what a weekend!

[winterbadger]

I've spent a good part of the last hour catching up on LJ friends, and it sounds like various people have been having lots of fun, while others are struggling with difficult things and bearing up well. I am happy for the former and wish I could do more for the latter.

I also wish I could do more for my parents; my mum's been in the hospital since last week with pneumonia (when you live in a poorly ventilated house, have only partial lung function after surviving lung cancer, and believe yourself to be allergic to almost all medications, these things will happen). And my dad, not terribly well himself, has been having to deal with looking after himself and getting my mum to the ER (they said they waited for TEN hours--I can't really beleive that, even after taking an SO to one and waiting for an hour when she was already vomiting and dehydrated).

BUT, both my parents INSIST that they don't want me, my sisters, or their grandkids coming down to help out, that this would make things WORSE because they would have to worry about them driving all that way, etc. And when my folks say stuff like that, it's not Tante Racheleh saying "Oh, don't vorry about me, I'll chust sit here in da dahk!" They really mean, "Don't!" So.

So I've been keeping busy with other stuff. Friday night and Saturday morning I finished assembling and priming my 2000 point Eldar army for the IronFist Leage Escalation competition. Saturday mornign I took the little elfies over to Game Parlor in Chantilly and fought a challenge match against a Dark Eldar army, losing badly but having fun. (There's a reason I picked "qorbanot" as a name for my Eldar's craftworld.) Then I went over to john_arundel's and hung out with him, his two kids, and our pal Bryan. We had many bottles of Guinness (the three grownups did!), played a silly game I'd gotten that morning called Ninja Burger, and Peter showed us the current rough draft of the book that he and the other members of La Belle Compagnie are working on about life in 1381. Then redactrice and shy_kat showed up to babysit the kids while P and B went off to a La Belle meeting and I went to feed a friend's cats and play with them, then go home and do the same with mine.

Yesterday I lounged about in the morning, played soccer in the afternoon for two hours, then crawled home for a hot bath and movie night with redactrice, shy_kat, and beckon. We watched Hero and ate Chinese food. :-) The movie was good, beautiful and artisitc and full of entertaining wire-fu martial arts, but it wasn't as good as House of Flying Daggers, which the ladies and I had seen recently at the wonderful Fairfax Cinema Arts Theater. J and M and I played Ninja Burger; C went to bed becasue she had to work today.

Today I prepared to attack my list of Things To Do; I did pretty well, especially considering I took time out to play Settlers of Catan and foosball with Melissa, write four notes to people I'd spotted on match.com, correspond with one reenacting/wargaming friend from a former job and another long-lost friend from college (Phil Carroll, redactrice and balzacq! He says hi and is living in NH now). But I also did:

dishes
laundry--two loads
groceries (Tuesday p.m.)
homework
vacuum apartment
sweep porch (Tuesday a.m. before work)
check tires (Tues a.m.)
clean desk
go to Borders for a book (Tues p.m.)
deposit check (Tues some time)
clip cats' claws
recycling (Tues/Wed)
clean catboxes
put up coathooks
reorganize kitchen cabinets and store stuff from C

The desk is going to take an evening at least, and Wednesday night I have more soccer. And I still need to fold and iron the laundry. Oh, well, it's been a fun weekend, a relaxing one, *and* I got lots done. Yay me! :-)

Comments

[azbound.livejournal.com]

I can assure you it most likely did take 10 hours at the ER. The average wait at the hospitals down here is 18 hours and Dave and I waited 10-12 hours Saturday night.

[winterbadger]

Instant reaction: WHAT were you guys at the ER for?! Are you OK? Is Dave OK?

Secondary reaction: This tells me that the system of medical care in this country is simply broken, pure and simple. For someone to arrive at a hospital in need of urgent medical assistance and have to wait for hours is simply unacceptable. That's abuse. I'd expect that in a Thirld-World country. Forget Social Security; the government needs to be fixing *medicine*.

Well, strike that. Considering that they're probably going to break SS for at least a generation and likely cast millions of elderly people into poverty with their "reforms" probably the last people that should be trying to fix the medical system are the current government.