[Because of the work-related content in this entry, I’ve set it to Private. I added a bunch of people who’ve commented on my blog in the past to my Contacts list to compensate. I'm afraid it's a heckuva disjointed entry as well--I simply haven’t had the time to record my impressions piecemeal as they come to me, nor do I have the time right now to weave them all into one nice seamless narrative…Bear with me. Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow American posters!]

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Well, Falstaff was dead when I went to wake him up this morning. It looked like it was a peaceful death; he was just snuggled into his dog bed in the usual sleeping position. We wrapped his body in a blanket (for taking to the vet for cremation) and sat talking with the kids for awhile. There was no point going to synagogue because all three of them kept breaking into tears (and half the time when they did, we'd start crying too), so we wound up spending most of the day at home. When we get...

Ever have one of those days, weeks, months where you despise everything you write, regret everything you say, and are so repulsed by yourself you can't bear to live in your own skin?

Yeah.

I keep telling myself it's just what I get for being stupid enough not to take medication this winter when I suspected months ago I'd need it this time, just the final throes of seasonal bipolar, any day now it's going to abruptly veer into that unnerving giddy-trembly hyperactive...

Falstaff is angry with me. I can tell because twice in the last 10 days, he's gone into the kitchen while I was out, torn one of the 'childproof' kitchen cabinet doors off at the hinges (how does a blind-deaf, 17-year-old pug hobbled by arthritis manage these things?), and strewn everything he could find in it all over the kitchen floor. It's his way of shouting, "Whatever happened to sitting with me half an hour every night, damn you!"

Well...he's right. It's been just...

Following up on my previous entry...

So, I just got back today from visiting my mother. It was a pretty draining week--I spent all my afternoons with her, part of the evenings too most days. In the end none of my siblings were able to make it down there at the same time, but that was probably just as well, since I spent all my spare time grading midterms.

My mother has progressed a little from when my younger brother was there--most of the basic selfcare things...

This is following up on my recent ZC thread (here) about my mother's accident and consequent brain injury...



Today my younger brother, who's still down there for the time being, happened to be on his cell phone talking to me when he arrived to visit my mother. Since she's been showing a few signs lately of beginning to recall certain people she knows well, and had even briefly asked about me and one of my other brothers, Reuven spontaneously said, "You know...

For Thanksgiving we're inviting over a new colleague of mine who's from Boston. He's single and had been really looking forward to flying home to spend Thanksgiving with his family, but due to a painful sciatica/ruptured disc problem, he had to scrap those plans. The poor guy's had a really lousy first semester to begin with, mostly due to last-minute course-scheduling screwups in our department that left him holding the short end of the stick, and I think also because he's just really homesick....

I was just in the kitchen with my oldest son, starting to make dinner, when the doorbell rang. I went to get it, and was maybe 3 feet from the door when my 4-year-old daughter darts in front of it and shouts, "Don't open it--it's a POLITICIAN!" She meant a political campaign worker--our neighborhood's been overrun with them lately; she'd spotted the telltale clipboard and stack of flyers through the window, and knew from experience that more often than not their "visits"...

A friend of mine who teaches at Stanford told me about their Hillel Center there (Hillel is an international Jewish campus association) hosting this event over the weekend. I thought he was joking, but after looking it up online, indeed they do have such an event, and so do numerous other campuses. Apparently this new "tradition" began a couple years ago...
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Now that we're in the lull between summer school and the next academic year, I've hastily and belatedly turned my attention to a couple proofreading and editing tasks I'd agreed to help out with earlier in the year: a recently retired colleague's travel memoirs, and a book of personal essays by local writers, comprising a community journalism project of sorts. On the whole, it's been a nice change from the usual--these aren't scholarly works, so there's no particular format they need aspire to,...

I haven't been around much during the last month, as I had surgery to remove a tumor from my spine and it's taken me awhile to get back on my feet. During that time we were visited for several days by a couple good friends from grad school, Ted and Michael, a gay couple who've been together for 25 years now (they're in their mid-fifties--Ted was a 'nontraditional,' i.e. older, fellow grad student of mine; we got to know Michael, who's a graphic designer, through Ted). Since they now live in Atlanta,...

OK, so I should've been grading papers instead of researching this not exactly pressing question, but reading all this stuff about the recent pet food scare somehow got me to wondering why it is that most cats seem so picky about what they will and won't eat, while most dogs will eat just about anything a person would (and, uh, several substances we wouldn't, if only out of strongly held taboos in most cases). Not that there aren't a few picky dogs out there--we had a collie when I was a...

Right around this time every year (and no doubt, aggravated by the fact that we usually spend Chanukah in Florida!) I start to get very depressed due to what my psychologist tells me is seasonal affective disorder (SAD). It's bearable enough, but does seem to be getting worse as I get older, which I'm told is typical--my mind and body just slow down all over in the way clinical depression always seems to cause: it gets hard to focus, alternating bouts of insomnia and near-narcolepsy, general hopeless...

We live on a street of row houses, about half of which are rentals. The house to the left of ours is a rental, and about a month ago a new family moved in, a 20-somethingish couple with 2 kids. Which is great, because there aren't many kids on our street, and so this gives our kids 2 new friends to play with. What's not so great is this couple regularly engage in ferocious, very loud, heavily profanity-spiked arguments that run on for anywhere from 3-15 minutes and take place at all hours, indoors...

*** WARNING: contains numerous references to certain basic but unsavory parenting realities, including Yark, Drool, and Saltine Balls ***


Well, we can't really say we're surprised; we'd been nervously glancing at the calendar for awhile now, waiting for the next shoe to fall and hoping it would happen sooner rather than later. But nope, that's never the way things work out, and so just a couple days after packing our oldest son off to martial arts camp for 3 weeks, we...