The LONG Vacation

For those of you who've been wondering where I've been:

• First my sister and I went on our long-awaited cruise to the Greek islands.  Fabulous time, but the onboard Internet charges were pretty fabulous, too; I only used the minutes I absolutely had to for checking my email.  Pictures to follow...many, many pictures.
• The minute we got home we discovered that our parents had moved up the date of their relocation to assisted living and put me in charge of arrangements for the sale of their possessions and their house.  We moved the furniture, clothing, etc. that my parents designated the next week and I have spent most of the time since (aided on weekends by Sue and sporadically by Dad) going through all of the stuff they've accumulated in 80+ years of living.  When I tell you we found Dad's grade school report cards and two large-ish boxes of photos of people no one could identify, you'll get some idea of what we were up against.  Fortunately the estate sale people start pricing things on Monday and the sale itself is next weekend.  After that we can have the carpets cleaned, finish patching the nail holes in the walls, etc., and actually list the house.  (BTW, I already cleaned the carpets once myself because the neighbor wanted to show the house to a friend from California who was in town last weekend.)
• I mentioned last spring that I would have to give up singing in the church choir due to the contract job I was taking, but the director asked me to keep showing up on Sundays even if I couldn't attend the weekly practice sessions - revealing a touching but misplaced confidence in my ability to sight-sing.  Now she's asked me to sing a solo (this Sunday) and repeat the performance at a reception for clergy at one of the local hospitals next week.  I agreed, but I have NEVER sung alone in public before, so I am terrified.  Over the last three weeks I have practiced the first verse of "You Raise Me Up" so many times that I'm probably singing it in my sleep.  I trust this means my vocal chords will channel my inner Josh Groban on automatic pilot even if the rest of me freezes.
• The contract job that was supposed to only last for three months was renewed and just finished in mid-September.  Almost immediately a friend of mine offered me a full-time marketing job, which I started as soon as the home-excavation project was more or less under control.  So far, so good.  But busy.
• Still teaching online classes - in Week 3 of the current session - and handling website maintenance projects for all my regular clients.
• In what little spare time has remained to me I've been catching up on several long-overdue projects in the yard and the house, including finishing a needlepoint pillow I started 20 years ago.  Now I just have to finish the bedroom curtains...

Excelsior!

"Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings." ~Jane Austen

A Vicarious Tour of the Mediterranean

Next week my sister and I leave for our cruise around the Mediterranean.  It starts and ends in Rome and we're also stopping in Croatia, Sicily, Athens, and several of the Greek islands.

Normally when I'm going on a major vacation I stock up on guidebooks and phrasebooks months before I leave, and do my best to plot out what I'm going to see and learn at least a few words of the language if I don't already speak it.  This time, though, Sue and I made our cruise reservations only about six weeks in advance, and those six weeks and the preceding month were crammed with activity and anxiety over my cat, my job(s), and our parents.  We finally agreed to take one of the cruise line's shore excursions at practically every stop, which greatly reduced the need to plan what to see or to add to my small Italian and Greek vocabulary.  Instead, in my scraps of spare time, I've been re-reading my favorite books set in Italy and Greece.  Some of them are so old that the country in which they took place has probably altered all out of recognition, but the fact remains that these are the stories which originally made me want to visit Rome and Athens and the Greek islands.

Enjoy!

• The Greek novels of Mary Stewart.  These are the books which convinced a teenager from South Dakota (which had NO Greek restaurants at the time) that some day she had to try roast lamb, Greek salad, feta cheese, retsina, and ouzo.  (Love the food and the retsina; can take or leave the ouzo.)  Tightly plotted, great characters, atmosphere that breathes from every page.  My Brother Michael (Delphi); The Moonspinners (Crete, and much better than the movie with Hailey Mills), and This Rough Magic (Corfu).

• Two books by Barbara Mertz: The Sea King's Daughter (as Barbara Michaels, set on the Greek island of Thera) and The Street of Five Moons (as Elizabeth Peters, set in Rome and the nearby countryside).  Barbara Mertz is an archaeologist, and many of her books reflect that.  The heroine of The Sea King's Daughter manages to explain a lot about underwater archaeology and the history of the Minoan civilization while being chased around the island by a local cult, and the plot of The Street of Five Moons centers around the forgery of historical art objects and takes us through a number of museums, historic homes, and quaint Roman shopping venues along the way.  Nobody else can make a dangerous situation seem quite as funny as "Elizabeth Peters" does.

• A Cluster of Separate Sparks by Joan Aiken.  Set on the Greek island of Dendros, this is a parody of the traditional romantic suspense novel.  The heroine is hired as a teacher by a Greek millionaire, and at that point the book diverges wildly from its supposed genre - not least in its extremely unusual leading man.

• We're not going to Venice, but I had to re-read Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell anyway.  In the classic epistolary tradition of Camilla, this story is told almost entirely in the form of letters from Julia Larwood, a London barrister on an Art Lover's Holiday in Italy.  Venice, art, love, murder, and quite possibly the most hapless and absent-minded heroine ever conceived - one of my very favorite books.

• Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany by Frances Mayle.  No, we're not going to Tuscany, either, but the descriptions of the food, the landscape, and the Italian people still make these better reading than any dry guidebook to Italy.  Again, Under the Tuscan Sun is much better than the movie of the same name.

I will be buying a block of Internet minutes from the cruise company in order to stay in touch with my clients, my sister's office, and the cousin who will be looking out for our parents while we're gone, but I may be too busy to blog.  In any case, I should have enough photos and stories from this trip to keep you amused for weeks after our return.

“I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight." ~Daphne du Maurier, Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories

Preview of Coming Disasters

No, faithful readers, I have not dropped off the edge of the earth, but it's been a very busy month.  My mother's memory problems have escalated to the point where Dad finally admitted she can't be left alone if anything happens to him.  They've put down a deposit on an apartment in a facility with assisted living and memory care options and are scheduled to move there at the end of September.  My sister and I are touring the facility today so we can help them decide what to keep and what to eliminate, and then we're going to their house to start the sorting and weeding.  My mother in particular is overwhelmed by the logistics of moving, but we keep telling her that we'll do all the work and she can just sit back and direct traffic.

And, indeed, I have been doing some of the work already - notifying family members, hooking Dad up with a realtor, reassuring Mom, discussing with Dad which of his possessions (like his van, his golf clubs, and many of his tools) are welcome to live in the empty half of my garage.  Before this situation blew up, my sister and I had paid for a cruise - not the one in November we had originally looked at, but one for the last week of this month and the first week of next month - so I'm having dinner this week with one of my cousins and his wife to give them a copy of my parents' keys so they can be the go-to folks if anything goes wrong while Sue and I are gone.  I also have a date with my lawyer this week to take my parents off my living will, medical power of attorney, etc., and replace them with the same cousin.

Fortunately the contract job I've been working in downtown Phoenix will be over on September 14 and my next online class doesn't start until October, so I'll have a couple of weeks to help my parents pretty much full time with the final flurry of moving.  My cousin's wife went through a similar process a few years ago and I think I'm going to adopt her "day of the move" strategy: she sent her parents off for a nice lunch while she supervised the movers, unpacked all their stuff and put most of it away, and got rid of all the packing materials so they could just walk in and feel at home.  As someone who moved a year ago myself, I understand how depressing a huge heap of boxes in the middle of the living room can be.

Well, time to go pick up my sister and visit "The Home."

Getting old really isn't for sissies.

“Keeping up the appearance of having all your marbles is hard work, but important.”
~ Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

Love in the Afternoon

When I first moved into my house a year ago, a pair of jackrabbits used to hang out in the back yard.  They were obviously a couple; they would play games or snuggle side by side.

Then one of them disappeared, and the other rabbit appeared very depressed, drooping around and hiding under bushes.  At first I thought that perhaps they had had little rabbits and the mama bunny was staying home with them, but as the months went on I knew that some horrible fate had befallen the missing one.

Today I looked out the back door and saw TWO jackrabbits again.  Hares are quite territorial, so I doubt that these are trespassers.  It looks as if my Big Bun has found a new Honey Bun.  (Sorry for the fuzziness, I had to shoot through the sliding glass door and the porch screen to avoid alarming them.)  Ah, love...

 

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."  ~John Steinbeck

Death in the Desert

Earlier this week I glanced out the kitchen door and was startled to see this right outside my screened-in porch:

In case you can't tell, that's a cottontail disappearing pretty much whole down the gullet of one of the local coyotes.  I hadn't realized they ate their prey fur, toenails, and everything, but this particular coyote certainly wolfed it all down and left nothing behind.

I felt a little sorry for the bunny, but when the coyote turned and walked away I realized that she was a nursing female and painfully thin.  I didn't exactly start humming "The Circle of Life," but I did feel that at least the rabbit hadn't died in vain.

“Coyotes, by nature, typically avoid human contact.” ~Warner Johnston  [I doubt Warner ever lived in Arizona, where they don't seem particularly bothered by it.]