General update

Sergeant no-words, etc.

I'm around. Check out my Livejournal if you want updates - most posts are public at the moment - I have little energy to spare here, I fear.

Thank you all SO MUCH for your support, it means a LOT. I apologize for not replying individually or dropping by your blogs to say hello, but I suspect you understand - I hope you do - one more task is not something I need, however neat the people involved.

I also have photos up on Flickr, some mine, some taken by my parents over the years.

Thank you. And a few notes.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

I did a write-up for Dad like his for Mom, sort of. I think the one he wrote for her was more eloquent... in any case, mine is here: http://kyrielle.livejournal.com/1144612.html?mode=reply

In addition, I have been posting some memories of him and inviting others to do so. That's here: http://pheon.livejournal.com/451031.html - I'll be adding more. My main personal journal is http://kyrielle.livejournal.com/ - this was more a creativity space. Repeating everything twice is painful, so I am mostly going to update there, not here, about this now - details, day-to-day, etc.

And for now it is bed-time. Okay, it's past bed-time.

Good night, Father.

I didn't think I'd have cause to write a post like this so soon after my last one. Dad lost control of his truck on an icy road this morning, and was killed in the accident.

I will try to write something for him like he wrote for Mother - he deserves it, he was an incredible man (still is, somewhere nice but not here, if the Universe has any sense of kindness or right...). But I do not have the words now. I only found out six hours ago (it took them some time to find me as next of kin) and I am shaky.

For now: Oh, Daddy. I miss you so much already. And I love you. And I hope there's a happy after where you and Mom are even now together.

And to those of you reading this who are still where you can type on the keyboard...I could use some hugs, even virtual ones.

And perhaps some prayers, or good thoughts, or candles lit - whatever you prefer among those.

Good night, Mother.

My mother passed away last night. Part of me is glad and mostly I am very sad - the glad is that she did not last long after she could no longer communicate, and the pain began to be too much. (Of course, it was being treated, but still....)

My Dad's description of her, when he wrote of her death, says it beautifully, I think.

Julie, my wife of 40 years, died today. She had been ill for a couple of years, but it wasn't until last month that she was diagnosed with untreatable lung cancer. Thanks to hospice support, she died comfortably in our home. She was 61.

Julie was joyously cynical, mildly paranoid, a superb cook, stubborn as a mule, a good mother, a supportive and loving wife and a hell of a bridge player. She loved games of all sorts, and was a voracious reader, a sharp debater, a WordPerfect fanatic.

On LiveJournal, she was pheontoo, though she rarely posted, using the account to read friends-only posts. Julie is survived by me pheon, our daughter kyrielle, our son-in-law terram, her cousin Beth, a number of sisters, nieces, nephews, grand-nieces, and grand-nephews, all back in Ohio.

I'll miss you, Mommy. And remember you. And I love you, always.

Photos

Photos up at Flickr.

It's hard, right now. I don't know what to hope for, these days.

More words another time.

Voices

I'm not sure this isn't a silly idea, but...if so it at least was interesting to me.

Get Your Own Voice Player

Manage

Memories

These are mostly memories of me, not my mother - or my mother in the context of me. I am trying to write up some others, but of course our views of those in our lives so often center around their interactions with us. In this case I was actually writing up memories of myself, but they also touch on her. I link to where I wrote them up in my LiveJournal, years back:

When I was little and other stories.

I'll add a couple more that are not there, more Mother-centric or at least parents-centric:

1) When I was young, we had a dog named Meyer. Meyer was a Doberman-Great Dane cross. As you might imagine, he was a huge and very leggy dog.

Meyer slept on my parents' bed. My parents, very logically, had a king-size bed at the time, as otherwise it would not have been possible to fit two adults and a dog on that thing! Meyer tended to crawl up into the middle. And then streeeeeeetch. A dog that size can, in fact, occupy most of a king-size bed if he wants to. My mother, with the same slender light build I have, never budged. My father, probably half again her weight and sturdy, sometimes got shoved out of the bed, however. (Mother has generally been a light sleeper - I suspect she was half-waking and bracing without remembering it, but no idea if this is actually the case.)

2) Sweety. The first cat that was 'mine' growing up was a tomcat (fixed) that I named Sweety. (Mom thought I was crazy when I gave him that name as a kitten - he was a tomcat, and she tried to explain to me he wasn't likely to live up to it. I insisted. He lived up to it. In later years, among other things, I found him baby-sitting two litters of kittens that their mothers had left with him while they went to hunt. And letting the kittens try to suckle on him, without protest. Not that it was doing them any good, of course!)

Mom, when I was younger, curled her hair. (Not sure if it was sometimes or always.) I don't remember Mom with her hair curled. I remember the curlers, the old kind with the spiky points, rolled in wet hair and left in overnight. The sort to make you want to sleep on your face so they wouldn't press in so much. And I remember that Sweety caused my parents' bedroom door to be closed when the curlers were in (and ultimately, I think, led to Mom switching how she did her hair - not 100% sure as my childhood memories are weakish)...because he liked to sleep on her pillow. Above her head, which he slid down into. All 14 or 16 pounds of him (he was a heavy cat).

...that hurts just to think about, actually.

3) I don't remember this one at all, but Mother has told me this. I forgot the dog's name but I believe they said today that it was Twitch. Mom remembers this dog "chasing" a naked baby me around a coffee table...at a slow walking pace...and whenever I would lag, he would stick his cold wet nose on my backside, spurring me on! Apparently we were quite amusing.

Things I am grateful for today.

Cool weather.
Rain.
A full moon above evergreen trees at the top of a hill.
Remembering the route to drive after almost a decade.
The fact that the landscape was so little changed.
Silly goats that dash away from the fence as I approach, then run back to it making noises of eager, hopeful 'feed-me'-ness as I walk away. Sillies!
Cats, affectionate and sweetly selfish.
My mother is still herself, still mostly not in pain, still well enough to take part in conversations even if she speaks less. Still able to feed herself.
Music. Oh, music.
The fact that there was no ice on the roads, even if there was left-over snow on the side of the road, on Bald Peak.
Sales on miniature Christmas trees, even if the trees are gone when I get there, that lead me to the crafts store.
Sepia-ink pens. With which I haven't, of course, played. But I have them.
Books.
Junk food. Fast food. Every so often, these are happy things. (I'm sure they would not be happy if I ate them often.)
Mom's fudge recipe (which I also shouldn't eat often, assuming I can manage to follow it and produce the fudge - I definitely shouldn't eat the recipe itself, of course! :).
Narbonic. Because it is funny and cool and a wonderful story. (Warning: webcomic about mad science with huge archives. Can eat large portions of day....)
Friends. Kind words. Notes of support.
My wonderful husband. And my in-laws, who were so kind and patient about seeing so little of me when they visited this weekend.
Modern medicine. My allergies are soooo much better now!
Warm blankets fresh from the dryer. I think it's bedtime for me when I am being grateful for those.... :)

Photography. Non-update.

Still very focussed on mother; I won't be posting much about that. Still not doing much art - I keep getting impulses, but the energy to follow through is going to other things right now. I'm making notes, so perhaps something will come of it.

I have been taking photographs, though mostly very snapshot-ish. A hawk close up, in silhouette, perched. Horses. Cats (one of them looking very silly). A Christmas tree. Little things. Daily things. They're at Flickr if you want to check them out. More will likely join them later.

Happy anniversary to us.

You know, my wedding was a day or two after a coworker died. Now my first anniversary is the day after the doctors tell us my mother has lung cancer. So far, my anniversary luck stinks - except, of course, for the guy I married and the wonderful well-wishes. I wish I could say my anniversary was a day of pure happiness, but I think we all know I'd be lying. It was remarkably happy for the circumstances, though, and I'm so blessed to be married to this man.

My parents had ordered a cake - a replica of our wedding cake, with different decorations - for us, and Dad dropped it off. It was so pretty I had to photograph it before I could bear to cut it! (Scott and I have both had a piece from 'happy' now. It seemed appropriate.)

My mother....

I don't know any good way to say news like this. My mother, whose health has been failing for some time, was diagnosed with lung cancer today, after tests started on Wednesday. It has already spread; and she is not a candidate for any aggressive treatment (she can't afford to lose the healthy cells that are left, and she is not strong and her weight is low; and chemo doesn't work well with this cancer). Weeks, months, maybe a year.

They will be working on setting up hospice care, and my father has been taking care of her and will continue. I will probably be very scarce. If I make time for art, I will post it, but my attempts to stay semi-committed to AEM are at an end here. I know myself: if I don't formally say I quit, I will guilt trip myself if I miss too much. And I have a feeling I will be doing relatively little that I view as art to be posted, if I do any art at all.

Here, alive, just not arting.

Is that a verb? Probably not - it is now. I did go to the Gardens today and took a couple photos, but not many - I was cold and my heart wasn't in it, and they aren't awful but they aren't great. I came home and I got new curtains up in the bedroom - I am so much happier with the look in there now. I made clam chowder from a recipe and I can only conclude the person writing it was insane, it came out awful and too onion-y in spite of my using half the onion suggested. Go figure....

I'm in Oregon. It's raining again tonight and the wind is fierce - we're under a severe weather alert for the wind, which is supposed to reach 40 mph with gusts to 60 tonight. I am not too worried for us here - even if the trees come down, I don't think any can hit the house. Our neighbor's place maybe - I hope they don't. But we are basically safe here. Power outages are another matter - already had one and lights have flickered. The UPSs kept everything safe, though (one overloaded, so I'll sort that out in the coming week - for now the desktop using it is off).

Tomorrow is trash pickup day. A decent percentage of my neighbors have put their trash out tonight. I really don't want to think about that and the wind too hard at once....

I've been stressed and down, for reasons I don't want to go into on a public blog, and that really got to me this weekend, making little frustrations like the soup into big things, at least briefly. On the other hand, my trash can is in the garage, and will go out tomorrow (in theory the wind should subside by morning--). So at least I don't have to find my trash strewn all down the street in the morning. And I have an alarm clock with battery backup, so I'll actually get up tomorrow.

I caved this weekend and bought cell phones for myself and my husband. Waiting now to see how much we use them; I hope the plan doesn't need adjusting but it might. But it's already come in handy since tonight he let me know he'd be late - in the storm, I'd have worried, but he's just staying late at our friend's house.

I don't feel like making art, but I have been thinking about ideas. Gathering a few materials. Finding the time and energy to apply them has been harder. I need to work on that.

For now, I'm trying Blogger Beta. If this whole space suddenly vanishes into a black hole, I probably hit a wrong button somewhere. ;) But not tonight. I'll play with the appearance of the site and updating it a little some other time. Right now, I think if I shut everything down and get some sleep, that would be the sanest plan.

Poem-babble

I think this is actually bits of two or three poems, crammed into one and missing other pieces, but this is approximately how it occurred to me and I can always work on it from there. (Approximately because it showed up in rush hour traffic on the freeway, and I thus had to remember it for a while before writing it down. I'm sure that mutated it further.)

Two days after the election, I step out
into an afternoon of sunlight on pale clouds,
brilliant, bewitching. As if change were
a god smiling down on all of us, and
the 'we' who won and 'them' who lost
were not equally nebulous, indistinct
as droplets in a storm cloud. As if
I wasn't still blind to the future,
the far-off possible indistinct. Thinking
we know which clouds bring too little rain,
which too much, until the ground is
buried under a torrent. And then do we ask
who brought this bucket-full and added it,
who brought that bucket-full? Or do we simply
wait out the worst of the water, and begin
shoveling mud from the porch, the living room,
again? Trying to make everything exactly
the way it was. The distance between that
and what can be done is as wide as an hour
of the past, and as uncrossable.

Photography and tweaks

Two photographs, altered slightly in PS Elements to bring out the look, then altered more heavily for fun. First, fall leaves at an office building, as a photo and as a "pastel sketch" (no actual pastels or even paper involved, I fear). And then a photo of a stormy, cloudy sky...turned into a pool of water. Kind of. It was fun, anyway, if fairly simple.

Sunset photos.

Well, kind of after-sunset photos, really, in the period between sunset and full dark. I snapped these tonight on my way out of the office. (Also some sunset pics while in the office but the only one that came out really well, has too much reflection in it that I'd have to edit at least to obscure, so I can't post that. Oh well - win some, lose some.)

Of course, a lot of the artistry here is Mother Nature's, but I did get the photos. :)

At least this time I had a reason....

I felt pretty lousy yesterday, and went to bed almost three hours earlier than usual. Feeling much better today, at least. I'll try to have something besides excuses up tonight....

Sorry--

Got distracted and blah, and played games and read books (reread the entirety of David Eddings' The Mallorean, a 5-book series...). Then I also needed to vote (Oregon does vote-by-mail, although this late, I'll need to take it to the drop box instead). When I realized I had a choice between voting, art, and sufficient sleep, with only two being reasonably do-able...well. Oops for getting into that spot, but the art does lose in that case.

Honestly feeling blah about my ideas for art, which is probably why the procrastination; and I had no quick and artful words to gloss over with. I will be trying to do something again Monday, however!

Short one--

What is the hidden name we are given at birth?
In the hills above the clouds, the syllables sound
the same as anything forgotten. No echoes.

Poem: Photographic Memory

(Yes, the art I'm doing is mostly word-art so far. There may be photography or other stuff later - I don't know. I went for a broad definition, as it increases the odds I'll keep doing this.... :)

(I hope this is decent. I make no promises: I just rattled it off tonight as, due to various unrelated complications, most of my evening got eaten up.)

Photographic memory

There's a blackberry where the flower bed used to be.
It is mounded, a weed, a menace, its thorns
waiting for the unwary to pass it. Somewhere beneath
there were the brilliant, sturdy pink blooms
of my childhood. Beside them the delicate necks
of columbines, trumpets waiting for the sky
to sip them. The old stump of the tree we never saw,
already cut down when my parents bought the place.
The stump was destroyed and hauled away.
The columbines died. Eventaully even the pinks died,
choked out by the blackberries. My parents still live
in that house, by that blackberry, the rosebush sprawling
and huge, the silver lace vine climbing in a wild tangle
up and along its trellis - as if in their later years
they have given into the impulse of teenagers,
to run wild, to let the world run wild again.
Somewhere, somewhere I remember a neatness
and an order, straight lines and log fences. Clean.
Deceptive: there was always something wild there,
the feral cats, the thorns, the fields gone to seed.
How easily the memory makes such things turn to
ordered rows, pretty flowers. How easily the parts
that didn't fit are cut from the photographs.

Musing: Autumn evening

It seems oddly appropriate to start my attempt at following along on Art Everyday Month with a musing, what I originally intended to use this space for before I discovered that it didn't sustain well by itself. I didn't set out with this planned as a start, it simply happened out of the moment, and that is the best thing of all, I think.

Stepping out the door at work this evening, I found it just barely beginning to rain: the sidewalk was still gray, dappled with the darker patches left by fat, slow drops of rain. The steady grace of water tapping the top of my head, cool and comforting. The leaves on the lawn were crisp and brown and still dry, sounding out a drumming rustle (or perhaps a rustling beat) under the rainfall. And all around, just rising, that inimitable and almost unnameable smell of city rain: asphalt first touched by water after a dry spell, the rising bitter-not-bitter scent, indescribable in any words I know, unmistakable. The water sliding down my face as I lifted it to the sky, breathing in that scent, the raindrops like tears of joy - proxy, someone else's, reminding me along with the scent that life is to be lived and not merely coasted through....

And I think, without meaning to, of a song I've been listening to a lot lately: Unwritten, by Natsha Bedingfield.

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open