Other: My New Phone

My new phone, with special lock guard!

I have a new phone. It's an HTC Hero, and, well, it made me really popular at work. For about 5 minutes. I'd been putting on the decision to get a new phone, because (a) I'm cheap, (b) I'm lazy, and (c) cheapness + laziness actually make me relatively environmentally friendly, at least as far as not acquiring and disposing of more electronics. (My only TV set still has a cathode ray tube. But, hey, the thing works.) But in the case of my (now old) phone, there's a (d). My father got me that phone the last Christmas I spent with him, 3½ years ago.

He had been asking me what he could get me that year, but I had nothing I needed or wanted. Then the $&%^^$%(* shuttle service came thisclose to making me miss my flight to Florida on Christmas Eve Day, and when I slammed the phone I had at the time shut after making no headway with their customer disservice, I broke the hinge. Arriving at the airport in Florida: "Dad, I know what you can get me..."

Here's how not-bleeding-edge I am. The phone I ended up picking out at the store was the same one my parents both already had (Motorola Razr). Then when the clerk went to transfer the contacts stored in my old phone into the new one, he pointed out that there were, like, 10. Which caused my father to mock me, since he had dozens and dozens in his.

So, even though I know it's silly, that Razr has memories. But it started getting confused over how much charge the battery did or did not have, and I started missing work calls. My father would have thought it was silly to keep it as long as I did, but I think he would still have been secretly pleased that it mattered. But he also would have thought my new phone was pretty cool. If he hadn't already gotten one for himself first.

Spoonerisms: Junior

Bandit, top, puts the kitten Coco II in his place, circa March 2005

My father's beloved cat Bandit died over the weekend after what was apparently a rapid series of strokes. Bandit showed up over 15 years ago when friends of my parents found a kitten when they were out walking, and being allergic, brought him straight over to their house. He was the first cat they had gotten since I left home, and the first couple of times I visited, he wanted nothing to do with me. Then one Christmas he had sustained one of his many injuries fighting with some creature real or imagined, and my soft, warm lap was too much for him to ignore.

My father called Bandit "Junior," the son he never had, and their affection was clearly mutual. Always riddled with health problems, mostly from his overactive lifestyle, Bandit's health became more precarious at the same time as my father's. He clearly missed my father when he was away at the hospital. After my father died, Bandit perked up some. I realize it's anecdotal evidence, but I really do think that Bandit felt the stress of my father's absences and the clear distress he was in when he was at home, and it took its toll on him. His health did actually improve somewhat over the past year, but he was still clearly showing his age.

Rest in peace, big guy. You made my father very happy.

Spoonerisms: If I believed in that kind of thing...

No change in the immigration status of Code Name Fork¹. I haven't heard a peep. Meanwhile, she's settling down more and more. She and Spoon did have an incident yesterday where she was carefully inspecting more of the apartment and he snuck up behind her, so when she turned and saw him, she freaked and ran. Well, she was running, so Spoon had to follow. He caught up next to my bed when her food and water dish are. I didn't see any flying fur, and certainly no wounds, so I'm not sure how much physical contact was made, but they definitely made a mess. It also put Fork² out a little bit, as she hasn't been interested in looking outside the bedroom since.

I'm also not sure anyone taught her how to play with wand toys. It takes a lot of work to get her interested. She does like to smack around her catnip empanada a little, although I'm not sure she's old enough for the 'nip effect to set in. And I got her to use the cardboard scratcher, too. Spoon had taken to it right away when I got him, but she hadn't shown an interest. Yesterday I gently took her front paws, extended her claws a little, and ran them over the cardboard. Last night I saw her do it on her own! And then she did her floppy-melty thing on top of it. She's too cute.

Today would have been my father's 66th birthday. He loved Siamese cats his whole life. His mother kept them when he was a boy, and although he liked other breeds, too (his last favorite cat, Bandit aka "Junior," is a black-and-white mutt), Siamese were always his favorite. He didn't keep one as a bachelor, but my mother said that almost the instant they got married, they got one, almost like that was the reason he wanted to get married. Tiger died of feline leukemia before I was born, but to hear my father tell it, he was, of course, the most amazing cat ever.

My father had at least one Siamese in the house more or less continously for the rest of his life. He encouraged me to get one someday, too, to carry on the family tradition. I'm not picky about breeds; a good pet who needs a home is about my only requirement. But I can't help thinking about how a beautiful little Siamese shows up just as I'm getting ready to look for a new addition... I don't believe in ghosts or supernatural hoodoo, but if I did, this coincidence might seem like proof.

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¹Dan suggested we call refer to her this way for the time being.
²Note that this will NOT be her permanent name. I don't use it to her face.

Knittin' Crap: Spoon's New BFF

I designed this submarine thinking of my father. When he was sick, I had been trying to decide if I could make him something to let him know I was thinking about him. Well, he was never a sweater/scarf/excessively-cute-Japanese-cartoon-characters person, but he really liked naval and World War II history, so I had toyed with the idea of making a submarine.

I didn't start it, though, until after he was gone. I chose an old-WWII era sub, when they still looked more like battleships meant to go underwater than the cylinders we see today. It didn't turn out too well, and it's certainly not to scale, but it was a learning experience. I hand-felted the wool/mohair blend slightly, and then sewed it together and stuffed it the other day while watching The Golden Voyage of Sinbad for the first time in probably 25 years. (I loved that movie when I was a kid, but other than some of the Ray Harryhausen creatures, I had totally forgotten most of the movie. It was strange watching it again.)

Well, Spoon has a previously-established penchant for mohair. It didn't take him long to establish a relationship with the sub. I was hesitant to let him at it at first, but it's not like I really care for the thing, and it's actually pretty tough with the tight gauge and the felting, so I said, ok, have at it.

Knittin' Crap: A Sweater's Story

I stayed up a little too late last night finishing this cardigan. Yes, it was about 2½ years since I actually started it. No, it was not at all a complicated pattern, although all those seed stitch borders were pretty torturous. (Seed stitch is Evil.)

I first saw the yarn, Noro Lily Multi, at the beginning on March 2006. I had met my parents at Dulles Airport for my grandmother's 85th birthday. She lived in Richmond with my aunt, but first we spent a day in DC, getting a tour of the Capitol from my cousin, a fire safety engineer there. Afterwards, my father went to the National Air & Space Museum and my mother and I, well, found a yarn store. We took a cab a mile or so from the Mall to a place called Stitch DC. I actually only got two skeins of the Lily at the time because I didn't know what to do with it, and I was actually a yarn-knitting neophyte, not thinking in sweater terms.

We decided to walk back to the museum to meet my father. As we stepped out of the yarn store, my mother told me my father was going to have surgery in a month because he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Personally, I think dropping that kind of bomb in the nation's capital is a form of emotional terrorism, but none of the dozen or so different police forces seemed to notice.

They had caught that cancer early, but my father had all kinds of complications from the surgery itself. A pulmonary embolism led to use of anticoagulants, which led to internal bleeding and multiple infections. He was in the hospital for months and had multiple surgeries for the bleeding. But I never believed he wouldn't make it, even when my usually stoic and optimistic mother panicked. I don't know if it was denial or what, but it was what it was. And he did make it.

Meanwhile, I had found a sweater pattern I liked, a simple one, and ordered more of the same yarn. I was happily knitting away, and had finished the back, the two front pieces, and a sleeve when... no more yarn. I was, after all, inexperienced at choosing my own yarn for a pattern and had underestimated. It was by now about a year, I think, since I had bought the original two skeins. I went to order more and... it had been discontinued by the manufacturer.¹ They were out. Uh, what?

I finally found someone selling a few leftover skeins on ebay (yay, ebay to the rescue!), but I had set the sweater aside and started other things. It took me probably another year to get back to it. And then I had to knit those two interminable seed stitch plackets...

But around that time, my father had been diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. They only found it at the beginning of June when a brain tumor had altered his behavior.² And I knew this time that he wouldn't make it. I just knew, because of the bad health he'd been in in the last few years, which had also sapped him emotionally (I cannot understate the severity of his phobia of hospitals, and after being stuck in one for almost half a year, I can't blame him all that much). I couldn't tell either of my parents, though, because I didn't want him to think I had no faith, and I knew my mother didn't want to believe it. I wasn't going to try to break her hope. I don't know if I should have or not, but I did what I thought was best.

Of course, he didn't make it this time. The survival rates once lung cancer has spread that much are grim. We just didn't expect to lose him in three months.

So, I finished the sweater last night. In a convoluted way, it will always remind me of my father.

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¹ Too bad. I really like working with it. I managed to get sweater-quantity of another colorway at closeout price.
² They managed to remove the first brain tumor (yes, there was a second one found later), which was right against the skull in front. When I saw my father in the hospital right after, he said they used a jackhammer to get it out. Yup, that was my father, all right. And as stubborn as he was, they would have needed some serious power tools to get through his thick skull.

Other: Story du Jour

My mother has a nose that has clearly been broken. My father liked to say that she had been kicked in the face while milking a cow (she did actually grow up on a working farm), but she'd always reply with her slightly annoyed, "Uh-huh."

Here's the real story. My grandmother would send my mother and her sisters to summer camp every year. My Aunt Mary is only about 16 months older than my mother, so they were about the same size and had the same coloring. One year my mother fell off the top bunk onto the concrete floor of the cabin, which was how she actually broke her nose. The camp counselor drove her home. When my grandmother opened the door, she looked at this kid with an extremely swollen face and asked, "Well, which one is it?"

Red Eye: Red Georgia Clay

The small town where my father grew up is about a 4-hour drive. Once you leave Interstate 10 to go north, your scenery is limited to a lot of pine trees, cotton fields, pecan groves, livestock pastures, and towns too small to have a car dealership but which still sported multiple heavy farm equipment dealerships.

My uncle drove my father's fancy new pick-up truck. For the first time in his life, last winter he had treated himself to a brand-new vehicle, with every bell and whistle possible, down to the heated front seats. (I learned in Virginia in March that the back seats are not heated, thank you very much.) Unfortunately, he only had it a few months before he became too sick to drive it.

My short-legged mother and her sister sat in the back. I was assigned navigation duties, not like I knew how to get there, but my mother is really bad. She starts chatting and then says, "Oh, you were supposed to turn right back there." Of course, after having to get up before dawn and just being worn out, I wasn't too good at staying awake.

There's a small town called Monticello, Florida several miles south of the state line. The only thing really notable about it is the courthouse which is literally smack-dab in the middle of the road. Not just the middle of the town, but of the main road, effectively making the building a large roundabout.

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I was basically off on Planet Karen most of the time at the funeral home. Seeing relatives I hadn't seen in many, many years or had forgotten completely is generally overwhelming on its own for me.

For the service, my mother had asked one of my father's colleagues to speak. He gave a very complimentary talk with a little welcome humor. Then a minister, whom my father had never met but who had talked to my mother a while at lunch, began.

My grandmother had died in March, also from cancer. The minister there, who hadn't known her either, gave a very subdued, tasteful service, which my grandmother would have liked, as she liked things simple, and which my mother also appreciated. The minister presiding over my father's service was... different.

About halfway through the litany of the various places my father had lived and places he had worked, I leaned over to my mother and then my aunt and told them that right about now, my father would have been making his impatient throat-clearing cough. Then I zoned back out when he started trying to make parallels to my father's life with Ecclesiastes chapter 3.

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I think I swallowed about a dozen Georgia gnats at the cemetery.

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During both drives, we listened to some of my father's classic country cds left in the truck. I still have a medley of early Johnny Cash songs in my head.

Red Eye: The Jungle

With my father waiting for the funeral home in the family room, my mother in the office/my guest room sending emails, and my uncle keeping his distance in the living room, I didn't really have any place to go to be alone except the backyard. By then it was late afternoon, and even though it was still warm, I was very cold.

My parents had had an escalating war with the backyard squirrels for several years, trying to find a bird-feeder they couldn't get to. Well, the only one that had managed to keep the squirrels out also kept almost every bird bigger than a bumblebee out, including my mother's beloved pair of cardinals. So, my parents caved about a year ago and gave the squirrels their own take-out window.



This doesn't always keep the squirrels out of the bird-feeders, though, particularly if the squirrel feeder is out or the squirrel just has a hankering for bird seed. They each seem to employ their own bizarre methods for accessing the bird feeders, though. This one shimmies down the pole, grabs a handful of seed, then climbs back up and sits on top to eat it. He'll repeat the cycle dozens of times in a row.



The yard also had a bumper crop of anoles this year. They used to be a favorite target for the cats, but the current pair are the "the females are supposed to bring home the bacon" types and so there are some very large anoles, and a zillion little babies. I mean maybe 4 inches long, half of it tail. It is somewhat amusing to walk around and make them all zoom for their home plant or tree.

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After they took my father away, Bandit once again got on the now-empty hospital bed.

He finally came in and slept against my legs that night.

Red Eye: Red Eyes

My flight from Atlanta was on time. My uncle was too sleep-deprived to pick me up from the airport. My mother told me just to take a cab the 30 miles from the airport. "Um, how much is that going to cost?" "Just get in the cab, Karen."

I was tearing up, so either I didn't have a chatty driver or he knew better than to ask.

My father was still breathing when I got to the house.

His breathing suddenly slowed, then stopped, several hours later. It was as quiet as one could hope for.

The previous weekend I had promised him that I would see him again. His final gift to me was to let me keep my promise.

Things I Got From My Father

Some of the things I got from my father:

• My mutant blood
• A constant need to read
• My inability to suffer fools
• A sense of humor so dry and tongue-in-cheek that I occasionally risk chewing my tongue off
• My blank "I'm going to pretend like you never even opened your mouth to say that" stare
• My love of cats

We buried my father next to his parents in the red Georgia clay yesterday.


Easter 1974 at the Brookfield Zoo


December 1974


July 1975


Christmas 1975. Note the tiny Siamese kitten in the crook of my father's arm!

Sunshine State Part 2

I forgot to mention certain little things... Like how I forgot to bring cds to listen to in my rental car. And the only station I can even vaguely tolerate for 3 days/4 nights was the classic rock station... which played the eponymous song "Bad Company" all 3 days while I was in the car. You know what's sad? Singing along to Journey. That's really sad.

Note to self: Don't forget cds. The mp3 player is only helpful on the plane.

My parents' desktop computer is painfully slow. I turned off a bunch of start-up crap, which makes it boot faster, but it gets bogged down and pegs the RAM quickly. When I go there next time, I will have a new 1Gb DIMM to stick in memory slot, thereby increasing the RAM by 150%.

Note to self: Don't forget the RAM. (I ordered more for my sluggish computer while I was at it.)

My mother had set up a hospital bed in the family room for my father. His cat, Bandit, would spend the nights sleeping between my father's legs, after taking a leisurely bath. We had to take my father back to the ER the morning after I got there. My mother spent the night at the hospital with him, but I went back to the house. Bandit was still getting up at the foot of the hospital bed, even though my father wasn't in it. I can't tell who misses the other more.

Note to self: Don't forgot to stop and pet your own kitties, who comfort you when you need it, too.

Some dumbass woman in the row across from me on the flight back from Florida to DFW was arguing with the flight attendant about how she didn't need to turn her iPhone off before take-off because it was in "airplane mode." Bitch, what part of "TURN OFF ALL ELECTRONIC DEVICES FOR TAKE-OFF" did you not understand? I was getting ready to climb over 3 people to smack her upside the head. It would have been so worth it. And how stupid is it to be arguing with the flight attendant anyway? I would have confiscated the damned phone for the duration of the flight.

Note to self: Don't get your ass put on the no-fly terrorized-dumbass-passengers-who-need-their-iPhones-shoved-up-their-asses list. It's a long drive to Florida.

The flight from DFW to Burbank was probably only about half full. I had the window seat in the 3-seat side of the aisle. No one had the other two seats. Finally, I could lie down on my side and actually sleep, something I have trouble doing on my back and halfway upright. All in all, it wasn't a horrible flight experience. The planes were pretty much all on time, give or take 5 minutes. My luggage didn't get lost. I only wanted to smack two other passengers.

Note to self: Flying doesn't always have to suck. Sometimes just the reasons for it do.

Sunshine State My Ass

Actually, my family moved to Florida 26 years ago and our area never got a direct hit.

I flew to Florida for the long weekend. The leg from Burbank to Dallas/Fort Worth was rather uneventful, but once in the terminal at DFW, I noticed two things. First, the Arrivals/Departures software they use apparently runs on Windows. How could I tell?

Well, that's not a very clear picture, but I was trying to be vaguely surreptitious with my mediocre camera phone, but trust me, it was a Windows "Uh, sometink iz brokn" box. Oddly, it only appeared in the Arrivals screen, which kept updating beneath, and it was only on one set of screens I saw. Another set further down the same terminal showed no such error message.

At any rate, after ascertaining that my connecting flight left from a completely different terminal, I decided to use the restroom before getting on the tram. I did a double take after seeing the orange sign in this picture:

I stood there wondering exactly why they would build a women's room that experienced severe weather. I've seen some scary ones, to be sure, but I've never actually seen a bathroom with its own tornadoes. I carefully went in, but seeing no people getting carried on cyclones and thrown against the ceiling, I decided to risk it. But I didn't linger.

During the flight to Florida, I sat next to The Most Important Businessman In The World. The one whose elbows stick over the armrests while he's using his laptop. The one who turns on his cell phones, yes, plural, when we haven't even landed yet because he has to check on some important deal. The one who leaps from his seat as soon as the plane lands, like that's going to get him off the plane any faster when we're in, hello, row 23.

Um, if he was so important, why was he sitting in coach?

Anyway, I hate Florida in the summer. It's like walking around in a swamp, and that's when you're actually above the water level. I've avoided summers there for 17 years. Only something of great import could have changed that, and so it was.

My father is dying.

He has lung cancer, which wasn't diagnosed until it had already spread to the brain, twice. The second tumor caused bleeding in the brain, which makes it very difficult for my father to speak, and also robs him of much physical strength and motor control.

There aren't really any options now, except to make him as comfortable as possible. Which means if he wants chocolate pudding for every meal, that's what my mother is going to give him.

I can't say we've been particularly close, not for a very long time, but he is my father. And no one should have to go this way.

I only heard him say about half a dozen complete sentences while I was there. Usually the best he can manage is "yes" or "no," if that. But after one of his physicians left, I leaned over and asked him why his doctors all looked like they were 12 years old. He told me, "You look like you're twelve years old."

That's my father. Of course, I will probably always be 12 years old, or 5, or 3, or a baby to him. Because he's my father.