Tag: mom

  1. Orienteering in life.

    14 June 2023

    "Don't follow me, I don't know where I'm going either."

    --Unknown

    Since I got my last big project finished up I've been trying to figure out what to do with myself. A certain amount of debugging was involved (as one might reasonably expect), culminating with the microSD card in my weather station tanking with terminal corruption (such that the card's on-board controller permanently locked it read-only). I'm fairly sure this was due to the card being used outside; enclosure aside the thermal cycling of the natural day/night cycle probably wrecked the silicon. I've since replaced it with an industrial-grade …

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  2. I may as well clear my cache.

    22 February 2023

    I'm back from Pittsburgh. I think everything's done. Somewhere in the back of my head I have things to write about and maybe some photographs to post. I don't have the brainpower to do that right now, though. Hopefully I'll get my head together soon.

    Anyway, I've updated my .plan file. The usual warnings apply, you have been warned.

    I also finally got around to fleshing out and posting an essay that I've had going for a year or two, which is some of the stuff I ran into while running my mom's estate. It's not my best writing, it's …

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  3. Two in a month.

    22 March 2022

    This might be a record. Two posts in a month.

    Things seem to have calmed down a little so I've had more compute cycles free to do stuff. The last week at work was uncommonly... I don't want to say "uneventful," but "less eventful." This left me a little time to work on some projects that have been hanging fire for the last month or two.

    Mom's estate is still in a holding pattern, more or less. I'm still trying to get through to her tax preparer, with no success. I've also reached out to the estate attorney I'm working …

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  4. Okay, fine. I'm generation X.

    08 March 2022

    This blog post best read while listening to this playlist.

    I keep trying to figure out how to start this blog post. I've started, stopped, pondered, and taken a shower while thinking about it off and on ever since my last post went live back in February. Unfortunately, life in the twenty-first century is.. well, being life in the twenty-first century. The laundry list of things that have taken up most of my time is unfortunately way too long: Java and log4j have cost me more nights of sleep and almost-but-not-quite migraines in the last month or so than I …

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  5. Grief.

    21 December 2021

    This blog post is probably going to make less sense than usual. It's certainly going to be out of order semantically; I'll try to minimize the disjunctions as best I can and I apologize in advance. Lately I haven't had the time (thanks to log4shell) or the compute cycles (thanks to my mental health) to sit down and work on this post. Everything's been laying pretty heavily lately, and it's been an effort to just make myself sit down and work on this post. I keep thinking of little things to post to keep those switches in my head going …

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  6. Mom's dead.

    15 October 2021

    The title pretty much says it all. If you want to punch out now, go right ahead.

    There's no other way to put it. No polite way, no delicate way...

    Cancer is neither polite nor delicate.

    ...

    The evening of 12 October, Lyssa chose to spend the night at bedside with mom while cousin Suzy and I went home to get some sleep. I don't remember exactly when we crashed but it was reasonably normal for us, maybe 2300 or midnight.

    At 0622 hours (which I don't think I'll ever forget), Suzy knocked on my bedroom door and said that Lyssa …

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  7. Hospice, day 1.

    12 October 2021

    Mom was moved to a hospice facility yesterday. Let's start there, because today's been a day.

    Things were all over the place today. I had a good quote lined up to open this post with (it's funny what subprocesses in your head can do when things are going pear shaped) but it's kind of pointless at the moment.

    Suzy and I drove over to the hospice this morning to see mom and talk with the hospice team to figure out what to do and how. Lyssa took a cab in before we let. The nasogastric tube is still in place …

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  8. Another shift.

    11 October 2021

    Mom was moved to a hospice facility this afternoon. For how long, we don't know. We're supposed to meet with a social worker tomorrow morning to figure out what to do next. Technically she's still under palliative care, but she's wasn't able to stay in the hospital in her condition.

    Mom is still insistent that she wants to go home. To die.

    That's going to take some doing, and it's not something that we can decide to half-ass, nor is it something that we can decide to do as we please (even on my mother's say-so). Her state has to …

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  9. I guess it runs in the family?

    10 October 2021

    Judy and I slept at mom's bedside in the hospital last night on recliners that the nursing staff was kind enough to bring in. Mom's fever spiked to 103 degrees Fahrenheit in the span of about four hours, she was febrile, and her breathing was agonal. In an attempt to make her comfortable, the nurses gave her a couple of doses of IV zofran and reglan, with a side of haloperidol for anxiety and fear. Later in the evening they gave her a dose of IV benadryl because my mom was scratching at her arms and chest, and was making …

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  10. I don't think it'll be long now.

    09 October 2021

    Someone asked me why these blog posts are always backdated. The reason is that I can't write about a day's that's happened until that day's... happened. Plus, if I wrote it up late at night and posted it, probably nobody would see it (the churn of social media being what it is). And, it seems wrong to liveblog somebody's impending death. Especially my mom's.

    I guess the cat's out of the bag.

    Yesterday morning when I woke up, I made myself breakfast and coffee and then took Dora outside in her stroller for some fresh air. Around my second cup …

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