|
| |
Archives
that's all for now
These are all the links I've been saving up for the last couple of weeks. I guess I should find some more. Or maybe I should put up some more books I've read. Later.
real americans
Some food for thought, but then anything by Joe Bageant is food for thought. Very rich food.
Revenge of the Mutt People
Bred for meanness
by Joe Bageant
|
Many years ago I worked at an industrial hog farm owned by the Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe in northern Idaho. The place stank of the dead and rotting brood sows we chopped out of farrowing crates -- bred to death in the drive for pork production. And it stank of the massive ponds that held millions of gallons of hog feces and rotting baby pigs, and every square inch was poisoned by the pesticides used to kill insects that hogs attract and the antibiotics fed to hogs from hundred pound sacks. The Coeur d’Alene Indians refused to suffer those kinds of conditions; they wouldn’t even manage the place. They contracted it out. As my friend Walter Wildshoe said: “Only a white man would work there.”
The hog farm, however, offered one company benefit. The white manager gave employees any young pigs that developed large tumors -- those with tumors smaller than golf calls went to market with the rest of the hogs -- or were born with deformities such as heads scrunched sideways with both eyes on the same side, or a leg that stuck out of the top of their body instead of the bottom. We employees would butcher and eat them. Among hog farm employees, all of whom were tough descendants of the Scots Irish mutt people, free pork of any kind was prized, deformed with tumors or otherwise. You never saw a Swede eat the stuff.
So I took these pigs home and, using a huge old butcher’s knife, slashed their throats in the woods, right in front of my two kids -- ages two and four at the time -- without flinching even as the pigs screamed almost like humans and thrashed around, splashing thick dark glops of blood everywhere. It bothered me not one bit, just like it never bothered my daddy or granddaddy. Nor did it seem to bother my children as they watched, just like it didn’t bother me as a child when my uncle handed me sacks of barn kittens to drown in the crick. And Walter would shake his head and say, “Only a white man would wrestle a hog with a butcher knife. An Indian would shoot the motherfucker with a gun.”
My point here is that we rural and small town mutt people by an early age seem to have a special capacity for cruelty, compared say, to damned near every other imaginable group of Americans. For instance, as a child did you ever put a firecracker up a toad’s ass and light it? George Bush and I have that in common. Anyway, as all non-whites the world round understand, white people can be mean. Especially if they feel threatened -- and they feel threatened about everything these days. But when you provide certain species of white mutt people with the right incentives, such as free pork or approval from god and government, you get things like lynchings, Fallujah, the Birmingham bombers and Abu Ghraib.
| |
[more]
photography
Les Krims
[more]
thanks to Conscientious
This takes me back to my mispent youth. I first got serious about photography in the early 70s. Les Krims was one of the photographers we talked about and his book on making chicken soup had a certain notoriety. He used his mother, in panties only, as the model. I understand that his mother was popular as a model after this. Other photographers liked to shoot her. That says something about the lemming like quality of a lot of photographers. She died last year. Sad to hear. The printer that taught me black and white printing actually made the recipe. Said it was pretty good. I have the book and keep it with my cook books. Anyway, lots of neat stuff here.
amerika the weak
President Jonah
by Gore Vidal
|
While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea. Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and—Lo!—the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.
Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, “cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand,” so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon’s radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in “The Simpsons.”
| |
[more]
thanks to Time Goes By
photography
Niagara
Alec Soth
[more]
thanks to orbit1.com
denial
Goodbye Terry Gross, We Niver Knew Ye
On liberal media denial
by Joe Bageant
|
Having come to understand that mainstream media are in the business of selling fried chicken and cars, giving Wall Street head, and stealing bandwidth from the public's airwaves, none of us expect them to question anything afoot in the empire. We quite understand they cannot be wasting profitable air time on a nation whose collective memory is 30 seconds long. So we watch them pull their punches and wait for the commercials, which are their whole point anyway. If, god forbid, you are the pointy headed type interested in details, turn on NPR. And if you consider yourself hipper than the couch taters out here in Budland, go onto the net and visit Salon. Or if you are so worldly and hip you are a downright commie, then subscribe to Mother Jones. That's the way it used to be.
But now we are seeing what were once considered the more intelligent and in some cases more principled media such as NPR, Salon and Mother Jones distance themselves from meaningful controversy -- pulling the few wimpy punches they have. (Bullshit controversy, however, is still in fashion.) We are talking about Mark Crispin Miller's new book, Fooled Again -- How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One, Too (Unless We Stop Them). Miller has become a known and respected progressive figure, one of the few in-your-face bespectacled lefty author types with any credibility. But when it comes to promoting Fooled Again, the guy can't even get arrested. No interviews, nothing. In fact, these days even his cash bounces -- Miller can't even buy a spot on National Public Radio for his book. Now you may be saying to yourself: "Public Radio doesn't sell advertising." Which would make you one of those delusional souls who believe that shameless brand hawking by the oil companies and the financial establishment on NPR is not advertising. I mean, after all, ADM and Wal-Mart? NPR has sales people out chasing these sponsors. They sell these damned announcements. The only difference between NPR's "paid sponsorships" and the puke jock shows' commercial radio ads is that the NPR folks don't have a real rate card. Which is either stupid or brilliant, I'm not sure.
| |
[more]
photography
Esther Bubley, photojournalist (1921 - 1998)
|
A protégée of Roy Stryker at the U.S. Office of War Information and subsequently at Standard Oil (New Jersey), Esther Bubley (1921-1998) was a preeminent freelance photographer during the "golden age" of American photojournalism, from 1945 to 1965. At a time when most post-war American women were anchored by home and family, Bubley was a thriving professional, traveling throughout the world, photographing stories for magazines such as LIFE and the Ladies' Home Journal and for prestigious corporate clients that included Pepsi-Cola and Pan American World Airways.
| |
Dissin's Guest House
Washington, D.C. 1942
[more]
thanks to wood s lot
How do you like your democracy now, Mr. Bush?
Hamas' stunning victory underlines the contradictions and hypocrisies in Bush's Mideast policies.
by Juan Cole
|
In a mystifying self-contradiction, Bush trumpeted that "the Palestinians had an election yesterday, the results of which remind me about the power of democracy." If elections were really the same as democracy, and if Bush was so happy about the process, then we might expect him to pledge to work with the results, which by his lights would be intrinsically good. But then he suddenly swerved away from this line of thought, reverting to boilerplate and saying, "On the other hand, I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can't be a partner in peace if you have a -- if your party has got an armed wing."
So Bush is saying that even though elections are democracy and democracy is good and powerful, it has produced unacceptable results in this case, and so the resulting Hamas government will lack the legitimacy necessary to allow the United States to deal with it or go forward in any peace process. Bush's double standard is clear in his diction, since he was perfectly happy to deal with Israel's Likud Party, which is dedicated to the destruction of the budding Palestinian state, and which used the Israeli military and security services for its party platform in destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority throughout the early years of this century. As Orwell reminded us in "Animal Farm," some are more equal than others.
| |
[more]
Prospects with Hamas
by Helena Cobban
|
I have a column in the CSM today: it's titled Hope for a Mideast resolution could grow with Hamas leadership . In it, I do a quick analysis of the Hamas victory and write:
The strong internal discipline within Hamas, as opposed to the indiscipline and factionalism within Fatah, indicates that a strong Hamas leadership can be a more effective participant in peace diplomacy than the Fatah leadership has ever been. (Interestingly, this view has been expressed even by some Israelis.)
| |
[more]
Hamas Election Victory: A Vote for Clarity
|
Hamas' victory in the Palestinian Authority legislative elections has everyone asking "what next"? The answer, and whether the result should be seen as a good or bad thing, depends very much on who is asking the question.
Although a Hamas success was heavily trailed, the scale of the victory has been widely termed a "shock." Several factors explain the dramatic rise of Hamas, including disillusionment and disgust with the corruption, cynicism and lack of strategy of the Fatah faction which has dominated the Palestinian movement for decades and had arrogantly come to view itself as the natural and indisputable leader.
The election result is not entirely surprising, however, and has been foreshadowed by recent events. Take for example the city of Qalqilya in the north of the West Bank. Hemmed in by Israeli settlements and now completely surrounded by a concrete wall, the city's fifty thousand residents are prisoners in a Israeli-controlled giant ghetto. For years Qalqilya's city council was controlled by Fatah but after the completion of the wall, voters in last years' municipal elections awarded every single city council seat to Hamas. The Qalqilya effect has now spread across the occcupied territories, with Hamas reportedly winning virtually all of the seats elected on a geographic basis. Thus Hamas' success is as much an expression of the determination of Palestinians to resist Israel's efforts to force their surrender as it is a rejection of Fatah. It reduces the conflict to its most fundamental elements: there is occupation, and there is resistance.
| |
[more]
Shocked By America's Blindness
|
I nearly fell out of my car window Monday morning while traveling around several of the fine universities in North Carolina, when I read U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statement on the Hamas election victory in Palestine. She stated: "I've asked why nobody saw it coming. It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."
Good grief, Condoleezza, this is not about having or not having a good enough pulse. It's about the consequences of the last decade of Israeli and American policies toward the Palestinians in general, and the Islamist resistance movements in particular. This is not a time to persist in simplistic, counterproductive policies that will only further strengthen the forces of military resistance against the Israeli occupation, and wider Arab-Islamic political resistance against America 's blatantly pro-Israeli position.
To add a new dose of American perplexity and wonderment now to several existing layers of mistaken policies on Arab-Israeli peacemaking will be of no help to anyone. If Washington 's initial reaction is bewilderment at why it did not see this coming, and a reaffirmation of its policy of placing Israeli security above Palestinian security, then we are all in far more serious trouble than we can imagine. What is required now is a combination of honesty, independent analysis and composure that have long been missing in Washington's policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
| |
[more]
thanks to Antiwar.com
gerry
I'm still spending most of my day in Gerry's room making sure she doesn't fall. The bad part is that, with her Alzheimer's, she doesn't remember that she is unstable. "I'm fine." I have to explain every time that she has fallen. Last night was pretty bad. She would have gone down several times if I hadn't been there. She is a little better this morning.
Zoe met with the representative from HomePlace yesterday. Zoe is very happy with the people she has dealt with and feels as good as she can about moving Gerry to a care facility. There is some more paperwork to set everthing up but it looks like Gerry will be moving in next week. It will be good to have our lives back but there the house will feel a little empty without Gerry. Life goes on.
photography
L U T H E R G E R L A C H
Mammoth Camera Ambrotypes
[more]
thanks to wood s lot
the end of democracy
How Close Are We to the End of Democracy?
|
Although the Alito nomination process was largely a waste, it was very valuable in showing us how long and hard the Conservatives have thought about the "unitary" president. In Alito's earliest days with the Reagan administration, he laid out his concept of unchecked power -- of inherent authority. Tracing the clear, straight line from Meese to Bork to Alito to Thomas to Yoo to Gonzalez is easy, for those who can look. We can see the further immediate development, deepening and expansion of the concept of the unitary President that it became, long ago, before anyone was aware of it, a critical tenet of the Federalist Society and of the Conservative wing of the Republican Party.
The new power the President has come from somewhere. If you give him new powers, it comes at the expense of the people who previously had the power through the Congress to make those decisions.
This idea of this change of the power structure was not a flash in the pan idea -- it is not a concept without a meaning -- it is very serious and must be treated as such.
| |
[more]
food demons
Demonic Tots and Deeply disturbing Cuisine
[more]
thanks to J-Walk Blog
economy
More Deception from the Bush White House
The True State of the Union
|
This is what I have been writing for years, while the economics profession adopted a position of total denial. The first world gainers from globalization are the corporate executives, who gain millions of dollars in bonuses by arbitraging labor and substituting cheaper foreign labor for first world labor. For the past decade free market economists have served as apologists for corporate interests that are dismantling the ladders of upward mobility in the US and creating what McMillion writes is the worst income inequality on record.
Globalization is wiping out the American middle class and terminating jobs for university graduates, who now serve as temps, waitresses and bartenders. But the whores among economists and the evil men and women in the Bush administration still sing globalization's praises.
The state of the nation has never been worse. The Great Depression was an accident caused by the incompetence of the Federal Reserve, which was still new at its job. The new American job depression is the result of free trade ideology. The new job depression is creating a reserve army of the unemployed to serve as desperate recruits for neoconservative military adventures. Perhaps that explains the Bush administration's enthusiasm for globalization.
| |
[more]
thanks to Politics in the Zeros
The above piece is a must read. What is also interesting, as Bob at Politics in the Zeros points out, is that the author is part of the ruling elite. Check out his credentials at the bottom of the essay.
Saving in 2005 Worst Since 1933
|
Americans' personal savings rate dipped into negative territory in 2005 for the first time since the Great Depression as consumers depleted their savings to buy cars and other big-ticket items.
| |
[more]
thanks to Bad Attitudes
gerry watch
The Gerry watch continues. Zoe has been busy filling out paperwork to get Gerry into HomePlace. She meets with a representative from HomePlace this afternoon armed with questions. We should have a better idea of when Gerry will be moving in there this afternoon.
|
Wednesday February 1 2006
|
bicycles
Almost two years ago I posted about a most beautiful bicycle built by Richard Sachs for Jonathan Green.
Last week I received emails from both Richard and Jonathan. Richard had found my page and let Jonathan know. It was nice to hear from both. Hearing from them was also a whack on the side of the head, metaphorically speaking. A year and a half ago I was working on a fixed gear road bike. Money and taking care of Gerry put that on hold. I've been thinking about getting back to finishing the fixie and getting it on the road again. Hearing from Richard and Jonathan moved my enthusiasm up a few notches. Here is Richard's site:
RICHARD SACHS CYCLES
Truly an artist in metal work. I wish I could afford one. Even more, I wish I was enough of a rider to be worthy of a Richard Sachs frame. Check out his links, gallery, and many articles. And Jonathan has a neat site:
Tribute to the Plate Fork Crown
I'm going to start a bicycle section in my blogroll with these two sites. I would do it now but I'm still in Gerry's room and my laptop doesn't have the right software.
oil, surburbs, and peckerheads
Two Peckerheads
|
I'm fond of saying that I'm allergic to conspiracy theories. Behind our country's dismaying governance, cluelessness really rules, not plotting or scheming. Take, for example, these astounding remarks made Friday by former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on NPR's "Marketplace" show:
"As China grows -- at the current rate it's growing, in twenty or thirty years -- and becomes the number one largest economy in the world, I think China may become our nemesis."
One would think that Mr. Reich is a pretty smart guy -- former Rhodes Scholar (same class as Bill Clinton), Harvard faculty, cabinet secretary. Now, why on earth would Mr. Reich believe that China can possibly keep behaving the way it does for another two or three decades? China faces energy starvation along with the rest of the world. China has less oil left than the United States (and the US would have roughly four years worth of oil if we were deprived of imports -- 26 billion barrels used at the rate of 7 billion a year).
| |
[more]
photography
The Scanner Photography Project
|
Several years ago, I built my first homemade digital camera. The idea was simple - I would take an ordinary flatbed scanner, and use it in place of photo paper with a large format camera.
| |
[more]
thanks to The Online Photographer
iraq
Friend home with nasty dose of reality from Iraq
|
The word my friend used to describe the situation in Iraq was disaster. While the Bush administration tries hard to control the news we hear, now and then we get to hear some of the truth. Let me tell you, it's not nice hearing the truth completely unfiltered by the government or the media. Most of our troops over there are seriously demoralized and want to come home. Very few match the picture of what we frequently see on the news - proud to serve, dedicated to the mission, loyal to the Commander in Chief. The commanders there are angry that their men are being killed because someone hasn't approved getting them the right equipment. They are upset that they are being asked to take on a mission when they haven't been given the resources they need to achieve victory.
| |
[more]
thanks to Steve Gilliard's News Blog
Iraq war could cost US over $2 trillion, says Nobel prize-winning economist
· Economists say official estimates are far too low
· New calculation takes in dead and injured soldiers
How Many Iraqis Have Died Since the US Invasion in 2003?
30,000? No. 100,000? No.
|
President Bush's off-hand summation last month of the number of Iraqis who have so far died as a result of our invasion and occupation as "30,000, more or less" was quite certainly an under-estimate. The true number is probably hitting around 180,000 by now, with a possibility, as we shall see, that it has reached as high as half a million.
| |
[more]
My Military Experience (What Really Demoralizes the Troops)
|
1. Being Unprepared.
There is a sort of gallows humor that one clings to in Iraq. This is especially true when outfitting a Humvee with armor. I've saw some of those Up-Armor vehicles out there. Almost all of the grunts don't have them. They have to ride around with plates attached to their vehicles. This plating is spotty at best. The truth of the matter is it does very little to stop shrapnel in a blast. It will deflect some of it, but it is hardly a substitute for the fully-armored humvees I saw out there. Now we find out 80% of torso-related fatalities could have been avoided had the Pentagon distributed certain plates they had in their posession. It's like being thrown to the meatgrinder. Feeling expendable is demoralizing.h
| |
[more]
thanks to Steve Gilliard's News Blog
photography
Scotland
A selection of photographs of Scotland, dating from the 1840s to the 1870s, including work by William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton and Thomas Annan.
'Old Vennel, Off High Street', 1868
|
A photograph of a vennel off the High Street in Glasgow, taken by Thomas Annan (1829-1887), in 1868. Washing hangs between the windows of the tenements and dirty barefoot children play in the passageway as a woman watches the photographer capturing the scene. The High Street started at the east end of Glasgow where the majority of the city's slum housing was located. Overcrowding and poor sanitation made for high mortality rates caused by infection and disease. Thomas Annan was a Scottish photographer who lived for most of his life in Glasgow, where he established a studio in 1855. In 1868 the City of Glasgow Improvement Trust approached Annan to take photographs of some of the slum areas of the city prior to demolition. The resulting images are some of the earliest examples of documentary photography. Thomas Annan was the father of James Craig Annan (1864-1946), a noted pictorial photographer and member of the 'Linked Ring'.
| |
[more]
iran
The west has picked a fight with Iran that it cannot win
Washington's kneejerk belligerence ignores Tehran's influence and the need for subtle engagement
|
Never pick a fight you know you cannot win. Or so I was told. Pick an argument if you must, but not a fight. Nothing I have read or heard in recent weeks suggests that fighting Iran over its nuclear enrichment programme makes any sense at all. The very talk of it - macho phrases about "all options open" - suggests an international community so crazed with video game enforcement as to have lost the power of coherent thought.
Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to be slapped about the head by a white man. It is the fourth largest oil producer in the world. Its population is heading towards 80 million by 2010. Its capital, Tehran, is a mighty metropolis half as big again as London. Its culture is ancient and its political life is, to put it mildly, fluid.
All the following statements about Iran are true. There are powerful Iranians who want to build a nuclear bomb. There are powerful ones who do not. There are people in Iran who would like Israel to disappear. There are people who would not. There are people who would like Islamist rule. There are people who would not. There are people who long for some idiot western politician to declare war on them. There are people appalled at the prospect. The only question for western strategists is which of these people they want to help.
| |
[more]
thanks to Antiwar.com
The Iran-U.S. Dispute and Military Action
|
Iran and the U.S. are at odds. They have been greatly at odds since 1979 when the Shah of Iran fell from power and the Islamic Republic of Iran began. But the U.S. participation in the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 shows that the U.S. has long sought substantial influence over Iran’s rulers. What are the roots of the antagonism between these two states, and how might it end up?
| |
[more]
thanks to Antiwar.com
On Iran: "Rewarding the Hysterical at the Expense of the Calm"
|
In my own view, Iran's nuclear pretensions are a direct result of America removing Iran's chief antagonist in the region, Iraq under secular (and yes, fascist) rule -- as well as from the sad fact that America's mystique of power and capability has been greatly damaged by bogging down in the Iraq quagmire. When the perception of American power declines, allies are prompted not to count on the US as much and enemies have an incentive to move their agendas.
| |
[more]
pentax fun
My mailman delivered a couple of accessories that will take me to where I've never gone before. The first is an adapter ($26 from Ukraine) that will let me use the lenses from my medium format Hasselbladski on my Spotmatic and H1a.
It has the M42 screw mount on one end and the Salut-S/Kiev 88 mount on the other.
Mounted on the Pentax, or any other M42 mount camera, it now allows me to put on all my Salut-S lenses on my Pentaxes.
Like the 90mm lens that is the normal lens on the Salut-S and a moderate telephoto on the Pentax. What is nice about this lens is that it will focus as close as two feet which makes this also kind of a macro lens on the 35mm Pentax. Macro work is something that rangefinders don't do so well but SLRs are great at. And, when I bought my second Salut-S I ended up with two of these lenses. Now that second one has a new home. I'm looking forward to using it when I get the time to shoot again.
Mr. Mailman also brought a set of 3 extension tubes ($15.95 on eBay) so that I can do real macro work. Macro work is something I haven't really done before. I'm looking forward to it.
latin america
Our fearfull leaders aren't paying attention to what is going on south of our border. This is probably a good thing.
Evo Morales and new waves in Latin America
by Helena Cobban
|
Over the past 500 years, colonizing powers of European heritage have used their military might to impose their will on all continents of the world, committing countless large-scale crimes of humanity against the indigenous peoples of those other lands.How wonderful, therefore, that 513 years after Christopher Columbus's flotilla arrived off the coast of the Americas, in Bolivia an indigenous person, head of an indigenous-based political movement, has been elected President.
I know I should have written about Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) before now.
Dominic Tweedie kindly sent me this link, which is to the text (in English) of an important address Evo made on December 24. In it, he builds on his own remarkable experience of organizing the people of his home district, and says:
| |
[more]
camera straps
One thing that has been going well is gordy's camera straps. In January I sold almost double of what I sold in December. It was time to take it to the next level. I had been advertising in Rangefinder Forum, which has worked very well, so I added APUG. I have been using leather scraps from one of my clients who is a leather worker but I was starting to need more than he could provide so I invested in some hides. This will let me make the longer neck straps in all four colors: the natural that I have had all along, as well as black, brown, and dark brown.
black leather/green thread
brown leather/black thread
dark brown leather / red thread
all four leather colors
I had a customer today who liked the string neck strap but wanted something stronger and wondered if I could make a single point neck strap with a split ring. So I did and I will be adding it to the strap site when I can get back to my desktop with the web page software. He wanted to use it on a heavy light meter but I had a flash of inspiration and it turns out it will work quite well to carry cameras vertically.
You saw it first here. I also ordered some leather tools that will let me make some leather pads for the neck straps. Soon.
reporting from gerry's bedroom
It's been a roller coaster couple of weeks. A week and a half ago Zoe went up to Oak Harbor to check out HomePlace, a care facility for Alzheimer's and dementia patients. This was pretty traumatic for Zoe but HomePlace is highly regarded and she knew that she had found the place for her mom, Gerry.
Then last Wednesday Gerry fell on her back and had to be taken up to the hospital in Coupeville by the Paramedics. Luckily she didn't break any thing but it put a big scare into us and we realized we need to have her watched 24 hours a day. Zoe has more about this in her blog. We had been having care givers come in the evening and then we added them in the days too. There were usually gaps of a couple of hours that I watched her.
Then Thursday Gerry fell again but the caregiver caught her and wrenched her back. The caregiver's, not Gerry's. On Friday Kathy from HomePlace came down to evaluate Gerry. Zoe goes into detail in her blog. Zoe has been real hard on herself but she has done more than most daughters would.
What really firmed up our plans was that Sunday Gerry decided she didn't want the caregiver around and we had to send her home. Zoe had been hoping to put off taking Gerry up to HomePlace for a little while longer but now it became clear that the time was now. When the caregivers aren't here I spend my time in Gerry's room to make sure I am near her when she walks since she is so wobbly. Try spending 20 hours in an overheated room. (She gets cold very easily so we keep her room at what is comfortable for her.) I can't do much more. It could happen as soon as this weekend but there is paperwork to fill out and and doctor's orders to get filled. Soon.
In the meantime I spend a lot of time with Gerry. We still have someone coming in the evening for three hours and Zoe spells me as she can but she is not in great shape. Not only has this taken an emotional toll but, when we were in the Emergency Room, she had to catch Gerry as she was sliding off the bed and Zoe wrenced her back and screwed up her knee. We are having a good time now! I finally set up my old laptop. A guy from Switzerland gave it to me. It's an old IBM Thinkpad of 200 mhz. The tricky part is that it has a European keyboard and I have the keys mapped to the US standard. Tonight I finally pasted little pieces of paper with the correct symbols on them. 25 keys were affected. I don't like laptop keyboards anyway but this was pretty painful. At least I can now do something while Gerry is sleeping. It won't be too much longer.
|
|
|
|
