Walk
It seems that lots of people I know have a horrible disease that is in their family — or worse, in their body — that they must contend with. Various forms of cancer, MS, PKD, Lyme, Alzheimer’s, the list goes on.
As you likely know, ours is my dear sister being clobbered by ALS. I feel like a heel, because:
Last year my family and I created a walk team to raise funds and awareness for ALS research and services in honor of her. She has been battling this wholly craptastic disease for more than 3 years, and sometimes it can feel like it is taking all of the light out of everything. The walk was the best thing our family had done together in a long time, and we raised a large amount of money, and they gave us an award, and everyone felt great about it. It was actually amazing because it gave us a really positive focus during a really hard time.
Somehow, I didn’t manage to understand that this year, the walk would coincide with a very special trip that we have been planning with the other part of my family. We had planned this trip before they had set the walk date.
Back to the heelness.
I am upset that I won’t be participating in this year’s walk in person. I’m helping to coordinate the event and raise money and awareness. but it feels wrong not to be there.
It also feels weird to announce that I am asking for money since I’m not even going to be able to go and walk 3 miles. Just there I was going to make a joke about how I can walk 3 miles, pinky swear, but that is just weird, since so many people with ALS can’t walk three miles. Or any miles, or at all. Nor can they eat, or talk. See? It is bad. Bad like some horrible parasitic guinea worms I learned about for work, just in a very different sort of way. All this to say: Regardless of the fact that I won’t be at the walk on 9/25, I am going to use this as a platform to shill for ALS.
This page links to posts describing some of our experiences. And this is a page where you can contribute to the walk if you would like to do so. Many friends already have, this year or last year, and that is an amazing and nice nice thing. Thanks to all of you, whether the way that you are nice to me is financial or not. Even just listening a bit and learning about ALS will help in the long run. I appreciate it!
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Another Conversation
Since the Conversations with Celia post was one of the most popular, and since I have no time for a real post, this morning I had another conversation with Celia, so I thought I’d tell you about it.
As we ate breakfast, Celia was admiring my son’s nose.
“Look at Henry’s nose. It cute! It so small-like.”
It is indeed small, owing to the fact that he is a baby, and everything on him is small.
She touched it lovingly with her pointer finger as I heard a key in the lock: my husband was getting back from his run.
“DA!,” Henry yelled through his corn cereal, spluttering milk.
“A little nose. Not like yours,” she told me.
“Honey!,” I yelled through my coffee. “Come in here to hear what Celia is saying about my nose!”
“I don’t have a big nose,” I explained to her.
“Not big so much, just pointy,” she explained to me.
What Does He Love?
I ran into an old friend at the swimming pool the other day. We’d spent a lot time together in high school and college, a lot of it around swimming pools, so it was funny to run into him in that setting after not having seen him in several years. He was with his four year old son, and I was with Henry, who is now 18 months old. My friend didn’t know I’d had a child, and he just sort of shook his head with the awe that parenting sparks in reflective people.
Can you believe it? he asked, in a general way.
Then, What is he like?, in reference to Henry. We looked down at him, as he was plowing around through the foot-deep water with an extreme purpose: joy collecting.”Well, I guess he loves the water,” my friend commented. “What else does he love?”
That would be: anything with a beat he can dance to, and that includes the microwave or coffeemaker when they have completed their tasks, and even the refrigerator, if you leave the door open for long enough and it is trying to get your attention.
The refrigerator has no problem at all getting Henry’s attention. “He loves food, too,” I explained. “That is evident by looking at him,” the friend said.
Henry is . . .solid . . . these days, but he’s becoming more and more picky. But these are the things on the list at the moment:
1. roasted asparagus spears
2. watermelon on the rind
3. fresh corn, the cob of which he likes to suck and chew like a hobo
4. decaf iced lattes (I try to limit this. I do. And at least that baby who smokes is not mine.)
5. plain yogurt blended with milk, ice, and banana
See, for the most part, he eats like a Hollywood type. You know, egg-white omelets and all, though he would never eat an egg. Or an egg white. Or an omelette. But then there is the flip side to all of these healthy food:
6. pizza
and his new favorite thing:
7. butter
And this is where we get to the nut of my story: really, I just want to brag about how my child loves butter, because I somehow find enthusiasm one of the most charming qualities. And butter one of the most delicious and awe-worthy natural elements to come from a cow.
I’ve tried to put butter on things for Henry before, but except for a buttery toast phase when he just started to eat solids, he has not been too interested. “MO,” he has roared. To be clear, that’s not “more,” which is indicated by high-velocity headnodding and “m-muh? m-muh?” Instead, roaring “MO,” means “no,” and his point is clear, as he waves it away like a self-important actor smacking a paparazzo’s camera to the ground.
However, all that changed when he discovered the wonder of butter last week: European butter in a fancy little blue ramekin. He spied it on the table and invited it into the small inner circle of things he will eat.
Great!
However, he has decided to treat it as a food, rather than a condiment. As in, I am not in the mood for this bread, which I find rather dry. But I’d love a handful of butter, or three. Thanks for taking care of me!
Well, I’m working on it.
Around the Water Cooler
This one is Russian Orthodox!
For the past three years, I’ve been working for a “virtual organization.” So, though I was an employee, I was the sort for whom pants were optional, if you know what I mean: I worked from home.
There are pros and cons to that situation, of course.
Pros
Some of the pro are avoiding the time and effort of commuting, avoiding other people who are commuting, avoiding bed bugs on the commute, avoiding other people in the office, and not being tethered to a desk but having the ability to roam, pantsless, from the kitchen to the desk to the bed to the couch and back. When working from home, I also enjoyed the ability to get some tacos started in the afternoon when on a conference call.
These were the pros before I was a parent. But once I became a mom and went “back to work,” one of the biggest pros was having a babysitter hand my baby to me so he could take milk from me, rather than carry a secret machine in a backpack with lots of parts that needed to be washed and bottles with a quantity of milk that I feared wouldn’t suffice that needed to be refrigerated and transported. And finding time and space in a busy day in order to pump. People who can manage to pump at work are miracle workers so far as I am concerned.
I also got to know and relate to Henry’s babysitter and be around in case she needed me.
In sum, there are a lot of pros to working from home. But as I said, there are also some cons.
Cons
Let’s see: absolute lack of community, abject loneliness, a burgeoning inability to relate to other adults, and a new aversion to pants. Lately, having a small child tap at my bedroom door saying “mama? mama?” has made everyone pretty sad, so last week, I finished up at the nonprofit.
And Now?
This week, I started a part-time gig at a publisher where I used to work. It’s the sort of work where, I only go 20 hours a week, but I actually *go.*
I get up, I get onto the train with my reading material and my iPod, I buy expensive espresso drinks and drink them in the company of other people, all while I am wearing presentable clothing.
My Thoughts So Far:
1. The offices look exactly as they did several years ago when I left, except for with several years more grime ground into the rug and upholstered bits.
2. If you had asked me what it was like to work in that building before, I would have told you that the fire alarm went off every day but that it was a false alarm and that the man at the front desk used his faulty and buzzing intercom system to attempt to explain to us, in a very thick and possibly fake accent, what was transpiring. But then both you and I would have suspected that I was exaggerating. Here’s the thing, though: it happened the first day I was there, and I have only been there two days, so let’s just say that it does actually happen (at least) 50% of the time.
3. After 2 days of sitting in a chair for many hours in a row without galvanting from room to room at will, my back already feels like I urgently need some sort of invasive surgery.
4. I missed the water cooler, you know, figuratively. The water cooler culture. I went to find the literal water cooler, though, to get a drink on my first day, and noted that it looks like a robot has conquered and ousted the bubbler. Whereas it used to be a plain jug thing that relied on gravity and a glugging noise to deliver water, the new water cooler has a piercing blue light and no obvious supply of water, which must come from, I don’t know, behind the wall or something. Both water cooler culture and technology have changed. I hope I can handle it!
Thanks to striatic on flickr for use of the photo!
It’s Said That If You Blog About Your Cat
Then you lose readership.
I, however, am fairly confident that my readership expects the occasional cat story — if not the occasional cat recipe.
If I were going to eat my cat, I would braise her with red wine and juniper berries. However, I decided to *wash* her this week rather than eat her: she’s been in a funk since the move and isn’t really grooming herself.
Given a choice, she might have preferred to stay home in a nice fragrant braise administered by me, rather than leaving the house in the rain and riding in the scary scary car, then being subject to a wet and soapy bath by a groomer who is not on the approved list of people who are allowed to touch her. That person also dried her, and stuffed her back into her carrier, whereupon she had to ride home in the car again. It’s like outward bound without the aspect of having to turn your underwear inside out one day, and then outside in the next day, every single day for a month.
The Groomer’s Story
It wasn’t that much better for the groomer. I doubt that it ever is: my cousin had a job washing cats once, but it was too hard, so he quit and became a neurologist.
The groomer we had this week got scratched in the vicinity of the eye, I was informed, when I picked George up from the vet. Just in case you think by my vague sentence construction that it was a different cat who scratched the groomer in the eye, it wasn’t. It was our protagonist.
Quick Aside
Yes. My cat’s name is George, and my son’s name is Henry. I have an apparent affinity for kings; at least I am consistent. The cat is also a female. My son is male. Next paragraph:
How About Me and Henry?
It was also very stressful for me: carrying a mewling and sloping 20 lb carrier in the pouring rain with a spritely 1 year old in my other arms. I mean, arm. In my teeth, I held the umbrella.
To make the whole thing interesting, Henry bellows and shrieks when he is not in charge of the keys, and he will dive downwards to try to wrestle them away from me when I am carrying him. This abrupt change in the center of gravity keeps everyone on their toes. Off of their toes!
Henry had a blast, though, all around. He was delighted to leave the house, delighted to go in the car, delighted to visit the vet for the first time because not only are there real live animals traveling hither and yon, even the scale has carved wooden animals on it. He hugged the scale. There are also magazines full of nothing but pictures of dogs, both the editorial and the advertising sections. Wow, is the vet awesome.
Do We Groom Henry?
While we waited for George to be bathed, I had a mind to get Henry groomed, too. His father has started to voice frequent concern about the length of Henry’s hair, and has started to make claims such as “it would take so much less time to wash his hair if it were shorter.”
It’s pretty short, but maybe Matthew has a mind to engage in competitive speed-washing tournaments for the fall season. Every second counts!
Had it not been pouring, Henry and I would have walked over to the haircuts-for-children place, since I was feeling in a somewhat conciliatory mood. However it was indeed raining cats and dogs, so we had to go to the diner across the street from the vet and order Belgian waffles and sausages, instead.
Finally, the grooming was complete, the little family was repacked in the car, the car was parked, and we arrived home safely. As she always is after an adventure, the cat was delirious with pride. She rolled around and purred, pornstarlike, on the kitchen tiles. She was in such a good mood for a moment that she even let Henry pet her.
I noticed while petting her that there was a suspicious chunk of something embedded into her tail fur — ironically, a chunk that hadn’t been there when we left the house. So, I pulled it out as much as possible with my hands, then sniffed it. Why, we will never know, but I confirmed my fecal suspicions.
Denouement
I got a paper towel. I couldn’t lock her up because I couldn’t leave the toddler unattended with her. I couldn’t get her to sit still because she doesn’t like having her tail pulled, and she was getting nervous again, and Henry was suddenly in hot pursuit. He just really wants to hug her so badly, and he’s gentle, even, but then he gets so excited when he is hugging her gently that he screams at her. I believe he believes that is screaming with her, not at her; still she is very scared.
Finally I got her laying down and was trying to extricate the poop clump and not paying much attention to Henry who had run into the bathroom and gotten a large box of assorted tampons: the sort without an applicator. When I noticed him, he was very gingerly offering kitty the smallest tampon in the box, as a snack. She refused, so he moved up a size.
He is so loving and accommodating to her.
I love them both so much.
Church Avenue Chomp 