeaten from all 3 of my real readers and from all of my trackbacking spam splog-fans to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, or the Cancer Support Center.
The hospital has wireless and so my husband David and I will be hauling several pounds of personal tech down with us – laptops, earplugs, iPods, cell phones, and what not. Also books and notepads. We’re even bringing an extra laptop for another family member.
Now watch: if everything goes well, we’ll just get set up and get our gear going, and it’ll be time to pack up and move to recovery, or to the private room (expected stay: 1 night).
On a personal tech topic, I’ve been thinking about what my next cell phone will be, as our contracts have run out. David’s been egging me on to get one of these:
Well, maybe. I’m not keen on how blocky and big (and heavy!) it is in the hand – I played with one at the Woodfield iPod store, which is staffed by the sort of people who look like high-end Second Life avatars, and it won’t fit in the “phonespace” of my current small pocketbooks. It’ll fit only in the larger pockets of some of my big travel bags. And I wasn’t getting the whole “tap and pinch and flick” motion, because my fingertips are pretty dry and the screen didn’t really want to respond to the tap of fingernails (short as they are, even).
On the other hand, it’s pretty slick how the thing can be either vertically or horizontally aligned, and they can lie flat on a desk just like the email/Interwebs/communitech appliances they are, where they can be glanced at or played with or used as iPods or photo albums. We’ll see.
I bought some natural makeup while at Woodfield, where I was getting my glasses replaced, and of course found out to my great irritation that there’s a much cheaper outlet for the stuff… ARRRGH. Really annoying. But it looks pretty, and so I may get around to wearing makeup more frequently than I have in recent years.
One of the things I continue to brood on constantly, but rarely blog about, is my extremely poor self-image and complete lack of self confidence. Here I thought that’s what the initial impetus To Boldly Blog was coming from, but no… I blog constantly about church stuff, wacky news items, and every few years, politics.
On the other hand, do we really need another navel-gazing whiny blogger blogging incessantly about Her Issues And Icky Touchy Feely Blog-Goo? I think not, so it’s just as well.
Another thing on my mind of late: a different and much younger family member is living an independent yet dependent life, farther from home than is convenient for frequent visits, and does not drive. And so, visits are few and there are occasional disappointments and mis-communications. It would all be so much easier if only there were not the issue of a five- or six- hour drive, each way. It is not known if this distance living thing will be a permanent feature, or only until a better, closer alternative is found.
It is not known if these speculations would be welcomed in some quarters. Probably not.
All I can say is it feels a bit too much like exile and punishment for me to be entirely comfortable with the arrangement, but there are positive features to this wide separation, too – and there isn’t a great range of choices for locations, so in some ways the family member was lucky to find a place to be independently dependent.
We try not to worry and to be upbeat and supportive.
Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes its harder.
I must try to have a less jaundiced view. I must try harder to hope for the best.
More later – tomorrow’s an early start. I don’t know if it’ll be necessary to take any more time off from work this week, as it depends on how things go, but we expect to visit our battling health warrior with a big batch of chicken soup later this weekend.