A blizzard with over a foot of snow for the first weekend of the new year. I've spent the day cocooning, working on my filing system, getting the year end financial stuff ready for the taxman. I've been putting this off, but clearly God thinks it's time to get to it, and who am I to argue with a foot of snow?
I also hacked the perl programs that I use to keep this site in order, changing some copyrights, and fixing a few bugs. The archives, in particular, were pretty screwed up--think I have them working now. Perl is a pretty ugly language, as computer languages go, but its data and operations are just what you want to do this kind of a job. I think there is a metaphor there--elegant simplicity buys you little if the data and operations aren't right, but if they are, you can put up with considerable crud. I guess that's the recipe Microsoft has used to get rich on... After all, I'm using FrontPage to compose this, even though I want to throw up every time I have to look at the HTML that comes out of it. There's a metaphor there, too, but I'm too weary to look for it.
Diana is bouncing around, driving, and otherwise doing quite well. We meet with the doctor next Tues. to discuss radiation and chemotherapy, the next chapter... But this has been a hard two weeks.
The boys came back from CA, having wasted over a week with their dad. Eson's homework was untouched--although he said he'd worked on it, nothing had been completed. We had our first chance to try our new policy of letting go as he steadfastly ignored his paper that was due until after dinner on New Years. It was harder for me than Diana to just sit back and let him do what we would do, without stepping in and "owning" the problem. At dinner, we had a bit of a talk with him. Diana set the tone: "how can we support you?" The idea is to have him take the lead in asking for help, rather than our telling him what he needs to do. The closest I got to interfering was pointing out to him when he got tired that night that he had made a choice to spend the best hours of the day playing computer games rather than doing homework, and that there were consequences of that choice that he was now facing. He took it well.
Over the next two days, he got the paper done, and actually asked for help several times. It felt much better to us, and I think his attitude was better about it also.
Driving home from picking them up at the airport, Eson seemed quite squeamish about even seeing his mom--I think he was very uncomfortable by her "disfigurement". Probably a bit of Oedipus in there, but he seemed quite distressed. Of course, when he saw her it was OK. But there is no doubt that the boys are having to grow up as a result of this experience, and I think that's actually a good thing.
Diana continues to be surrounded by support--meals continue to arrive at the house, and people are dropping by and calling. One woman who called is named Ginny. Now, Diana doesn't have much of a California accent, but one thing she does do is pronounce Ginny exactly the way I would pronounce Jenny. When she said Ginny had called, I heard it as Jenny, and was sure that she had confused her name. We had one of those funny conversations: "Her name is Ginny." "Yes, Jenny." "No, not Jenny, Ginny" (which she heard as "not Ginny, Ginny"). Eventually we sorted it out. Kind of. And now when she refers to the woman, it is "JENNY", drawn out and exaggerated but not sounding in the slightest like Ginny. I'll have to make sure Ginny knows that Diana is just culturally conditioned, not stupid... Or maybe I should just let this go, to.
So Happy New Year. In spite of everything, it is...
Thank you for reading.
Copyright © 2001-2003 Pete Stevens. All rights reserved.
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