Egad.

[kyburg]

Canning jars are twice as much down the street from where I work, than down the street where Jim works. I don't think I can remember pricing changing that much inside of a twenty mile radius - ever. And dammit if I'm going to get them shipped, even with crazy intarweb deals. The mind rebells.

More than enough to offset the cost of driving out there for them. In-sane.

...

I need a nice trip to Las Vegas. Let me explain this one. I don't think I've ever been in Vegas when it wasn't the ragged edge of disaster - seriously. The last time was in 2001, when Jim went in to meet up with his father and step-mother, attempting a reconciliation...and well, they were just as nasty as Jim had led me to believe. So. Tradition upheld, even then. I haven't been to Vegas and not had something lurking in the background the entire time I was there.

Was telling someone at work about one of those trips - the one where I did that nursing convention at the Tropicana, back when New York New York had just broken ground, and Cliff had just gotten out of the hospital and was with my mother in her temporary digs after her house had burned to the ground and he'd landed in the ER there with an insulin reaction and then couldn't get discharged because they couldn't get his CHF under control and and and...the room went quiet again. Oops.

See, Cliff had been hospitalized back in 1995 after having a grand mal seizure right in front of my mother - then they found the strokes, and the MI...and after having a biopsy done to rule out any infectious processes, went into failure out at Redlands Community Hospital, where he was basically given a bed in the step-down unit and expected to die. Then he didn't. But didn't get any better. So I called his doctor at Cedars, said I'd had enough and wanted him back over there under his care and we moved him.

On the way there, he had another MI.

The same day, my younger brother was cleaning a chainsaw with gasoline in the garage of the house in Hemet, and a 'friend' came by with a lit cigarette...and when the house went poof, 'friend' disappeared, and brother ended up at San Bernardino County on a vent due to the smoke inhalation.

I'm at Cedars with Cliff, Mom is at SB County with brother...and we really aren't sure what's going to happen with Cliff.

But...after a cardiac cath (that was the time and the waiting room silverkun and I were in when we had to be Big Damn Heroes and called a code of our own on someone who went down...good times, good times), and a long stint in CCU, then rehab, he came home. But I needed to be in Las Vegas within a week of his discharge, and he really wasn't all that stable and easy to manage (seizures, a TON of cardiac medicine, already brittle as hell diabetic...) so Mom took him for me. Out in her rental while the house was being rebuilt again house.

When I got in after the show with feet worn to hamburger, I slept on the temporary cot he had been sleeping in - because Cliff had gotten in the hospital...

And I'm just standing there rattling this off like it was a grocery list. Well, at the time? It was the time, as it was put in. And that wasn't even one of the worst times.

You can see why I don't scare easily.

Ten years since he passed - longer now, since that trip to Vegas to do a trade show there.

About the only thing that crosses my mind is the lack of fair in it all for Cliff - he got the first Tenchi OAV, but he never saw Cowboy Bebop. No cell phone, let alone an iPhone or even an iPod. The fastest machine he ever got to work with was a Pentium Pro, and not even for very long. Internet was dial-up. He had friends on AOL - but no LiveJournal or Facebook.

No Splenda. No WoW. No PS2 - shoot, I don't think we had anything beyond the Sega Genesis and that gathered dust.

Meters weren't in common use - he had spent a lot of time in a hospital up in Lake Arrowhead who did all their blood sugar readings by draw. (I sent them a replacement meter after Cliff died.)

And so the only person his age in the long-term care...it wasn't funny. I think he shared a wing with one other person his age, dying of AIDS-related issues. Once. And they didn't talk.

I've had the ten years since he passed. I can only imagine where he's been - or doing - because I certainly know when he's been around, shit happens. (I'm still certain Jim is his doing - meeting him like I did was such a fluke, it couldn't have been accidental.)

I think I want a steak dinner this year. And try to get as many people together as possible. It was what Cliff had told me he wanted, a year after he died - he wanted us to celebrate his freedom from this life. So we got together, and wore all of his old work ties to a place that - you got it - cut them off and hung the tails from the rafters. That was really good steak, come to think of it.

So many of the people from that meal are now gone, his godfather being one of them.

I've got a week of timeshare banked, I probably should try to use before Kiddo gets here. I checked the directory and there are 16 properties in Vegas I could pick from.

Think I might find a really good steak place there?

...

Gods, you should figure it out by now. You just don't have time to be miserable. This is your time, the only time you get. You can be as unhappy as you want to be, for whatever reason...but don't look at me funny when I do anything to get past that and get out of those places as fast as I can. Cliff never did - last month of his life, he was traveling around the country seeing his AOL friends and seeking cures at all of the major hospitals back east. I was NOT in favor of this plan, seeing it as base usury of his friends and family for no useful benefit, and would only sink his status even further (and dying wasn't what I was worried about, it was surviving another hit, leaving him in a lower status that worried me).

He came home sick as a dog, and died a month later. But he had seen everything by train from Los Angeles to New York. And back again.

What are you waiting for? Something to happen? Don't wait - make something happen yourself.

Here's me - making shit happen for ten years now.

(That steak dinner idea is getting better all the time...mmmmm.)