Just went to the store…
Pot roast, potatoes, carrots, celery, etc.
It’s supposed to be just a light dusting, but more later in the week.
We are home and snug and preparing to decorate for Christmas, a thing Jane dearly loves to do. I agreed to clean up in advance while she picks up the new novel for a couple of days, then turnabout, and so on. All is merry, but not yet bright. Our neighbor put up Christmas lights before Halloween: we just plan to put up trees, nothing outside…we lived in one of those extravagant decoration neighborhoods that sort of did the ultimate: there was even a plan for where to land a chopper to get a neighbor out if somebody had a heart attack, because the road was jammed solid after dark. Having done THAT kind of decorating—we think a mantel and a couple of trees is quite enough! 😉
I just spent 17 hours of today in two different hospitals with my father who fell last night at 10:00 PM. I didn’t get a call from him until 3:26 AM this morning – he’d been on the floor for 5-1/2 hours. Got him to the ER (via ambulance) and X-rays revealed a broken left femur just below the socket. They transferred him to a hospital in Dayton (about 35 miles south) which had an orthopaedic surgeon on duty today. Surgery was at 9:00 AM, and he was out of the OR by 10:00 AM, into recovery. We got up to his room sometime before noon, or so, my memory on the time isn’t exactly clear.
He was resting comfortably when I left – they’d just given him a dose of dilaudid through the IV. He’d had a significant drop in blood pressure around 3:30 PM and they couldn’t give him the pain medications which would have dropped his BP even lower. He was around 60/39 at one point :O, but they did manage to get it raised, and he got his dilaudid around 7:30 PM. I stuck around for about 40 minutes more to make sure he was comfortable, then I came home. I’ll be back there tomorrow morning….
I hope your father recovers fast and completely. Broken hips can be tricky.
So sorry to hear about your dad, especially his having lain on the floor for so long before he was able to get help. That is a scenario I fear greatly finding myself in as my mom is 92 — although very healthy for her age, very alert, active and mobile. I hope your dad does well and recovers his mobility fully.
SO sorry to hear! Ow!
So sorry to hear about your dad. It’s good that you were able to be with him though. He’ll be spending some time in physical therapy (I’m assuming they went ahead and did a hip replacement). My grandmother wouldn’t cooperate with the physical therapy and didn’t recover as well as she could have, though she was able to walk, albeit with some list to starboard. Hope he has a speedy recovery.
So sorry to learn about your father’s accident! I hope that he has a speedy recovery with no complications, and that the hospital/care center isn’t over-eager to release him before he’s ready. I hope, too, that you can get the rest you need.
My mom broke her kneecap this spring and required surgery. Because of her age, the hospital expected that she’d need to stay for a few weeks before being transferred to a rehab center for even more weeks. Instead, she could walk a bit 24 hours after the surgery and was ready to come home only a few days post-surgery. The surgeon was delighted at how well she healed and at how assiduously she followed the PT’s guidance.
I hope your father enjoys a similar outcome!
Sorry to hear that, Joe. Good luck to you and your father.
___
Oh, the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful.
And since we’ve got no place to go,
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
p.s. Are Sei and Shu well trained at keeping out of the holiday decorations, or do you just not put temptation in their way?
Sei cannot be trusted near ribbon, tinsel, or lint.
Our two are not to be trusted near a tree, ornaments, garlands, or most other holiday fixins.
Junior, our elderly longhair, suffered a series of bad mats in his coat. After the indignity of having to have us untangle his leg from a bad snag and trim out as much of the snarl as we could, we had a professional groomer come over and give him a lion cut. He seems much happier these days, although people snicker at the ‘poodle-do’ when they first see it. Dreadlocks are not a good look for him.
@Joe — I’d put my thoughts at/in Shejidan. I hope your dad does well in P.T. (Hmm, prepositions can be tricky translatables.)
You know, I really wish our English-speaking culture still valued seniors. Senior citizen? Middle-aged? Why is it that “elderly,” a perfectly good word, became so associated with being ~too~ old, and therefore enfeebled of mind and body, and therefore a negative word, a pejorative? The word, elder, for an older person, especially one who is wise and old, aged, is a fine term, or it was and still ought to be. It’s funny; we now call older folks “seniors” as short for senior citizens, a euphemism. Yet we use sneiors (the word) for other things too, and “juniors” are either young(-ish) teenage girls, or the second-to-last year in high school of either boys or girls, or a kid (or adult) named after their daddy, a male kid. We seldom call kids/teens “juniors” to match the older adults as “sniors.” It’s one of those not-quite-matching oddities of our language. And our culture somehow has become very youth-centri. Yes, I know I’m not the first to note this. But it seems a shame that we can’t value “elders” more and have the very word as an honorable, uplifted concept. I guess I’m fortunate. I was brought up to appreciate older people, elders, seniors. And, ahem, these days, I nearly qualify as middle-aged. I am not sure how that happened. Time sure goes by in a hurry. Thing is, I mostly still feel like that teenage kid about to enter college. (And gee, do I wish that had turned out differently.) Ah, well.
Aside: I could swear there is such a word as heliot or heliod, having something to do with Greeks and possibly the military, or one or the other. But a search just now turned up nothing much nline, via Google or Wki. Helios and Hheliotrope and hlix and hlicopter, I get, but why am I sure there is such a thing as a heliot or a heliod, and that it’s a noun? This is what I get for never having had a classical/antiquities history course, or any Latin or Greek. But my memory says the heliots were some group of note. Help, please?
This is what I get for having a liberal arts education. I have a head full of weird bits of things, few of which are conidered very useful or marketable in modern business. Bah. I ~like~ my liberal arts background. I still would not really trade it, though I also wanted a techie background.
Yes, though my path was *very* non-traditional, complicated by internal personal factors (the gay thing), I am still mostly a bookish lad at heart. Libraries? Bookstores? Academia? Fine by me. Languages? Oh, yeah, baby.
You’re thinking of helots.
Thank you. Why didn’t I think of omitting the I? I should’ve thought of helots, but had my mind fixed on heliots, somehow.
I’ve read through half the Wiki article, up through Deomgraphics, and…outch, institutionalized second class or no-class (zero-class) citizenship, slavery without the name. Yikes. I’m reading the rest.Encountering lots of Greek vocabulary and concepts foreign to me. New, if not entirely foreign or new as in unsen efore.
It’s a funny thing: To me, the Greeks and Romans come across as so civilized and modern, and yet so ancient and arbaric in many ways. I am sure hey would both be reatly offended that anyone civilized would think they were barbaric. Be it noted, some things we do in modern times in Western culture, I think are not much more civilized and could be called barbaric too. So none of us is immune. The lesss lovely aspects of human nature remain alongside the better angels of our nature.
Still, now I know a bit more than I did before, and that’s a good thing, even if the knowing is not as pleasant as one might hope.
Hmm, perpetuate a lower class that’s more populous than your own, but don’t promote ways to improve their state aand thereby make them allies or assimilate them into your society. Not a good strategy for a group (Spartans) so bent on strategy and victoryy. ad they didn’t think of it as a viable alternative.
To create allies from former enemis wo’ve lost the war? That seems like a vetter strategy to me. But of course no one asked me. Heh.
Off topic, but CJ, I tried downloading The Writer’s Life part 1, which is supposed to be a freebie off Closed Circle, and the link didn’t work. I tried using two different email addies and neither worked. I’ve bought Pts. 2 and 3, but I can’t get part one. I wrote you an email about it, but your spam filter may have eaten it because it was a forward of the link email.
I think the spam filter ate it. We’re needing to get our site massaged back into order. The freebie orders just aren’t working as they ought, and I don’t know why. Patience through the holidays: we’re on a crunch, but need to get that tended to, too. Apologies on both!
I’ve saved the link emails. I’ll try again in the new year.
I know fans will be interested when you and Jane can get the A-U history short story ready in ebook format. Looking forward to when it’s ready.
Waoo! Snow in Portland Monday night?? Well, it’s a week off, anything can happen between now and then.
(No, I don’t know how to spell that. It doesn’t sound like “whoa”.)
We pronounce it like “woe”, but we don’t necessarily mean calamity and sadness. We mean more like “Whoa”, as in “wait”, but we definitely don’t pronounce the “h”. I guess two o’s is wrong, Don’t know what’s right.
BCS, I have an amazing vocabulary related solely to SF/F. When I can’t find a word through your type of search, I get to ask Chris (MS, but not grounded at all in SFF). When I get “the look” I can be pretty sure it’s from a universe she’s not visited. . .
Joe- So sorry to hear about your dad’s fall. From personal experience, keep a notebook including the name of health providers, your dad’s physical and mental condition, and anything out of the ordinary. This isn’t lawyer stuff; you get asked the same ?s over and over and the notebook really helped. Please make sure you take care of yourself, too!
I think you’re thinking of “Whoa!” as in, “Whoa, dude, that’s one giant Frosty the Snowman!”
Or maybe, “Wahoo!” which is like Yahoo, but with a Wah instead of a Yah. Hah.
:: Is currently attempting to convince the used printer to print something, and will win out eventually. Computer technology is great when it works, and a fine doorstop when it doesn’t. ::
Later this week or early next week, I get to take my old, unrepentant iMac in to be reshipped back for recycling and, I hope, a credit towards purchase of a new Mac.
The printer doesn’t like printing the required email, for some reason. Haven’t yet gotten to the shipping label. Ah, well.
My iPad2 is working happily again with the iCloud service, after an argument it had. I was not privy to what was said between them, but for a good while, the IPad2 was not speaking to the iCloud, and so, well, there was no silver lining. Heheh. But now they have reconciled and seem happy to, er, do whateer it is they do.
I have ben intermittently working on a new item for the Ty Box Tales, eventually. I expect another installment for that later in the week (neither are online yet). But I have to chase down syntax errors in my CSS or HTML or both, and I am not yet happy with the new look, and will be changing it a lot before it gets to go live. It’s just for that storyline, not the Toy Box Tales as a whole. I think I will get close to what I want. But the first couple of tries didn’t turn out like I’d imagined; too little contrast or too dark or too light, and the font choices didn’t quite suit it. But something will be forthcoming.
Now that my iPad is happy with the iClloud again, I can resume or restart reading a couple of books on EPUB2 and EPUB3. At some point, I want to tackle learning PHP, and think I have the books and resources I need.
The computer situation, if and when I can get a new iMac, will let me get back to font production, still in the stages before submissionfor consideration of publication by one or more vendors. Really want that to proceeed. But if I get the rebate on recycling, then it may be after Christmas, rather than Befre, that I can get a new computer. We”ll see. The Win7 laptop is holding together, but I am still having trouble with its keyboard being cramped. Haven’t plugged in am exernal keyboard yet, but will.
I am still in bureaucratic limbo land on any assistance, and I get to call again to nag offices to see what has or has not yet gone through. Last report, nothing’s done yet. Sigh.
Hanging in there. Just very down and frustrated, but at least there is some hope it’ll turn out better in a few months.
I splurged and bought something for Christmas, and will be paying it off and doing without, but I think it was worth it. The last few months have been very, very trying. Hope I haven’t overdone it, but if so, I’ll live with it.
We are supposed to have a slight cold snap tonight and tomorrow, then a gradual return to our too-mild temps this season.
Hoping for good to come.
He was discharged this afternoon from the hospital and is now at the rehab center for a time not yet determined. He’s been walking with assistance around his room and to the bathroom. The staff is surprised that he’s doing so well.
Huzzah! As WOL said, I’m glad there were no complications from laying on the floor so long before help arrived. He sounds like a tough guy 🙂
Glad to hear that, Joe. Best wishes for your father’s health and speedy recovery.
Excellent!
I agree about “Whoa” being the same as a exclamation, even with the H suppressed. See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whoa
Really glad to hear that, Joe!
Occupational therapist was in and did an initial evaluation. His arm strength seems to be all right, so she had him walk about 50 feet or while using the walker and she had the belt around his waist. Physical therapy will come in and start his regimen a little later today. His mobility and progress is pretty amazing.
great! sometimes the incident that gets attention and treatment is not all bad. I know when my mum had a couple of fainting spells, it brought on diagnosis of a problem that, untreated, would have gone very bad.