Current mood:	tentative
Current music:	suburbs of goa on SomaFM

many things come to pass...
So, I'm realizing that I haven't posted here in a LONG time, partly because some major things have happened in my life that have dominated my time over the past couple months.

A lot of the current somewhat fertile, somewhat frantic chaos happened when my sister-in-law called me two weeks before Mother's Day.  The essence of the call was, "I have cancer -- you have to take your mom."  After my dad died, my mom did the grand tour of us kids and decided to move closer to Joe and Sue.  Sue didn't work (at least didn't work full time, I'm not so clear on this) and had more time to help her out.  Mom's objection to living near me was twofold -- I invited her to come live *with* us, and she wanted her own place, and I am too much the gypsy -- "You'll just move."  Although I assured her that if we moved we wouldn't put her in the yard sale, she remained unconvinced.

Now, I feel like of the three kids, I got along best with my mom (although I'll confess to being more daddy's girl in a lot of ways).  But this is her decision.  I come from a family of stubborn, opinionated folks.

So when my brother, some months before May, found that he was moving to Colorado and was moving mom to an independent living facility there, I called my mom and said, "OK, so you're going to have to move anyway.  Do you want to come here?"  And after some soul searching going back and forth she said no.

The other thing about this was that I was surprised that mom's dr's thought she'd be ok in an independent living situation.  She'd been in lock-down in a home for terminal dementia patients for four years.  Joe and Sue had told me she'd been better the past few months, but I had no concept she was that much better.  She's not quite deaf as a post, so phone calls with her were often a bit absurdist at best, without thinking there were delusions involved.

So of course, I said yes.  This was around May 1st-ish and on Mother's Day weekend, Mom moved in.  This gave us two weeks to change the whole house.  The eating table in the kitchen went to the dining room, which we'd been using as a living room.  The living room moved to the greatroom in the basement.  Fish's magic workshop, which had only recently swapped rooms with Joseph, went to storage, and we moved down there.  This left the master bedroom on the first floor for Mom, so everything she did could be on one floor (she has Parkinson's, and some issues with mobility).

That was nearly as fun as moving the whole house.  We even had to hire movers to be able, on a practical basis, to get all Fish's magic stuff to storage.  The little buffer we had in the bank (which was essentially cash flow buffer) disappeared entirely as we incurred extra expenses and lost working hours.

Mom moving in had a set of adjustments.  She'd never met Fish.  She wasn't sure about anything here for a while.  But we've kind of all settled in together.  We've lost loads more time trying to get all her stuff with meds and doctors and social services and whatnot set up.  It's like having another kid, for the workload, and we also have the issue of monitoring a pretty inflexible medication and meal schedule -- which also means sleep schedule -- and if you know us at all you know that's really changed our lives radically.

By late June, Sue was gone.  Ladies, get yourself screened for ovarian cancer.  I'm impressed by just how vicious and fast it can be.

So in early July, we spend another week orchestrating a trip to DC for the funeral by car. *OMG*   My poor brother -- forty years of marriage to his college sweetheart, in one of those nearly anachronistically gender differentiated marriages that probably happen more in military families.  He's learning to keep a house and balance a checkbook for the first time in his life at 64.  And he's *still* moving to Colorado, away from his support networks.  For the first time in my life, I am worried about my big bro.

And then the next week, Joseph leaves for NC to spend some weeks of the summer with his dad.

It feels like it's been nonstop.

Have I mentioned I'm trying to be in startup mode?  And that's going slowly for obvious reasons -- as of now, I'm wondering if I can sustain startup mode at all.  So we're talking to a possible business partner next week about a fit, perhaps subsuming our project under his already funded aegis.  And we're pitching a book to O'Reilley -- Magic for Makers -- based on a class we're teaching in September/October.

We seem endlessly busy, and at the same time endlessly broke.  I'm getting tired of it.  I want something to move so we can have a better idea of What's Next?  Not that we aren't having fun along the way!  But May to now?  Too much.

That's life in a nutshell.  And nuts is about it.

Wouldn't want my life to be boring...right?