Month: December 2003

last year, I fell and hurt my ankle. (emergency room on christmas eve!) this year, just a cold. but it meant another christmas of mostly sleeping.

(not that I was too well prepared even without the cold. I used to love christmas, now it fills me with dread: too much to do, and I’m always behind the game. someday I will be as prepared as mom used to be. honest.)

today I feel tired; still not breathing too well, and I’ve been plagued with sinus headaches. not something I usually suffer from, so it kinda freaks me out. I feel like my brain is running extra-slow, too.

one very nice thing on Christmas Eve, though; I called Shelley on seeing “her request for places to get pictures”:http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/connecting/lighter_than_air.htm — when she said she was taking a southerly route, I thought of the beautiful places I saw with Grandpa &/or Grandma Nelson, back when I was a teenager. The one that I thought she’d get the biggest kick out of was the “Chiricahua National Monument”:http://www.nps.gov/chir/ (somewhere around here I have photos I took as a kid).

it felt strange to call her, like breaking an invisible wall. I’m not a big fan of the telephone, generally speaking. I prefer either the full-context experience of time in person, or the precision (relatively) of the written word.

but I’m glad I did. not that it was a deep or particularly serious conversation, but it was a connection where there hadn’t been one before.

“she said she didn’t think she’d be able to go there”:http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/adventure/now_this_is_a_doorway.htm because of the weather, so I went through my drawer of old photos and found this:

I took it in 1987, when I was thirteen, on a visit to my grandparents…the three of us girls used to take turns visiting them each summer. I think Grandpa and I went through the national monument on our way either to or from (maybe both) a church where he was filling in for the local minister. It’s not a great picture, but it brings up good memories.

I surrender. this time I have, in fact, caught C’s cold. no sniffles, really, but I feel like I’m breathing with a heavy weight on my chest, and my throat just won’t stop hurting. (cold beverages seem to help.)

so there will be a hot shower, and a silly movie, and then some sleep. tomorrow will likely be equally slow and uneventful.

christmas looks to be as mellow as thanksgiving was, although this time both of us are fighting off colds (C was sick at thanksgiving). I came home a little early today and got some cool pictures of the tree, stockings, etc….

(the picture in the corner where the site name usually goes is of the christmas stocking I’ve had since I was a little girl. C is in the background helping a friend wrap a present.)

on a less gloomy note, C came up with a theory this morning about why the hobbits were (relatively more) able to bear the Ring: it’s because they don’t wear shoes…their bare feet allow them to remain grounded. no, seriously.

it made sense to me….

“Liz writes about the aftermath of her brother-in-law’s death”:http://mamamusings.net/archives/2003/12/20/how_to_live_life.php and formulates a simple rule:

bq. Live so that no one you love
will be unpleasantly surprised
by what they find when you die.

I have a bit of experience with that myself, though probably not as directly as what she’s going through.

Seven years ago one of my co-workers at the children’s museum died in a car crash, which I think I’ve written about here before. But after the coma, after her death and the funeral and after everything started to get back to normal at the museum, we discovered that her files, her records of all the projects she was working on (mostly marketing stuff) — were a mess. No one could understand her filing system, such as it was, and most of her work was just in piles on her desk back in the tiny office at the far back of the museum.

What I learned from that is that one should endeavor to leave one’s work so that anybody can pick it up if you get hit by a bus tomorrow. Needless to say to anyone who’s seen my desk either at work or at home, I don’t always live up to that.

The other experience that she brings to mind is strikingly more unpleasant….

For those who don’t know, my father died when I was eight years old. It was sudden, or at least it seemed sudden to me. (He’d been in the hospital once before the heart attack, on my 7th birthday.)

I’d never thought much about money, or class, or how well off or not we were, before he died. We owned a house; Mom stayed home; we didn’t have the nicest things, but we had a VCR when they were still a luxury, and an Atari. (The VCR we had for years and years, but I don’t remember what happened to the Atari. Mom and Elizabeth still live in the house.)

But after…money became suddenly and painfully important, and remained so. The details are hazy, and some things I do remember I don’t think are appropriate here. But I know that we managed to keep it all together partially because our house had a mother-in-law house which provided for some income, and because my grandparents helped us.

That uneasy feeling of the floor suddenly falling out of the world…knowing just enough to know that we weren’t secure, but not so much that I could actually understand, and being too young to have anything to do about it anyway.

It still makes me feel queasy.

got home a little bit ago from seeing Return of the King at the Seattle Cinerama…after spending the whole afternoon/evening before at Kat’s watching the first two movies (extended editions, of course). so good….

(when Eowyn pulled off her helmet and killed the Nazgul, I swear the whole theater let out a cheer.)

more later….

“What color are you?”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000389.html — hmmm, must be grading season.

But I love this:

bq. After Henry croaked, Katherine dropped the prim and proper act and married Thomas Seymour, a dashing pirate-y kind of guy who was dumb as a post. Which goes to show you that even bookworms know how to get it on.

I am “Katherine Parr”:http://www.spookbot.com/quiz/parr.htm

sometimes you shouldn’t be nostalgic, but you are anyway.

(having seen X-Men movies recently, and listening to Cranberries (followed by Depeche Mode!), and been working on reuniting Aila and Reboa. sigh.)

I’m finding I actually like the undesign I’ve got now. partially because the visited link color works with the purple in the crocus.

I do want just a little bit more, though. more of *what* — that I can’t yet say.