北方之旅... And Back Home

The get-together for Alvin Xiao back in July was a terrific blast.

The food was varied from superb to ghastly. My friend's cousin reminded me of Jack London. I ran in the Leland  "Friends of Fishtown"  5K race.

My Chinese language skills were perfunctory. I had studied an old text from the Sun Yat-tsen days, and I sounded like some old Sheng that talked as if he remembered the Yuan dynasty.

There were fire lanterns lofted into the summer sky of night. Someone had one and was lighting it about 12 feet from me, and I had visions of it blowing into me and dumping blazing parafin on me, scarring me forever and providing a viral hit on YouTube during the summer doldrums.

On the day when everyone went to the beach, our hosts had chosen a secluded shingle that was a bit of a trek up hill, down dale, and around rather largish inlets of still water. One of the older numbers in the party became quite bowled over by the efforts to enjoy the sun and surf, and they had to be returned via borrowed kayak.
Let that be a lesson: when having large get-togethers, always have some sort of quick exit device thingey available, just in case someone is not feeling well.

After July, we went into August, September, and on...

My mother's house was sold. We had to find her a new independent living place. We had a garage sale, found a place, and moved vast quantities of stuff.
My mother describes herself as a neat-freak, but I think she is more of a neat-hoarder-freak.
When it came time to move, her vaunted box collection was just about useless.

She gave my niece 3 previously owned plastic chocolate eclair containers from Sam's Club along with 14 calendars for 2015. At least she is not giving them out for Christmas!
She also had more wire shelving of different sizes than I have ever seen. Of course, she has room for hardly 1/5 of all that.
She has tea cups stackers even though all of her tea cups were given away, and mugs are to be used.

This took a while.

My younger brother suddenly died on October 5.
My older brother has 4 surgeries scheduled ( hip, hip, knee, knee) starting November 20.
The day after my mother moved into her new digs, I took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure of an early and not too debilitating stage... maybe. She spent about 3 hours in the hall on a gurney, and when the nurse came to give her Lasix, I said that I do not think she could make it to the Ladies' Room.

I remember my father and Lasix. It was like jet fuel for the bladder for him. (Did I tell you that not only had my mother "saved" one of my father's plastic hospital urinals, but she had also conserved one of her father's old-timey metal hospital urinals... and she had been planning to offer them as items in the Garage Sale. We told her the neighbors would talk, and she backed down... but the metal urinal probably would have actually sold at a good price.)

She still argues against getting a Medicare Plan D for medications. She does not seem to grasp the notion of insurance against catastrophic medication costs.
Quaint.

Live is good, although most of these details suck.

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