Dear Brother-in-Law visited my Dear Mother this week. He thought she looked great! “You look great!” he told her. “You’ve put on some weight!” Uh-oh. Dear Sister and I know better. We agree that DM does not want to hear that. No matter how tiny she is now, a lifetime of conditioning makes weight gain […]
Family
Nobody Wants This
I stayed on for a bit with my mom after Thanksgiving, helping with some things around the house. “Helping with some things around the house” is a sanitized version of what I was doing. This fall, my mother was the target of evil scammers who posed as people trying to protect her online identity and […]
Chimeras
At least once a decade, I try to put in an appearance at the Kornish family reunion. This was the year! On the trip this summer, we stopped at Dear Mother-in-Law’s home on the way to Middle of Nowhere, PA (reunion venue, and no, not the official name of the town). DMIL was a champion […]
Ancestral Wisdom
My father created a small brochure to distribute to his four grandchildren in 2007. The title of the brochure (or tome, if a brochure can be a tome) is “The Wisdom of the Grampus.” He made extra copies, so his grandchildren’s parents and grandmother (aka Grammus) got copies, too. It has a calendar format, with […]
Wolves
I have been known to offer the following explanation for my quirks: “I was raised by wolves.” I am not sure if Dear Sister (DS) also uses this shorthand language. But I know she will back me on everything here. Daddy Wolf raised his daughters to be fierce. The lesson took better with me than […]
How Can I Write a Title for a Post When Words Cannot Do Justice to These Moments?
The blog has a new character! !!! Grandson 1 has arrived. Grandson 1’s parents (Son 1 and Dear Daughter-in-Law) do not want photos posted of him. I get it. I specifically recall the origin of this insistence. Son 1 was a teen. I showed him that when one wrote stuff online, people for years to […]
It’s a Sign (2024 Edition)
This is a beautiful ballad from the Eagles, released in 1975, “Take It to the Limit.” Listen here. All alone at the end of the evening And the bright lights have faded to blue I was thinking ’bout a woman Who might have loved me I never knew You know I’ve always been a dreamer […]
Runcible
One of the themes in my remarks at my dad’s memorial was his love of poetry. He always told us, “poetry was meant to be read aloud.” Last week I traveled to Bloomington, Indiana and had breakfast at a restaurant called Runcible Spoon. The reference felt like a wink from dad: Edward Lear’s “The Owl […]
And Now
Heartrage is exhausting. I am not done raging, but I do take breaks. Here’s one of them. DH and I are watching Blue Bloods. Blue Bloods is a police family show with an ensemble cast. “Police family” in the sense that all the adults in the family are in the police, except the district attorney […]
Waste Not, Want Not
I wrote a few months ago about my dad’s passing. Mom is doing really well. My sister and I have been visiting her to help with some of the team projects. Last summer, I helped find a home for the 1980s electronics assemblies that my dad used in building Gamma Instruments (his thickness gauge business). […]