Breathing Hard

In which our Hero finds himself catching his breath and aware of the fragility of it all

Well, great, I just wrote a two paragraph opening to this entry and then finished by completely disproving my own point. So, I’m starting over.

Hello. Hi. Hello. Happy New Year, Gentle Reader.

It’s been kind of a busy start to the year. Work resumed, with all of the completely unsurprising and yet mindblowing in it’s new heights inanity of the IT world. Life kind of started up again after the loss of my uncle.

Actually, life never really kind of paused, instead being somewhat consumed by the passing of my uncle and the family obligations that come with that and the plans that had already been made, and the plans that had formed around the plans that had been disrupted. It’s been crazy. And when the dust cleared, I was at home with just a case of Guinness for company. Because my father is visiting his mother, and my mother is visiting her grand-nephew.

In a way it’s a startling adjustment, to go from the abundance of family at the holidays to just me. It’s stressful because the quiet is almost shocking so that I’m not enjoying my solitude any, at least not yet. It’s stressful because I don’t like my parents travelling by themselves, and I worry about them till they reach their endpoints. It’s stressful because my mother left here with a late-breaking health anomaly, that ultimately drove a visit to the emergency room. Followed by a calm night, followed by a phone call from my cousin. “I was talking to your mother.” Oh, yeah, I already talked to her tonight, she’s doing okay. “Actually…”

Turns out she’d fallen hard enough to split her eyebrow. She insisted she was fine. “I don’t think it needs stitches.” My cousin asked her to get checked out, and when my mother wouldn’t budge, “You go to the hospital or I’m telling Serin what happened.” My mother didn’t; my cousin did. And thus a very upset Serin insisted she get herself checked out. If it was just the fall, I might have listened to her, but the two together made me dreadful anxious. To her credit, my mother gave in.

I feel bad for the… um… I guess he’s my nephew, more or less, the guy my mom is visiting and staying with. Two hospital visits in three days. It’s good in a way, because he’s from the “back home” side of the family, and my mother’s general age and specific grandmotherlyness makes her more or less the queen of England to him. I know he’ll take good care of her, and he very definitely has.

But the maddening thing is that this is just a case of my mom being my mom. The head wound was not the result of fainting or collapse; rather it was the result of missing the ball while playing with the toddlers, and just banging into the wall. Horseplay. With the great-grandnephews. Horrifyingly delightful. Wonderful story, later. Right now, I just wish I was there to provide the illusion of adult supervision.

I’m in the middle of a technical apocalypse. Everything seems to be failing all at once, and it’s making me very anxious. My storage array blew a disk, and it took days to recover it to a point where I could make a backup. I sent my phone with my dad and as a result I’m still using my older, broken phone. The house humidifier is still busted. The macs aren’t working right. And my internet has suddenly been a yo-yo for the last few weeks.

A last, lost Christmas story to close this out, mostly so I don’t lose it. And apologies if I’ve forgotten and I’m telling this again, but I had it from 11 year old Bob (who was much too amused for this to be an entirely good thing). Oven was playing by the Christmas tree, so his grandmother picked out a few of the plastic spheres, stripped the wiring and gave them to the boy. The toddler played a while and then, eventually done, turned to his grandmother to ask for the wires back so that he could hang them on the tree:

“[Grandma]?”

“Yes [cutiepie]”

“Can you give me hookers?”

My aunt is reported to have kept a straight face at her grandson’s unexpected but awesomely hilarious request. One presumes she understood the intent, but in any case, she asked Oven “Why?”

“I need hookers for my balls”