Tag Archives: Domesticity

General musings

A rough year


Just finished my shift yesterday, and was having a talk with my work buddy, who, when I spoke about the latest developments in my life, vouchsafed; “You’ve had a rough year.”

In real terms I’m sure other people have had it far worse, but for me life has been a bit of a ride these past two years. What with the death of a close friend, playing unhappy host to visiting high dependency family. Angies first hip replacement. The struggle to finish the second volume of the Stars trilogy. Angies second hip and all the internal agony of watching her in pain for so long. Running her errands, washing and grooming while she’s fresh out of hospital. Housework. The infernal grinding effort to keep the family budget balanced when I’m not making much. Never more than pennies for myself. At times like these, Larkins adage “Life is slow dying” seems more than appropriate.

Today, how tired I truly feel hit me like a rock in the face. All the coffee in the world doesn’t seem to help. Angie thinks I need a ‘project’. I think she’s bored as all get out. We need a time out.

On the other hand, not all is darkness. I’ve amused myself watching the antics of our local colony of Rufous Hummingbirds. I’ve reloaded the feeder and seeing as they stay year round at our location, will keep it topped up throughout the late Fall and Winter. They’re elusive little tinkers to photograph with the Camera I’ve got, and so far all I have are the relative low-res images below:

There is a truth in all the above. Nothing lasts, and all bad things pass eventually. I remain guardedly optimistic for the future. Now I must make tea.

Observations

Home and Curry


Angie is home, now kitted out with a new hip joint and currently up to the gills with painkillers. She’s tucked up nice and cosy in bed. There’s a roaring fire in the stove, and the house feels like a home once more. Overall I’m feeling a whole lot more relaxed.

To celebrate her return I made one of my home made curries with home baked Naan bread. Being a bit lazy with the curry I simply chopped up a pound of cardboard chicken (Skinless, boneless, flavourless – I don’t like it, but Angie does), used up my last jar of Sharwoods and chucked in half a teaspoon of dried chilli flakes, which gave it sufficient heat. Basmati rice was also prepared (1 half cup Basmati rice, one and a quarter cups of cold water, bring to boil until almost all water is gone, then take off heat and stick a cloth over the pan for the rest of the water to evaporate). Mango Chutney, check. The Naan bread took a little experimentation, as my oven only goes up to 500 Fahrenheit, and leaving the yoghurt out of the recipe might have been a mistake as the texture was a little stiff. However, we live and learn. It was close enough for government work, as the saying goes. After her bout with vomiting due to a painkiller reaction, the Curry went and stayed down. For this small mercy I am truly grateful.

With regard to opiates, I remember a compound called Prochlorperazine (Proprietary name Stemetil) which is useful when administering opiates as it reduces the nausea. Working on what would nowadays be called an Oncological ward for a few weeks, palliative patients often had a mixed dose of Stemetil with their Diamorphine to cut down the drug dreams and vomiting whilst reducing cancer pain. When Angie was having her first bout of vomiting I asked the nurse if Stemetil was still in use, and was told it was restricted to palliative care. Or as I recall a senior nursing officer say in the 1980’s; “They’re dying anyway, so it really doesn’t matter if they (The patients) become junkies.” Which is a refreshingly pragmatic view of the world.

What with all associated shenanigans, running errands to drug stores, keeping friends and family informed, and general caring for my wife while she is indisposed, all writing on major projects has ground to a halt. Apart from the blog. This is only a temporary state of affairs, and as soon as Angie is well on the mend and fully self care capable, I will be torturing the English language with my facinorous prose. As usual.

Events

Toughing it out


Up at four yesterday, getting Angie into hospital for her second hip replacement was a chore. Nonetheless, in these circumstances I try to fill the unforgiving minute with work. By seven in the evening I was shattered. Seeing Angie come out of recovery onto the ward in serious pain didn’t help. She was shrieking in agony when the nursing staff got her into bed and told me, quite bluntly, to get the hell out of the room. The sight of her in such agony freaked me out and has left me more than a little shaken. The muscles at the back of my skull bunched with the tension, and are only starting to unwind the following morning. All that and a midday shift at work too.

Currently feel like I’ve taken a minor kicking. Muscles wound up and knotted with the nervous tension. Various aches and pains from a restive night. Most unpleasant.

I will visit Angie after todays shift. She’ll have had a good twenty four hours plus to come past the initial post op pain, and a regimen of painkillers will be in place. I am confident that she will be fine. I think. I’ve got all the mobility aids she will need while in recovery when she gets home, and we have a trip to San Diego planned for Christmas as a post-hip replacement treat. Nothing major, just a well earned time out. Our first Christmas to ourselves in five (Ten?) years.

In the physical world, all the clouds that loured upon this house are in the deep bosom of the ocean buried, and the sun is finally shining. According to forecast, we have a few days of this before the rains close in again. The ducks are no longer in hiding. It could be worse. It’s Fall.

Nothing from Harper Vector on the first Cerberus as yet, either yea or nay. Although the longer the wait, the more a ‘nay’ seems likely. Any day now I’m expecting a curt ‘Not what we’re looking for’ e-mail. I wasn’t really expecting anything out of the submission. It was a ‘cattle call’, as they say in showbiz circles. Another day, another rejection. Yawn. Moving on.

Events

Issues


There are things in life I don’t like to think about. Things which cause me emotional pain. Things like Angie going into hospital for hip surgery on the 6th. I don’t like the thought of that at all.

While my imagination is quite gleefully capable of recounting things in graphic detail like all forms of blood and gore I’m not happy about real life dismemberment and how fragile and tenacious our flesh is. All of which I have seen in real life, so it’s not as though I’m a complete stranger to the ideas. Where there’s a car crash or a roadside death, I’m the impatient guy who wants you to move quickly on and not rubberneck. Why? Let’s just say Death and I are old acquaintances. Not the friendly sort, but the kind you want to cross the road to avoid, eyeing each other suspiciously.

One career item I don’t like to dwell on is my sojourn as a student nurse back in the early 80’s. What a complete train wreck of a career choice that was. Took me a few years to get over the emotional fallout. Just lost my Dad, so I was still pretty shaky emotionally at the time I started. Worked on various wards, in Emergency facing addicts, RTA casualties and drunks. Nursed physically and mentally subnormal children (Or should that be ‘challenged’, or some other soft fascist euphemism – poor little things). Saw people die up close and personal, knowing there was nothing I could do about it. Gave ‘last offices’ to three people who I’d grown to like. Maybe I even helped save a few lives, I don’t know. Gave comfort to a few. Even while I personally was going to pieces. Did that make me weak? I tried not to be.

What really eats at me about Angie’s forthcoming operation is that I know exactly what goes on and it haunts me. The spotlit line of blood on antiseptic yellowed skin as the first cut is made. Welling red quickly swabbed up and bleeding cauterised with little smoking fizzes (Do they still use diathermy?). Muscles rapidly transected down to the bloody red of the periosteum and white of bone. The impersonal tug of retractors, the gaping red mouth of the incision, and the awful, magnified dentist drill buzzing of the compressed air saw as it cuts through bone. My wife’s bones. Angies Head of femur. Angies hip socket. I can’t shrug it off because I’ve seen it happen several times. Even been scrubbed to ‘manipulate’ the patients leg twice, standby scrub / swab count twice each (I think, it was a long time ago) and the thought of her being sliced open cuts my heart about as though it were happening to me. The empathic pain doesn’t burn, it aches, it stabs, it crushes, and she’s going into operating theatre and I dare not think about it, yet I can do little but.

Did I say nursing was a poor career choice for me? Man, I must have been dumber than a truckload of five pound lump hammers to even think of it. Why? Too much imagination. Too vulnerable. I actually, physically feel the pain of others. If there’s an opposite to psychopath, that’s me. It’s why I can write Paul Calvin as a character, and identify with someone who sees all the pain of the world and tries to help. Even when he can’t.

I love my wife very dearly. I hate it when she’s ill. I hate it when she’s in pain. Yet she has to have this dismemberment inflicted upon her to prevent more pain. To return her mobility and let her walk properly again. Yet my heart is awash as though a hurricane load of rain has been dumped on it, and there’s nothing I can do. Did I say I hate this? Forgive me being rhetorical or even sarcastic, but the memories run dark red and bloody and I must try to rise above them. Angie needs me to be strong for her, even when I’m not; and there are times like these when I am not strong at all.

There may be a writing hiatus. I may simply pitch in to another writing marathon just to stop me thinking about it. A flood of words to wash away thoughts of her pain.

I know one thing for certain.

All the Zen in the world isn’t going to help.

Technology

Master of my own domain


While the muse has deserted me, mid murder scene, I’m doing what I normally do in these circumstances, which is simply to find myself something non-keyboard related while my subconscious mulls things over. Today I am building Angie a wine rack and also have taken the step of registering my own domain name for this site and the ‘Martyn Jones’ brand name, martynkjones.com. There’s also a new Facebook page which is completely public without my youngest daughters weird and wonderful collection of pictures making an appearance. There are a few odd code glitches at the moment, like the ‘like’ button being inoperative, but I’ll fix that in the next few days or so.

Sites exclusively for the Stars trilogy and Paul Calvin novels will follow. As will a picture of the completed and filled wine rack.

Observations

New desk


I’ve inherited a desk. One of those large multilayered steel, glass and dark wood confections with various shelves, presumably meant to be an office in its own right. It’s a corner lurking beast of a thing with a steel board to magnetically pin notes to. Shelves above and below the main surface, and a couple of parts I can’t use because I have no idea what they are for.

We had to assemble it from component parts which arrived in kit form with no instructions, which caused much scratching of heads during assembly, especially as the whole thing felt a little counter intuitive. As far as populating it is concerned, at present I’m going for the minimalist approach. Cordless handset phone on my right. My own books on one of the upper right hand glass shelves. PC speakers on the top centre with a battered old Lava lamp providing a contemplative focus. Laptop stage centre, lonely tea mug on my left in what seems an acre of space. Wallet on top left hand shelf next to some fly tying contraption with a magnifying glass I picked up from somewhere.

Underneath, dog is snoring at my feet in the capacious void below with the dangling wires and a power bar. Even down there are two shelves. I think one is meant for a small footprint printer, and the other for a desktop base unit. They don’t feel right as footrests.

Today I begin work on the second Cerberus novel with a quantum look at Death via a murder scene. Working title; ‘A falling of Angels’.

General musings

Good, and not so good news


Phoned my mother across the time zones at lunchtime PST, which is eight hours away in England. Nice to hear her voice every so often.

She tells me that as a grand dame of 96 she is finally getting online via broadband in the small Warwickshire village where she lives. I hope the information overload doesn’t get to her. No more letters, as we will probably be talking via Skype in the near future. I’ll give her a ring, walk her through the installation and sign up procedure, and bingo! Video calls. We talk to Angie’s side of the clan regularly via Skype, which has been an absolute godsend as far as communication goes. Especially as my brother and sister in law have just emigrated to Australia. The only issue is time difference.

There was the sad revelation that an Aunt I barely knew died two weeks ago. Should I go into mourning? I don’t think so because I hardly know anyone from that side of my Mothers clan. Out of my three maternal aunts, she was the last. So now I am Aunt-less. Loads of cousins, second and third cousins, but no aunts.

I feel no sense of loss because I hardly knew her, and getting upset over the death of a virtual stranger, even though I am closely blood related, does not touch me. To say it did might indicate a strain of hypocrisy, a sense of false mourning that is not yours by right. While the news is sobering, I cannot get worked up about it. We had no real connection and haven’t really heard from them much since I was small. Especially as relations between my mother and that specific part of our extended family have been less than cordial for several decades. All you really feel is “Oh. Right.” Nothing you can do about it, and the world keeps turning anyway. Is that too cynical? I don’t know.

No news as yet from Harper Vector, although I’m not really expecting anything. It was a shot in the dark as all these things are, and if they don’t like the Paul Calvin stories I’ll just take the first draft, polish it up a bit and punt it out onto Amazon myself. Nothing ventured as they say. Then I’ll finish ‘Darkness’ for Fan Expo in April 2013 and get that out there. See what happens. Keep on flinging enough stuff at the wall, and something is bound to stick.

Observations

Canine Quantum Mechanics


Experimental proof of the work that just got David Wineland and France’s Serge Haroche the 2012 Nobel prize for Physics.

Proof is as follows. Dog is lying at my feet as I am working.

Wife enters room to fuss over printer / scanner, and asks me to move my old crash helmet into next room.  Dog is still in position and does not move a muscle as I step over him.  Wife accidentally kicks a lamp over and curses it.  I leave room to move crash helmet to back bedroom.

Upon entering back bedroom two seconds later, Dogs bum is observed, quivering slightly and sticking out from behind bed. The physical act of movement between the two positions (Under my feet in my office and behind bed in back bedroom some twenty linear feet away) was not observed.  Ergo, there must have been a moment when he was simultaneously lying at my feet and quivering behind the bed in the back bedroom.  Good gravy!  Canine Quantum Mechanics has just been experimentally demonstrated.  Move over Schrodinger’s cat.

‘Superposition’ is a real phenomenon. My Dog proves it. Now where’s my Nobel prize?

Cerberus

Four thousand words a day challenge: day thirteen


I’m slowing a little at present, and yesterdays output on Cerberus was down to just over 3400 words. However; the ending is all mapped out and the next three days will see me galloping for the finish line at full tilt. I may even pass the six thousand per day mark. That means being at my keyboard solidly from six am to midnight for two days at least. This is not a problem for me, as my next day job shift is on Sunday.

Today I’m backtracking over the rest of the current 64,000 words and reviewing some of the less well constructed paragraphs. Tasks include adding in detail and correcting the most glaring errors. Smoothing the flow where it feels clumsy and contrived, and generally clarifying POV’s. At this stage of the game I’m confident of completing on time.

My only current distractions are my Wife’s few mildly challenged clients and the bleeping of the answerphone. My answer to that is to crank up the music and stick on some headphones. The words must flow.

General musings

Drama, doubled


Like most people who write, I have a day job. Not highly paid or high flying, but a job nonetheless. Mostly all the drama contained therein can be dealt with without too much ado. Keep your head, stick to the procedure, and ensure you have done your bit properly. Today, just as I’d logged on at my workstation, my cell phone rang; Angie was immobilised and concerned that her artificial hip joint had broken or dislocated. From the tone of her voice, she was obviously in a lot of pain. I rang her Orthopaedic surgeons office and they recommended she go straight to emergency.

Today must have been the shortest shift I have ever worked. About two minutes and sixty seconds to be precise. Knowing my two work buddies had been earwigging on my cell call I said; “Sorry about this guys, but I have to bug out. Angie’s hurt and I have to get her to emergency.”
To which the answer was a simple “Go Martyn, just go.” Bless their cotton socks. Even if it does cost me a shift’s pay. Family is more important.

Ran headlong down the back stairs and remotely popped the car door just as I shouldered the basement exit door open. After leaping into the driving seat and gunning our little Subaru’s engine, I cussed and fumed at every daydreaming driver in front of me on the way home. Glorious, blazingly sunny day, but I was on a mission, with no time for sunshine, lollygaggers, or the directionally challenged.

When I got home, Angie was sitting on her work chair looking slightly pained, with Joanna sitting on the bed, trying to keep her Mother’s spirits up. My dog, Amos, thought it was a great game and Jo, bless her, held him by the collar while Angie wrapped her arms around my shoulders and I half piggybacked, half guided her down stairs, while she tried not to panic about falling. My dearly beloved is no lightweight, and I haven’t done any weight training for years, so I hung on to bannisters and uprights firmly with one hand while pulling down on her left arm to ensure she didn’t let go of my shoulders, just to take her weight off the afflicted hip. Managed to stagger the twelve paces or so to the car in this fashion and gently swung her into the passenger seat. Thence followed a brisk but fairly uneventful twenty kilometre drive to the hospital.

A note about Emergency rooms, everywhere. Unless you arrive in an ambulance, you immediately become a ‘not so serious’ case, taking second place in the queue. Fortunately it was a quiet morning, apart from one poor chap who was groaning like one of Torquemada’s tormented in a nearby treatment side room. Whatever they were doing to him, he wasn’t enjoying it one little bit. We borrowed one of the shopping trolley like wheelchairs, and squeaked and rattled Angie into Emergency. Second in the queue, we were admitted in jig time. Then settled in to wait our turn.

It is written that “They also serve, who only stand and wait.” and this goes triple for Hospital Emergency departments all over the world. After three hours quietly talking and holding my wife’s hand in the bland walled alcove marked Triage #2, the Emergency Physician got time to see her, and half an hour later Angie was wheeled into X-Ray by a blonde haired trainee technician who looked no more than sixteen, but acted with the friendly professionalism of someone ten years older. While Angie was having her however many micro-sieverts worth, I busied myself with a few story notes, tried not to chew my fingernails, buying a cup of coffee which I never drank.

Half an hour later Angie was wheeled out of X-ray to be dispatched back to Emergency by a solid looking lady who had to take her instructions via a heavily padded looking mobile phone device. I looked at the device and wondered idly how many times it had been thrown across a room. Which was probably the reason it was so tough looking. She pushed Angie’s wheeled treatment bed back to Triage #2 where the physician returned, and after a modicum of judicious prodding and joint manipulation, pronounced Angie’s artificial joint still sound, leaving us with the diagnosis that she had probably only suffered a groin strain. Which was a relief. Ten minutes later, I’m supporting Angie on a short controlled stumble back to the car, and thence home after a couple of minor shopping errands.

As kind of a finale to the days alarums and diversions, we pulled into the front yard to see our landlord, Mark, lying on a blanket and cushion in the shade of the house, ankle bound up in a splint after taking a tumble at work. Did the decent thing and offered to make him up an ice pack, but he said he’d got plenty of ice and could do it himself. The man is a trooper.

Amos, my pet trip hazard, dashed out as soon as the door was opened and fussed everyone, but calmed down after his scheduled feed. He’s a gorgeous dog, lovely temperament, but no brain whatsoever. Just a big old excitable puppy. A Black, brown and white bundle of fruit and nutcase. Wouldn’t have him any other way.

Angie dug into her painkiller supply and, Ibuprofen comforted, settled into a few Learning Consultant tasks. Jo is on her final work shift before going back to the UK on Sunday, and I cooked chicken legs and prepared a salad. Sunset is painting the cliffs opposite a pleasing shade of stony pink. Angie is phoning an old friend to tell her about today’s misadventures. I have settled down with a large whiskey and want no more surprises. At least until tomorrow.

What can I say? It’s been a day.

General musings

Back from the printers


A day of errands today. A short hike down to the printers for some test posters this morning. They’ve come out better than expected. The artwork for giveaway bookmarks needs a little tweak, but definition and content are looking much better than I’d hoped. Just have to play with the wording on the reverse and they’ll be good to go.

Arranging a visit to the vets for my dog, Amos, who is looking a bit peaky, poor chap. Have tried changes to his diet and exercise, but nothing seems to make any difference. So off to Parksville we go. The Bellevue clinic has always been pretty good, so despite a 50km drive, I’m happy to take my poorly pup up there. I’m thinking bladder stones as he is over 12 years old, but the Vet will have a better idea. Hope it’s nothing too drastic. That pup has come a long way with us, across the Atlantic and trans Canada, and it puts a nasty prescient knot in my gut worrying that he might be seriously ill.