Dad Pt 2
He’s still in ICU, but doing OK. The consensus seems to be that complications arising from the stents are what made him unwell – what they’re going to do about it is another question. An ultrasound today, an angiogram tomorrow, an explanation/prognosis forthcoming.
I spoke to Sister In Law tonight. Mum is exhausted from all the travelling, so they had her over for dinner. Dad is apparently taking calls, so I’m going to try and ring him tomorrow. I think hearing, “And how are doing, you old BASTARD?” will cheer him up no end. Sister is going to visit on the weekend – we’ll try and get down there, but folks understand that we’re a bit snowed under with planning and such.
I’ve been a wreck the last couple of days, but I’m finally starting to relax a little. Here’s hoping everything works out, and the old sod makes it to my wedding, and a few anniversaries, for that matter.
Dad
Had a call from Mum half an hour ago. Dad has had a ‘mild to moderate’ heart attack and has been admitted to hospital. Mum and Brother T are with him, and will probably come home once he’s been properly admitted (nearest major hospital is about an hour from home). He had a couple of stents put in less than a week ago, and has been feeling unwell from the combination of blood thinners he’s been on. Mercifully, someone took notice of his ‘indigestion’ before things got too serious. I think. I hope. I’ll get an update from Mum when I get home tonight.
Can’t write properly at the moment. Am in an interesting headspace. More news later.
EDIT: He’s stable, if not entirely comfortable. He may have to go back to St Vincent’s (where he had his surgery) so that the people who performed the procedure can scratch their heads and figure out what went wrong. I suspect a cardiologist may need a knock to the head and a thousand lines of “I WILL NOT CAUSE EMBOLISMS” – we shall see.
I’m a lot more relaxed than I was – I had a wrong number call from the same area code as the hospital this afternoon and I nearly burst a blood vessel holding my breath for bad news. Mum is going back to the hospital tomorrow with assorted relatives, and she’ll call to update me on what’s going on.
T minus 42 and counting..
..and I have the office to myself for a couple of hours. Joy!
Sunday turned a little bittersweet. Madam and I went through my assorted boxes of crap odds and ends and sorted it all out. We now have a pile of stuff to go to charity, a full recycling bin and a largish pile of books, notes and memorabilia to find a home for.
Some of this stuff is old, like my university textbooks and reading bricks from 1990 (!) and keepsakes from my theatre gigs in the mid ’90s. Looking through it all, I got a bit nostalgic for the old days. If nothing else, I had a lot of energy in those days. I worked full time, sang in a choir and still found the time to work on theatre projects (sometimes two at a time!). I know the jobs I had in those days weren’t as taxing, but I still feel like a lazy lump.
On the other hand, I look at the lost years I spent grinding away at dead end jobs with nothing to show for them. My sea change of 2000, when I accepted a redundancy payout, took a year off from life, and went backpacking… and I came home to pick up where I left off. As pleasant as many of the memories from that time are, it feels like I’ve wasted so much of my life. This was a hard thing to contemplate, and I spent much of yesterday dealing with it.
Still, it’s not all gloomy. As interesting as some of those times have been, I wouldn’t have gotten here without them. I’m not swapping my life with anyone, bad times or not. My job – that you can have :-) but that’s another story…
Sunday morning
..and the weekend’s events have gone pretty well.
Dancing continues to get better. This week’s emphasis – hips! What was just a bit of fun learning suddenly became real exercise, and we were both sweating hard by the end of the lesson. Our instructor asked us if we’d like to stay after next week’s lesson and join in a social event. This is cool, because it’s not usually offered to folks like us. So, next lesson S will teach us a few bits and pieces so we can join in with the other dances, and there’ll be drinks and nibbles. That sounds cool, and it’s nice to be invited. We’ll see how it goes.
Dinner last night went pretty well. Roast beef, roast veg (potato / sweet potato / baby carrots) and green beans with gravy. Not my best roast (not sure that I got it properly defrosted, so twas a wee bit too pink for my liking) and I ended up using packet gravy as my recipe for sauce espagnole has gone missing, but our guests seemed happy enough (that’s code for “practically no leftovers”). There was much laughter and conversation late into the night, and people got the therapy they needed. We took Ms V home and collapsed into bed. Madam is still there :-)
Today’s jobs.
Lots of little cleaning and organisational stuff.
- Getting the list of people we need to poke re RSVPs and poking them.
- Finishing my job paperwork to hopefully submit on Monday.
- Refiling all the paperwork I pulled out for tax humbug.
Some writing would go down well too, I suppose. We shall see.
Yesterday’s rollercoaster
..which I’d rather not repeat in a hurry.
After panicking about assorted issues, tearing up the house looking for documents (Madam is a saint for putting up with my moods and offering sage advice), I managed to -
- apply for a leave of absence from University for the semester;
- submit my tax return;
- get a strategy together for being debt free very soon.
Now, I’m feeling rather drained, but relieved to have all that crap sorted out. I served Madam a steak dinner and snuggled in front of The Blues Brothers in part payment for services rendered.
Tonight - there is dancing. I never thought it would turn out to be this much fun, but we seem to be pretty good at it. Our teacher is talking about learning something completely random tonight just to break up the monotony (cos you can only spend so much time on one four-minute rhumba, apparently). Madam is keen to continue when these lessons are done. We’ll see how my enthusiasm holds up – they seem to have a pretty active social scene.
The weekend - we’re having Ms V and Ms P over for dinner, which will be nice. This means I get to go hunting at the markets tomorrow for something interesting, which is one of my favourite weekend pursuits. Madam has a Special Seekrit Dessert planned too.
Sunday brings more cleaning, hunting for lost CDs and generally staying in the “slow and steady” school of organising for the wedding.
Speaking of [insert nag here] if you haven’t sent your RSVP, please do! Deadline is July 31.
And LJ goes WheeeeeCRASH
..and I’m still waiting to see what went wrong. Sometime between 6:00am and 7:00am AEST everything went belly-up. Even though I’m not an active LJer anymore, it’s still my lifeline to a lot of people *paws at screen pitifully*..
Overtime wasn’t too bad last night. We all brought junk food and made a party of it – while working terribly hard, of course! It was a long day, but it’s made things a bit easier today, so it was worth it.
My new gem of a story, tentatively titled Mercy, is coming along. I got to pick Madam’s brain last night about nursing and medico-legal stuff, which was a nice bonding experience. Sure beats working.
Ah yes, work. That’s where I am right now. *ahem* Back to it, I suppose.
EDIT: Power outage, apparently. Oopsie. There were a few slightly snarky editorial pieces on WordPress about how that sort of thing never happens to them…
Starting early, finishing late and managing one’s Muse
I usually start my day stupidly early. I picked the habit up when Madam was on shift work and had early starts, and I’ve stuck with it. I enjoy the peaceful time – what yoga practitioners call the ‘brahmamuhurta’ – to catch up on my reading and sort my day out. This morning, I had two meals to assemble and paperwork to wrangle. I still managed to fit in a hearty breakfast and be out the door by 7:00am. Thanks to the joys of Canberra’s bus service, it takes a mere 45 minutes for me to travel 12 kilometres to work, and I’m here nice and early. No pestering from the call centre for another half hour, and I can dig deep into the work before all the annoyances start.
Today, joy of joys, there is overtime, so I won’t be leaving here til 8:00pm. I don’t mind the evening sessions so much – a solid couple of hours with no one around to interrupt.
Yesterday, Your Humble Author had a crisis of Muse Management. While plugging away at work during the busiest part of the afternoon, he was struck with a brilliant short story idea. How does he deal with a situation like this? He drops his work, scrambles for his notebook and scribbles like fury for ten minutes. He then returns to work, tapping away at his keyboard in a distracted fashion, occasionally stopping to stare into space. He then breaks the silence with an excited squeak, dives back to the notebook and writes a few more frantic dot points. This bizarre behaviour continues for the remainder of the day.
I suppose I should be grateful I’ve landed a permanent position here, and I get along famously with my supervisor..!
T minus 47 and counting..
and not stressing about the wedding at all, thankeeverymuch. We got a few odd jobs done this weekend -
- I tried my monkey suit on, and Madam and I were very happy with the result;
- we figured out our incidental music for the ceremony, and sourced legal copies of same (don’t want APRA breaking up the party, now do we?);
- organised car and driver for the day.
I pleases me no end that we’re doing this at a sensible pace. I’m sure many couples are left tearing their hair out at this point, but we’re doing pretty well (at this point, I offer a giant raspberry to Certain People who complained that we were obsessing about the wedding – *thppft*)
Saturday night, we had dinner with Aurelius, who is back in town after an extended stay in Brisbane. I got to introduce Madam to the joy of Malay cuisine, which she enjoyed very much – enough to propose we have our post-wedding-rehearsal dinner there, in fact. We shall see.
I am slowly getting to know the voodoo of WordPress – expect this blog to get a little more interesting in the near future.
In the beginning…
..there was the introductory comment. And the comment was without content or meaning. And the frustration of THE AUTHOR waxed wrath upon the comment, for the phrase “Hello World!” filled him with righteous anger. So THE AUTHOR rose up and smote the comment, filling it with bilious waffle. And THE AUTHOR was well pleased.
Here endeth the lesson.
