10:18 – Barbara is trying hard to keep things as normal as possible despite her dad’s condition. She refuses to go over to the nursing home and just sit there all day watching him die. I think that’s the best decision. Dutch is sleeping most of the time anyway, and when he’s awake he’s often so confused that it’s difficult to hold any kind of conversation with him. Barbara wants to remember her dad as he was, not as he is now. At our age, she’s been lucky to have him around all of her life, and in pretty good shape until recently. And, like me, she’s been lucky enough to live locally to her parents rather than living across the country and being able to see them only once or twice a year.
So at this point, the emphasis is going to shift to doing what she can for her mom, to help her get past the inevitable loss of her husband of almost 70 years. In fact, Barbara and Frances are heading over to their mom’s apartment today to do some stuff and then take her out to dinner.
During her four-day weekend, Barbara is also getting some stuff done around the house and yard, and helping me build new batches of science kits. I haven’t booked the 20 kits we sold earlier this week to a small private school, and won’t until we receive the check and it clears. Even so, we’ve already done three times the business so far this month that we did in May 2012, and kit sales continue to accelerate.
re good memories of Barbara’s father: Would it accomplish anything to bring a video recorder every time Barbara or Frances visit Dutch? Maybe out of twenty hours of visits and recordings there’ll be an hour of clear-minded discussion that can be edited into a video they could watch. Would have been better to do this a year ago, but there you have it.
Regarding the murder of the British soldier in London, Eric MacDonald, an Anglican clergyperson turned atheist has a good post on how Islam justifies such behaviour:
http://choiceindying.com/2013/05/24/theres-always-a-proof-text-when-you-need-one/
(Pointed to by Jerry Coyne’s site.)
Not a bad idea. We actually have some formerly Super-8 film taken over half a century ago of me and my siblings and two cousins and grandparents, aunts and uncles all running around down at the grandparents’ house in Fairhaven, MA. I am twice the height of my brothers and skinny as a rail, though I ate like a horse then. I know my parents fed me but someone else looking at this might thing we were being starved.
So we have film of grandparents born during the Great War; an edited video of Dutch, a veteran of the next one, would be something to hang onto for the next couple of generations, at least. OTOH, maybe it’s already past that time; all we really have anyway are our own memories of parents and grandparents; our kids never knew my own parents and once Mrs. OFD and me and my siblings are gone, those memories will be gone, too.
Tempus really does fugit, and my parents as children saw marching veterans of the War Between the States, as I myself saw Spanish-American War vets in parades as a kid. And my great-great-great grandfather William saw War of Independence vets.
Best wishes and prayers for this Memorial Day weekend to all; it’s 50 here in Retroville today and we’ve had steady rain and wind for several days now, much more like March or September than almost June. And snow up in the mountains. Algore, your ticket is ready for the Clue Train, dawg.
“…an Anglican clergyperson turned atheist…”
Not a huge stretch these days, as evidenced by the continued blasphemies uttered consistently by their leading bishops and archbishops in the West. And good riddance, sad to say, though, to the ECUSA, due to die completely via demographics by 2026.
He’s mostly right about the hadjis finding whatever textual justification they want for their horrors. They all apparently prefer life as it was circa 800 AD in the Sandbox and would like to impose that by force on the rest of the world.
My ex-wife’s church used to have “remembrance” services after a member died. Not a weepy memorial service like most I’ve gone to, but telling anecdotes and little things about him. Then someone got the idea of doing these before the people died. I went to her father’s, done maybe a year before he died; he was in his 80s and definitely on the decline but not terminal and still healthy and aware enough to enjoy it.
Yeah, I’m only 59 but I remember as a child watching the veterans from WWII–young men, then–and WWI march. They even had some from the Spanish-American war, although they must have been 80 or more at the time.
And, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ll never forget shaking hands with a really old guy at the VA hospital in maybe 1957. He told me that when he was about my age he’d shaken hands with Abraham Lincoln.
The shaking hands-six degrees of separation thing: I shook hands with the late General Westmoreland; he’d shaken hands with General Black Jack Pershing, who, in turn, had shaken hands with General Grant, who’d of course shaken hands with General Lee, whose dad served with General Washington. Washington had no doubt shaken hands with the Marquis de Lafayette who’d shaken hands with King Louis; thus my direct connection to French royalty before they got whacked.
A word to the wise for our own “royalty”….
OFD wrote:
” And snow up in the mountains. Algore, your ticket is ready for the Clue Train, dawg.”
It doesn’t matter. Global Warming ™ fits all data.
OFD wrote:
“Not a huge stretch these days, as evidenced by the continued blasphemies uttered consistently by their leading bishops and archbishops in the West.”
For years my best atheist friend loved to mock the C of E for having an archbishop (of York?) who was an unbeliever. OTOH, he was generally happy to support the Salvation Army financially because they believed what they said they did and weren’t in the (theologically and politically liberal) WCC.
If memory serves, and if it’s the same period I’m thinking of, yeah, it was the Archbishop of York who should have been a Unitarian Universalist or Druid or something, but not sitting there at the pleasure of Her Royal Majesty and raking in the dough at his swell digs there. This was back in the 80’s right? I remember it because this jackass made the nooz, naturally, and I was co-teaching 8th-grade Sunday School at the time, and I thought ‘what a buggering bugger he is when I’m trying to do this gig here and he from his high and mighty position cuts my legs out from under me,’ etc., etc.
And yes, I have respect for the Salvation Army and also the Society of Friends, for not only talking the talk but walking the walk; likewise the millions of Anglicans in East Africa and the Sandbox who are being relentlessly persecuted by hadji mobs and who have been continually martyred in the Faith like other Christians there in general and my fellow Roman Catholics in particular.
Yeah, 1982 or ’83 I think.
Oops. Did it again. This belongs in Sun.
Also I’ve never heard that the Salvation Army uses donations for fancy executives with seven figure salaries and company limos.
(I gave the Wikipedia article a quick look and came up with this: A Moscow court ruled that the Salvation Army was a paramilitary organization subject to expulsion.)