Gram has been losing weight for a year or so, mostly due to lack of appetite. Scans of her digestive system showed some abnormalities but nothing conclusive. A few weeks ago, Gram started bleeding though. This put in motion additional tests. Turns out she has uterine (or ovarian, I’m not sure) cancer.
It’s early stage. And essentially the choices are: surgery or slow death. Tuesday she goes in for surgery.
Since she’s so underweight, the surgery isn’t a slam dunk success. Getting the cancer is the least of the problem actually. She may see an extended amount of time recovering, and is at greater risk of complications. I’d be worried if I hadn’t already gone into do the next right thing
mode.
Next week I’ll start fretting about Gramps’ upcoming surgery.
Posted in Life.
Tagged with cancer, family, health, surgery.
By King Rat
– February 21, 2010
Yesterday was the big move for my grandparents. They were about as cranky as I’ve ever seen them. They had 62 years of accumulated stuff in the place they’ve lived in for 36 years, and they wanted to keep as much of it as possible despite moving into a place roughly 60% the previous size. They also felt like they were out of control since neither of them physically could help much with the move. On the roller coaster and not able to get off until the ride is over.
But we made it. Jennifer, Sharon, Jason and his dad John came and helped. My brother Joe and his former partner Mike took the day off and helped, despite Joe being under the weather. My aunt and uncle helped Gram and Gramps supervise, as well as drove and packed.
Jason and I got yelled at by the building staff. You can’t use that elevator!
And then they sent someone outside to yell at us again. We thought God intended us to use that elevator because it came 5 times in 10 minutes but the other one never did. We were wrong.
I am sore. But oh my god I am so happy knowing their health is so much better taken care of there. After an emotional move and getting Sharon a vehicle, I just cried as I drove home. So happy to have all of this come together.
Thank you so much to the people who helped. I have no way to say how much this meant to me.
Posted in Life.
Tagged with assisted living, family, moving.
By King Rat
– January 21, 2010
I need moving help.
Here’s the scoop: My grandparents are moving into an assisted living place. Originally Gramps wanted to hire movers, but he got back the estimate today and it was thousands more than he expected. The actual move is one bedroom and one living room worth of furniture. They are leaving the second bedroom and the kitchen out. I need 3 to 5 people to help with the move, either with loading or unloading. Pizza and beverages (at a minimum) will be provided. I’ll probably have a pie or two too.
Here’s the catch: It’s next Wednesday the 20th. Short notice and not a weekend. But even if you can only spare a few hours in the evening, we could use the help.
I’m expecting loading to be early afternoon (noon to 3pm) and unloading to be evening (4 to 6 pm ish).
So, can you help?
Edited to add locations: Moving from 6535 Seaview Ave NW (by Shilshole Marina west of Ballard). Moving to 12509 Greenwood Ave (Ida Culver House in Broadview).
Posted in Life.
Tagged with family, moving.
By King Rat
– January 12, 2010
I made this soup last week when I was staying over at my grandparents’ place. Gramps is supposed to be on a cardiac diet, so most boxed meals and canned soups are out. But soup made from scratch can be prepared without salt frequently, so I brought over The Ultimate Soup Bible
to pick through. Nothing too fancy, cause my grandparents aren’t fancy eaters. And with a small kitchen and old equipment, I wouldn’t be able to complete a lot of fancy steps.
Recipe is what I made, not what’s in the book.
- 6 tablespoons margarine (I would have used butter, but that’s what they have)
- 1 medium leek
- ¾ teaspoon fresh ginger
- ¾ cup unsweetened almond butter
- 1 medium carrot
- ½ cup frozen peas
- 1½ cup frozen cooked chicken
- 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
- 1 cup cream
- Melt the margarine in a dutch oven kind of pan
- Chop the leek
- Chop the ginger
- Sauté the leek and ginger until it turns soft
- Lower heat
- Chop the carrot
- Add almond butter, carrot, peas, and chicken, and ½ cup of water
- Cook until everything is cooked/not frozen
- Remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes
- Transfer mixture to blender
- Add 1½ cups water
- Process for about 90 seconds
- Pour back into pan
- Bring to boil while stirring
- Lower heat
- Stir in cream
- Stir in chopped cilantro
This was super super tasty.
Posted in Cooking.
Tagged with almonds, chicken, cream, soup, vegetables.
By King Rat
– January 7, 2010
With all the hullaballoo in my family, I haven’t gotten around to posting this to the blog yet. Most everyone will have seen it on Facebook, though. Next Pie Night will be Sunday, January 17th, nominally from 4 pm until 11 pm.
Do you like pie? Then come to pie night! Friends and enemies alike are welcome!
You can bring a pie, but you don’t have to. If you do bring a pie, please make/assemble it yourself; purchasing a pie at Whole Foods is verboten. Feel free to bring beverages, whipped cream, ice cream, or other pie accoutrements.
Where? 2301 Fairview Ave E in Seattle. Ring WEISS on the call board.
Please note in the comments here or add yourself to the Easy as Pie Night Facebook event if you plan to come, and if you plan to bring pie. I need to know approximately how many pies to make.
Any last minute questions or need of directions? Call 206-607-9177.
Image A Slice of Lemon Meringue Pie by Daniel Greene used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 2.0 License.
Posted in Events.
Tagged with pie, pie night.
By King Rat
– January 4, 2010
I’ve been known to cry in front of people before. Lots in fact. Any kind of public grief will have a decent chance of setting me off.
Last night, for the first time, I experienced nearly breaking down just because I was so overwhelmed. I’m good at soldiering through. I never once felt like I was going to lose it during mom’s illness. Tired, stressed, and very definitely broken. But soldiered through.
The last week and a half of Gramps being in the hospital has just been rough. Gram’s dementia is very serious, though she’s mostly lucid. But she can’t be left on her own, even though she thinks she’s capable of taking care of things.
The last two weeks I’ve been under a deadline for work. I was handed a broken project in a language I didn’t understand with no requirements and working with a service that has incorrect documentation. I had another project that possibly had to be done before the first of the year.
So I was driving Gram to and from the hospital. I talked with Gramps a lot. I worked from the visitor lounge on the cardiac ward. I’d work until 3 am as well.
I really wanted to go to Heather’s birthday party last night. But shepherding Gram through her medication took nearly an hour. I left their place around 10:15. Decided I was going up to the party anyway even though I knew the place closed at 10:30. On the way, I started losing it.
No vacation. Missing stuff I want to do. Work pressure. Laundry and cleaning undone. A best friend who stopped talking to me 9 months ago. Handling dad. Handling grandparents. Another night of working until 3 am.
It finally got to me.
I’m better now. Both projects aren’t needing me for a while. Gramps is home and my grandparents will be moving to assisted living hopefully within the week. My girlfriend Sharon, despite me being a Christmas grump, bought me an awesome Christmas present (pajamas that won’t get me arrested) and painted a card for me. Spent the day mostly on Gram and Gramps’ couch.
Last few years I’ve written a year in review kind of thing. I think this post about covers it.
Posted in Life.
By King Rat
– December 31, 2009
At 12:07 this morning I got a call from my grandfather. When he calls, I answer. He’d passed out in the hallway and had called paramedics. He assumed they would take him to Swedish like they normally do. There’s a “normal” course of events when Gramps has a heart attack. This is his 5th or 6th in 13 months and he has another 3 or 4 hospitalizations in addition during the same time frame.
So I did my normal course. Get dressed. Make coffee. Call Joe. Dawdle on the internet for 15 minutes. Then leave for the hospital. I got there 15 minutes before they did.
I am always fine when I get the call. Driving up Lynn is fine. I start to get worried this will be the last time I see him about the time I get on the freeway. By the James St exit I am a wreck and near bawling. But I pull it together while climbing James St. And I’m all business by the time I get to Swedish.
That is my “normal” progression.
My main concern is Gram. She has dementia and stress makes her worse. So this morning I walked to meet her at the ambulance and took charge of her while the paramedics wheeled Gramps into emergency. They thought I worked there and were surprised I couldn’t tell them the access code for the emergency doors.
Gramps was admitted overnight, though now it has stretched into 2. Gram cannot stay by herself though she thinks she is fine. So I am crashing on her couch for the second, hopefully less sleepless, night.
The docs who downloaded his pacemaker data confirmed a heart attack. Without the builtin defibrillator, he would have died. It’s the 3rd or 4th time it’s saved his life.
Posted in Life.
Tagged with family, grandfather, heart attack.
By King Rat
– December 25, 2009
The neologism making the rounds this winter is snowpocalypse
referring to the big snowstorm that hit the east coast. The Lede
a blog at the New York Times, attempted to track down the origins of the word snowpocalypse. They tracked it back to Seattle last year, and a few other places in 2007 and 2006.
But they didn’t really find the origins.
Someone on the Seattle Livejournal Community wants that community given credit for Snowpocalypse. And they certainly have a case for popularizing it during last year’s snow storm, though the Stranger’s Slog and other popular local blogs had a lot to do with it. But the term goes further back than that.
DCist claims they first used it. In 2005.
But they are wrong. Searching even further back I found a post by sea_colleen at Seattle Metblogs that used the term Snowpocalypse a couple weeks before DCist did. I didn’t use Google to find that. I knew it where it was because the origins of the term have come up before, and I know the term had currency in one Seattle group before 2005.
Seattle Metblogs sea_colleen is Leenerella on Livejournal, and she was an active participant on the old Seattle Gothic message boards, hosted on ezboard. The word was used there a lot in the 2002 to 2004 time frame to refer to the local media’s hyperbolic coverage of various snow events. They’d imply that the city would shut down, but then we’d get ¼ inch of snow and life would go on. If we did get any snow, King 5 would send Danger
Jim Forman outside to report from the most blustery location he could find.
I don’t know who first used the term on Seattle Gothic. I don’t know where they stole it from or if that person coined it herself. But the folks there have a better claim than the other pretenders.
Sadly, little remains of that message board. The moderators pruned message threads, particularly little content ones like Snowpocalypse!
. Ezboard moved it from server to server, and lost oodles of discussion threads in various crashes. Versions of it were hosted by members both before and after it was on Ezboard. Ezboard became Yuku and some archives are there. The Wayback Machine has a few posts archived.
Edited to add: Found a couple other references from Sea-Gothers that pre-date DCist’s claim. Here’s Prince of Happiness, another Sea-Gother, using snowpocalypse in December 2005 as well. And a snapshot from the Wayback machine of forum topics on Seattle Gothic from January 2005, one of which is SNOWPOCALYPSE 2005!!1ONE!!!ELEVEN!1!!.
Posted in Opinion.
Tagged with neologisms, origins, snowpocalypse, weather.
By King Rat
– December 23, 2009
Posted in Common Knowledge.
Tagged with video, youtube.
By King Rat
– November 4, 2009
In my quest to find more rice recipes (cause I have a giant bag of rice and it’s cheap), I tried this recipe for Spanish rice from Greg Atkinson’s West Coast Cooking. Really easy, fresh ingredients, pretty tasty.
- 2 cups long grain white rice
- 1 medium onion
- 2 tablespoons minced garlic
- 1 tablespoon dried oregano
- 2 large tomatoes
- 2 teaspoons sea salt
- 1 bay leaf
- Rinse the rice several times in cold water
- Let rice drain in strainer
- Chop the onion
- Cut the tomato up
- Put tomato, onion, garlic and oregano in a blender
- Puree
- Remove mixture from blender when the blade just spins through the tomato chunks
- Put mixture in food processor and/or chop stuff by hand until the chunks are much smaller
- Put mixture back into blender
- Puree vegetables until they are liquefied
- Add water to make 4 cups total liquid
- Pour vegetable liquid into 3 quart saucepan
- Add salt and bay leaf
- Bring liquid to boil
- Add rice to saucepan
- Reduce heat to low and cover
- Simmer 20 to 30 minutes until liquid is absorbed
- Remove lid, stir, and let stand
Posted in Cooking.
Tagged with rice, vegetables, vegetarian.
By King Rat
– November 2, 2009
