Been a while...
I've been meaning to update this, but things keep happening.
First, I did go visit my family about a month ago. While my mom isn't physically on the decline, she sure is mentally. I don't want to go into all the details, but her short term memory is pretty much shot, and her long term memory is declining. Like, she didn't even know who Ruth Bader Ginsberg was, or that I was an archaeologist, or that her family lived in Illinois, not New York. One of the biggest mind fucks I've ever had was silently watching my dad help my mom count her pocket change--going over each coin, and helping her add them up. (She knew the coins, and their values, just couldn't remember how many of each she had.) So yeah, that's fun. I had a few conversations with my uncle about medium and long term care, because we're definitely approaching that stage.
Related to that is that my older brother, who's in contention for the world's laziest fucker, has moved back in with my parents to once again take advantage of them in their old age. I can't trust him to do anything to help my parents. He hasn't paid rent in years, nor has he even cleaned his bathroom in literally 10 years. Literally. I do mean that. I walked in there and saw shaving cream splatter on the back of the door that was there three years ago. The kitchen was just as bad, but in a different way. Mice had gotten in at some point. They killed the mice, but they decided it was OK to leave the mouse droppings all over the pantry and cabinets. This, in a state with plague.
As such, I'm scheduling a cleaning service to show up and help clean the two bathrooms and kitchen. (because gods know dear old brother will never get off his ass). It'll require a deep clean the first time ($110+tax/hour for at least 2 hours) then I'll consider a monthly service just to keep up on things. Besides the obvious health dangers, the other issue is that ultimately this house will need to be sold, and I don't want to have to deal with an even bigger clean up (and potential repairs) then. I've been talking about this with my uncle and jokingly said that I was going to keep a tab of the costs of the cleaning service and take that out of my brother's portion of the inheritance; my uncle said 'yes, do that' and that he was thinking about changing the will up a bit to deal with the fact that my brother has been basically taking his inheritance out of my parents early. So that will be fun. I plan to follow up with my uncle about that soon.
Anyways, in other news: last Tuesday my body decided it was a perfect day to develop appendicitis. Around 9 or so, I felt an ache above my pubis, and having never felt that particular pain before, decided to go to urgent care. (It was just off enough that I knew it wasn't a pulled muscle, so I thought it was a minor hernia.) So I went to the clinic, they took 5 minutes to poke and prod, and told me that I needed to go to the ER and get a CT scan. They transferred me over to a local hospital, my roommate dropped me off there, and after a few hours of waiting I got that scan. The doctor(s) came in and basically said that I was at the early stages of appendicitis and that I had some options for treatment, but that they were recommending surgery.
So yeah, that happened (my first real surgery), I was carted off by 6:30 PM (give or take), awake by 9, and back home by 10. I've been recovering since then--sleeping 10 or 12 hours a day, but I'm actually feeling pretty good now. The scab from the major incision point fell off this morning, and as I caught it so early we were able to do it laparoscopically so there's very little scaring. I still have a bit of weakness, and I can't lift anything over 15 pounds for another week or so, but I'm healing up pretty nicely.
Other than those, things have been relatively quiet. Work is work, and still going on. We're working from home until at least the end of the year. I'm still working on my book; I get a third review back...oh gods, 6 months ago now? That wasn't very flattering, so I had a few calls with my publisher, we worked on editing the intro chapter and now I'm going through all the other chapters and trying to make things a much more coherent whole. Eventually this thing may be published. At least the publisher is still on board and supportive of the project.
Oh, and my graphics card (a 2070) started to die this past week, so I just had to ship that off to the manufacturer yesterday for repairs/replacement. Thankfully I had an extra RX580 lying around, though I was going to give that to my roommate as part of his Christmas gift (Cory and I are building him a PC). I feel like an ass for taking it back, but he understood and was willing to buy a 1660 Super for himself (which, is actually a nicer card than the RX580 I was giving him, so it kinda worked out). I still feel like an ass.
Anyways, this is my favorite time of year, and I'm actually feeling like I could go for a longer walk (anything more than 20 minutes was really taking it out of me last week) so I may go visit one of the parks around here today.
PS--Oh, and my toilet broke 3 weeks ago, so I had to replace that. :P