Posts in Category: Day in the life
Staying busy part 2
I honestly didn’t mean to go into such a lengthy monologue about my mom in the last post. It really was supposed to be about the slightly paradoxical feeling of being overly busy despite being unemployed.
Of course, an obvious explanation for feeling like one has too much to do would be engagement in a fevered job search, writing and sending of dozens of applications every day, calling all contacts at all hours, devising ever-more refined searches on the job board, and so on and so forth. But this doesn’t apply to me at the moment. I have moved through the panic phase that immediately follows being laid off. I did keep that up for awhile, but I had certainly started to feel the futility of frenzied days fighting to reenter the work force. Perhaps I also had a vague intuition of broader issues raised by the periodic dumping of American jobs, whether they go overseas or simply into the trash heap of social progress.
Friends and acquaintances started helping me bring a different view of my situation into focus. It started with Rebecca pointing me to The Brazen Careerist’s post on 5 things to do when you are unemployed. The list did not include job hunting. A couple weeks later, through networking with a friend and colleague, I met a java programmer who recently received her MBA in sustainable business. She took the opportunity of unemployment to build a great Web site called neighborhoodfruit.com that’s devoted to helping backyard gardeners share and trade the fruit and vegetables they grow. We had a great conversation about the current employment climate, sustainability, and what I want to do next. Then tonight, a received an email from a prominent local businessman with whom I had an interesting conversation after running into him late the other night at the Hotsy Totsy. It simply contained a link to an interesting article entitled Use Jobless Time to Build Better World. And with that as a goal, you can see how even the current legions of jobless workers could be working overtime.
Staying busy part 1: eldercare
Ever since I was laid off from my job in February, life has been exceptionally hectic. This seems completely counter-intuitive. This is because I obviously have much more free time than I did when I was working full time. Nonetheless, the free time seems to fill up fast with things that I either wish to do or that come up that I must do.
One huge thing that has come up is caring for my mother. This started the very day I was laid off when she fell and broke her wrist. About three weeks later, her left hip, which had been painful for months as the prosthesis from a much earlier hip replacement was rattling around loose in her femur, finally just broke. That is, her femur just started disintegrating. It was time to attempt a total revision of the hip replacement. This was a major undertaking that just a couple months before was seen as not worth the risks by an orthopedist at Kaiser Richmond. But now the risk of a failed surgery, becoming wheelchair bound, was already a reality.
The first orthopedic surgeon to look at her new situation, basically thought he could not do anything for her, but offered to refer us for a second opinion. The referral was to Dr. Bini, director of orthopedics for Kaiser East Bay. Dr. Bini was very confident he could fix her. “I can cut this and replace that; and if that doesn’t work, I have some other toys I can play with.” But he was very upfront about the risks: “For a 91-year-old, the anesthesia is dangerous. Or afterwards, she gets a clot and it goes to her lungs, that’s it. Or she gets pneumonia, which it’s unlikely she’ll recover from.”
We decide to move forward with it, and he schedules her for April 29th, at the end of an already full day of surgery for him. He just adds her in. So, there were three days of appointments for tests, including blood, urine, ekg, and biggest of all, a heart stress test with nuclear imaging.
Finally, she has the surgery. Dr. Bini calls me 5 or 6 hours after I left her with the pre-surgery team to say that the surgery went great, and that she came through it well. By Friday, she was recovering really well and they were planning on discharge to a rehab home the next day.
But the next day, Saturday, she started having terrible trouble breathing, and a chest x-ray showed patchy fluid throughout her lungs. It looked like pneumonia. By Sunday, she was moved to ICU, on an oxygen machine that helped keep her lungs inflated (bipapp?) and the doctors there were mostly talking to me about her health directive and “do not resuscitate” (DNR) status. We were all preparing for the end game. But I know these old Greeks, and her in particular. She’s too stubborn. Monday morning, the doc on watch suggested that she could be on the breathing machine indefinitely and that if she goes a couple days without change it might be time to think about pulling tubes out of her and just keeping her comfortable till the end. I said let’s see what we can pull back in terms of intervention and see how she does. So, over the course of a couple hours, we took her off the back-pressure oxygen, and got her down to just a little oxygen through a nose tube, not even a mask. And there started the big rally. The ICU docs were surprised.
She continued to improve through the week in terms of her infection and ability to breathe. However, she refused to eat, take her meds or otherwise cooperate in any way. Her lack of English, baseline dementia, and combination of lack of sleep and regular morphine all had her totally delusional. I was having to come in everyday to try to get her to eat and take some meds. By Friday, the ICU docs were again concerned that this was going to send her into decline again. And they felt like the hospital environment was a big factor in her disposition. They wanted to discharge her to a skilled nursing facility for rehab and focus on getting her on a normal routine. Saturday they did that, and sent her to Kaiser Post-Acute. Of course, that didn’t change her attitude much. They called me this morning to talk to her about eating, letting them take her vitals, and starting physical therapy on her hip. I tried. Later in the morning, we (Sarah, Theo, and my friend David) all went there for a mother’s day visit, and to see what the situation is. I actually got her to eat several bites of pureed food (can’t blame her for not liking it), and let them get her vitals. It looks like that is going to be the drill for the coming days, until she gets oriented. Assuming she ever does.
Monday in London
I finally got a chance to work through a batch of photos from the London trip and posted them on flickr last night. My walking tour began on Monday. We had been here many years ago, but I did not get a real sense of the layout of the city center. It seemed pretty big and confusing, and hard to grasp. We took the Underground pretty much everywhere, and got good at looking at the tube map and figuring out how to get from hotel to museum, etc. But this means that you start at a point and then disappear underground, and then pop up at another point. So, one does not get a real sense of the connective tissue between. This time was different. I took the tube to get a bit closer in, but then just walked the streets from point to point. This helped to make it clear where things are in relation to each other and made the city intelligible to me as a visitor. I’m not claiming I’ll remember any of this by the next time I get to visit, but that is another story entirely.
As I mentioned in the last post, I took the District Line tube to Westminster and came out of the station right in front of Big Ben.
This was a wonderful site with which to start a day in London. The sky was clear and the gold glinted in the sun. I walked around the corner onto Victoria Embankment to stroll along the Thames for a bit. That’s when I first glimpsed the London Eye, a gigantic ferris wheel 443 ft. high. That’s over 25 stories! It simply dwarfs the large buildings right next to it. Sarah wanted to go for a ride, but I’m not sure how my acrophobia would treat me up in that thing.
Along the way I also saw the Battle of Britain Monument. I thought it was rather an odd monument that was not sure whether it wanted to be a contemporary, abstract work or more of a traditional figurative sculpture.
I walked up Horse Guards Ave, and back down Parliament St, past the Horse Guards Cavalry Museum. Then past Downing St., which is pretty well guarded. It’s a fairly small and short side street, closed off with a large metal fence and gate and many police guards standing around. No surprise, of course.
I didn’t see Mr. Brown, however. He and the finance minister were busy working on a deficit budget to bail out the British economy, which became quite a news story while we there. There is quite a bit of opposition to the amount of borrowing the British government is proposing to do to get through the economic hard times. In contrast, the daily protests by Tamils over Sri Lanka were barely covered in the media I saw while there. A couple citizens I spoke to seemed mystified about what the protesters were demanding the government do about the situation in Sri Lanka.
Coming back down the street toward Parliament, I happened upon the aforementioned Sri Lankan Tamil protest. I’m not sure how I missed it the first time around; perhaps they had not started “protesting” yet and I took them for tourists.
At first, I was quite surprised to come upon the scene and found it rather exciting. There was definitely some action as the huge crowd spilled out of the park at one point and blocked Bridge St. The police were trying to hold them , but got pushed back and eventually fell back to protect the House of Commons, etc. Ultimately, it was all pretty civil, and well behaved on this day. After taking about 100 photos at the protest, I headed back up Parliament St toward the National Gallery. This time the Horse Guards were out and I got a couple shots.
Soon I arrived at Trafalgar Square, and got the standard shots of the Nelson’s Column and National Gallery in the background. I immediately recognized Admiralty Arch from my previous visit to London, but only as a landmark I passed through to get to the ICA.
I spent only about two hours in the National Gallery. Since I was traveling on a budget, I didn’t spring for special exhibits, but immensely enjoyed the fabulous permanent collection in the rest of the museum, which is free.
After the NG, I headed up Strand toward St Paul’s Cathedral. Along the way, I passed Somerset House, a large historic complex which I’d not heard of before, but which appeared to include a wonderful art venue and be worth a special effort to visit in the future. More on that and the rest of Monday in the next post, coming soon.
Welcome to London
Big Ben in the morning.
So, as I mentioned previously, I took the tube to Westminster. I walked out of the station and looked up at good old Big Ben, shining gloriously in the morning sun. That was pretty exciting in itself. I walked along the Thames a bit, marveled at the London Eye (ferris wheel on steroids), and generally walked in circles touching on Horse Guards, Downing St, WWII memorial, and so on.
I came back out onto Parliament St and noticed more activity in a crowd gathered there. This turned out to be another day of protest by Sri Lankans demanding a cease fire between the Tamil Tiger rebels and the Government.
Crowds with signs outside Parliament.
Pretty quickly, the mass had spilled out on to the street, chanting “We want, cease fire!” and the police piled in to push them back. But before long the throng pushed police lines back and it was chaos. The police reformed a line half a block back. But then a commander came and I heard him say, “They must not reach Parliament. It must not be breached!” as he order the line off the street, effectively abandoning the streets to the marchers in order to defend the House of Commons and Parliament.
Police get pushed back as protesters break through lines.
Before too long reinforcements showed up with wagons and blocked the streets with vehicles. I stayed around too shoot for awhile, but eventually thought it was time to do some more conventional sightseeing.
Arriving in London
Earl's Court, 2009 London Book Fair
Sarah and i have arrived in London for the London Book Fair. Well, she’s arrived for that. I have arrived to accompany her while traveling and enjoy the city for three days. The flight was uneventful and as pleasant as nine hours in a confined space can possibly be. We are flying British Air. The food was fine, and we had decent red Bordeaux with dinner.
We rode the underground straight from Heathrow to Earl’s Court station, a stone’s throw from our hotel, the Barkston Gardens Hotel. After dropping off our bags and freshening up, we headed out for a stroll and then to a pub for dinner and ale. Photos and more details coming soon.
London is even more wonderful than I remember it. The first morning after arriving, I got up with Sarah, and we went down to continental breakfast in the hotel. From my perspective, the best thing about this breakfast is the toast. Soon after the server seats you, she brings you several triangles of toast, hot, unbuttered and standing on edge in a cute little rack. For a toast fiend such as myself this is quite a treat. Naturally, there is quite an assortment of condiments. The rest of the continental breakfast is fine but not particularly interesting.
Afterwards, I walked Sarah to Earl’s Court for the London Book Fair, and went on my way for the day’s exploration. I should mention right off that the weather here is just unbelievable right now, sunny and about 68 degrees, perfect for long walks in the city. I took the tube from Earl’s Court to Westminster. I walked out of the tube station and straight into view of Big Ben. I walked about taking some photos and started off in the direction of St James’s Park. But before I got far, something caught my eye. I will go into that, along with other details I’ve skipped, in the next post. Right now, I have to get back out into the city for day 2!
Fastest Mailbox in the World
I’ve been going back to Fresno every couple weekends to fix up my mom’s house and get it re-rented. Driving from the house to the hardware store I passed by this mailbox. Each time, I was in a hurry to get something and get back to work. But by the third time, I could not stand it anymore. I had to stop and snap some shots.
I can understand the flames. I can understand embellishing the mailbox. But I just can’t quite grasp the exhaust manifold. Wheels? That I could see. Wings? No problem there. Conning tower? OK, maybe. But exhaust manifold? I guess I’ll just chalk it up to another aspect of the Fresno aesthetic that makes it such a strangely alluring place.
So it goes
I wrote this on March 1st, but didn’t feel like posting it until now.
I arrive at work a bit early on Friday to catch up on email communications and other work. I am cranking away until about 9:30 when my cell phone rings. It is the rest home where we moved my 90-year-old mother, Efrosini, in early January. They found her lying on the floor in her room; she seemed to have fallen and hurt her hand and wrist. I call the advice nurse and make a same-day appointment at Kaiser Richmond. She says to get more information and if it looks bad, take her to the emergency room. I talk to the director at the rest home, and he says he will take her to the emergency room, and that I should meet them there as soon as I can. Great. Not much chance of getting a lot done today now.
My boss walks by my office and I tell him what has happened with my mom. He asks, “Are you leaving now?” I reply, “In a few minutes after I finish off some stuff here.”
He says, “Stop by my office before you go so we can meet briefly and catch up.”
After a few minutes I get up and walk toward his office. He waves me in while he gets the controller, closes the door behind me, and they sit across the small table from me. My danger instinct spikes while the blood rushes to my head.
“Well, Neo, I know you have been here a long time and …” swoosh, swoosh, swoosh goes the sound in my head. “It’s nothing personal, we are continuing to reorganize to cut costs, and we have to flatten out the org chart. It is just not a good fit going forward…” swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. “Here’s your vacation time payout.”
No real warning. No severance.
I return to my desk to collect my personal items. I leave the building.
I think “well, at least I don’t have to hurry back from the emergency room.”
Getting old is a bitch
They say, “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” That’s not true.
Actually, life’s a bitch, then you get where you can’t see or hear very well, then you get wrinkly, then you get batty, then you can’t walk very well and have hip ad knee replacements, then you take lots of drugs every day, then you get slower and more batty, then you can only walk with a walker, then you get more batty and start wearing diapers again, then you move to a depressing place with other people in the same sorry state and slug away a couple years, then you are broke, then your kids are broke, then you fall and break your hip, then you spend two weeks in the hospital and/or nursing facility, and then you die. But right before all that starts, you go through all it with your parents.
Fortunately, there’s cocktails, and, in particular, new and wonderful bourbons with which to make them. That’s what the NYTimes says, although they didn’t mention flora.
Flip-book Life
We recently took a trip to Seattle for our dear friend Jen Dixon’s birthday. Jen’s friends from all over the country came for this one, and so we saw a lot of people. We had a wonderful time, and it was actually rejuvenating. It just felt like we reconnected with our friends there in a much more significant way this time. I suppose that because it was a tough year marked by personal loss, and because we saw people we had not seen in years, and because we are all older, there was this pervasive sense that being with people you care for is what matters in life. It sounds corny, but I don’t know how else to describe it.
One of the really nice things we had a chance to do was take a drive up Aurora Ave to see Jen’s public art work installed on the Interurban Trail. I really loved the work. It has a playfulness and a sense of place. Yet the combination of the simple, colorful, unfolding content on a form usually reserved for the concise delivery of important information for travelers creates a semiotic mystery. “What does that sign mean? What is it telling me about what’s ahead?” I love that in a work.
Night Rambler 5
It showed up one day earlier this week. It sat quietly over to the side minding its own business, not making a peep. I went by once and noticed it immediately, but I, too, didn’t say anything. Life is like that a lot these days. One makes mental notes and tries to find them later amid the clutter of scraps of paper, children’s toys, empty wine bottles, and job postings.
I went by again and the tug was more insistent; the mental note came floating down from the rafters, landed in plain view. For two days I shuffled it to the top of the stack of other mental notes.
Sarah had noticed it sitting there and said something to me about it. Tuesday night it was still there when I left the house to run the errand in another note. I threw my tripod in the car on my way to get milk.
On the way back home, i went by again. This time I stopped. I didn’t care that it was night. The moon was almost full. The golden convertible gleamed in the cocktail glow of moonlight and sodium vapor.
It was accidental at the time, brought about by the time constraints of modern suburban living. But these two great tastes taste great together: suburban neighborhood car photography, and night photography.
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