Hi guys! This has been a busy month. Three weekends ago, we painted about a third of the inside of the house, which was an ordeal. I pretty much hate every single aspect of painting, from cleaning up to taping to cutting in to rolling. And the only part I do like - moving everything back in to a freshly painted, clean, pretty room - I was too tired to enjoy.

Two weekends ago we had my uncle's family over for Grandpa's 85th birthday party. Yes, it was last month, but scheduling is tough. Laura still ended up working and being unable to come, but after cleaning the house and cooking and all the prep work, I don't think she minded too much.

Then, last week, the night of the party, my dad started experiencing severe abdominal pain. He said it was identical to what he felt just before his emergency surgery to remove an intestinal blockage from almost two years ago. He was ready to go to the emergency room when it finally went away, but he did schedule an appointment with that surgeon on Wednesday. When he got there, and they talked, the surgeon decided to admit him to the hospital to run some tests. When they first got him in and did the usual preliminary stuff, they found out his blood pressure was 85 over 50, and his heart rate 50, so it was like, what's going on?!

After four days of tests in the hospital, they determined...nothing. Not why he was feeling the pain in his middle, not why his blood pressure was so low. They did find out that his spleen and lymph nodes were slightly enlarged, but the oncologist who met with him said that the enlargment was so slight that he didn't want to do anything invasive just yet, and to have a CAT scan in six months and see if there's any change. So this past weekend was getting Dad home, getting him rested - because if there's one thing you don't do in a hospital, it's sleep - and get him fed, because after three days of no appetite before his appointment, he had four days of no or very little liquid food.

And in the meantime, I wrote, and Laura and I are working on some soon-to-be-not-secret craft stuff, and I started a new screenplay. That's kind of a different story, so I'll go into that more in depth later. Heh.

My family decided to ring out 2009 with a bang. Two bangs, actually. But I'll get to that.

My dad, Laura, Sarah and I got up early and headed out to pick up Gamps, then drove to Missouri for our annual pre-New Years cheap booze buying run. There's a big, like, discount alcohol emporium we go to a handful of times a year, but always around the Fourth of July and before New Years Eve at the very least. We were thinking that for the first time in a week, the roads were pretty good. Most had finally seen a plow, a few sunny days meant that the places that had been scraped were mostly melted off, the huge drifts and piles were avoidable.

We pull into the parking lot, head inside, and Laura slips on some black ice and falls. Instead of going straight down, she tried, mostly on instinct, to brace herself, and in so doing threw her leg out to the side, so when she did fall down, she ended up wrenching the shit out of her knee. Bang number one.

She tried to walk the stiffness out of it, so we went ahead and picked up some drinky-drinks, then drove Grandpa to the store while we were out, then dropped him off at his house. Then we prepared for leg two of our annual pre-New Years outing: Chinese buffet and Half-Price Books. We've been doing this at least since I was at USC, and it's nice to take a break from the usual holiday food, as well as get out and spend some of that Christmas money. We usually go a few days after Christmas, but waited this year because of the weather, so everyone was a little bit more excited about it than usual.

As we took the on-ramp to get on I-70, we came around a turn and drove right into a pothole about two feet in diameter, right in the middle of the road, that my dad couldn't see until he was already on top of it. Bang number two.

It didn't take much more than a half-mile for the front tire to blow out. My dad pulled over to the shoulder, which was almost completely covered with ice. The snow had been plowed to the side, obviously, so there was nowhere to stand except in the snow. Laura and I got out, my dad got the jack and spare, and proceeded to try to jack up the car. The jack broke. My dad thought that maybe he had the car up high enough to switch the tire out anyway, so he pulled it off. The car was not high enough and was still resting a bit on that damaged rim, so when he pulled it off, the car settled back down, and far enough this time that he couldn't get another jack underneath. So he had to call for a tow.

This makes it sound more orderly and quick than it actually was. We were on the side of the highway for over an hour. It was just over twenty degrees outside, we were standing in the snow trying to change a tire. In that time, not a single person stopped to see if we needed help, not a single cop or state trooper drove by. There were four city trucks patching cracks in the asphalt literally twenty feet away from us, and no one even looked our way, let alone asked if we had a cell phone or needed a hand.

My dad won't get his car back till Wednesday; the suspension has to be adjusted, and he needs new rims on both tires on that side, as well as tires, as he found out the back tire had been damaged, as well. The bill for just the suspension and rims is over five hundred dollars.

Happy new year!

God, this month. It's been one of those months. Have you ever had long periods of time - not just a day, or even a couple days, but seemingly endless successions of days - where everything just. I mean, I have felt like this pretty much every moment of every day of December.

It's like if there were a movie, called Murphy's Law, and you saw it, and looked it up at home later, and found out it was based on a book, and when you went to the bookstore, found out it wasn't just a book but an autobiography, and you read it, and even more things happened because obviously they can never fit in everything from the book into the movie, and then you get to the end and you're just glad that's not your life, and then you turn to the author picture and note at the end and then you realize IT'S ME. I WROTE THAT BOOK.

And it's not big things. The house hasn't burned down, the old blue van still drives (today I got it up to 35 mph!), I am healthy. It's the cumulative effect of a million tiny things: I have to take off my glove to open the door because the doorknob sticks, and that makes me drop my keys, and when I bend over to pick them up my purse falls off my shoulder, and my iPod drops out and hits the concrete, and I pick it up and stick it in my pocket, and as I walk inside, the headphone cord gets caught around the railing and the speaker part gets pulled out from the earbud and the whole apparatus will no longer work. (True story, btw.)

It's all of that, plus the animals. I think five animals is too many. I read somewhere that a dog is like a very bright three year old, in terms of its intelligence and behavior as well as how you should treat it; I think our dogs are more like really dim, perhaps developmentally challenged, two year olds. Spencer plays this game called WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO GO NEXT I WILL GET THERE FIRST, and if he's not tripping me, then he's herding me or making me stop and wait for him to sit still before I can try walking again. He barks at everything, and when he barks, Princess barks. The cats just roam around and attack each other and gallop up and down the hallway and knock Christmas tchotchkes on the floor and cry because they haven't eaten in one entire hour and they're going to staaaaaaaarve.

And then there's the picking up after my family, and arguments over who gets to watch the nice TV, and piles of clean clothes in the living room and I folded all the laundry I am sure as hell not going to put it away for you, and loud people during sleepy time, et cetera.

I need a holiday. A very long holiday.

We're hosting the Christmas get-together this year, so the past few days have been biz-zay. We're doing the serious kind of cleaning, you know, washing curtains and dusting mini-blinds and polishing hardwood and vacuuming couches. Yesterday Mom and I made all the desserts: chocolate toffee cheesecake, carrot cake, fudge, and sugar cookies. Ugh, the sugar cookies; I used pretty holiday cookie cutters, except that I can never get the thickness of the dough, its temperature, and the oven's temperature right, so they either were crispy little burnt things, or they puffed out so much you couldn't tell what they were. I ended up taking, like, almost two hours decorating them so you could tell that the bows were bows and the presents were presents.

Today we're making the barbeque brisket and ham, and putting together everything else, besides cleaning up again because cleaning in advance never actually works. We're having my dad's brother and his wife, my Uncle Paul and Aunt Debbie, over, along with my cousins Duncan and Elliot and their wives (my other cousins, Angela and Kaitie, can't make it). And Gamps, of course. We're going to have...twelve people in the house? We don't have room for twelve people in the house.

Speaking of my cousin Duncan, I had forgotten to post some of the pictures they took with his baby daughter Ashlyn, who happens to be my grandpa's first great-grandchild. Kindly check out the happiest baby in the entire world.





You can kind of see Heather, Duncan's wife, there. Hee.





Four generations! I love how my grandpa is not actually looking at the camera. There was not a single picture where all three men were; if my grandpa did, then my Uncle Paul wasn't. I don't know.

As I've mentioned before, we've been working since this spring on an extension to our old playhouse, which will become my dad's new woodworking shed. It's a pretty big project, and it's occupied most of our weekends this summer. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take pictures at the beginning of the project, when Laura and my dad dug a hole three to four feet deep at the back of the yard, when we put in a concrete block retaining wall, and when we started to put up the walls. Here's our progress since then, however.



Grandpa arrives for a day of work. Phoenix awaits him.





My dad says to stop taking pictures of him while he works, as it makes him nervous.



Ahaha!



Sometimes Grandpa works.



Sometimes he watches.



Always watching: the cats.



AS CHIEF SUPERVISOR, I'M GOING TO HAVE TO ASK ABOUT THESE PICTURES YOU'RE TAKING.



This was the death rafter, here on the corner. My dad came up underneath it twice in one hour, scraping his shoulder. Then I jogged up the hill and ran straight into it with my head; Laura said she heard the entire structure shake. So she painted blue warning stripes on it.

Two hours later, she smacked into it with her own head.







Making a roof!



A window will go here.



Here you can see the retaining wall, as well as how much dirt had to be moved before we could pour the concrete foundation.



Sasha likes to hang off the pool deck to watch from above.



He also kept track that we were using the right materials.




Supervising is hard!

Wow, what a day. My dad woke up this morning with horrible stomach pains that just got worse and worse, and finally at 1pm my mom convinced him to go to the ER. They did an x-ray and a CAT-scan, and found a white spot on the scan that showed there was a baseball-sized mass on his small intestine. They took him into surgery, and apparently there's some little pouch on the small intestine, this useless thing, like an appendix? Anyway, it had gotten obstructed and the tissue had started to die, so they were able to go in with the little scope (laproscopy? something, you know) and cut it off and stitch it right up. As surgeries are concerned, fairly straightforward, but still.

So he'll be in the hospital for at least three days or so for observation, and the doctor recommended he take a month off work, since his job includes lifting heavy things. My poor grandpa, who had come out for barbeque at 5pm, ended up having to sit at the hospital for five hours; after my dad came out of surgery and recovery and we got to talk to him, my grandpa was like, it's IHOP time.

It's been a long day.

Grandpa is home! He came home earlier this week; his last doctor's appointment, they decided that just letting this drug work its way out of his system over at least a few months wasn't going to work, especially since his aches and pains and stiffness and swelling was getting worse. So, they put him on prednesone (me?), and it was a MIRACLE. Once his lab work checked out, he packed straight up. Since then, he's worked on lawnmowers, weed-eated, worked in his garden, drove hither and yon, et cetera. Very happy times.

I'm applying to some actual grown-up adult jobs. Keep your fingers crossed.

FINALLY saw Indiana Jones. I really, really liked it. Probably because Karen Allen is awesome and wonderful and beautiful, and I'm so, so glad they brought Marion back. But I also just liked the whole style of it, the retro 50s pastiche both in production design but also in plot, and of course the cinematography was gorgeous (Kaminski FTFW), etc, etc. CATE. Amazing. We saw a trailer for Benjamin Button and I am way stoked.

Well, the kids are taking finals, which means I need to find a new job. Bah. (What am I going to do with my life? I hate the way this industry is set up; it is so hard to get into it.)

My Grandpa has taken a cholesterol drug for years, and when he recently started feeling muscle aches and pains, the VA was too dim to realize that one of the side effects of his medicine was aches and pains. They finally figured it out and took him off, but it's going to take months to get it all out of his system. He's just in pain all the time, stiff, especially in the morning; it's frustrating because he's a very healthy guy for his age, always up and about and doing things (the man built an extension to his barn last year, on his own, in a week, at the age of 82), and if he had gotten off sooner he probably wouldn't be this bad now. He's going to stay with my aunt and uncle for a while, and my dad's been very upset and stressed over all of this, so hopefully now that Gamps isn't all by himself things will be better.

In the meantime, I'm not sure I'm used to the idea that I can't just drive in to see my Grandpa whenever, you know? We go over to his house all the time, and now he'll be half an hour away and we can't really drop in on my uncle the same way. I think it's for the best, but it's still been kind of sucky around here the last few weeks, all of this stuff.