Me been away Long Time!
Hello once again to those of you who follow this and please accept my apologies for the time in between posts. I'll endeavor to do better.
In the last three months,
I started working for a contractor to the government agency I've been contracting for - I'm now a sub-contractor. I've been to DC twice for a week at a time and learned much new stuff. The contractor's accounts payable department is a bit slow so I just got paid for my 2/9 invoice -we were getting ready to eat the cats! I hope they are more punctual with my subsequent invoices, although I AM trying to lose weight and slow paycheck could help - LOL.
I had a serious bout of asthmatic bronchitis - damned thing lasted 6 weeks! The doctor had me on all sorts of meds and a nebulizer - I looked like an old guy in a nursing home with my breathing machine! It's all cleared up now thank GOD!!
I'm down to 222 pounds - I started at 238 -(I had to take 6 weeks off my exercise program - you can't do miles on a treadmill if you are coughing up nasty stuff every three minutes!) I started again a couple of weeks ago and then took a week off because of the next paragraph. My goal is about 205 by the end of July and a resting heart rate in the high 60's. Much work to do!
Mom stopped eating and drinking around the 15th of March, she deteriorated rather quickly and died on Saturday morning the 24th of March. Susan, my brothers Joe, John and Paul as well as my dad were with her when she went and then we had a week of funeral plans, travel plans and all sorts of mayhem. We did get to bring our Sarah home for a whole week, but her visit was tempered by the sadness of the funeral. I had been preparing myself for this for years since her alzheimer's started, but I guess you can never prepare enough - it was still really hard.
I wrote this about her and delivered it as her eulogy at the church - I post it here so you all can maybe know her a little bit - and when you are done reading it - call your mom and tell her that you love her! If she is near, hug her and if she is with mine - remember her. Brendan was her Irish Wolfhound, my dad said "Dammit Jeanne numerous times each day, and Sister Florine was the MEANEST nun in the Cosmos.
Jeanne was many different things to many different people….
First she was a wife who was married to our dad for almost 54 years - a marriage that lasted through some wonderful times and despite some tough times. It is a testament to both of them and the love that they shared that they remained married all those years - you just don’t see those numbers much anymore. Their marriage is a visible example of the word commitment.
She was mom to seven of us - a job that required her to take on many roles
Comforter: someone ALWAYS seemed to have hurt feelings that needed to be soothed, usually Joe because he was the baby and we picked on him a lot, but the rest of us all needed her reassurance quite frequently too.
Provider: She went to work to help dad provide for the seven of us - food, clothing, school tuition, and above all, the monthly payments to Dr’s Posch and Lavrich (our pediatricians) - payments that continued well after some of us left home.
Paramedic: It seemed that almost every day provided an opportunity for her to put into practice her First Aid skills - sometimes because of wounds that we inflicted on each other and sometimes because we just did really stupid things! Her first aid kit was a red suitcase and it was the envy of most EMT’s!
Nurse: I’m sure there were some, but it’s difficult to remember many days where one of us didn’t have mumps, chicken pox, flu, cough-due-to-cold, or our all-time favorite - strep throat! A penicillin shot and some chicken-noodle soup and we were good to go. If they gave frequent flyer miles for trips to the pediatrician’s office, she and dad could have vacationed every year in Tahiti - free!
Teacher: She always had time to help us with homework, and when I was young, she and a few neighborhood moms were our kindergarten teachers (teacher’s strike or lack of funding, I think) - classes rotated among the different houses and each was a different experience for us.
Disciplinarian: As kids, we would rather have faced a pointer across the rear-end from Sr. Florine Therese than have to face mom after having done something wrong! She was really tough, but in retrospect, she was really fair, too.
Referee: Our living room and dining room often resembled a boxing ring or a wrestling mat, and she was not shy about physically stepping between two or more combatants to break things up!
Short-order cook and Banquet Chef: She could make just about anything in no time at all and she was a wizard at finding the best deals on food for us. I remember waiting at Fisher/Fazio’s on Saturday for the clock in the store to change to 5:00 in the afternoon because that’s when she could get 10 loaves of bread for a dollar - and they would be GONE by Wednesday! She could make a FEAST and feed us all with a few pounds of chuck roast and some potatoes. I think John the milkman retired to a beach house in Florida on the profits he made from our family - and Emil Combs the UPS driver is probably collecting disability pay for a bad back from delivering all of the SEARS ROEBUCK merchandise to our house when there was a catalog sale, or before school started each fall.
Planner: Family vacations became annual camping excursions of two to three weeks that required three to six months of planning - we remember every single one of them - we bore a striking resemblance to the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, but we had a BLAST!!
She was a surrogate mother - we all had friends who from time to time needed a place to crash and mom welcomed and fed every one of them - a trait I’m sure she got from her mom and dad.
She was grandmother to 13 and I don’t think anything made her prouder!
She was our mom-cat and she wore the same spring coat for 20 years so that we could sometimes have new ones.
She was Aunt Jeanne, she was Mean Jeanne, and sometimes she was “Dammit Jeanne.” She was an RN, a softball coach, a tutor, a seamstress and a good friend. And as Aunt Maryanne will tell you, she WAS Mrs. Malone.
She loved St. Patrick’s Day, ANYthing green and her good buddy Brendan, and we will all miss her terribly.
In one of my favorite books, a young Hobbit named Pippin asks a wise old wizard named Gandalf if this is the end. Gandalf replies, “End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. There’s another path; one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back and it will change to silver glass, and then you see it.”
“See what?” asks Pippin.
Gandalf replies, “White shores, and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Second star to the right Mom, and straight on ‘til morning.
In the last three months,
I started working for a contractor to the government agency I've been contracting for - I'm now a sub-contractor. I've been to DC twice for a week at a time and learned much new stuff. The contractor's accounts payable department is a bit slow so I just got paid for my 2/9 invoice -we were getting ready to eat the cats! I hope they are more punctual with my subsequent invoices, although I AM trying to lose weight and slow paycheck could help - LOL.
I had a serious bout of asthmatic bronchitis - damned thing lasted 6 weeks! The doctor had me on all sorts of meds and a nebulizer - I looked like an old guy in a nursing home with my breathing machine! It's all cleared up now thank GOD!!
I'm down to 222 pounds - I started at 238 -(I had to take 6 weeks off my exercise program - you can't do miles on a treadmill if you are coughing up nasty stuff every three minutes!) I started again a couple of weeks ago and then took a week off because of the next paragraph. My goal is about 205 by the end of July and a resting heart rate in the high 60's. Much work to do!
Mom stopped eating and drinking around the 15th of March, she deteriorated rather quickly and died on Saturday morning the 24th of March. Susan, my brothers Joe, John and Paul as well as my dad were with her when she went and then we had a week of funeral plans, travel plans and all sorts of mayhem. We did get to bring our Sarah home for a whole week, but her visit was tempered by the sadness of the funeral. I had been preparing myself for this for years since her alzheimer's started, but I guess you can never prepare enough - it was still really hard.
I wrote this about her and delivered it as her eulogy at the church - I post it here so you all can maybe know her a little bit - and when you are done reading it - call your mom and tell her that you love her! If she is near, hug her and if she is with mine - remember her. Brendan was her Irish Wolfhound, my dad said "Dammit Jeanne numerous times each day, and Sister Florine was the MEANEST nun in the Cosmos.
Jeanne was many different things to many different people….
First she was a wife who was married to our dad for almost 54 years - a marriage that lasted through some wonderful times and despite some tough times. It is a testament to both of them and the love that they shared that they remained married all those years - you just don’t see those numbers much anymore. Their marriage is a visible example of the word commitment.
She was mom to seven of us - a job that required her to take on many roles
Comforter: someone ALWAYS seemed to have hurt feelings that needed to be soothed, usually Joe because he was the baby and we picked on him a lot, but the rest of us all needed her reassurance quite frequently too.
Provider: She went to work to help dad provide for the seven of us - food, clothing, school tuition, and above all, the monthly payments to Dr’s Posch and Lavrich (our pediatricians) - payments that continued well after some of us left home.
Paramedic: It seemed that almost every day provided an opportunity for her to put into practice her First Aid skills - sometimes because of wounds that we inflicted on each other and sometimes because we just did really stupid things! Her first aid kit was a red suitcase and it was the envy of most EMT’s!
Nurse: I’m sure there were some, but it’s difficult to remember many days where one of us didn’t have mumps, chicken pox, flu, cough-due-to-cold, or our all-time favorite - strep throat! A penicillin shot and some chicken-noodle soup and we were good to go. If they gave frequent flyer miles for trips to the pediatrician’s office, she and dad could have vacationed every year in Tahiti - free!
Teacher: She always had time to help us with homework, and when I was young, she and a few neighborhood moms were our kindergarten teachers (teacher’s strike or lack of funding, I think) - classes rotated among the different houses and each was a different experience for us.
Disciplinarian: As kids, we would rather have faced a pointer across the rear-end from Sr. Florine Therese than have to face mom after having done something wrong! She was really tough, but in retrospect, she was really fair, too.
Referee: Our living room and dining room often resembled a boxing ring or a wrestling mat, and she was not shy about physically stepping between two or more combatants to break things up!
Short-order cook and Banquet Chef: She could make just about anything in no time at all and she was a wizard at finding the best deals on food for us. I remember waiting at Fisher/Fazio’s on Saturday for the clock in the store to change to 5:00 in the afternoon because that’s when she could get 10 loaves of bread for a dollar - and they would be GONE by Wednesday! She could make a FEAST and feed us all with a few pounds of chuck roast and some potatoes. I think John the milkman retired to a beach house in Florida on the profits he made from our family - and Emil Combs the UPS driver is probably collecting disability pay for a bad back from delivering all of the SEARS ROEBUCK merchandise to our house when there was a catalog sale, or before school started each fall.
Planner: Family vacations became annual camping excursions of two to three weeks that required three to six months of planning - we remember every single one of them - we bore a striking resemblance to the Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath, but we had a BLAST!!
She was a surrogate mother - we all had friends who from time to time needed a place to crash and mom welcomed and fed every one of them - a trait I’m sure she got from her mom and dad.
She was grandmother to 13 and I don’t think anything made her prouder!
She was our mom-cat and she wore the same spring coat for 20 years so that we could sometimes have new ones.
She was Aunt Jeanne, she was Mean Jeanne, and sometimes she was “Dammit Jeanne.” She was an RN, a softball coach, a tutor, a seamstress and a good friend. And as Aunt Maryanne will tell you, she WAS Mrs. Malone.
She loved St. Patrick’s Day, ANYthing green and her good buddy Brendan, and we will all miss her terribly.
In one of my favorite books, a young Hobbit named Pippin asks a wise old wizard named Gandalf if this is the end. Gandalf replies, “End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. There’s another path; one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back and it will change to silver glass, and then you see it.”
“See what?” asks Pippin.
Gandalf replies, “White shores, and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
Second star to the right Mom, and straight on ‘til morning.