Three weeks after my father started rehab, my mother started getting more and more confused and less able to move. She went in the hospital Saturday. Monday morning, we were told that she is in the final stage of terminal cancer. I need to comprehend this.

First, if anyone still bothers to read this blog, I just want to preface the following with one plea.

If you have diabetes or a loved one with diabetes, do whatever it takes to get it under control. Whatever it takes.

Tomorrow my father leaves the hospital after two and half weeks. He also leaves minus his leg halfway up the shin. I couldn’t convince him to go to the hospital because he was worried more about my mother, who was in the hospital three and a half weeks  earlier because complications from chemotherapy almost cost her her leg. Once she was out of danger, he finally relented.

After two days of iv antibiotics, the doctor said it was a lost cause.

He’s taken it a lot better than I have. Other than a night duty physician who felt it was less bother for her rounds if he was kept on atavan for four days after his amputation, he’s come out in pretty good spirits considering. 

He goes into inpatient rehab Thursday. He thinks he’s going to be on a prosthesis in two to three weeks. Not if he doesn’t get the diabetes under control, and even then it’s going to be a long winter before he’ll be mobile because of the associated healing problems.

I’m surprised I’m even writing about this. I can’t believe what’s happened the last three weeks.

Been busy developing a business writing course for a local college management seminar, but I stumbled across this on Facebook (thanks to Mark C. Still). What a blast, considering it’s been 28 years since I saw this . . . .

And they expect me to teach writing to managers . . . . .

Sorry, the embed’s not working . . . try here

There exists a severe disparity between how Europeans can carry off the white captain’s cap look and how Americans can do the same.

Example: Jurgen Prochnow as the hard-boiled, veteran U-boat skipper with his no-nonsense chief engineer in “Das Boot”:

Alles gut?

And hard-boiled pop ditty writer Daryl Dragon and his nonsensical sidekick Toni Tennille:

Muskrat love? 'America' should have been summarily beaten for giving this duo the rights . . .

I rest my case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kennedy

if only to behold, within a 2-hour span:

1) the sight of Meryl Streep and an incredible simulation of a mutated Jami-Gertz lookalike laughing and cutting up like a pair of delirious giant cassowaries or Miss Hathaways;

2) the odd sight of Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci sitting together in a tub full of suds;

3) the impressive sight of Meryl Streep boning a duck (a scene done only once before by Lea Thompson in “Howard the Duck,” and with far less deliberation and brutality than by Ms. Streep);

4) a delicious-sounding way to reduce butter;

5) aforementioned duck encased in pastry;

6) Ms. Streep’s superhuman restraint from patting Mr. Tucci’s head like he was Jackie Wright on The Benny Hill Show;

7) a reminder why I’ll eat a poached egg only over my own dead, decomposing body;

8 ) another chance to see the Dan Ackroyd takeoff on “The French Chef” and to laugh harder and in a more-informed manner than the twenty-somethings sitting in front of me (that’ll teach the little bahstahds to look at their cell phone screens while the house lights are off);

9) the spectacle of Frenchmen actually being polite and nice to an American, and;

10) a damn fine recipe for beef boulignon stew.

And to think the young pseudo-adults from my workplace I saw at the theater were saying how much they were gonna get into “G.I. Joe – The Rise of Cobra.”

That Les Paul died after causing so much enjoyment for people, or that Sarah Palin draws breaths and exhales such intellectual filth

but his daughter will never be mistaken for him and his lack of basic human decency:

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 1921-2009

Michael provides us with a delightful essay on hats this week, and it reminded me of the hat I’d like to have:

This man, Marc Mitscher, commanded the single largest and most powerful battle fleet ever to see combat. And instead of gold braid, admiral’s stars or other regalia suited to a fleet command. Mitscher wore a lobsterman’s cap with a simple USN officer’s crest. If that doesn’t illustrate serene self awareness and utility of purpose, what does?

That’s a hat . . . .

(08-11-09: I should clarify the statement ’single largest battle fleet.’ Mitscher commanded Task Force 58. In th esense that it was a unified group of ships operating as a single force in combat, it was probably the largest and most powerful battle fleet ever to see combat.”