The Burrow

Appliances that were inserted to treat him are going to be removed tomorrow, along with the offending irritant.   This comes as a surprise, although not an unwelcome one.  The hospitalist managed to squeeze us into the surgeon's schedule. Once again, I'll be driving to the hospital, parking with the valet, and waiting. I've spent most of this summer in the hospital, waiting. Getting old is not for sissies.

FlapJilly's birthday was July 29th.  Her mother called us so that we could sing happy birthday to her.  Usually, we make that phone call on our own.  That happens when I decide that it is July 29th. Unfortunately, I spent all day Wednesday knowing it was the 28th. How does this happen to me?   Without a school or work schedule to follow, I end up at Pilates on Monday when I'm scheduled for Tuesday.... or I miss my eldest grandchild's birthday. Spending days in the hospital added to the problem, especially when they don't update the day/date white board in the patient's room. As G'ma said when asked for the day and date during her mental status exam - Do you have a newspaper?  That information is in the top right corner. If only the print edition of the local paper weren't $90 a month......

Costco's aisles were filled with backpacks and lunch boxes this afternoon.   Monday was New Teachers First Day. School starts in one week - Wednesday, August 6th. My desk is covered in planning for the year.  A planting calendar, the school year calendar, Back to School Love Feast..... my brain is not prepared for this. It's July.  It's the middle of the summer.  I should be planning a trip to the ocean, not deciding which seeds to plant in Grandma's Garden.   I don't understand why the school year is structured the way it is.   Tucson Unified School District is floating the idea of year-round school, or 4 days/10 hour weeks.  (Parents have been asked to weigh in;  this woman's analysis is worth reading) .  The Cuters' school in Chicago was on trimesters; we loved it.  Having vacation time when everyone else was in school made ski slopes uncrowded and theme parks deserted.  We made good use of the time. I'm not just c...

TBG is being released today.  The relief is palpable.... for both of us.  The hospitalist managed to secure a follow up appointment with a doctor whose scheduler told me the next avaliable date was in November.  Home health care is organized, and I had nothing to do with it.  Behind the scenes, people were working and planning and all we had to do was say yes.  His bills this year are close to $500,000, and that's without this 8 day plus surgery stay. We paid a manageable deductible.  Procedures billed at thousands were magically reduced to hundreds because we have insurance.  The uninsured pay the not-discounted-amount.  It's easy to see why medical debt destroys families.  Medicine in America is broken.  None of the staff here received the 40% increase that TBG now is paying for h his insurance.  Where did that money go?  Gun violence is never acceptable.  I can, however, understand the rage and fury and helplessness tha...

Drove home in the dark, though tonight it was punctuated by bolts of lightning.  This is not the lightning of Long Island or Chicago or Marin.  These are vertical, startlingly bright, tremendously long, bolts of light that illuminate the mountains and make midnight feel like late afternoon.  Sometimes there are more than one at a time, and the whole sky turns a milky white. I would rather have been a passenger than the one responsible for staying calm as the night explodes. Hadn't remembered to leave a light on and groped to find the alarm, whose bright green clock wasn't enough to encourage a speedy transit of the 5 steps from the door.  I dropped my hospital purse and the bright pink cooler on the kitchen counter and turned to the sink to wash my hands. I looked up as I replaced the detritus of the day with aloe and grapefruit and saw this Last month,  Auntie M and Mr. T sent me a fruit basket filled with lots of multi-colored paper, some unfortuna...

Drove home in the dark.   Hungry, but this isn't New York City so by 9pm there's MickeyD's or Burger King.  Created a boring but filling turkey sandwich, read Miles Taylor's Substack . Found Arcturus and Vega and went inside; the air was too thick to be enjoyable. I was moping.   Came into the library and saw a new message blinking red on  the answering machine (yes, an answering machine for our landline.... yes, a landline, too). Wondered what the other 14 messages were and listened from the beginning. Magic. Giblet and Little Cuter babbling happily, signing off with a resounding BYE!!! FlapJilly and Little Cuter encouraging Giblet to say hi. Big Cuter and Queen T after their first ultrasound; she's beautiful. The rest were nonsense and easily deleted.  While congratulating my past self for saving them, I replayed my three love notes from the past. I'm smiling and my heart is full.  Like I said: Magic.

Trying to find joy in a hospital setting is a matter of small steps.   This morning,  TBG was ready to lighten the darkness and let me roll up the windowshade. It's a lot easier to be anxious when there is beauty avaliable with a tug on a chain.  Instead of focusing on the tubes and the beeps and the evidence of illness surrounding him, I'm lying back on the small, sort of comfortable, sofa,  watching the clouds and writing to you.  I can feel the love.  I feel you caring.  It's a virtual, giant, warming hug.  Thanks for being here.  

Hospitals (yes,  we're back in the hospital) create an interesting collection of humans.  When we arrived this morning, there were white,  middle aged,  sick people in the waiting area of the Emergency Department.  This evening,  it is filled with people of every color and size and shape.  It also creates an interesting collection of machinery,  much of which is attached to TBG at the moment.  Heart rate,  blood pressure,  respiration.... I can watch it all from my chair at the end of his bed.  There are green squiggly lines,  white curves with flattened tops,  blue  mountains, all sorts of numbers in pink and green and turquoise. There's some comfort to be taken from monitoring the monitor.  It makes up for the fact that I can do nothing to fix what's wrong with him.  The EMTs came just after my 911 operator told me to call back if he stopped breathing.  That was a piece of information.... what el...

Did you ever stand in the middle of the room looking for the adult who would tell you what to do? That was me, last night.  I'll have more to say tomorrow.  Right now,  I'm trying to be the competent grow up on the room. 

"Are you and the President friends?" "I'm his lawyer." At a certain point, the rest of us have to stand up and shake the 37% of Americans who think that this shit is okay.  It's really really not. JD says that if Watergate happened today, it would be a 12-hour news story .  I have been thinking about that since he said it last month.  No matter how I spin it, I can't make it okay.  He's telling us that his administration's sins dwarf  Nixon's.  And he doesn't seem to mind. It's not okay.  It's really not. Pete Buttigieg just explained it all very clearly while talking to Jen Psaki.  We are in a moment where real change can happen.  FFOTUS certainly broke everything, but that doesn't mean we have to put it back together the same way. Real thoughts spoken in complete sentences combined into paragraphs and plans and ideas and I really really really hope he gets to be president.  Soon.

TBG and I managed to listen to some of it.  We clicked away at the same time that CBS stopped showing it.   Sen. Mark Warner (not John Warner, the Virginia Senator once married to Elizabeth Taylor) called on his Republican colleagues to stand up and defend our elections against FFOTUS's lies and mendacity.   But it's more than lies and mendacity.  It's truly drivel. DRIVEL Definition & Meaning Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com › dictionary › d rivel Jul 2, 2026 — 1. to talk stupidly and carelessly FFOTUS accused China of stealing millions of Americans' personal information by hacking into our (unbelievably, like no one has ever seen) insecure voter data bases.   Sure, maybe.  Except it's an incredibly dumb argument, especially coming from a politician. Anyone can access those data bases by paying the County a fee.  It's how campaigns are run.  I brought the huge computer printouts from the Marin County Recorder's...

The interminable road work fronting her business for the past too many years to count forces me to drive several extra miles, ignoring the map lady's guidance, since none of her left turns or u-turns are possible.  It doesn't matter.  She's worth the trip. The relationship between a woman and her hairdresser is personal and private and, if it's a long term relationship, a living diary.  You have the same basic conversations every time, because that's what life looks like.  Family, work, sports, politics.... whatever your connections, you've watched them evolve over time.  Children grow, teams win, politicians die, but the chair and the tools and the participants remain the same.   Today, as most days over the past few years, we moaned and groaned over FFOTUS's clown car government and its ripple effect on small businesses like hers.  People are stretching out their intervals for services, letting their hair grow, giving up colorizing.   ...

TBG found it.  He was searching for something that wasn't sports related.  He stumbled upon something neither of us knew was coming.  It didn't appear in any of the what to watch  lists that come across my feed.  It was just lying there, waiting to be discovered. Season 3 of The Diplomat  is on Netflix. We were excited.  The sun was still up and we turned it on anyway. Six hours later, well past our bedtime, we decided to save the last two episodes for tomorrow night, in part so I could type to you, but mostly because we want to stretch out the pleasure.    This is brief.  I am tired but my mind is racing.  I'd definitely add this to  yesterday's list. .

It's been a while since I shared the good stuff.  Here are snippets to entice you to dig deeper. Geraldine Brooks is one of my favorite authors.  Her take on Little Women  won the Pulitzer Prize.   Horse  is about so much more than the celebrated stud sire and his enslaved groom.  Memorial Days  is her latest and I loved it as much as all the others.  It's a retrospective and real time look at  grieving the death of her husband, Tony Horwitz  (who turns out to be a very interesting character himself and whose Confederates In The Attic  is on my library reserve list. ***** Millie Bobbie Brown won my heart as Eleven in Stranger Things.  Although TBG dismisses it as barely a chick flick, I find the Netflix adaptation of Nancy Springer's young adult novels  to be absolutely delightful.  Where he sees puerile, I see guilelessness.  Her gender bending clothing, her fierce and admirable mother, and her domineering ...

Today, he is 8. Fitzgerald, the dog zooming through the birthday photo shoot is oblivious, while I am struck by the passage of time.  Wasn't it yesterday that FlapJilly and I were waiting at home for Mama to push him out?  Now he's hitting home runs. I love the big kid he's becoming,  the kind, sensitive, artistic, responsible, human who runs faster than anyone else, ever, and whose heart is always open and giving.  He was that way as a toddler.  He's that way now.  Watch out, world, for what's coming next.  He's not a baby any more.    

At 7:15  this morning,  as I realized that, once again, the water in Grandma's Garden was not working,  my car thermometer read 98.   Tonight, at 8:30, our pool's thermometer read the same.   The heater turns off when the pool reaches 85 and we let the sun warm it up the next few degrees to take the edge off.  But sustained triple digits during the day lead to overnight lows around 82 and if I've not done my laps by 10 I'm swimming in bathwater.   Without a sun shield and a shaded parking space, my car barely cools off by the time I'm home. First world problems, I know.  But the service dog I saw this morning was wearing rubber soled booties with gripper dots to raise her paws off the sidewalks.  It's not an overreaction.  People who live outside show up in Emergency Rooms with third degree burns from sitting and sleeping on our sidewalks.... and that's a first world problem, too. Anyway, it's too hot to do much think...

Whatever the reason, the quarterfinal game was hard to watch.  The Americans were late to every ball.  They stood around as Belgium danced around them.   4-1 is an embarrassing soccer score.  Watching that fourth goal bounce into the net, initiated by an errant pass and unimpeded by the goalie, had us groaning.  Is soccer just not our game?  Was the brouhaha over the red card too much of a distraction?  Did changing the line up and then changing the line up confuse the players?  Or did they just not care? That's the sigh.  Here comes the smile. Waiting in line at the clinic's pharmacy is always a pleasant experience.  Weird, I know, but absolutely true.  Today, we three women all agreed that, although none of us (nor TBG on the bench) could recall its name, the Sally Fields movie with the octopus is a must watch film.   Although I was feeling pretty good after sharing intelligent thoughts about an amazing actress with...

Eric Swalwell was MSNBC's favorite panelist until he wasn't any more.  He vanished in an instant, withdrawing from California's gubernatorial race (and why isn't that governatorial?) amid allegations of sexual misconduct by numerous women. ***** John Kennedy engaged in numerous acts of sexual misconduct during his presidency..... that we know of.  Were women too frightened to come forward then?  Or was he just so charming that no one could say no?   ***** Graham Platner managed to defuse his tattoo disaster only to fall upon yet another allegation of rape.  Bernie Sanders, an early supporter, wants him to withdraw from the Senate race.  Seems like we'll be watching Susan Collins be shocked and surprised for 6 more years. ***** Ruben Gallego, once a good friend of Eric Swalwell, now regrets their relationship.  Ruben used to be a regular on MSNBC, too.  We haven't seen him in a while.  Is the stain of that relationship souring his status ...

After ruining my 4th of July, FFOTUS decided to trash my World cup fun, too. Was the red card an overreaction?  Do we like VAR?  They won without him with only 10 players on the field so maybe it doesn't matter? All that was interesting to consider as we waited for tonight's match.  Then the Corruption Hotline fired up and our felon was talking to FIFA's crook and afterwards the red card disappeared. Note: the rules say a red card cannot be overturned. Note: the two guys on the phone have never, will never, can never play by the rules. So now, instead of watching the US men triumph or collapse under adversity, we're faced with a match whose outcome has already been marked with an asterisk. Everything the man touches dies.

America couldn't throw itself a birthday party.  Everyone seemed to lose interest once it became all about FFOTUS.   There was no bunting.   There were no American flags put out for the occasion (except ours, because he doesn't get to take that memory away from me).   There were no 250th Birthday Sales.  Our Mexican restaurant  did offer me a $6 margarita (which I happily accepted) and volunteered to change the tv channel (is that even a thing anymore?) so that we could both watch the soccer with ease.  We didn't inconvenience anyone; we were the only patrons. For some reason known only to himself, TBG turned our television to Fox and invited FFOTUS into our living room.  God, Communism, and your beautiful 2nd Amendment  later, he began introducing very old veterans who were to salute very old flags and then take their very old selves off FFOTUS's stage.   Some of them didn't get the memo and seemed to overstay their ...

This is how I feel about America right now - droopy.  But there was a time when I felt hopeful, even enthusiastic about our standing in the world.  That's when I originally wrote the post I'm reprinting below the sad flag.  I'm going to let those memories take me back in time for the 4th of July. And it turns out that I will put on our country's colors and not give in to the despair I feel.  I cannot let him take this away from me, too. The sky is pure blue,   painted that way as G'ma said every time she looked up.  The occasional fluffy white cloud drifts by, and I'm hearing G'ma remark on that, too.  The flag in front of the house is swaying, the pole wedged between the base and the capital of one of the front columns, secured with thin, silver, crafting wire.   It's an elegant solution to TBG's reluctance to put holes in his house;  I feel like Daddooooo every time I wrap another ring around the post. Daddooooo was big on ingeni...

I'm not in the mood to celebrate or look back on happier times. I should have no problem with my closet this weekend.  I have a plastic tote filled with red, white, and blue tie dye, with flag adorned t-shirts, with sweaters fastened with patriotic buttons.  It's our country's 250th birthday party and we all should be celebrating. But there's nothing going on.  No Happy Birthday America sales, no bunting, no flags, no nothing. I feel somewhat awkward putting on any of the celebratory finery.  FFOTUS has preempted America's birthday party.  He's crashed the event, made it all about himself, and in doing so ruined it for the rest of us.  It's hard for me to feel proud of America's exceptionalism when FFOTUS has smeared it with feces. Take a look at these pictures Brother took on Tuesday afternoon at Trump's American State Fair on the National Mall in DC. From Brother's accompanying text: The temporary buildings are synthetic stucco and canvas mural...

John Roberts wrote both decisions. In one, he says the President can fire anyone he wants,  in any Federal agency, even those created by Congress to be independent of the political party in power.  Goodbye FTC Commissioner Slaughter. In the other, he says the President can't touch the Federal Reserve Board.    Member Cook keeps her job. Justice Amy Coney Barrett took him to task , pointing out the tension between the two rulings. If you're still wondering whether the Supreme Court is acting as an independent body, beholden to the Constitution and the American people, I'd love it if you can explain this. All I've got is that the money-ed class does not want the global economy rocked any more than FFOTUS has done already.  They are less concerned about big businesses merging and driving up prices while lowering competition and worsening the situation of those American people they're supposed to be serving. My Congressman is running tv ads saying I work for YOU!...