Tag: circa63

I know the many people who read the story
about Sammy going on antibiotics will want to know how it
turned out.

Speaking as someone who knows him, he’s much better. (You
can’t tell from this picture — it’s morning nap time.) His
energy level is higher, he isn’t having accidents in the house, he
doesn’t seem to be drinking as much, and while he’s still peeing
more than he used to, he can often get across the street before he
has to do it.

The vet called on Tuesday with the results of the tests he took
after finishing the antibiotics. It turns out that there is not
an increased level of antibodies to leptospirosis, so he probably
didn’t have that, so we don’t have to worry about the liver and
kidney damage that would have done.

So the likely thing is that he had some kind of infection that
the antibiotics he took for the possible leptospirosis cured.

The vet says his urine is still pretty dilute, so it’s likely
that there’s some kind of kidney malfunction that isn’t showing up
on the bloodwork. He would have liked to do an ultrasound to see
if there’s a kidney problem that that could find, but that didn’t
sound reasonable to me.

It’s likely that the kidneys aren’t working as well as they
used to, but he also has (according to the vet) a “muffled
heartbeat”, and he’s about to be 13, so it seems to me quite
likely that something else will kill him before whatever the
ultrasound turned up, even if it was something treatable.

I get lots of high-tech modern medicine for myself, but I’m
likely to live another 30 years, and I have health insurance to
pay for it.

The New York Times front page covers polls of people against
military strikes on Syria, but not anything about the protests
organized by MoveOn and other
organizations.

I didn’t go to the one I was invited to in Boston, but I know
some of the people who organized the one in Fall River. Here’s
the interview
the organizers gave the Fall River Herald News.

Ms Conrad reports that there were 30-50 people and lots of
energy. More energy for chanting, “NO WAR” than for listening to
speaches or singing “Blowing in the Wind”. But there were three
TV stations and at least two newspapers. So I don’t know why the
Times doesn’t think demonstrations are more newsworthy than
polls.

If the Times is going to go on reporting polls as “news”, they
should at least explain what the pollsters are doing to correct
for the growing number of people with only cell phones that the
pollsters aren’t supposed to call. The story this morning only
said, “The nationwide poll was conducted via landlines and
cellphones from Sept. 6 to Sept. 8 with 1,011 adults.”

I’ll probably end up telling you several stories about my
mother’s funeral, but the one that surprises me that it should be
a story is this one.

The previous funerals we’ve arranged in Fall River were for my
grandparents. They had lived elsewhere, so most of the poeple who
came were friends of my mother’s, and we just invited them all
over to the house.

We originally thought we’d do that for my mother, but the
kitchen sink was clogged, the vacuum cleaner had stopped short
never to go again when my mother died. My mother died in Fall
River, Massachusetts, where
she’d lived since 1959, and knew a lot of people so we weren’t
really sure that there mightn’t be more mourners than the house
could handle even on its good days.

She wanted a Roman Catholic funeral, and the church she had
attended after she could no longer drive across town to the Polish
church, and before she stopped being able to walk even a few
blocks comfortably was willing to put up with what we wanted to do
with her ashes.

Unfortunately, it was built to accommodate the post-war
building boom, and Catholic churches of that era didn’t think
they’d need any kind of gathering hall in the building, so we
couldn’t just get someone to bring sandwiches to the church.

I told this story to a friend who comes from England, and she
said, “We just did my mother’s post-funeral reception at the local
pub.”

The dynamic young priest who founded the parish is popularly
believed to be why the whole parish is zoned so that there cannot
be a liquor license. So there is no local pub. Consequently,
there are of course a lot of stories of poeople getting killed in
drunk driving accidents.

When we were in the process of deciding that the vacuum cleaner
and the kitchen sink weren’t going to get fixed before the
funeral, my sister picked up the yellow pages and started looking
for function rooms. Of course, most of them are attached to
establishments that serve liquor, and therefore are nowhere near
the church which is centrally located in a large, sprawling
parish. (The funeral was a 9 in the morning, so we didn’t
actually want liquor, only some food and some space where people
could hang out and talk.)

But it turned out that my mother’s favorite bakery, about 5
blocks from the church and three blocks from my mother’s house,
was listed as having a function room. We called a friend and
asked him if he’d ever done a function there, and he said, yes,
he’d had a small party for the one-year anniversary of his
father’s death, and everybody just ordered what they wanted at the
counter and took it in the back room and he paid for it all and it
was really nice.

When we called the bakery, they were a little concerned that
there might be too many people for them to handle, but we promised
to call them with the number (this is one of the things funeral
directors do for you) and to send the overflow to our back yard.
There turned out to not only be the back room, but a very nice
garden with a few tables. Someone said that the Fall River Garden
Club gets the owner to come talk about succession plantings.

As it turned out, there were about 70 people at the funeral, of
whom about 25 came to the bakery, and about a dozen of those came
over to the back yard when the bakery started rearranging the
tables to accommodate the lunch crowd.

The
Times article about Diana Nyad’s swim from Cuba to Florida is
inspiring.

Not that I’m ever going to assemble a team like that to do
anything, but it is impressive that when she hit a problem she
found an expert to address the problem.

She twice had to stop because of being attacked by jellyfish,
so she found a jellyfish expert, and ended up wearing a special
suit at night and covering her face with anti-jellyfish gel.

She had to give up one attempt because she got an asthma
attack, so this year, she had a pulmonologist on her team.

There’s also a cautionary tale about trying to do this without
enough support staff — a man claims to have done the swim in 1978
with only scuba gear, but he doesn’t have documentation to back it
up, so he doesn’t get the credit.

It also sounds like the weather (maybe aided by her
meterological staff) cooperated. She finished a day earlier than
planned. In still water she does long-distance swimming at the
rate of 1.6 miles per hour, but there were stretches where she was
in a current going 5 miles per hour.