Adjusting

Hi!  How are you doing?  Are you settling in?  Does it feel like home?  Do you miss your old house?  Have you found a job yet?  Have you started any home improvement projects yet?

Those are the most frequent questions I get asked.  I answer, fine, yes, not yet, YES!, no, we put up a new fence for the dog.  

I'm not quite sure what my truth is to those questions.

I made my favorite homemade bread recipe to make the house smell like home, but this place is so huge, that I couldn't smell a thing.  I searched for places to go berry picking, to put blueberries in the freezer for winter.  But I got too busy to get to the fields, so I purchased berries from the farmer's market, froze some, made jam out of the rest.  

Same type of canning jars, same kitchen towel, same motions, but no sense of accomplishment.

I made my favorite quiche for dinner.  There was only the slight smell of garlic in the house.  The scents dispersed too quickly.

I have been working on an on-line class for my old employer, so in addition to house stuff, I am staying very busy.  Still, I haven't found additional work.  That may take some time.  I might finally get to work on a novel, or some other work that has been rattling in my head for years.  Now that I might have the luxury to explore such an endeavor, it feels like I'm standing in front of a great abyss, unsure how to cross it.  It's terrifying and exciting all at once.

Getting there . . .

For the last five weeks, here's what I've been doing:  week 1, moving, unpacking; 

week 2, trip to Maine; Week 3, unpack and go see my sister; 

week 4 both M's brothers and their families here, then go to Albany for a 50th wedding anniversary for M's aunt and uncle, week 5, M's parents come for a visit, clean and put bedrooms back together after previous visitors, work on on-line class, spend time with M's folks. 

Min is still planning her Spring wedding.  Here's a shot of her and L, her fiance.  She's in an arm stand, like a hand stand, and his legs are straight up against her.  I wish she would have sent me the whole picture, so you could see the balancing act, but this is what I got.  

Min is continuing her acrobatics training and modeling.  Here's a picture of her lighted hool-a-hoop act.

 

So it might not sound like much, but I've been very busy, and out of town way too much.  The house is now all "put together," meaning all the furniture is set up, pictures hung, stuff in cupboards.  I still have two small boxes in the kitchen to get to, and the entire basement is full of boxes for the office and craft room that need to be taken care of, plus the garage is piled high with moving boxes that need to be cut and flattened so they can be stored in the basement for any future move.  So that's a very brief description of all I've been doing. Needless to say, I've been working every spare moment, so I hope you'll forgive me for my blogging absence.  One good thing, we are having a lovely cool summer and gorgeous sunsets here at the new house.

 

Wedding Dress

Pat, here's a first look of Min in her wedding dress.  It needs some minor alterations, but here it is!

Little observations

My day consists of unpacking, furniture arranging, decorating, cleaning, running errands, and checking Facebook frequently to see what my friends and kids are up to, so I don't feel so disconnected from the people who mean so much to me.  It's a weird feeling, being older and starting over.  Moving was so much easier mentally and physically when I was younger.  I had the illusion of immortality when I was younger.  I didn't think when I moved, "this may be the last time I see this person."  This time though, I had to acknowledge that was a possibility.  The realization that now that I was gone, friends would find someone else to fill my absence.  That's as it should be, but it felt more like the end of an era when I moved this time.  This moment, these relationships, will never come again.  It's also another phase for me as a parent.  My kids gave me a good trial run when they both left the country to travel to other places.  It made me realize in a very real sense, they were their own people, living their own lives, that no longer included touching base with me on a daily basis.  Now that I have moved away, I have to look at their daily lives from a distance, see what they're doing, who they're spending time with, and what experiences they're having that is making them the people they will become.

Min is still doing circus training, only local now.  She models for spending money on occasion while also working on her wedding plans.  I love this child's eyes!  

B is still living the carefree life of an unencumbered, single, twenty-something, staying up late, playing video games, hanging out with his buddies.  I'm still waiting for him to grow up.  ;-). I love his sense of humor and his quick mind.  

I miss them both.  I miss my friends, but I'm very busy trying to get the house in order so I can focus on the on-line class I'm doing for the university I left behind, and trying to find other work here, trying to  find my new normal and get into a new routine.  I'm glad we made this move, took this chance, but it is an eye-opener how different moving is when you're older, as opposed to when you're younger.

Trying to find a new normal

I spent so many weeks de-cluttering, cleaning, packing, organizing, just to be ready for the big move.  Then we get to our new home and I begin unpacking furiously, moving furniture, getting new drivers' licenses, insurance, organizing our new place, only to stop everything abruptly to go on a previously scheduled family vacation.  Now I'm back home, still unpacking, meeting with fence companies, shopping for supplies, random furniture pieces, and I need to find all the cords to our desktop computer so I can finish prepping for an on-line class I'm doing for the Fall, get out a letter of recommendation, and resumes for the continued job hunt.  The dog is back from a two week dog training camp, and I still don't have my head on straight.  Every day I write a list for things that need to be done, work my way through most of the items on the list, then the next morning I start the process all over again.  I want to just sit and do nothing, but I don't know how long I'll have, to get everything organized before I go back to work, so I push through, try to get everything organized and done before the luxury of time is taken away from me.  Here's a quick tranquility break, pictures from our recent trip to Maine, then back to work!

Love Conquers All

U.S. Supreme Court Decision Legalizes Gay Marriage for the Nation

Future project?

CK, I thought of you when I saw this.

The next phase of life

My daughter, Min, got engaged last week!  She had never met anyone she wanted to marry, and I was settled in the thought that she never would marry.  This is so wonderful!  Her fiance, Luke, got her an opal surrounded by diamonds because she didn't want the traditional diamond solitaire.  They are planning a Spring 2016 wedding, in the woods, very Bohemian style, which fits well with Min's hippy nature.  They are currently looking for a suitable wooded venue that will let them bring in food, and have music well past the 11 p.m. Noise curfew time of most State Parks.  Min has a friend who lives on 300 acres, so she's planning to see if any place on the property will work.  I'm so happy for them.  Luke is a really great guy.  He's a vegetarian like Min.  He dotes on her and is very kind and considerate of her, plus he has a good job and a good head on his shoulders.  Min is very happy and I couldn't ask for more for her.

Internet Censorship

I received the following e-mail today.  Have any of you heard about this?

In just a few days, key lawmakers will vote on a new scheme that will facilitate the spread of a restrictive ‘link tax’¹ online.  This backwards censorship plan is supported by a politician named Jean-Marie Cavada. A classic Internet villain who wants to hold onto the past.

Will you demand that Cavada back off plans that would restrict your right to link before it’s too late?

We know Cavada hopes to usher in new powers that could see links and comments on Soundcloud, Facebook, and WhatsApp to your favorite blog redirected or blocked entirely.

Have you seen those “not available in your area” geo-block-like messages? Yeah, more of that sort of thing. We hate them too. 

If Cavada gets his way we’ll see much more of that frustrating Internet censorship and it will affect users everywhere. Let’s all send him a message he can’t ignore now.

Here’s the rub: Cavada’s link censorship plan is about to be voted on in a powerful EU parliamentary committee he chairs.²

Regardless of where you live many of your favourite websites and key web infrastructure will be covered by his irresponsible censorship scheme. 

As it stands, if Cavada gets his way you could see some of your favourite websites being forced to pay a ‘link tax’ for pointing to information that’s freely available elsewhere.³

Get this: he even tried to scrub the input from Internet users from this decision-making process.⁴ He then tried to block a UN free expression expert from talking to key decision-makers about the problems with his restrictive plan.⁵ Who does that?

For Cavada to back off he needs to hear from as many of us as possible right now. The vote is in just a few days. 

This isn’t the Internet we want: tell Cavada to back off this link censorship plan right now.

Every story has a hero and a villain, and this story is no different. We know which role Cavada is playing.

We have a hero: Pro-Internet champion Julia Reda has actually set out a positive roadmap⁵ for how to bring more of the Web we love to more people around the world.

Cavada is trying to ruin this forward-looking plan by inserting his censorship plan into the process. Let’s not let him do that.

-Meghan, on behalf of your OpenMedia team

PS: We need to make sure that Cavada hears our message loud and clear. And the more people who share this action, the easier that will be. Can you take a moment to share on Facebook and Twitter today?

 

Footnotes:

[1] 'Link tax' also known as 'ancillary copyright.' Find out more about it's effects here and here.
[2] Jean-Marie Cavada’s bio. Source: European Parliament.
[3],[4] What does Cavada want the future of copyright to look like? Source.
[5] MEP scuffle points to EU copyright controversy. Source: EU Observer.
[6] Copyright evaluation report - explained. Source: Julia Reda.

Plodding Through

 Last week I cleaned out one side of the garage, hauled three truck loads of stuff to the dump.

Today I began working on the basement.  B is finally home from Taiwan (Yay!) so he was helping me with all the heavy lifting and sorting. 

We only got a little further than what you see in this picture.  It's surprising how exhausting it is to lift case after case of legal books (easily close to 100 pounds) and make multiple runs to the dump.

We will get right back at it tomorrow.  M will be here to also help.  Yes, she came back early from England :-( but after she told me about the conditions of living and training, I can't say as I blame her, though I was hoping she would make it longer.  Oh well.  Now I'm off to visit blogs that I've neglected as of late.

A Diagnosis

So I haven't updated you all on my hives situation.  It got worse, which turned out to be a good thing.  As long as the hives looked like normal hives, the doctors kept putting me on prednisone waiting for it to clear up. 

Then the hives returned even while I was on the prednisone, and turned into these beauties that were bleeding under the skin.  I can't describe how painful they were.  They were hot, they burned, they were swollen, and it hurt to have my clothes touch them.  At first I wondered if they were shingles, because I had chicken pox when I was a kid, but they weren't.  I drove over to my doctor's office while they looked like this, demanding something be done.  I was ready to check into a hospital.  I didn't know what to do and clearly, the steroids weren't working and the doctors didn't know what they were. 

They got me in with an allergist who also specialized in immunology.  This was my lucky break.  When the doctors at this new office saw my hives, they said, "those are not ordinary hives."  To which I replied, "of course they're not, I'm special."  Good thing my humor hadn't left me yet.

The doctor then began to pepper me with non-stop questions on when they started, their changing character, any medications I'd been taking, known allergens, foods I'd been eating, etc.  He clearly had seen these before, and was just trying to narrow down which illness I had.  He said he narrowed it down to four different auto-immune disorders, but wanted a biopsy of one of the hives to verify what it was.

So a hole in my leg and a week later and they had the results.  I have 
Leukocytoclastic vasculitis

They think it might have been triggered by the statins I was taking for my cholesterol, since the hives developed four days after I began taking them.  Leukocytoclastic vasculitis is a very rare side effect of the particular statin I was on.  I found an NIH study on people who developed this disorder while taking statins.  Most people improved a couple of weeks after being off the statins.  Then there was another group that took 6 months to 2 years to get completely better.  Clearly I'm not in the first group. 

Since my immune system is still going nuts, thinking it's under attack, I have to go on immuno-suppressant drugs to calm it down.  I also have to have blood tests every two weeks like clockwork to verify that the drugs they have me on aren't harming my kidneys or liver, and to also verify that the leukocytoclastic vasculitis hasn't progressed to my internal organs, because that could kill me. 

It's such a weird thing to not feel sick, yet know I have something that could be deadly.  It doesn't feel real.  I feel fine.  So far the hives haven't come back, and I'm not noticing any side effects of the new medicine, well besides getting hot and flushed on occasion. 

So, now with the diagnosis in hand, and knowing I'm moving, they had to transfer my case to another immunologist in Buffalo when I move, all while continuing the bloodwork every two weeks.  So I spent the better part of one day, faxing medical records and giving background information to the new doctor's office in Buffalo, then did the same thing with a lab up there to continue my blood tests, also scheduled tests for while I'm still in Maryland, and because I can never have anything be simple and normal, I also had to find a lab in Maine, where I'll be on vacation for ten days in July, to do blood tests.  Everything is now in order, all the labs know when to expect me and who to send the results to.  Organization is a good thing.  :-)