Went to Reedsburg over the weekend, to pay respects to the Library bookshelf quilt.  It's nice ( Read more... )

The most recent chemo wasn't doing the job. (It took them a while to figure it out because hospital A would only look at hospital B's scans if they were snail-mailed on a CD, even though they could be accessed online.  'Sakes.)  The remaining options all have nasty side effects and won't cure Mom anyway.  So, she's stopped treatment.  Quality of ( Read more... )

Mom and I purchased a planter of autumn-hardy flowers for my aunt's grave.  There's no stone there yet - just the little stick with the name and photo - and most of the funeral flowers had gone home with her husband's kids, so we had a little trouble finding the gravesite...it's odd to wander around a cemetery looking for freshly-turned earth.  ( Read more... )

It's a relatively big thing (so to speak) when one of the out-west brothers makes it home.  So we had a family gathering of sorts at Minnesota brother's house.  Sis came too, and Mom of course.  The nearby brother didn't join us, because he and Minnesota brother don't get along, but he's taking out-west brother boating this week.  And other out- ( Read more... )

...from the U-Haul trailer containing all the things that didn't fit into Mom's new apartment.  That was...wow, that was Sept. 11 that we moved Mom, and the 13th when I made the ~200-mile drive back home.

( chemo, trailers, china hutches, water softeners, newCat.... )

I gave three full days of "knowledge transfer" (two Thursdays and the following Tuesday) to a nice assortment of business teams.  It was deemed important by the IS PTBs (and rightly so), but not important enough for the allocation of measureable time (boo).  I spent time on it anyway, and got a lot of good out of it in return:  knowledge transfer, ( Read more... )

One of the reasons I don't mind driving Mom around when I visit is that we get to talk.  (She's still circumspect in her conversations about old boyfriends, though.)

This time we talked about - among other things - religion.  When discussing the possibility of punishment and reward in the afterlife, with an 83-year-old woman who's been diagnosed ( Read more... )

...which is fine.  We'll see if the trend continues.

Last weekend Z and I took Mom up to Baraboo.  We took in a bit of the Fall Art Tour, Fermentation Fest, and the Museum of Minerals & Crystals.  The museum looks iffy from the outside, but the collection is impressive, well worth the price of admission.  At Wild Bird Barn I got some improved bird- ( Read more... )

Weekend before last, and I made a quick trip to Iowa and back.  In McGregor we stopped at a very fine bookstore - more about that in its own post.  The main purpose of the trip was to see Mom; she had entered her quilts in the county fair...their quality exceeds county level, but it pleased Mom to get ribbons - first time she's entered any quilts.

( Read more... )

It was pushing 90 on Sunday when I was gardening (plenty warm for Wisconsin in May)...tonight it's in the low 40s, with light rain.  And, I appear to have lost another battle on the project at work - it will be a big block of wacky extra work for me, and a mega-block of maintenance for...someone...down the road.  No one's quite stepped up to claim ( Read more... )