The Bitch Cat from Hell

When the people at the animal rescue start to question whether or not you really want a particular kitten, you should listen to them, and not to the kids or the big kid who have become smitten with her cute looks, while you have become bitten by the sharp little teeth behind the disguise.

She looks SOOOOOO cute, doesn't she? She's a ticking time bomb, but she hides it well. We adopted her in January 2007, about a week before the last of the old cats died. Unfortunately, the past year has been a journey of discovering how abused this poor sweet looking thing must have been before she was placed in our care. She hates me. She comes over to me, paws my legs, and asks me to allow her on my lap. She curls up and purrs. And then, for no reason, she will either growl and bite me, swat at my face with her front paws, or just growl and go bonkers, all teeth and claws, until she can jump away. If one of the dogs is nearby, she will then attack the poor dog, biting their legs like in danger of her life, while the poor dog turns and looks at me, trying to figure out what the hell is going on.



Her real nature comes out - as she sees us taking her picture while she lurks in wait inside a package of bottle water in a corner of the kitchen.

In the past year, she has mellowed a bit. She never goes after the kids. She lets the younger one carry her around the house, and climbs up into her top bunk to sleep at night. She now climbs on my lap when she's hungry or thirsty and does not immediately attack me - heck, this morning, she actually curled up and went to sleep instead of biting me - but she's still the most unpredictable animal I have ever had. Ginger, the big dog, is her archenemy, although Ginger doesn't seem to know it, and takes her attacks as a stunning surprise every time. Ginger likes cats, used to lick one of them until her head was soggy and she got bored and walked away, but now comes immediately over to my desk when Joelle starts to growl, as if she's going to fend off the attack personally.

More on the Cat from Hell, later.

More Brooklyn

In my previous post, I thought Blogger was having a melt down. Turned out it was the Western Digital 80 gig drive I installed less than 6 weeks ago as a data drive. Next time I booted up, my system told me the SMART was bad and that I needed to backup and reboot. I'm SMARTer too. I am replacing the drive with a Seagate 160 for less money than the WD. Now if I can convince WD to RMA the drive, or the OEM guy we bought it from, I'll be alphabetically happy.

Anyway - more of the Prospect Park area of Brooklyn:

Brooklyn

A photo from late September, when we attended a Buddhist Peace festival in Prospect Park.
I had never been to the actual park before, although I had been through the area many, many years ago. I had forgotten how wonderful the neighborhood around the park is. Many, many beautiful old brownstones lovingly restored like the one above.

Right now Blogger is having a meltdown, so I will have to upload the rest later.

This is why I garden

Daylilies and a Sunflower as big as the Sun.

There is little that can be as satisfying as planting a seed the size of your pinky nail in April, and standing underneath a nine-foot tall sunflower in July. Or sticking what looks like a bundle of roots into the ground and finding yourself surrounded with a riot of bright orange lilies almost as tall as your shoulders.

Except maybe having fresh grapes to eat, a handful of warm tomatoes, a bowl of cucumber salad and green beans just blanched. Makes sharing the sunflowers with the chickdees that much more fair. Birdies got to eat, too.

Life Alterations or Why I am Not a Credible Person - again?

(Image: The "Crazy neighbor"/aka CN, sighting down his driveway with a rifle. Across the street is a house where three girls are about to come home from school at the time this was taken.)

I have edited and removed this post entirely. Let's just say that when someone tells the boro attorney that you don't like what the chief of police is telling people because it is both untrue AND an invasion of privacy that he is sharing information about you, the reaction of the town is to immediately punish YOU and the person that told you about this.

I am neither a genius nor is "there a thin line between genius and insanity". Time to sell my house, move and sue this town.

And the guy with the guns is still playing with them in his garage, whenever I am outside in my yard. Chickenshit sits hidden in his garage, but the sound is unmistakable. What a waste of oxygen atoms.

What Memorial Day is all about.

It started as a day to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers after the Civil War. Those at the time assumed that there would be no more important wars requiring these ceremonies. Most of them would have been hard pressed to comprehend the next century and the carnage and death that would follow in Cuba, Flanders, Normandy, Korea, and a little French Colony that no one thought about in their era - Vietnam. Or the war that was never declared, in two nations far from here with little of concern to most of us at the time of the civil war but of the most extreme importance in this era of machines and plastics.

Now, it's a weekend getaway to a place at the beach, or a parade where they throw candy at the kids, after which we burn meat, eat too much, and hang out doing things we normally can't or won't do, in celebration of the coming warmth.

Just a reminder of what Memorial day is really about - my blog entry from last Memorial day:

http://ifiknewwhat.blogspot.com/2006/05/remembering-bobby.html

The Danse Russe by Williams

When I discovered The Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams, I thought I had discovered something, but it turned out to be something else. When I looked out the bedroom window to the house across the street, through the linden trees, it was just another house I saw across the street. I would play games that the middle son was in his bedroom across and through the trees, and I would pull the shades tight in some modesty that I thought I needed from his peeks of life through the trees.

Now, the windows are gone, the odd angle of the roof below where I peered to listen to the summer's hail and the ice dams of the winter, where I always thought that in case of fire I could cling to the ledge below and jump into the azaleas below, landing in a bed of furious pinks and reds and whites and purples, colors of the tropics against the dark red brick of the house.

Well the people that bought it when we sold it out from my mother, they have no care about the azaleas, or the halls wandered late at night, with the cold kitchen tile and the fake red tile on the floor. The way it felt to be a little ill and step into the colder tile of the black and white bathroom floor, reflected in the silvered mirror when you closed the door and pulled open the medicine chest to sit on the edge of the sink and examine your zits in the mirror to the drone of the tv in the living room. The way the blue and green setional couch hugged the walls between the room divider and the side of the fireplace. The way the beige carpet smelled when you stretched out on the floor at christmas to examine your new Vac-u-form. The old air conditioner that replaced one of the rose windows on either side of the fireplace over the couch. And the winters when you'd set the flue and pile the logs on, to lay on the carpet-covering brown goatskin rug, the shaggy one that the cat's always loved to knead. There was a way that the light fell upon it to make it look otherworldly, as if it were the pelt of a trophy hunter's pride, laid out on the hearth of the home like a grand prize, in front of the TV and the fire.

But the people that bought the house stripped it bare, ripped of the second floor and stuck up new sticks. My blue bathroom is gone, along with the closet where I left my old transistor radio, the red one. The room under the eaves that smelled of dust and the toys we stored in there when we no longer played with them, the toys I dragged out last summer, still in stale cardboard boxes, to leave in the basement of my own house now. What kind of careless people would tear down brick and put up plastic, cover the warm brick where I found the handprint of a mason from the 1920's with plastic siding, as if that were an improvement?

I look at vintage photos now, and see brick houses with the windows decorated like battlements in brick, and wonder what souless people could do that to a house, cover it with plastic siding and tear it apart, leaving the shrubs rootless in the yard, the front steps chipped and chiseled and discarded for the dumpster where I sat and sold lemonade and watched other kids on their bycycles, held the door open for my own daughters on hot summer days, or pushed the mechanincal doorbell to summon my mother to let us into her house, me and my horde of tired kids on halloween, for thanksgiving dinner. When I drove by, I thought of the shock of seeing my grandmother's house in Jersey City was gone. As if the world has a vacancy that can never be filled again. That's what my kids will think. No one will ever look out that picture window in the front and move the curtains aside with a wave of a hand at them. The window itself is gone, the shrubs my mother so tenderly cut and shaped for all those years, the radiator that was in the way so you could never look straight out, but so that you could lean your elbows to hold your head and peek and hide from the strangers at the front door if you wanted to. The window where I watched boyfriends drive off into the night, and cars come and go. Where I heard Trixie the dog barking, and Shadow, where my Ignatz cat sat and surveyed the grass outside and jumped out of sight to greet me at the back door when I arrived home.

What a world our homes are, from the trinkets in the windows and the view of the universe we see from them, the pine tree in the yard, the lindens as they grew old and died, the wavering light of summers and winter snow and the hurricane when the dead trees were scattered and fallen across the street the entire block and how odd the light seemed afterwards. How odd it was to see sky and not trees and how bright and unnatural and naked. Now the sky is open, the roof is open and green grass that still pokes up in the winter is harsh beneath the dumpster and the uprooted shrubs. I want to drive by in the dead of night and see the darkness of the place of my childhood. But it is gone. The world is gone. Left to haunt my thoughts at four in the morning in my cold house, a world I can only hold inside for this brief time, until I too am gone. And someone takes my bones and covers them with plastic, like the brick house, and hides them from sight as something unneeded, ugly and old.

And the place most familiar, the things touched in the dark and remembered, fade and are gone forever to nothingness. Time is evil.

Happy New Year!

After eating several pounds of king crab legs dipped in garlic butter last night, Alfredo with shrimp, lemon pie, countless cups of hazelnut coffee, I just want to waddle in here and wish everyone a happy new year, and all the best for whatever 2007 will bring.

It's all got to be uphill from here. And at my present weight, it certainly feels it!

Rant du Jour - Modern Medicine

I got a phone call from my sister last week that my mother fell and hit her head again at the assisted living for adults with dementia that my sister had moved her to, after my mother fell and hit her head and broke her wrist at the regular assisted living. This means that my mother's mental state has gotten to the point where she can not function at all without someone acting as a caretaker 24 hours a day. She no longer has the ability to protect herself or think about her own safety, to use a walker or a cane to move around her room. It means she will be probably tied into a wheelchair when no one can watch her, rolled around like furniture and planted someplace where she can't get hurt by trying to take care of herself.

All of those images of the worst that a nursing home has to offer, especially when viewed through the eyes of the able-bodied. All of those things that we all dread happening to us when we are elderly. And not what any of us ever think will happen to all that we've managed to accumulate in life, the money, the possessions, the memories. All gone. All disposed of. And all that's left is a stream of days sitting like a potted plant in front of a TV or moved from place to place to be "entertained", to receive "enrichment", and to be managed.

And this is the best that money gets us at the end of our lives, thanks to modern medicine and medications that keep us alive longer, well past the point where the rest of us is worn out and no longer working.

OK - here's my rant:

I have very mild hypertension - so mild that ten years ago, my blood pressure would have been considered in the range of normal for my age. Somewhere between 120 and 130 over 80 - just ten points (or whatever it is) over what someone has decided is normal for an over fifty woman.

Every time I go to the doctor, for whatever reason, I am given a script for medication for hypertension. Just like every post-menopausal woman is given a script for anti-osteoporosis medication, and/or a bone scan and is told to get a mamogram and other tests, most of which involve radiation exposure.

What percentage of those tested get cancer from that exposure? No one knows.

What percentage of high blood pressure leads to health problems and what percentage of medication leads to health problems? No one knows.

What percentage of post-menopausal women would benefit from more exercise and a better diet? All of them. So what to do? Give them more pills to take, of course, and tell them that it won't hurt, and they probably will not even know they are taking the medication. Well, someone exposed to low levels of anything probably won't know about it either, until it kills them. Or just cripples them.

When I was pregnant, I had a huge discussion with my OB/GYN about the particular medication he wanted to put me on for pre-eclampsia. When I used to go to my mother's Parkinson group, almost all the people there had been on Aldomet for their blood pressure. It's a drug that no one understands how it works but that it affects dopomine in the brain and lowers the blood pressure, and studies have never been able to link it to problems in pregnant women. So it is automatically assumed to be safe to give to them. Short-term, it might be. But no one has ever done a follow up study on the children born to these mothers. So we really DON'T know. But thousands of pregnant woman are told to take it every year.

So I did, and I worry about what I did to my children, and may never know the answer.

Anyway, there are no real studies out there to see what the long-term effects of anti-hypertensives do to the people that take them. Do they live longer? Do they have less problems because of their lowered blood pressure? You'd assume yes, but, guess what? There has never been a study of that, so we are ingesting all sorts of odd chemicals on the pretense that we are improving our health, but with no real idea if we really are. But someone in the pharmecutical industry is driving a BMW because they can sell a drug to more and more doctors, and someone who owns shares in a pharmacy is doing quite well because they can sell more and more drugs at a profit. But are we living longer, or feeling better, or even having a better life? The answer is statistically, no, not really - not in any way attributable to the drugs we are swallowing.

The question really is why are we allowing this to be done to us? Why aren't we fighting it? My next-door neighbor is going bankrupt because he has been told he needs to get a shot that costs $300 every two weeks because of his bloodpressure, and $300 worth of monthly medications to further control it, and the side effects of all these drugs. And he's nearly eighty years old. So he has a much longer potential lifespan, but he's living in near poverty to have it. And his real problem, the kidney disease that is raising his blood pressure, is not treated. Only the symptoms. My husband, who is about 80 pounds overweight, is on an injection created from gila monster venom twice a day, four different medications for diabetes, an anti-depressive, a chlorestoral lowering drug, a baby aspirin, and a couple more that I can't think of at the moment. If this wasn't covered by his health insurance, it is more than a thousand dollars a month in medications. And, honestly, if he lost the weight, he probably would not need the drugs - so why are insurors so willing to pay for them and not for a dietician and a health club to encourage him to improve his health?

I had a big argument with his GP over my blood pressure and my decision to monitor it rather than immediately starting the two different medications he decided I needed. I lost weight, and increased my level of exercise, and lowered my pressure from what it was to what it is. And I could walk outside and get hit by a bus, or die of a heart attack when I am eighty, without medication, or live to be a miserable, incontinent, demential eighty-five year old with twelve daily medications and a three thousand dollar a week room in a nursing home. My mother is there now, and she's just turned 75. I would not want her life, and she doesn't either, even if she really barely understands what is going on. At some point, we have to expect that just because we can extend life with medications a bit, no one lives forever, and there is a point where the benefits are not outweighed by the cost of propping up lives with drugs on the pretense of making them better.

When my dog was diagnosed with lymphoma, the vet told me the next thing to do would be to have her cancer "staged" and start chemo. So what did that involved? Major internal surgery for about $800 for the dog who would now have to recover from it, plus still have lymphoma. Then chemo, which, in animals, is not always a big deal - which might get her an additional six months of remission. Or might not, at all. At a cost of two or three thousand dollars more. At the end, tho, the cancer always wins. Meanwhile, she needed to be on comfort medications. And needed to be screened for other medical problems, at a cost, to us, of nearly another five hundred dollars.

What happened at the end? After eight weeks, Molly died of lymphoma, without the major surgery. Without the chemo, which would have allowed her another four months of life. Or possible not. Or she could have been hit by a car when she darted out the door, as she used to do all the time. No one will ever know. But we did what we thought was best for her, and she took her last breath where she was surrounded by her family and in a place where she was HOME. That's better than probably you or I will be allowed to have. Not tortured in an effort to stave off the unstoppable, not drugged into a stupor, not handled by strangers who don't care much, not in a place we don't know, with choices made for us by people that don't know us, have no idea of what we would want or how we lived. Molly got a better death than most humans are now allowed to have.

How sad is that for all of us?

Sometimes, medicine has to make difficult choices. The problem is no one is willing to do that anymore. And the government, the people we trust to make sure the best choices are made, isn't doing that either. So we slog along, being told absolutes that aren't anything, that have no facts to back them up - and we spend huge amonts of money on hopes that aren't based in anything real. We put hopelessly brain-damaged people on life support until their bodies literally decay, because the doctors won't tell us not to, and can - so they do. We treat diseases we might get - and get other diseases from the medication that kill us instead. And instead of just making a choice and saying that no one lives forever, but the quality of the here and now is what matters most.

And how really sad, and really, pathetic, is that? We are exploited to the end - and those that survive us, laden with guilt that they might not have done all they could, in the impossible effort to cheat death. Mortality always wins - but the greed in the culture can not and will not admit that, even to themselves. And never, ever, to us.

More Christmas

This one is from an actual photograph from one of last year's blizzards - the arbor vitea's belong to my neighbor across the street, so this is a close up view of what I see from my desk. These bushes are so pretty that they have become the backdrop for everyone's posed pictures - high school graduations, proms, christenings - everyone is walking over and posing the kids and the family in front of them all the time, including us, so I figured I might as well have them on my desktop. If you want 'em, right click and save them. I use a blue desktop to frame them rather than stretching the image out, but it works either way.

Another Christmas Window background, thanks to Paint Shop Pro. Sized at 800 x 600, you can swipe it by right clicking and saving.

More Molly

Molly, Ginger and Grendel (clockwise from left)

















Molly decides that Gren's ears aren't clean enough.











I miss my smiling dog - every time I'd come in the back door, she'd be grinning at me (as she plotted how to get outside and run away for a couple of hours). The day I took her to the vet, she stood on the metal table, looking out the window, and then cased the joint - standing up on the windowstill to see if she could open the window and peering into the wall vent looking for alternative means of escape.

She was sweet, but those wheels never stopped turning. One of the biggest things to hit me is the act of leaving the screen door open off the kitchen for fresh air. I haven't done that since June 2001 when I found out the hard way that Molly could force it open. And no one has peed in the living room for a week.

Wait a minute - just why do I miss that dog?

Molly

My dog Molly died yesterday after a struggle with lymphoma for most of the past two months.

She was a monumental pain in the ass from the day we bought her home from the shelter. Pregnant, I spent most of the summer of 2001 with her and nine puppies in the middle of my living room, a slave to dog containment and poo. I developed elaborate means of laying down grocery bags and newspapers in layers to make it a little simpler to maneuver around puppies in a wading pool, and an old playpen, and finally a huge metal dog crate. Molly was not housebroken, and nursing dogs eat and relieve themselves seemingly a thousand times a day. And I patrolled the house, mop in one hand, Nature's Miracle in the other - seemingly a thousand times a day, plus all the times the puppies got out, or Molly let them out, or the kids let them out.

But then there was the night that I was putting up the side on the playpen, Molly on the outside, the puppies inside, and she came over and insistently stood on the side so that I could not lift it and lock it. One at a time, she licked each of her children on the snout, wagging tails on both sides, as if she were counting noses and saying good night. Only when she was done, did she jump down and let me secure the side. She repeated this ritual every night until most of the puppies had gone to their new homes, and only she and four of them were left. And, then, it was just Molly and her son Grendel, the runt of the litter. She'd look over her shoulder at him, and lead him into the crate for the night, crying and barking and carrying on until both of them finally settled down.

She opened the refridgerator, and stole a turkey. She taught Grendel how to do it, and when Ginger, one of the other puppies, was returned to us after six months, she taught Ginger. So we'd get up in the middle of the night to the sound of three dogs trying to scratch the door open to the Magic Food Place when we tried to outsmart them with a toddler lock on the door. Woe betide us if we forgot to latch that latch. Molly never missed a chance.

Then there was the time that she and Grendel figured out that they could squeeze out the space on the side of the air conditioner in the children's bedroom. First, the plastic shutters were destroyed. Then, when I replaced them with masonite and screws, they pushed the entire air conditioner out of the window when I forgot to lock them in the crate while I ran and errand for 45 minutes. I came home to find it hanging from the back of the house by the cord, and both dogs tied up in the yard by a neighbor that had found them. And a police officer, trying to push the air conditioner back in because the door to the house was locked. So the air conditioner went back in with heavy mending plates screwing it in to the windowframe and securing it from moving.

I thought that was it. Problem solved.

A few days later, I came home to find Molly tied to the front railing.

Another neighbor was standing on her porch across the street, and watched Molly push open a partially open inside window and scratch her way out through the screen, poke her body through the hole she had made, and leap into the bushes from the dining room window. Molly, being the friendly thing she was, ran right to the neighbor, and quickly back into captivity.

So I learned to close windows when I went outside for a minute.

A week later, we go out to dinner. And come home to an empty house. No dogs. Thinking someone had broken into the house and taken them, it took us a while to see a window that had been closed tight in the kid's bedroom was wide open and the screen shredded. They had made their escape somehow. A few minutes of searching, and Ginger came back from a dumpster around the corner, covered in blood from hitting the footboard of the neighbor's truck on the way out - and the other two were caught about a block away a few minutes later. Molly had managed to open a closed, but not locked, window, a trick I could not believe any dog would do, until she got brazen enough to try to do it one day right in front of me - she would claw at the window until she could get it open a narrow crack, and then use brute force to push it up with her nose.

So every window on the house got a safety wedge to prevent it from opening more than a few inches.

Over the past five years, we discovered that Molly could shoulder her way out the screen door, taking Grendel with her (Ginger stopped following her after she got hurt jumping out the window), and be gone for hours if we turned our back for a second. And she would not come back, except to Larry, no matter how pleadingly I begged, until she was tired or satisfied that whatever her mission had been was completed.

But she was my dog after a while, totally mine. She started sleeping on the bed, between Larry and I, her head on my shoulder, snoring into my ear all night long. She was always where ever I was, under my feet as I sat at this desk, tripping me in the kitchen, watching me from the bedroom doorway - and outside the bathroom whenever I took a shower or closed the door. Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, she was so weak she tottered when she walked, but I was not permitted to go to the bathroom without Molly guarding the door - I could hear her nails on the floor, slowly, sliding a bit, as she got up from where ever she had been painfully trying to rest, and flopping down against the door with a groan from the other side of the door. After our guest had gone home, I sat here, looking down the long center hallway as Molly struggled to her feet and walked toward the back door and the kitchen where we had been keeping newspaper on the floor because the medication had been making her urinate constantly. When she got to the paper, she turned around and looked right at me as she went, clearly telling me that she was a good girl and knew what the paper was for, dignity intact to nearly the end.

Yesterday, I found her at the foot of the bed, stretched out on the rug, her breathing labored and loud. I called her name and told her it was OK to let go. Her eyes were open, but she never looked at me - she was in some other place, far away. But the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile when I said her name.

She died a half hour later, at home, having said her goodbyes to all of us in her favorite spot.

Smiling.

Happy Turkey Day.

Wish me luck. One of the kids was up until 3 AM, Molly the dog is dying from lymphoma within the next few days since her drugs have stopped working, we have company coming, I'm still defrosting the turkey breast as I watch the parade, there are spiderwebs in the oven in the basement, and trash is strewn from one end of the house to the other. And the extra dresser is still in the kitchen, like an unwanted maple houseguest - I can't even open the door to the refridgerator completely.

On the other hand, I have a home, I have family that loves me, and friends that emailed me this morning to send their wishes. I have a friend that is taking three trains to get here to see us because he does not drive and did not want to put us out to pick him up at his home. I have a cool pair of PJ's to wear at the moment, a pair of comfortable shoes, a warm bed, and a change of clothes to wear later. I have a pair of almost-new jeans. And a set of antique mix and match dishes to display. I even have a bottle of wine and some gourmet Turbo Dog beer to cook with in my kitchen.

In Iraq, in Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Sudan, in places where the floor is dust and there is no roof, children will get up hungry and be fortunate if they survive the day. Their mothers will cook over fires of twigs laid on rocks. They will have never seen a turkey, and their dogs will be for the purpose of hunting or a meal. They will wear the only clothing they have, barefoot, and scavage among the grass and the harvested fields or from a truck full of strangers with bags of handouts and leftovers from places far away. Their children be up at 3 AM, running from gunfire and bombs, if they haven't been victims of diseases that we treat here with one pill a day for ten days.

While we are vexed by the imperfections of our world, and irritated by what are blessings to millions of those who do not share the gift of living here, in this country, we should do more than just give thanks at our table. Let us look upon the blessings of friends and family and the absence of hunger, a warm room, and take a moment to be grateful. Just as those with none of this wealth are grateful for the things that are not - that they have a meal and someone to share it with. In the spectrum of humanity, that is really what life is all about.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Christmas Wallpaper

Technically, it's sort of more Holiday than Christmas, but I created this image a few years ago to use as a backdrop for the season. It's 800 x 600, and if you click on the small image, blogger will open a page with just the image. Right click and Save As and it's all yours. Hope you enjoy it.


More to come.

What are you doing here? GO VOTE

If you haven't done so already, get your ass out of the chair and GO VOTE. Given what is at stake, this is probably the most important election of our lifetimes. If the Republicans maintain their control over Washington, expect a draft to prop up the puppets in Iraq and Afghanistan, and march ever onward towards the rich oil fields of Iran's Gulf of Persia. Expect more spying on the lives of ordinary people under the guise of controlling "terrorism". Expect more body searches, more secret courts, more detainees held in secret prisons, more revelations of torture, more fear-mongering, and more real reasons to fear our own government.

We have begun the short march towards quasi-religious fascism in this country under the guise of Mom, apple pie and keeping us safe from the Islamo-fascists. But we need to make sure that the fascists in our own back yard do not get a greater toe-hold and greater empowerment.

If they do, the next election will be a moot point - if it isn't already too late.

In case anyone is wondering

...why I haven't been here:

My computer is terminally ill.

My mommieboard is rebooting the machine at random intervals due to a short I've been trying to repair for three weeks. I have now surrendered, and will be replacing it sometime next week, along with my processor(s).

At one point, I was reduced to picking my bookmark file out of recovered clusters with a hex editor. (I am too much a geek, I realized, when I thought about having the forethought to even know HOW to do that.) It is a wonderful thing, the way Ex-Pee handles application data. You can lose more files with even greater speed now than under the older versions. Plus restore totally useless Restore points to find nothing has been fixed because of the way Restore works.

No wonder Bill Gates has the manse in Washington, and I'm here freezing in Joisy.

Back-ups are a wonderful thing, though. Thank god someone had already thought of them before Bill came along, or I'd be REALLY screwed.

This is only a Test, Jennie

Jennie had a tooth that needed root canal therapy to save it. Her face blew up like a lop-sided squirrel, and she was begging for Junior Motrin the way I sometimes beg for sour cream and onion dip, but a lot louder and more insistent. She has always had whining down to an art form, and when her tooth and her face hurts, she's entitled to hone it up to a new high, and she did. Ignoring a constant "Put ice on your face" and "This is what happens when you don't let Dr. Joy work on your teeth because you were too afraid of the novocain needle", she actually preferred going to school over my company at home.

I didn't know that she was going to the nurse at school for ice packs because she was lying to me about how bad and how much her tooth hurt. So I got a "bad parent" phone call from the school nurse, during which I had to explain that we knew she needed a root canal - she had refused to let the dentist near her after an hour of trying, at which time the dentist gave up and handed me the xrays and the business cards from two pediatric dental clinics - and were trying to get her to a pediatric dentist that specialized in children with fear issues - and that it had taken five adults to hold her down for the anesthesia shot for the stitches in her toe a few weeks ago. That's one adult for every one and a quarter sutures, but who's counting?

The nurse told me she would never send a child to school with a face as swollen as that, and that the swelling could go to her brain and blah blah blah. I picked her up from school expecting a misshapen jaw drawing the attention of everyone. But the kid that I picked up looked normal. Perfectly normal. Her normal chipmunk cheeks normal, but normal. I had a few choice mental words with the nurse, but, hey, it's only September. Plenty of time between now and June to uselessly vent.

I get out the list of pediatric dentists covered by our medical and compare it to the names the original dentist had given to me when she surrendered to Jennie's ability to hold off the needle. There was one matching name, and, after stating the emergency and the nature of Jennie's problem, the dentist reassured me that she'd just finished working with an autistic child this morning. After that, Jennie would be no big deal. She's used to these sort of things with scared children.

OK, sounds good to me - I make the appointment and prepare for battle with Jennifer.

Flash forward to the dentist. She's a little tiny thing, with an office with fish everywhere, fish on a monitor in the waiting room, fish murals, and a fish fountain on the wall with running water, and anemone things on the arms of the chair for the kids to play with. Very much a theme. She's sweet and talks Jen through an examination of the tooth and the rest of her mouth, and a prescription for an antibiotic - and then tells me she can't do anything else, since she's not an endodontist. So we search our insurance for a pediatric endodontist, find no one listed, and start calling all the names we can get a referrals from the original dentist. Phone call number three is a guy with kids who works on kids. Says he's a father with three little ones, one of whom is also terrified of needles, so he understands what we are going through. He wants Jen to be the last appointment of the day, so that he can take his time to try to relax her and work on her.

I will greatly abbreviate what followed, except to say it took two trips, a prescription for Valium for Jennie, four hours on two different days in the waiting room, and two hours in the dental chair before the work was STARTED.

I needed medication of the liquid kind by the time it was all over - but I refrained. Besides, I was too tired to drink afterwards. And I needed to go to the store for more Junior Motrin.

Parenthood. Why, exactly, did we want to have kids in the first place? All the cats ever did was throw up on the furniture, a feat Jennie did within five minutes of her arrival home. None of them ever managed to kick me in the face while screaming and punching me - and that was AFTER the Valium.

Bomba the Jungle Boy

Back sometime in my childhood, my siblings and I inherited a box of children's harcover books from our neighbors, the Carovillanos. I don't remember if I ever read this, although chances are I did, because I read pretty much everything in the house with printed words and a cover that I could reach.

I was one of those kids that could not fall asleep without a book. I would drag the old Book of Knowledge up from downstairs until my mother got smart and put it in the hallway outside my room to save on my nocturnal roamings. Given that this was a set purchased for my father, and copyrighted sometime around 1933, it was a bit odd to read, but if there was nothing else I hadn't read around but the dreaded "Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories" or those encyclopedia volumes, it was a no brainer. "Uncle Arthur" was BORING.

Old pictures - Pop and Miss Chips

(Please excuse me while I recover from an unattended CHKDSK that seems to have eaten my c: drive.)

In this picture, my great-grandfather Rudolph Sprenger, called Pops by everyone in the family, sits in his living room chair with my grandmother's dog Miss Chips doing her best imitation of the RCA dog. Based upon the newspaper headline of the Jersey Journal in his lap - "Hungarian Premier Capitulates", the picture was taken in 1956.

I have a memory of spending the day at "Pop's" house when I was a little girl, sitting in the kitchen while he made me toast. He did it in one of those old toasters with a triangular base with two sides that had doors you opened to lay the toast on, partly upright, until one side was done; you'd then turn it over and brown the other side. I remembered that he had a little white mustache, and a very faint accent, and that he was rolly-polly and very old.

I carried this for many, many years before I actually saw his picture, knew who it was when I saw it - and had a shock when I visited his gravesite when my father died in 1984 and realized that Pop - my dad's grandfather - had died in 1957, when I was barely two and a half. When I think about the circumstances of being left with Pop, it was most likely after my sister was born
in 1956, while were were still living in an apartment on Communipaw Avenue in Jersey City. My grandmother lived with her father at what had been the family home since shortly after 1903 - 10 Claremont Avenue, an asbestos shingle-sided narrow row house on a steep street with a view of the Statue of Liberty (and a little bit of lower Manhattan) to the left as you stood on the front steps.

My grandmother had married young, and her husband, Thomas, had died when my father was only 4, at the height of the Depression. So she and her son moved in with her parents, and Pop and his wife Katherine became the real parents of my father. She had no say in the home, although she was the apple of her father's eye. From what my dad used to say, her mother ruled with an iron will that no one dared cross.

Anna, my grandmother, was a wild one. I'm still trying to ferret out details, but she remarried and divorced once after being widowed, the divorce supposedly because she was cheating on her second husband while he was in the Army during the second World War - or at least that is the story my mother told me. I remember my grandmother as doting on me, with wirey silver black hair (although she wasn't that old - barely fifty), bringing me a hankie of some kind everytime she visited as a sort of token between us. Some of them had edges she had tatted, some of them were printed with cartoon characters or ornate flowers - and some of them are still in my dresser to this day. For whatever reason, she had a big plastic bag of them, from which she never failed to give me one every time I saw her.

I remembered her house in Jersey City had an odd smell - wet linoleum and a bready smell - and a washing machine with a mangle, and an old coal stove that had been converted to gas sometime in the 1920's, oddly next to a modern stove. And this wire hair terrier named Miss Chips who liked to bite people, the first pedigreed dog I remember seeing, utterly my grandmother's dog, and utterly nuts.

"Get away from the dog," both my mother and father and grandmother would say the moment you entered the house. Chips was a biter whenever she felt either playful or angry, two moods that she could go from in seconds. I still remember the feel of her coat, wire-haired but silky at the same time. She reminded me of the old horsehair sofa my grandmother had.

Years later, in her old age, Chips lost most of her eyesight and bit one person too many and my grandmother had to put her down. The legal matters involved apparently were to much for Anna, and her mind snapped. One day my father walked in the door from his overnight shift in the morning as the Jersey City police called - they'd picked her up, naked as a jaybird, trying to get on a bus. After a few days in the hospital, she came to live with us. But she would never be "right" again.

For the rest of her life, until the day she died, she moved in and out of an assortment of mental hospitals and nursing homes, diagnosed as scizophrentic and/or just delusional. No one really could figure her out. And, in those days, no one tried really hard. So from the age of 54, until she died at 82, she lived in a place in her mind alone, divorced from all the hardships that life had done to her, where she never felt safe, but where she retained a quirky sacarsm to the end.

Just so sad.

Keith Olberman's Message

The following editorial was made by Keith Olbermann on his MSNBC show,
"Countdown" tonight on the 5th anniversary of 9/11. It is the most
powerfully courageous speech I've heard by a network newsperson since
the Vietnam War era:

---

This hole in the ground


Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40
days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of
what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains
of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes
and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into
my soul -- two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York
policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or
more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always
shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have
"forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping,
opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a
commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago
could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our
eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us
could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud
defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards
and criminals.

Five years later this country's wound is still open.

Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.


At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months
after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr.
Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot
hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,
have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their
reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we
can not hallow this ground." So we won't.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and
jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the
money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and
buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of
doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on
these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The
terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment
you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this
city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the
promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and
painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout
the country. The government, the President in particular, was given
every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot
be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be
squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to
take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being
American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did
the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them,
"bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would
have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as
morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the
Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the
terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection"
meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a
despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee,
hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a
war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is
"lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume
responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to
this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect
and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he
alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that
he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in
his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most
radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be
televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by
bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the
whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office
seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the
only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the
unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless
death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and
turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How
dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as
long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this
government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from
March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and
this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful
things.

And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting
episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials
disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for
calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests
he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and
suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced.
An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor,
returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by
hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device
that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no
need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human
machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find,
and it's themselves."

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it
up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves
tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and
explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts,
attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a
thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its
own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be,
if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public
chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of
it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely
question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this
empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this
administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

---

And not to belittle anyone's feeling, but, yes, this was an attack on the entire country, but you have to be here in NYC or at the Pentagon to understand that this was more than that. We knew the people that were in there, and many of us might have been in there ourselves, had been there in the past, and looked at those buildings out our offices, our schoolrooms, when we went for a drive. For us, the skyline of NYC and particularly Manhattan is ever present within our view directly or within a short distance.

Last night, I stood in my yard at midnight and saw the beams of light from "Tribute in Lights" directly to the east. They gradually faded into the cloudless sky, and the mixed emotions I felt at seeing them, from my home, are troubling and hard to explain. Not to denegrate anyone, but a tourist from Nebraska is not and never will share how that is. It's like walking through a cemetary reading names and dates on the stones of strangers, versus stumbling upon that of someone you knew. We all knew somebody there. We all lost somebody there. And we lost our innocence and safety there as well.