That's All Folks!

Well, this seems like a natural endpoint.  Granny is under professional care.  I could go on with "Granny's Greatest Hits" but that would leave no fresh stories for the screenplay.  I will be moving out of Granny's within the next two weeks.

To the 99.9999% of my readers who encouraged, laughed, cried, or just plain couldn't get enough, I send my everlasting thanks.  Your kind words have led me to the (not in the end so stunning) revelation that this might just be my calling.

To anyone else, I leave you the immortal words of Bill Shakespeare:

     Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow,
     Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
     To the last syllable of recorded time,
     And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
     The way to dusty death.  Out, out brief candle!
     Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
     That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
     And then is heard no more:  it is a tale
     Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
     Signifying nothing.

How Can I Resist?

Not the Beginning of the End, But the End of the Beginning

It's time to take the weight off and down my calcium supplements.  The extra pounds can't be good for my joints, and my only dietary calcium intake comes from ice cream.  Why?


Because I refuse to end up like my grandmother.


She was taken to the hospital yesterday.  Her hip and T-12 vertebra is broken.  She didn't fall...but arthritis and osteoporosis have eaten away at her bones.  They're like Swiss cheese.  There is literally nothing left of her hip to repair.  She probably broke both by just trying to get up out of a chair.  


Stubbornness is a trait that runs on both my mother's and father's sides of the family, and it can be a good thing sometimes.  But my grandmother has taken it to ridiculous extremes.  She has refused these last three weeks to take any of the Lortab that was prescribed for her even though she was in excruciating pain.  She has insisted these last three weeks that she could go home and take care of herself, even though she could not lift a glass of water to drink.  Three years ago her doctor told her her bones were fragile, that she should be using a walker and not going up and down flights of stairs.  I moved in two and a half years ago.  No walker until about six weeks ago.  Still going down to the basement to do her laundry.  When I moved in, I offered my help with these things, but all I got was an insistent N.O. I stopped asking.  It was a frustrating waste of breath to try.


But NOW she wants my help.  Because, you see, she believes that her hip and back will be fixed, she'll get some rehab, and she will come back home where I am going to care for her for the rest of her life.  She has told all the nurses at the hospital this.  I should make it clear that this is not expected of me by anyone except her.  She wouldn't let me dust the lamps in the living room but she wants me to do this?


Me.  A woman who doesn't have or want kids because of that whole cleaning up after their bodily fluids situation.   A woman who can't do that fake nice, sing-songy thing that nurses do with old people, as if they were toddlers ("And how are you today Adele?"  Gross.).  I can't even do that with toddlers.  A woman who's own back hurts enough because of the ginormous boobs her cursed genetics passed down to me.  A woman who should have left Buffalo ten years ago.  A woman on he cusp of a much needed life change.


We're all dying.  But in Western New York it just seems like everyone is doing it right this second.  Outside of a few blocks in the Elmwood Village the city is aging and cranky and set in it's ways. I will not join them.  I will take my calcium.  I will take the weight off.  I will do what I can to be that 90 year-old who goes skydiving for the first time.


I will finally come up for air. 

I'm So _____ We Had This Time Together

So...yeah.

Granny is currently staying with my aunt. After her foray to the ER almost two weeks ago, she needs around the clock care. My aunt had been trying to get Granny to come live with her for some time, and thank God someone is looking after her. She can not stand for any length of time, even to take a shower, and, well, bladder control is a thing of the past.

Of course, for the first few days, she insisted she could get by on her own. Now it is setting in that she does need full time help. It is getting to the point that she may have to be strapped into a wheelchair soon because she very well may tumble forward out of it.

So, I have the house to myself. I'll be honest, it's nice. But it is eye opening as well. I have ranted in the past about how the house is falling apart...a diagnosis that isn't too far off base. As I type, the wind is rattling the ancient, flimsy windows, and it is especially loud downstairs, where you can hear it blow through the old broken Jalousies on the porch. The floor in Granny's bedroom is like ice, partly due to the fact that her closet is not insulated, just like mine upstairs.

Over time, things had gone badly downhill. You could see through her bath towels. Her nightgowns were like rags, even though several new ones sat, tags still attached, in her drawer. I had bought some of them for her as Christmas gifts over the last few years. The throw rugs in her bedroom were filthy. A pail full of dirty adult diapers sat in the corner of her room. Several years ago (1992 maybe?), my mother had given her some barely worn sweatshirts of mine. Before Christmas, I came downstairs to find her wearing the very same sweatshirt I had worn to my first day at Aurora Middle School, September 1986.

Since she hasn't been able to really clean in some time, everything is coated with a thick layer of sticky dust, especially in the kitchen. I washed the cabinets with Murphy's oil soap, replaced the blind over the sink (it used to be white), and polished the burnished copper door pulls. Still, I feel like I'm arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. With the exception of the basement, there are no three-pronged electrical plugs in the house. The plumbing is laughable, having been put together from scraps of pipes my grandfather found while building the house. The furnace is from the mid-Fifties. The windows are falling apart. And then, the little things, like the gorgeous pink plastic tiles in the kitchen. Plastic!

I really hope she left me some Lortab.

Stubborn, With a Capital S-T-U-B-B-O-R-N

Granny refuses to take her pain medication.

She was prescribed Anaprox (high dosage naproxen sodium) for swelling and Lortab (hydrocodone, nice) for pain. I was to pick up the prescriptions for her yesterday morning, but she stopped me.

Granny: I don't think you'll be able to get my prescriptions.

Me: Why not?

Granny: Huh?

Me: Why don't you think I can get your prescriptions?

Granny: I can do without them.

Me: Granny, you really should take them...

Granny: I don't know what they're for, and that second one is nothing but dope.

Me: You say that like it's a bad thing. Aren't you in pain?

Granny: I heard the doctor saying I only should take them if I really need them. I can do without them.

Me: Fine, then suffer.

Turns out she overheard the doctor at the hospital questioning one of the prescriptions she takes on a daily basis, which it turns out is a drug for Parkinson's disease. Granny shakes badly but does not actually have Parkinson's. The doctor was asking why Granny's primary care physician keeps prescribing it when she doesn't have the disease.

So she called my mother, and after informing her that my mother is the one who looks terrible and belongs in a hospital, not her, my mother explained to her that she really needs to take the anti-inflammatory and pain medication so her body will relax enough to heal. She let me go get her medication but my mother told me this morning that she hasn't taken any of it. Uncle Sonny dropped off a wheelchair he had, and she's wheeling herself around the bottom floor in a flannel nightgown as we speak.

I just hope she leaves me some Lortab...

You Chose...Wisely: The Holy Grail of Weird Things Around The House (#7)

Kathleen, look what I found!

Friends, I can not hide my enthusiasm for our next entry, which I thought had been lost to the ages.

This here lamp, this wonderful lamp, a true kitsch classic, holds so many great memories for our family. I have been on the hunt for it since I moved in, and was under the impression it had been knocked over and broken. It used to reside on the bar in the basement. Yes, what you are seeing is a drunk holding on to a lamp post with one hand and a bottle of booze with another. The lamp at the top used to say "BAR" and I think this may have been what got broken, as the frosted glass globe on tops looks like it has been replaced.

The best part? The ABSOLUTELY BEST PART? The "You're kidding me, right?" part?

It has a music box in the base that plays "How Dry I Am". It still works, too.

And where did I find this treasure? Well, it had been under our noses the whole time. While Granny was in the ER today, we had to fetch some items from her bedroom. Now, I never go into her bedroom, and was unaware the the ceiling lamp didn't work. So we turned on the lamp on her nightstand...this was the lamp on her nightstand! She claimed she didn't know where this lamp had gone. Old woman, it's the lamp right next to your bed!

They're Sending Her Home. Seriously.

And again...*facedesk*.

I don't know how my mother, who can barely walk and suffers from vertigo, and her 73 year-old sister, who suffers from various ailments herself, are expected to care for this woman.

A few weeks ago, my mother told her, "You had your kids too young and you've lived too long. We're all to old and decrepit to really care for you".

Hopefully this incident will ring a bell in Granny's mind that she needs some kind of assisted living situation.

Famous Last Words

Well folks, it happened today.

She did NOT look good this morning. "My back hurts so bad, I don't know how I got out of bed. And every time I move this leg I hear a crack. I don't know what to do". I called my Mom, who came over with my Aunt Rose. They called 911.

The pain was in her lower back. The EMT said her hip might be broken. She admitted to the EMT that she fell on Saturday. Had she told any of us? No.

On the way out the door, she was yelling, "Does Kimberly know how to lock up the house?"

*facedesk*

The Mother Of All Rosaries: Weird Things Around The House #6

When I moved in, it was hanging on the wall in the space over my bed. It had been hanging there so long that when I pulled it down a light outline of it was left, Shroud of Turin-style.

It is The Mother Of All Rosaries.

I don't know where it came from. Perhaps it just appeared one day, the same way God supposedly just suddenly was. There is only one indicator on the back of the cross at the bottom - "Italy". No shit.

It's absolutely gigantic, at least six feet long, and plastic. As you can see, I had to double it up to wear it and we still couldn't fit the whole thing in the picture. Each bead has a weeping Christ and Mary embossed onto it, as shown in the closeup. It's incredibly depressing to look at, and why you would want it hanging above a bed was a mystery, until my mother informed me that this kind of rosary was supposed to protect you from thunderstorms and lightning strikes.

So, I guess I'll be struck by lightning soon, which will be hardly surprising, considering:

A.) My "luck" lately and,

B.) That I tried to wear it as a statement piece.

Paradise (Wherever You Are)

So I was hanging out with my sort of ex the last few days. This happens every week - I stay over a night or so. This is embarassing to me - not that I'm there but that I have to explain it to Granny. I don't see how it's anyone's business, but there I am running out the door saying "GrannyI'mgoingtoex's-bebacktomorrowkthnxbye". Well, I told her I'd be home Monday but decided to stay one more night because I just didn't feel like driving back home. And this is when the problems begin, because if I don't come home when I'm expected, suddenly, as they said in The Hangover, my corpse is being "fucked in a ditch by a meth addict".

Compare this to my mother, who basically stopped worrying about my personal safety sometime after I turned 21, because she figured, rightly so, that I was an adult who could take care of myself.

She called my mother at 10:15 pm, utterly terrified.

Granny: Where's Kimberly?

Mom: You know where she is.

What Mom Wanted To Say: None of your effing business.

Granny: But she said she'd be back today

Mom: So she's probably staying another night. She is 36.

Granny: What if she's stuck out in the snow?

Mom: She has a cellphone. And roadside assistance.

Granny: Well, who's going to take out the garbage?

Mom: Is there a lot of garbage?

Granny: No.

Mom: ...

Granny: Well, aren't you going to call her?

Mom: No.

Granny: You have to call her! Where is she? Call ex's house! Or call his grandmother!

Mom: I don't have his phone number, let alone his grandmother's!

Granny: How can you not have his phone number?

It is at this point that, against her better judgement, my mother whipped out her cellphone and called me, while still on the phone with Granny. I didn't hear it ringing in my purse, so it went to voicemail.

Granny: Did she pick up?

Mom: No.

Granny: I'll call you if she comes home.

Mom: Uh, don't do that.

This in turn drives my mother nuts, because then she starts thinking, "What if her corpse is in a ditch being fucked by a meth addict?"

P.S. Granny does have my cellphone number in her possession. She has never called it.

Diversion Time: Movies I Loved When I Was A Kid

1.) The original Star Wars trilogy
2.) Raiders of the Lost Ark, the sequels less so.
3.) Clash of the Titans - the remake comes out this spring. It looks just like 300. Sigh.
4.) Gremlins
5.) Airplane! and Airplane II
6.) Every Which Way But Loose
7.) The Cannonball Run and The Cannonball Run II (though not as much as the first one).
8.) The first three Muppet movies - The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Muppets Take Manhattan
9.) Poltergeist - don't ask me why, it still scares the living shit out of me.
10.) Back To The Future
11.) Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Honorable Mention: Dune
I didn't get around to reading the books until I was a teenager, but those giant worms always fascinated me.

Notably Missing: E.T. - never understood what the big deal was.

Happy New Year!

Well, for what it's worth, happy new year everyone!

If, by January 1st, 2011 I am still living with Granny, I hearby give anyone reading this permission to put out a hit on me. Seriously, put me out of my misery. Just make it quick and painless and leave my car out of it...Nigel's been through enough.

The Tale of the Christmas Cookies, or, Anything You Can Do I Used To Do Better

Ah, Christmas.

It's my favorite time of year. No, really. As a Christmas baby (Dec. 22nd), Christmas is my middle name (Kimberly Noel). And nothing warms my heart more than combining my two great loves - Christmas and baking. Hence, Christmas cookies. I tend to bake twelve or so dozen of them, sticking to a basic three (cut-outs, chocolate chip, and raspberry turnovers) and then picking a few interesting things for variety. This year it was rugelach pinwheels, flourless chocolate walnut, and Linzer cookies. I take this seriously. I start preparations weeks in advance, and bake with the mental focus of a professional chess player.

Granny used to bake. Used To. And she won't let me forget it. And I am a captive prisoner to her baking stories while I use her kitchen to make cookies.

Did you hear the one about how, when my Aunt Rose moved to California something like twenty-seven years ago, my grandmother baked some kind of Italian chocolate-grape jelly concoction and sent them to her? Like three hundred of them? You didn't hear that one? Because I have. Ten times.

Did you hear the one about Minnie down the street, you know Minnie, her husband still has the diarrhea, how she bakes all those Italian cookies? No?

How Granny always carried her cookies in a specific basket when taking them anywhere? And I should really use it, since she still has it? Haven't heard that one?

And how they used to have tasting parties at Home Bureau, and there were like sixty ladies there, but no more because the fire department wouldn't let any more in the building?

My professional chess player concentration is faltering. AND THAT WAS HER EVIL PLAN ALL ALONG.

Because you see, she can't stand that I can do it and she can't. And that I don't do it exactly like she did. Nevermind that there is a fifty-five year age difference between us. This is a competition folks, one I never asked to be in. Granny is the very definition of frenemy.

Eventually she will take a different tack. "Why are you baking all those cookies?" she will ask in a stricken voice. "Who's going to eat them?" She will do the same thing on the morning of Christmas Eve, when I make a broccoli casserole. "Who's going tho eat that?" she just about screams at me. Now, I can assure you that my family has never thrown away a Christmas cookie or leftovers, so, again, the competitor is back.

But the funniest part is this: She won't eat the cookies, even though she desperately wants to eat the cookies. Now if Minnie down the street (George still has the diarrhea, BTW) brings her a plate of cookies, I never hear the end of it, about how incredibly tasty they were. For days, hundreds of cookies resided in her kitchen, untouched. I took them to my mother's for Christmas Eve. When my Aunt El showed up with my grandmother, she pulled me aside and said "She was panicked over what happened to the cookies".

"Well, they're all here..."

"I know. She brought her own container to take some back home in."

I Don't Want To Get Old and Afraid

Ask anyone how long they want to live and how they want to die and most will give you the same answer. "Until I'm 100 and I want to die at home". I think these people had grandparents that dropped dead at 40 or so, because if you see what 91 looks like up close I think you would reconsider. Oh sure, you always get that 95 year old on the news who just swam the English Channel, but that's the big exception to the rule. Just this Sunday, the New York Times outlined how most elderly and some terminally ill people die - hooked up to Lorazepam, sedated to the gills, unaware of the fact that they're not dying at home and immune to their loved ones' goodbyes. Everyone assumes that dementia, Alzheimer's, emphysema, cancer and adult diapers will happen to someone else.

Granny has undergone a precipitous physical decline in the last two months. In October, she was getting around the house just fine, if slowly. Then the cane came out. Now its the walker, and it's all the time. She still insists on doing what she thinks she can do for herself, like still getting down into the cellar to do her laundry, but she really shouldn't have to be doing these things anymore. Last week Monday, I came home to find her attempting to make soup. She said to me, "I couldn't carry the soup" which I guess was her way of saying "I dropped the soup". She has lost the strength in her hands, and last week her sister had to put the sheets on her bed for her. She can not go to bed without taking copious amounts of Tylenol to dull her aches. Because of the loud ass walker (and my constant state of night-owlishness), I know just how many times a night she gets up to use the bathroom. Tying a garbage bag closed is becoming a production.

She can no longer even walk to the mailbox to get her mail or Sunday newspaper, nor can she really make it around a supermarket anymore. Which means she no longer really leaves the house. My aunt got her to my parent's house for Christmas Eve, but she couldn't really stay long. Then she yelled at me for buying her Christmas presents. And "making all those cookies". But that's a story for another post.

The physical decline is sad, but even sadder to me is the near constant state of fear and worry she lives in. This is a woman who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, raised five kids (two of which weren't technically hers), and yet she could beat Woody Allen in a game of neuroses. For instance, once it gets dark outside she wants to have the house all locked up for the night. Now that works in July, but in December it gets dark so early, so, ya know, I might still need to get into the garage for something after 4:15 pm. And that drives her crazy.

Here is a partial list of things Granny fears or worries about:
The placement and amount of the garbage can and "recycles", when it gets picked up and who will bring the can back to the house. That I might get run over/kidnapped/shot in a drive-by by random thugs when taking the garbage to the curb or getting the mail. That I may drop dead of a heart attack/stroke while shoveling snow. The amount of snow in the driveway despite it getting plowed and whether or not my car will get through it. Where I am when I am not in the house, and when I am coming home. That those damn kids will trash her new mailbox/steal her mail/steal her newspaper while walking to or from the high school down the block. That I am not using the proper rolling technique while making Christmas cookies. That I will drop or ruin said cookies or desserts while transporting them because I do not transport them like she used to. That I am not putting enough of something in the hamburgers. That the house is too cold. That the house is too hot. That the guy ringing the doorbell the other night at 7:15 was here to murder us (it was UPS).

Though I am not her caretaker, she has become spoiled by the fact that I have been unemployed since June and am usually home. But come the new year I really have to find a new job, and hopefully an apartment of my own. Who will get her mail? Her newspaper? Take her garbage out? Find her if she falls down the stairs?

I think I wanna check out at 70 or 75. That seems like a nice round number.

Groceries Again

First of all, I apologize for the lack of posts lately, things have not been all that calm on the homefront.

Secondly, she's at it with the groceries again.

Granny really can't be taken to the grocery store anymore. She really can't walk or stand for any length of time, and her recent bladder control issues make anyone unwilling to put her in their car. So she depends on the family to fetch her groceries for her.

The problem is this...she waits until she is completely out of food to inform any of us that she has no food. In short, I think she likes creating emergencies so that someone, anyone, has to rush around to do her bidding.

Now I live here, but I don't really feel it is my place to keep a tab on her food consumption. She is an adult and still in her right mind (theoretically), and to do something like that is akin to infantalizing her, in my mind at least. However, if she continues to insist acting like a child, we're going to have to start treating her like one.

And The Hits Just Keep On Comin'

Making sure the top of the window was totally closed this afternoon...they have a tendency to fall when you open the bottom. Pushed on it a bit and... CRACK!

The house is very slowly falling down.

To All My Haters. All One Of You.

I was reminded recently, by someone out of my past, that I used to be a better person. This is most likely true. Weren't we all? I was thinking over the weekend that I'm becoming a mixture of Larry David, Frances McDormand's character in Friends With Money (rent it), and Liz Lemon when she bought all the hot dogs out of spite after some guy cut the line in front of her at the cart. So, no I'm not perfect. I have been a good daughter and a bad friend. I've been the best girlfriend in the world and a total bitch. I've been the life of the party and the sucking black hole that's killing the room.

I must be good at this though, because even my haters still read my blog.

Call me any name in the book, but please do not take joy in my misfortune, no matter how much you may dislike me or my actions. I'm not Hitler for eff's sake. I don't go around trolling on your blog.
It's not that my feelings are hurt, it's just that you have NO CLASS.
If it wasn't my dog that had died, but my father, would you have said "what goes around comes around"? If I had been badly hurt or killed in one of those car accidents (and I got hit hard, the rental was totaled), would you show up at my funeral to tell my parents "Good riddance"? Done a jig at my hospital bedside?

No class. None.

Any future anonymous troll comments will be trashed.

Drop The Puck

Hockey season started a few days ago, bringing with it Buffalo's renewed, neverending, useless hope for Lord Stanley's Cup.
Two years ago I returned from a late work meeting to the sound of a Sabres game turned up to ear splitting volume. That's odd, I thought, because Granny rarely watches television, and when she does she usually sets it on mute so she can read the captions. This is it, she's gonna be dead in the middle of the living room floor, having breathed her last to the sounds of ice skates.

But no, there she was, standing less than a foot from the television, fervently praying her rosary.

The Sabres won that night.

Cooking Vicariously

One of the hardest things about living with Granny is that the kitchen is not really "mine". I love to cook and bake, and I hate having people hover over me when I do so. Granny is bored, and likes things done her way, so when I try to cook I get, "Do you need a pan? I have this pan. Do you need salt? The salt is over there." She has set aside a small amount of space in the kitchen for some of my cooking stuff, but it's nowhere near enough - there are boxes and boxes of kitchen things in the cellar. So when I cook, I'm going up and down two flights of stairs, unless I super organize ahead of time.
She just bought a new refrigerator which ended up being smaller than the last, so God forbid I take up too much room. Not that I want to keep tons of stuff in there, as she'll just end up washing it all again. (P.S. If I live to 91, God forbid, I'm blowing all my money on expensive appliances. Stainless steel, French door refrigerators, Viking ranges, front loading washer dryers with nano-steam technology, one of those dishwashers that will wash a plate even if it has an entire piece of cake on it...)
Anyhoo, yesterday I bought a bookcase for my cookbooks, which is already nearly full. And I didn't even include what we referred to at the bookstore as "food narratives", books of people writing about cooking. I guess I'm cooking vicariously through my books for now.

And Then...

I got rear ended driving my loaner Friday afternoon.

I am beyond being upset or angry. I'm about 80% to sheer catatonia.