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Kate and Pramas and I were in Portland over the weekend. I crashed the Canby High School Class of '88 reunion, even though I moved to Minnesota in my Freshman year, and reconnected with several of my junior high school friends, visited with my brother for the first time in a year and a half, squeezed in breakfast with my friend JD Roth and his wife at their place, and attended a barbecue with my mom, grandma, brother, and a bunch of people from mom's husband's side. Grandma is going to have to start dialysis soon and this is probably the last visit to Oregon she'll make so it was a bittersweet visit. Drove home last night and promptly collapsed into bed.

Woke up this morning to find that JD had posted something of an interview with us, from our talk about entrepreneurship over breakfast, over on his highly successful personal finance blog, Get Rich Slowly. Kinda cool, that.

Chris and I leave for Finland in one week and I'm freaking out just a tad about getting everything done that needs to be done. Speaking of, I shouldn't waste any more time noodling around on my blog right now. Eek.

Labels: family, grandma, personal, travel

I'm slowly making it through the To Dos on my list. I did a reasonable job of preparing for the summit, though I didn't have as many charts and graphs as I would have liked and I failed to flog my employees into complying with my requests for a new podcast or a new staff photo. Still, we made it through the summit pretty well and the food, at least, was solid.

Then it was my in-laws' visit. After brief confusion about their arrival dates, it turned out they were indeed arriving the day after the guys departed from the summit. Between the summit andthe visit, it's been two solid weeks of eating out or eating in-but-fancy, including a weekend barbecue at Ray and Christine's house (since they're our "Seattle family" it was nice for the Family family to meet them). A couple of false starts (Panos Kleftiko unexpectedly closed the first day we tried them, and Serafina not open for breakfast on Saturdays, which we didn't know until we showed up there) but all in all it's been a good run of food and activities. I've even managed to squeeze in a little cooking, including some Chewy Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip cookies. Bill and Elaine will only be in town for a couple more days and I hope it's not another two years until we see them again. It's been quite a while between visits recently.

Kate left for her class trip to OPI this morning. She's having a fantastic year, really coming into her own and bonding with a small group of very nice girls. Many of the kids who tormented her in previous years have left the school to attend middle school elsewhere, plus the kids are all just growing up and getting more mature. Kate was telling us about a kid who is new to the school this year who is annoying a lot of people with his behavior and how the kids got together to pick two "representatives" to take the kid aside and try to talk through their issues with him. So far it hasn't resulted in much for them but I'm quite pleased that the kids selected Kate to be one of their reps and that her ability to be fair, compassionate, and level-headed has been recognized (and is being honed). She was beside herself with excitement about this trip and I wish I could have squeezed in going to camp with her again this year, but it was not in the cards. I'm certain she's going to have a really good time. We'll hear all about it on Friday, I'm sure.

Now that the big milestones are passing I can get back to the regular level To Do lists. That in itself seemed miles away a few weeks ago.

Labels: family, food, Kate

I didn't blog much about my plans for Minnesota on the off chance that my grandpa might hear about them somehow. Unlikely as that was, I knew that if I didn't say anything I couldn't screw things up. You see, several months ago my aunt and uncle began planning a surprise party for my grandpa's 90th birthday and I dropped everything and arranged to be there as soon as I learned about it.

Immediately after GenCon I grabbed up Kate from her dad's and headed back to the midwest for a week. My family really pulled together for this one and we had an excellent showing. We were only missing one grandchild (my brother, who is deep in the middle of his surgical rotation and just couldn't get away at all) and two great-grandkids (teenagers who are already in school or who just started college and also couldn't get away). My aunt JoAnn's daughters (Kim and Connie) came, along with Kim's husband Larry and Connie's five-year-old daughter. My Uncle Jack's kids (Johnny, Josh, and Jen) came, along with Jen's husband Chris and their young daughter. Kate and I represented for my dad's branch of the family and all three of my stepbrothers (Jon, Mick and Erik) along with Mick's wife Jenny, whose wedding I attended last spring. There were also any number of close friends of my grandpa and extended relatives that I didn't remember at all who came out for the event.

Grandpa was completely surprised. My uncle had told him they were going golfing ("I'm the caddy," my grandpa chuckles. He accompanies Jack around in the golf cart but doesn't golf himself) and pretended that he'd grabbed "the wrong clubs" and had to go back to the house. Up they drove on the golf cart into an applauding crowd, to my grandpa's astonishment. He's not the sort of guy to cry but he did seem pretty choked up for a bit and he looked me in the eye and thanked me for "making the trip" more than once over the weekend. I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

We had a lovely time. Kate got to spend time with her uncles canoing, swimming, paddle boating, playing games and just generally goofing around. She got to meet second cousins, first cousins once removed, and even more distant relatives (some of whom are honorary aunts and uncles who are lifelong family friends). I got to spend time with my grandpa and also with my cousins (and their cousins), walk around town and see just how much things have changed since I lived there as a kid, and generally enjoy the place.

Kate and I came home toting souvenirs of the trip. I stocked up on wild rice, made a couple of trips to Zup's for potica, pasties, and all manner of brats and sausages (which they kindly packed up for me and I checked as baggage because the box was so big!), and pigged out on walleye, Nut Goodies and "hot air" candy. I took many photos and even got a couple of voice recordings of my grandpa talking about how he learned to drive at age 10 because his dad had gotten the family a car but no one could drive it (nor could they speak English!) so it fell to Grandpa to learn, and my dad talking about the time he and his friends (all of 13 or 14 years old) drove their snowmobile through the ice on a lake and the "hilarity" that ensued. I didn't get as many stories recorded as I'd hoped but apparently my Uncle Jack has a couple hours of tapes that he made a few years ago so I'm hoping I can get my hands on some of that eventually.

Doubly exhausted and twice as far behind as I was before GenCon but it was worth it. So worth it.

Labels: Ely, family, Lindroos

For us, Christmas is over already. Tomorrow there will be stockings even though Kate knows the whole secret to Santa this year and we'll go over to Ray and Christine's tomorrow afternoon for a while. Low key and laid back, nothing too different from how we'd spend a typical Sunday with the crew. The big stuff is over. My mom, brother, and sis-in-law left to go back to Portland this morning. We had our big dinner (I did skip making the squash/rice side dish after all) last night and opened presents after that. We also went to see Eragon at the Cinerama and so, because of its proximity to Top Pot donuts, we had donuts for breakfast. Typical for my family, we munched donuts while Pramas explained to my SIL about Pol Pot and the campaign to exterminate Cambodia's intellectuals. Nothing says Christmas with the family like the Khmer Rouge, eh?

We actually had a very nice family visit, though our lack of a spare room was sorely felt as all our guests (including Rosie) hunkered down with the Christmas tree in the living room. I sent the family packing with a trunk full of leftovers, including half a pumpkin cheesecake. My brother called when he got home just to tell me once again how good the food was.



I spent my day playing with this. I've finally joined the world of the real MP3 player, woohoo! Pramas even got pink to match my birthday shoes and my new phone. (I've been on a pink kick this year.) Kate also got a Scrabble set so we played that tonight, too.

Not that Christmas is all about gifts, but I have to say that the gifts I received this year were fabulous. I got clothes items that fit and that I love, I got food and cooking items that I'd been coveting or that were perfect together (one gift included coffee beans, another was a spiffy new coffee making device (thanks Hal!) for example), I got books and music that I've been positively reveling in. All hits and no misses. Pramas also got me a Truthiness kit from Subversive Cross Stitch that I can't wait to tear into. I stayed up way too late reading Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation (thanks Will!) and we finished off a big chunk of the various sweets and goodies that were delivered to the house (thanks Rob, thanks Ev!).

Feeling very good about my holiday this year. No grinchy feelings at all. How nice!

Labels: CHristmas, family, friends

The good Mr. John Tynes familiarized me with Shut Up Little Man! some years ago. Click the link, read his review, then read on if you're not familiar with the subject.

Done?

That's my mother's husband. No, he's not actually Peter or Ray (he's got the much more evocative moniker of Virgil) but last night, as struggled to get my mother's out-dated pile of hand-me-down computer bits to coalesce into a functional machine, I could hear him going on from the other side of the house. The smell of cigarette smoke wafting down the hallway, shouting in his half-deaf way, I picked up snippets of his side of the conversation: "Some goddamn garlic in it... or sumthin'. Or tobacco! Throw some tobacco in there.... I'm serious! Find some butts or sumthin' and just crush 'em up in there... What're ya heatin' it up for? He don't need that!" It was in the same slurry tone and inflection as any of the Shut Up Little Man snippets. I completely expected to hear him follow up with "...because you crucified it. You ruined it. Goddamn you!"

Before I left for home, he also treated me to his views on training dogs. Apparently, "you gotta beat 'em; that's the only way to learn 'em, they don't understand nothin' else." Unless, of course, they're dogs that bite children or eat chickens: "Don't matter how much you love 'em, you can't ever change a bitin' dog--or a chicken eatin' dog, so you gotta just shoot 'em," BANG (he slams his fist into his hand for effect).

Needless to say, I always feel like I've walked into the Twilight Zone whenever he's around. My mother is not that way, I have no fucking idea how they ended up married to each other.

Labels: family, rant

Entirely too hot again today.

Puttered around the house, hanging curtains, installing more shelves in the bedroom. Piece by piece the house comes together. I love looking around the house and seeing my own handiwork. Even though I've mostly limited myself to installing ceiling fans, shelves, or hanging the occasional picture, I still feel like I'm pulling off my own little home improvement show.

Making a little day trip down to see my mother and grandmother with Kate tomorrow. Mom's computer blew up and we have a surplus of old machines around here that will easily meet her needs (which amount to "has a modem" and "has a word processor"-maybe "has solitare installed").

Today was the day to see how my attempt at Nigella Lawson's recipe for "asian gravlax" (which I've had curing in the fridge for about 3 days) turned out. I felt too uncomfortably hot to eat, but Chris made a couple of bagels with cream cheese and the salmon (which he declared was "between sashimi and lox") and said it was good. I've still got about a pound and a half of cured salmon to polish off! Sometimes I get a little carried away with cooking stuff.

Labels: family, food, house

My mom called last night to remind me that she wanted to take Kate camping this weekend. Doh! I'd totally forgotten!

So, I'm packing Kate up and hauling her off to Grandma's house. Another missed day of school, but I figure if Kate can't have fun experiences with her family now, when will she be able to? I suppose the fact that I'm not at all thrilled with her current school makes me a little passive-aggressive, too. Not sending my kid there to be bullied and told she's a crybaby when I could be sending her off for some TLC with grandma.

Nothing like 8 hours of driving to start the weekend off right.

Labels: family, Kate, travel

So when we last left off, Kate and I were headed for Tucson. More specifically, we were headed to Green Valley, a little retirement community a bit south of Tucson, and a bit north of Nogales on the Mexican border.

My grandparents have had a summer home in Green Valley for many years now. I first visited them there when I was about 16. After my grandmother became ill, they moved to Green Valley year round and sold their Minnesota lake home to my uncle, Jack.

It was wonderful to see my grandpa again. It had been six years since I last saw him, despite my best attempts to visit with him the last few years. He's looking good, still healthy and active and very mentally aware. He's a little skinnier, has a slight tremor and a little more trouble getting out of a chair than he used to, but for an 86-year-old guy he's extremely mobile. He's a shark at competitive shuffleboard within the retirement community. He seemed delighted by Kate's antics and spent a lot of time just watching her or listening to her gab with a big grin on his face.

On the other hand, I wouldn't have recognized my grandmother. She's been confined to full-time care for the last six years. Her face is drawn, she's lost her ability to move and speak. She recognizes my Grandpa, who devotedly visits her every day, twice a day, and greets him with a laugh. The last thing Grandpa heard her say was a some weeks ago while a chipper young nursing aide was fussing with Grandma's hair trying to style it and chatting away to her about how she couldn't get it quite right, Grandma suddenly responded, "Who cares?" I had to laugh, that's my grandma. Grandpa speaks fondly of her being a "tough ol' gal" and it's touching and heartbreaking to see them together, him holding her hand or giving her a kiss and saying "See you later, honey." He brings her a Hershey bar as a treat every afternoon, and has a boxful of Hershey bars in his refrigerator just waiting to be doled out.

My grandpa knows everyone at the nursing facility. We couldn't walk 10 feet without someone greeting him or him greeting someone: other residents, other family members or friends of residents, staff, volunteers, you name it. He volunteers with the assisted living residents once a week, and he talks with some of the other lonely residents who have no one else to visit them. My esteem for him, which was high before, is now nearly indescribable. If you click this link you will even see an image of him from a few years ago on the official website in the photo montage (that's him in the right-most photo). I am embarrassed to say that I can't recognize whether the woman in the picture is my grandmother, she has changed so much from how I remember her and has gone through so many stages of change between the woman I grew up with and the woman she is now. The woman with the balloons, however, is either a relatively recent picture of my grandma, or someone who looks exactly like her.

La Posada is a large facility, with assisted living suites, a secure unit for dementia cases, and then a full-service nursing care facility for people like my grandma who are in the last stages of their diseases. Grandma has been in hospice care for 6 months now, hanging on much longer than anyone thought she would. When Grandpa first gave in and arranged for her to live at La Posada instead of at home, he thought she'd be able to move to an assisted living apartment. He left her that evening, unpacking and putting things away, but within a few hours of his leaving, Grandma took off and they found her wandering on the road a couple miles from home. It was a staff person who had met her that day who noticed her walking on the road and offered her a ride. When Grandma wouldn't get in the car, this woman stayed with her while her daughter called the sheriff. Poor Grandpa got a call to come get her that very night. It was the first time she'd ever wandered (at their home she would stay home while Grandpa went to shuffleboard and so on, no problem) but it meant she had to go into the secure unit instead of assisted living. They moved her out of the assisted living apartment the next day. Before she lost her ability to walk, she would wander in and out of the rooms in the secure unit, cleaning and reorganizing everyone's things. Luckily, the staff attitude was "It's her house, let her clean and we'll put things back in order later."

Grandma was keenly interested in Kate. She perked up and spent a lot of time watching Kate playing or walking around (as we took Grandma on a stroll around the grounds in her wheelchair). She was always a very active woman, always cleaning and straightening her house, working in her garden, crocheting, tatting, painting, you name it. It was so hard to see her hands, crippled and clenched.

My aunt Joanne says she thinks Grandma's time is about up. Even though she's healthy, she's starting to lose weight. Her body seems to be just slowly giving out. My family isn't terribly communicative, so until last month I had no idea that my aunt Dolly and Uncle Jack had come down for a month-long visit in March, or that my dad and step-mom had taken a golf trip to Phoenix and come down to visit Grandma a few weeks ago. My cousin Connie visited with her new baby in October, and I, independently of all of this, scheduled a trip as well. Joanne sees this as an omen, as if the family has been called back one by one to say our goodbyes. I'm so glad I made this trip, as heartbreaking as it was at times. I'm grateful that Kate was able to meet her great-grandma, and see a little of grandpa's devotion to her in her final days.

Labels: family, travel

Kate and I are nearly ready to go on our Spring Break trip to Arizona. She is so excited about going she was barely able to sleep last night and woke up at 2:30am wondering if it was morning yet. This is a grand experiment on my part: Kate and I haven't had a solo holiday together since I grabbed her up and took her by train from Vancouver BC out to a get-together (the first!) with my e-mail mom group, then made a brief stop at GenCon on my way to my parents' place in Minnesota. She was, oh, just about 8 months old for that trip. She's a bit bigger now but every bit as fun.

We'll be staying with a friend of mine who has daughters 7 and 5 years old, and visiting other mom-list friends, including the only mom on our list to have lost a child since we've all been together. Her daughter, Melissa, would also have been 5; she has two living daughters as well, ages 5 and 3-ish. Her Kate-aged daughter is a child of a much different temperament than her mother, and I've been pleased to be able to give my impressions of what's likely going on in Lauren's head (since I was very much like Lauren when I was her age). I'll also have a couple of days to spend with my friend Karyl, who is just an amazing woman: working full time, mom to two boys, going to night school to get her degree, and she's lost 40 pounds since last October.

That's the fun part of the trip. Visiting with The Moms, exploring the wilds of Arizona with Kate and their kids, swimming and sunning ourselves. Not much not to like about that!

The second half of the trip is more sad for me. I'm taking this trip primarily because I fear it's going to be one of the last times I will get to see some of my relatives, who are ailing in various ways. I have not seen my grandmother since 1993. It was shortly before we found out that she had Alzheimer's, though we'd had our suspicions that something just wasn't right before that. My grandmother is one tough cookie, though, and fiercely private. She and grandpa had long since decided to winter in Arizona, and she groused about coming back to Minnesota in her later years. "It's just a work farm," she'd say, as she cleaned the beach or hung clothes out on the line. It was no surprise when they eventually decided to live in Arizona fulltime, though I have no doubt that being able to hide grandma's illness through distance had a little something to do with it. My grandma has long since forgotten that she ever remembered who I was. I don't exist in her world anymore. I'm not sure anyone does. She went through a serious bout of pneumonia last spring that they feared would be the death of her, but even in her diminished state she'd have none of that. She'll be going out when she's good and ready, thank you very much. I feared her for much of my childhood, afraid of crossing her and making her stern with me, but it's clear to me now that the same scrappy will to make things "just so" that intimidated he hell out of me as a kid is fundamental to her being. Even when everything else that made her her has eroded, that iron core of her determination remains.

My Grandpa Lindroos, meanwhile, was diagnosed with prostate cancer a couple of years ago. My dad broke the news to me that Grandpa had decided not to bother with treatment. I guess he figured at over 80 years old, it was a slow disease that wasn't going to take him before Grandma passed on, so why go through treatment? I've seen my grandpa a few times since he made the decision to put Grandma into fulltime care. I know that had to have killed him, they'd been married for over 50 years at that point. I used to work in a nursing home that specialized in care for residents with dementia conditions (mostly Alzheimer's, but some other conditions as well), and we saw over and over again that families would try to keep their loved ones in the home as long as they could, often far longer than they should have. My fondest childhood memories revolve around the time I spend with my grandpa, at the lake house he built himself, where he indulged my requests to go fishing or drive the motor boat or "build stuff" with his power tools. He loved me unconditionally, was patient and understated, and proud of me. When I "helped" him post some No Hunting signs on his property, he proudly displayed an entire row of my childishly-scrawled "Don't Shoot the Baby Rabbits!!!" signs (complete with animal drawings made with black permanent marker on wood planks) all the way down their winding rural driveway.

I made special plans to bring Kate and Chris up to Ely last summer, to coincide with my grandpa's scheduled visit to his old house (which now belongs to Uncle Jack and Aunt Dolly), but then Grandma had her scary bout with pneumonia, and everyone thought she could go at any moment. Grandpa certainly didn't want to take two weeks to go to Minnesota if Grandma was at risk of dying while he was gone! Under the current circumstances, I don't know when he might make another trip "home" and goodness knows if I would be able to arrange to be there at the same time. So, I've scheduled a trip to see him in Arizona instead.

I'm quite a bit frightened by what I might see when I get there. I deeply love my grandparents and they were undeniably influential in shaping who I've grown up to be. The feeling I have about them now, in their current circumstances, is tenderness and timidity. I feel like I'm watching the beautiful bubble of their lives, full, shimmering, increasingly transparent and in danger of popping out of existence at any moment. I've never known anything like it before in my life.

Labels: family, friends, Kate, travel