Let's
move on for a moment before we return to this weekend's California
Thanksgiving I-5 freeway traffic fiasco. It's obituary time! Here's
a good one from a few weeks ago, for Helen Joseph Epstein. I thought
only the Catholics gave their women male middle names, but I guess
not. Sidenote, I remember my friend having a nun named Sister Joseph
in Catholic grade school, and that was in and amongst all the Sister
Katherines and Sister Mary Graces. It was funny back then when I
imagined a lady with a beard in a habit.
"Helen
Joseph Epstein: April 28, 1914 - November 17, 2006. Born in Cleveland,
survived by (a lot of people). Her careers include Cosmetic sales
and real estate Investment. (All spellings and caps are sic, btw,
not mine.) She will always be remembered by her personal traits;
gracious, humorous, gorgeous, loyal, artistic, glamorous, shopaholic,
stubborn, friendly, social, critical, stunning, and street smart.
Foods she enjoyed were sweet potatoes, toast with jelly, chocolate
ice cream, white fish, soup, sardines, and tuna fish, canned. Some
more of her favorites include her Jaguar, the color Red, and listening
to music. Her favorite countries were America and Israel, cities;
Los Angeles, New York, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Her most popular
sayings: "Eat your carrots!", "What do you need it
for?", "Drink your milk." Her prized possessions
were hats, ethnic art, rugs, clothes, dishes, her home, and Judaism.
She also enjoyed gardening, designing, entertaining, flower and
furniture arranging. Last wish from 2001, "I wish that I could
walk naked in the rain!"."
Sounds
like she had a good life. And if you read between the lines, in
lieu of flowers all donations should be made to the high-maintenance
bipolar crazytown society.
===
So,
speaking of death, Gray's grandma died. He's in his early thirties,
and this is only his second grandparent to leave the planet. I haven't
had any grandparents for like 15 years, which I've mentioned before,
so it's a little foreign to me. She was 82, she had Alzheimer's
in a bad, bad way, and at the end she went really quickly. We did
not go to the funeral, which for various and sundry family reasons
didn't bother Gray very much. Who it did bother (the death itself,
not us not going to the funeral), was Gray's mother, whose mother
it was who died. And while this Thanksgiving wasn't the Worst
Thanksgiving Ever, pockets of it came pretty darn close to tying
it for first place. Combined with all the emotion surrounding the
death, who knew that my new interest in organic baby things would
be capable of causing breakdowns and chaos throughout the land?
I will not go into details, but I will say here what I would not
say to anyone in person because I often spare people's feelings
to a fault even if I'm broiling inside: if you invite someone to
your house to stay with you over a five-day holiday period and they're
almost seven months pregnant, don't give them shit. About anything.
Just bury your problem or talk about it rationally, one or the other,
plain and simple.
===
There
just was no escaping the traffic, to or fro.
===
So
no gestational diabetes for me, which is good and I can resume eating
my beloved french fries once in awhile. What I do have, it turns
out, is a vague case of anemia, which blows, and which I've never
had before. The baby is apparently leeching my iron away, so I have
to take Iron pills, and guess what their chief side effect is? Constipation.
So my god, how much more prune juice can I drink? I fear the baby
won't have enough uterine room with all the stuffed-full unmoving
small intestines in there.
I
also got a flu shot this morning, which I debated high and low over.
I've never had one before, and I'm pretty healthy overall, but then
there was that study last year that said if a baby in utero is exposed
to a fever in the third trimester it's more likely to get schizophrenia,
and then one of my (doctor) friends had to be hospitalized while
pregnant for a flu last month in the ICU and was like YOU HAVE TO
GET THE SHOT, and I found out that the version my OB's office was
giving is the one with zero mercury preservative, so I did it. And
in two weeks I go back to get that RH shot, which is an actual blood
product where if you look carefully it will warn you on the manufacturer's
website that it could give you Cruetzfeld-Jakob disease (like mad
cow!) even though it's unlikely, which I'm also having a raging
debate about with myself, but my own doctor is like YOU HAVE TO
GET THE SHOT, so with all these people screaming at me what am I
supposed to do? All of this makes me sound insane, but really I
just want everybody to be safe and healthy.
I'm
going to go have a sandwich (with bread) and concentrate on recovering
from this weekend.
