My sister was a devoted Red Cross volunteer. In the last years of her life, she spent a total of 534 days at disaster sites around the United States. She also worked with the International Red Cross Federation in the Balkans during the Kosovo conflict. She and her husband flew to Belarus and Georgia to monitor elections.
So there’s a certain satisfying logic to this picture:
In the background is the National Palace in Haiti. In the foreground, those are tents on the roof of a police station. Nurse Tattoo is sleeping in one of the tents at night. During the day, she’s helping at hospitals and clinics in Port au Prince.
My brother-in-law says that international relief work is like a bug. Once it bites you, you can’t get enough of it. I suspect that this is the first of many, many pictures I’ll pore over, trying to imagine what she’s experiencing.
Thank you to everyone who has been thinking about what my family has been going through. Thanks to those of you who emailed or called and to those who didn’t but were steadily holding a little candle in their hearts for me and mine. I appreciate it more than words can say.
Thank you to Jack, for sharing her last days with me. It was an honor to work with you to give the woman we both loved as much as we could.
Thank you to my seestah, who made great food and squeezed into a recliner with me next to our big sister’s bed, so we could all watch The Bachelor together while eating Ethel’s amazing pound cake. Thank you to Michael for outstanding enchiladas and the best breakfast I’ve ever eaten. Thanks to Erika for hugs–and for the lightning round of clothes-shopping. Thanks to Patrick for mustering up the focus and opening his heart to create an amazing and inspiring memorial service. Thanks to John, for making me laugh and for reminding me about priorities. Thanks to Cassy, for food and friends and Southern hospitality.
Thanks to Nurse Tattoo, for coming when I needed one of my peeps and for insight, compassion, and energy. Thank you to Amy, for saying some exactly-right things at exactly the right times. I leaned on both of you more than I ever imagined letting myself, and I’m so grateful that you let me.
And thank you to Mr. Music–for your music, for your warm hands and open heart, quiet listening, and walking in our door at the end of every day.
Hello y’all. I’m Wrinkling from Atlanta, Gee Eh. Where, as I mentioned previously, I’m spending some time with my oldest sister.
My sister is an amazing woman. She’s worked in refugee camps in Kosovo, monitored elections in Georgia, and managed 800 volunteers for the Atlanta Red Cross. She loves to laugh and play Scrabble–two of the most important activities in life. At one point, she had four boys under the age of seven. She and her husband have been married for 48 years; they say it’s because they told each other that whoever left had to take the children.
Fifteen months ago, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. This did not stop her from being an amazing woman. After chemotherapy, her oncologist asked her how her physical activity level was; she said her only problem was that she couldn’t ride her bike up hills.
She had an amazing year. But, almost exactly a year after her diagnosis, things stopped being so amazing. Now they’re just plain hard.
I’m trying to help. So is one of my other sisters. (I am SO glad that this sister likes to cook, because, let me tell you, between me and my brother-in-law, it was getting pretty bleak in the eating department around here.)
Helping is pretty much a full time job–with really strange and unpredictable hours. And I need to use the time I spend thinking about Wrinkling and doing it for other things.
Mr. M has had an archaic computer for a while. In dorknology, of course, “archaic” means it was about four years old. But he upgraded this week.
I was so excited. I don’t care if dorknology is mine or someone else’s. He let me help pick it out.
Mr. M uses his computer to compose music on his keyboard. He plays, it goes into the Macinnards, gets mixed with other stuff, and voila!, he has a fabulous new song.
I should have taken a before shot. He had his old computer and one of my old computers on his desk, leaving roughly 4.3 square inches open space. But here’s the after:
Check out the absence of cords on his desk now. He’s got yer wireless USB mouse and yer Bluetooth keyboard. Plus, yer 19 inch flat screen monitor.
Still a little bit of cord spaghetti back there on top of his new 250 GB Mac mini. But so much better.
If you could see what’s on his screen, you’d be looking at the weather in Atlanta. Which, as it happens, is my destination today. I’m going to spend some time with the sister who’s known me the longest, she of the raining camping trip with endless Swedish movies and the puppy on Patrick trick.
One of the many things I cherish about Mr. M is that he is the funniest person I know. He makes me laugh all the time–and this one is so good I have to share it.
Yesterday morning, the UPS guy came. Buster goes into full-alert mode for the UPS guy, the Fed Ex guy, the mailman, Girl Scouts selling cookies, you name it.
It’s all a show–in reality, he is an enormous chicken. Also yesterday, before the UPS man, there was A LANDSCAPING CART in our way on our run. Who knew it was a deadly landscaping cart? He went into immediate full-brake mode, and he spent about four minutes checking the cart for weaponry. Which means sticking his neck way out, sniffing, and skittering backwards, sticking, sniffing, and skittering backwards, etc. .
When the UPS man came after we returned safely home, B did his usual barking and growling. Mr. M looked at him for a minute and said, “Barney Fife.”
Mr. M and I have discovered the pleasures of the Red Box. You know, the big box by the door of the grocery store that dispenses DVDs. (This is just a brief stop on our way to streaming movies directly from the Internet to the TV. We are gathering the requisite dorknology. Mwah ha ha.)
Saturday night, we rented this for a dollah:
Caper films are a great ride. In general, we love them. Even though we usually have to stop the DVD at least once and figure things out mid-stream. Thank goodness our brains work in complementary ways; one of us has generally tracked what the other one missed.
The part I love is at the end, when all the pieces suddenly come together–like the last 30 seconds of The Usual Suspects, which are doubly fabulous because they contain Kevin Spacey.
Duplicity has the potential for fabulosity, what with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. Also Paul Giamatti, of the Perpetually on the Verge of a Stroke School of Acting. It almost gets there, with locations I’d like to visit if I weren’t so enamored of my living room. The premise is clever, and some parts are pretty funny. The music is great.
Sadly, there is, in the end, a meh factor. But, all in all, it’s a fine excuse for cuddling up together on the couch–and it was worth the dollah.
Mr. M didn’t hunker down by the dining room table and say, “Down!” and I didn’t say, “Stay!” and place the bone between his paws and then walk behind Mr. M and pretend I had a treat so Buster would look all alert and interested.
Nope. B just looks like this all the time, completely on his own.
But I have yet to figure out how to deal with the fact that, sometimes, when I open my mouth, what comes out is a cross between intelligent comments and the language of an alien planet. This never used to happen–the connection between my brain and my word-forming parts was four bars all the time. Now I occasionally get packet loss.
(Ooooh, a dorknology analogy. Which I probably won’t do again, because I feel like I have to explain this one. The Internet comes in packets. When you have a dropped connection, like when Skype suddenly says buh-bye when you were least expecting it, that’s packet loss. I think. I could be wrong. Which makes my dorknology analogy not only somewhat obscure but also possibly fallacious. So I probably won’t do it again, even though I liked using the word ‘fallacious’ just a second ago. Those are the kinds of words I get to use when I write for money. Which tells you that you probably don’t want to read anything I write for money.)
I don’t mind if this happens when I’m, say, sitting at the dinner table or talking to a friend. I hate it when it happens on the phone with a client. Or, even worse, a group of people.
I was recently on a conference call, and someone asked me a question. I intended to say something like, “I think you’d have a better chance with a public health journal.” (Shows you how fascinating my work conversations tend to be.)
What came out was something like,”I think you’d have a chetter bance with a hublic jealth pournal.” Then I tried to correct it, and it came out, “A better chance with a public hooth jeernal.”
You get my drift. All I can think at the time is, at least they didn’t hire me because of my speaking skills.
A while ago, I raved about Dragon, the voice recognition software, which I use several days a week. Basically, whenever I have to write something longer than one paragraph, I put on my headset and talk my way through it.
The position of the microphone in front of my lips is critical. If it’s not just right, the wrong words appear on my monitor. Then I repeat what I intended to say, using an increasingly irritated tone of voice, like it will somehow help if the dragon knows I’m getting peeved. Eventually, I give up and type whatever I wanted to say.
This week, I got the wrong words, and, instead of getting mad, I laughed out loud. I dictated the words “rich characters” and what I got was “rich care Bears.”
I love so much about this. I love the mental image I immediately got–of a certain purple something with a rainbow on its stomach. Care Bears were Nurse Tattoo’s thing when she was a little girl; as a counselor-in-training at the YMCA Day Camp, her camp name was Care Bear. (Sorry to blow your cover, NT.)
I also love the randomly placed upper case on Bears. I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to capitalize that word, since I don’t a) write headlines about wildlife or 2) pay any attention to football.
I don’t know if you ever watch The Today Show. I watch about 20 minutes a few times a week, when I’m stretching after a run or lifting weights.
The TS covers all kinds of stories, from amusing to heartbreaking and back again. And they make transitions between them.
Which they plan for. Unlike me.
Often, the transitions on TS involve Al Roker dropping his usual jovial smile and tone of voice and speaking somberly about the weather. This amuses me, even though, really, what’s he going to do when changing the topic from, say, Rwandan genocide to rain in Cincinnati.
So here’s Al’s transition face:
(I’m not sure what happened to the rest of his head. Perhaps he has a built-in rain gauge.)
In the background is the National Palace in Haiti. In the foreground, those are tents on the roof of a police station. Nurse Tattoo is sleeping in one of the tents at night. During the day, she’s helping at hospitals and clinics in Port au Prince.
Nope. B just looks like this all the time, completely on his own.
