Carol's random babble

In the TV series "Firefly," there's a comment from Shepherd Book to Mal in the episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds (when Saffron has stowed away on the ship claiming to be Mal's wife): "If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater." I think they should add spammers to that list. It's not bad enough that I get spam email on a daily basis (who doesn't?) but I've seen an increase lately in spam comments on my blog. Sometimes they are obvious. When you get the same word repeated 8 times in a row ... or a bunch of nonsense text full of links, those are pretty clearly spam. Sometimes it's not so clear, but if you read through you can tell. One recent example started out asking me what my blog platform is. Hello? Blogspot = Blogger. On the "It's My Birthday" post (where I talk about my dying mother sayi...

Well, my birthday is nearly over, actually. I was complaining at work this morning that it's (hopefully) my worst birthday ever. I couldn't sleep in the middle of the night last night (from 2:30 to 6 a.m.). I have a cold and feel like crap. We're essentially waiting for my mom to die of dementia. (Part of the reason I couldn't sleep was the worry that the nursing home would call with bad news.) There are signs that it's very close. There was a care plan meeting about Mom at the nursing home today. Donna and I were there, and Suzanna and her boyfriend Chad showed up - Suzanna didn't want to visit Mom unless Donna was there. So they went to see her while I waited with the people there for the meeting, then they stayed for the meeting. After the meeting, I thought we were going to stay with Mom for awhile, so I went back to her room and sat in a chair next to her and held her hand. A couple of times I told her that I was there, and that it's my birthday...

I have mentioned before that my mom is in a nursing home after she broke her leg last August. Since then, life has been a roller coaster of figuring out what to do about her apartment, packing her apartment, purging a lot of stuff and storing the rest, my sister (and Mom) deciding that Mom would, after all, go "home" from the nursing home, into new apartment with my sister (Donna) to look after her, Donna and Mom finding and signing a lease on a nice apartment downtown, getting Mom's stuff moved there, and all the ups and downs of Mom's medical treatment, including surgery to get her leg fixed. During the nursing home stay, Mom started having problems with eating. She would eat, then gag and throw most of what she ate back up. This would happen after a bite or two, or sometimes she just gags even when she's not eating. She's lost a lot of weight. So a round of medical tests, to see what is causing this. During this, it was discovered that she had "...