Kaye's Home

Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. Kaye had to stay overnight even though it was supposed to be day surgery, but she appears to be fine, other than having a pain in the neck (thyroidectomy and intubation during the surgery) besides James and me. She's tired but she'll be okay, I think.

James is glad to have us home, and I'm glad he made it through the night.

Pray for Kaye

My partner is having a five-hour operation thyroidectomy because she might have thyroid cancer, and doing a biopsy is practically removing everything, so that’s what we (she, her doctors and I) decided to go with. It’s always nerve-wracking for me to hang around hospitals alone – and I’ll be alone for over five hours, wondering. You can smack me for being whiny, but if anyone reads this and believes in something, prayer would be appreciated. I’m always afraid something will go wrong with the anesthesia and she’ll wind up in a coma or something. (I watch way too much er .) So if you pray, please pray for Kaye. I need her back home, as does James.

Thanks.

Not Dead Yet

I’ll be back in a couple of days. Lately I’ve been busy having pleurisy and pneumonia and reading really bad novels with James at my side. I don’t know whether his clinginess is because he’s concerned or just happy to have someone to hang around with. I’m going to pretend it’s the former. While I’m in bed, he assumes the “nurse’s position” in his bed on the bed.

Pilgrimage Day: Chaucer and Cats

Today is, if I remember correctly, the 625th anniversary of the Chaucer pilgrimage. I will observe it by reading the following (from The Manciple's Tale) to James, as I’m sure he will appreciate it:

Lat take a cat, and fostre hym wel with milk
And tendre flessh, and make his couche of silk,
And lat hym seen a mous go by the wal,
Anon he weyveth milk and flessh and al,
And every deyntee that is in that hous,
Swich appetit hath he to ete a mous.

Roughly translated:

Take any cat and give him milk and tuna and a silk beddy-bye basket, and let him see a mouse go by the wall; right away, he’ll ignore all of that and anything else you can think of to give him (laced with catnip, yet), such appetite has he to eat a mouse.

Music Room!

Yesterday was so busy. Between appointments and re-doing the house (to a point), I didn’t have time or energy to type much. We turned our guest room into a music room for me. I have four guitars, a banjo, a sax (Gran-Gran’s), a clarinet, a flute, a couple of recorders of different sizes and a keyboard. That takes care of the instruments, I think. The rest are electronic stuff and a guitar stool and music stand. And Kaye’s desk. She just uses it as a file cabinet, but moving it out of the room would be a lot more difficult than moving the bed out was. I hope having a “music room” will help me focus. There was hardly room in the bedroom to store all the stuff and practice (or open closets). I've got a framed picture of Joan Baez up and am planning a Dylan and Arlo picture so now I’ll have a place that says “practice!” the way my study says “work” and the bedroom says “sleep” (or read or paint, but there are only so many rooms in the house, and Kaye wants some of them, and we need one we can lock James in when the plumber comes or whatever).

I can’t find such a thing as a sax or clarinet mute. That’s disheartening, especially with the sax. I guess I will literally “stick a sock in it.” For now, I’ll just nap. I'm so tired . . . but grateful for the space!

I guess the bedroom can double as the recuperation room. :P

Here's to Bill

My great uncle Bill has been saying I should start a blog for, well, I didn't mark it down on my calendar, but for a long time now. I'm pretty sure that his suggestion was a defense mechanism to keep him from being the target of my every thought, but he put up with my e-mail for a good long time. Now he is eighty and cites that as an excuse for every little teensy thing, like not answering my e-mails every twenty minutes. I don't know that that's a good excuse, but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt, never having been eighty myself. When he doesn't answer my e-mails, I really get annoying and call him. Usually he's doing something like scraping scrambled eggs off the ceiling. How they got there in the first place is something I never even bothered to ask. I mean, I try to give the man some space. I figure if you've got scrambled eggs on the ceiling, you don't need an inquisition on top of it. Now when I call, I often get an answering machine that's set not to take messages. I try not to take this personally. I just never heard of an answering machine that didn't take messages. So with tears in my eyes, I set off to think of someone else to bug with my new problem, that Bill won't even take a message from me because he has set his answering machine against me. I still have things to say. My cat, James, sleeps through half of what I say to him and my imaginary friends go play with someone else when I start to talk to them. So you can see my problem.

Hence, this blog. Someone besides me will benefit from my pontifications. I will notify Bill of its existence so that he can continue to experience my every thought.

Tomorrow night at 8:00, I will be seeing Arlo Guthrie in concert. Solo. No Pete, no Oklahoma Swing Band, just Arlo. Pete's great, but I figure he's probably scraping scrambled eggs off the ceiling and can't come make everybody sing. It's up to me and Arlo. People who haven't experienced Arlo past the "City of New Orleans" have really missed the boat. That's a great song, but not his strongest suit. He is an interactive act, like Pete, and, more important, he's smart and funny. Funny is important when your imaginary friends start forming cliques that you aren't part of. And this is a big deal, because I am actually paying to leave my house, whereas normally you have to drag me away from my desk. In all my life, I have gone to two concerts, both in the 80s: James Taylor and Joan Baez. They are major events for me, unlike my brother, Chris, who I swear went to a different concert every other weekend from seventeen to thirty, often driving hundreds of miles for the privilege.

So good morning America, how are ya? I'll be trying to learn HTML and JavaScript and all that kind of stuff that makes blogs sexy, but right now, I'm just saying hello.

And you can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant.