Mom's Health

So yesterday I got all pissed off and pumped up and just had to write about the protests and patriotism.  I think one of the reasons I was so pissed though was family.  Mom is sick.  More sick than normal.  And I'm just about as worried about her as I've ever been.  Lemme set the stage a bit so you can understand my concern when I get back to the present.

My father died 10 years ago.  It was devastating to our entire family.  Family, to us anyway, is just about everything.  To this day I'm still striving to earn my father's pride.  As hard as it was for me to lose my father, it was ten times as hard for my mother to lose her husband.  They had plans to grow old and travel together.  To enjoy both their retirements and reap all the benefits they'd worked so hard for.  After the initial round of grief, I thought Mom would be okay as she started to travel with my aunt... her sister.  Mom and Aunt S have always been very close, and now that they were both widows, they became even closer.

Mom, at the time, was very healthy.  Sure, she had type 2 diabetes, and smoked, and had several other long standing problems, but she could get up and run with the best of them.  She was about 60 at the time and looking at her and her activity level would put her closer to 50.  Then she started having heart problems.  Over the course of a year she went into the cardiologist and had a bunch of tests and figured out that she needed to have a triple bypass.  Just to rush through this part, she had a bad recovery from the surgery and after another year of tests, they found out that none of the bypasses were viable.  They all failed.  And their best guess was that they failed soon after the surgery... so while mom was trying to recover from open heart surgery, she didn't have the improvement the bypasses were supposed to offer.

Unpatriotic Protest?

I guess it started with Colin Kirkpatrick.  Maybe it started earlier, but this is what brought it to my attention as well as the attention of most people I know.  You see, he wanted to protest.  He wanted to bring attention to something and he knew one of the best ways to get his message out to the most people was to do something shocking.  So he sat down during the national anthem.  After that game he said "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder".

Later he switched from sitting to kneeling during the national anthem.  As he put it, he did this to show respect to show more respect to former and current U.S. military members while still protesting during the anthem.  At the time that this was going on, I couldn't have really cared less.  I caught it on the news, and saw a reaction of protesting his protest, but I figured it would blow over soon enough.  But my God... this has become an epidemic.  People seem to be losing their minds at the mere act of protesting during the national anthem and even more athletes are joining in.  People are crying because he can't seem to get hired on as a quarterback and say it's because of his protest, but it's also spreading to fans and even students in school.

And I'm left over here wondering what all the fuss is over.

She set's me free

So over at D+X I have an ongoing thread that I titled my "Playlist Diary".  I share music there that touches me.  Sometimes it's just how it touches the 'me' that's Caitlyn over there, while other times it's music that touches 'me' as in the person writing those posts out.  And even then, sometimes that author 'me' is male and sometimes it's 'female'.

But the underlying current in that thread is that I"m sharing music.  I'll sometimes write out a scene with me in character, and sometimes explaining how that particular song is affecting me in real life.

So today after I wrote up the previous post about going to New Orleans I wasn't feeling particularly 'Caitlynesque'.  I've been thinking recently that I might be slipping out of her mentality, so I wasn't too surprised.  Instead of moping about it, I just continued to focus on New Orleans.  I went to youtube and watched videos about the plane I'm going to take (MD-88), about checking luggage in at the airport, about both Detroit's and New Orleans's airports, and then on to watching videos about New Orleans itself.  I started watching one that was in a Video Log (Vlog?) format and had a musical montage in the beginning with a song that I hadn't heard before.

At first, it was just one of those songs that I don't particularly like.  It's chill.  Chill music normally doesn't do anything for me.  I think slower songs are fine for that mood, or even more upbeat songs that are kept quiet enough to be background music.  But this one... well, it changed me.  It washed over me in a way that left me feeling very feminine.  I started hearing bits of the lyrics and one in particular caught my ear...

Vacation Time!

So I'm fast approaching my next Vacation.  I'm so thankful that traveling has become a big part of my life.  From quick two day trips around my home state (Detroit, K-Zoo, Grand Rapids...), to weekends in the Windy City, to drives down to Dallas, to big trips down to Mexico.  In fact, it's become such an every day part of my life that I've now started mentally breaking them up.  Only a few years ago I would have looked at three days in Chicago as a full fledged Vacation.  I mean, it involved everything a vacation would have, right?  Travel (car? plane? train?), hotel (downtown?  boutique? cheap?), and things to do (touristy trips to the Sears Tower? revisiting the old neighborhood? going to the Art Institute?).  Heck, Detroit was about the same thing except for the travel as a car was the only obvious choice.

But now?  Honestly, that's a weekend trip.  It's fun and I want to do it as often as possible, but that really doesn't require a lot of planning.  Trips like that could be done at the drop of a hat so long as I have the days off, and really I could get most Friday's and Monday's off around my weekend so it's not even that much trouble there.  It's just a matter of having a friend that wants to do it and the cash in the account.  Dallas is a bit more of a trip as it does require either a plane ride or an extra four days to drive it.  But that's visiting friends.  I get to hang out with their family, maybe go to a school performance, get kicked in the nuts repeatedly by their dog, BBQ, check out my buddy's new guns... it's hanging out on a slightly bigger scale because we live so far apart.  It's not a vacation.