Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

And this ain’t talking about the amount of rain we’re getting in Arizona! But as a brief aside, the Salt River Project reservoir levels have gone from 42% one year ago to over 80% today. And that’s all in the last 2 or 3 months.


No, today we’re talking about family tragedy, impending tragedy, and general gloom.

We’ll start with my girlfriend Russet coming down at the end of January. We attended the Renaissance Festival Pleasure Feast and had a great time. Shortly after that, while Russ was here, she’s talking to her mom and finds out that Russet’s dad is in the hospital with rectal bleeding. Not a good thing. Add to this the fact that he’s 80 and had a massive heart attack and stroke 20 years ago, so he’s basically been living on borrowed time. They probed from both ends and found he had a tumor the size of a man’s fist. It was successfully removed, along with 8” or so of bowel, and a visual inspection showed that the cancer had already metastasized and was attacking his liver.

They need to do a CAT scan to see how much further it has traveled, but they wanted to wait until he had recovered from his initial surgery. The scan is scheduled for this coming Tuesday, but they won’t have the results until Thursday. Russ was scheduled to attend a fanfic convention in California this weekend but flew to Ohio to see her family instead. She extended her stay until Friday so she can get news on what’s going to happen.

Some positive news did arrive. They got the pathology report back on the initial tumor and found that it might respond well to some new chemotherapy drugs. So that’s something at least.


When Russ was here, we went to Tucson for a day trip. I screwed up and didn’t remind her to bring her Ren Fest garb for the Pleasure Feast, so we went to Chivalry Sports and bought her a new outfit and me a new shirt and vest. Coming back we discussed marriage plans. This is something that we discussed last summer while I was up in Cloudcroft, and though we don’t have a set date, for that matter I haven’t formally proposed, we had some general ideas as to what we wanted: a fairly non-religious ceremony in a meadow or up at the observatory, immediate family of parents and best man/woman, photographer, that’s about it. Then later we’d have a big reception in Phoenix where we can get all our friends and family together.

So that was the original plan. We talked more about marriage on the way home from Tucson, talking about various things, such as my possibly needing to stay a bit longer in Phoenix to complete my degree, plus I’ve landed a good paying job and have a bucketful of money that I need to repay my parents, this is a factor because I’m not going to be able to walk into a good paying job in the Cloudcroft area, tech just isn’t that big up there. So we had vague ideas what we wanted. And Russ has met my parents and gets along quite well with them, when she was down for the Ren Fest we had dinner with my parents and spent the remainder of the evening playing Mexican Train Dominos, which I won for the first time. Mom showed Russ her book of photographs of wedding cakes that she has decorated, my mom does an amazing job with wedding cakes, infinitely better looking and tasting than your standard resort cakes. While I was in the bathroom before we left, mom & dad asked her if she could cope with them being her in-laws. So things are pretty good all around. She loves my friends, isn’t scared away from my family, things are pretty good.


Well, now long-term planning has been thrown out the window. I expected perhaps later this year to get married, but again, nothing definite had been set. While she’s in Ohio she’s going to discuss us getting married with her folks, I think it would be a definite comfort to her parents if we did it. So I may be flying out to Ohio on fairly short notice. I’m just hoping that we can do it either before the end of March or we can wait until the end of May as my class load is going to be hell in April.


So that’s Part The First.


Part The Second.

Felicia, as in Bear and Felica, her brother passed away about ten days ago. It was not unexpected, though the timing I think took everyone by surprise. He beat cancer a number of years ago, but a year or so ago it returned with a vengeance, and he finally succumbed. It was widely expected that this would be his last year, it wasn’t expected that it would happen in February. I found out about it Sunday when I got back from San Diego. This, combined with Russet’s dad having cancer, is just insult added to injury.

That’s Part The Second. Now the fun begins!


Part The Third.

Mom called today, said they were in the emergency room for eight hours last night and got home after midnight. Since they didn’t call my house or my new cell phone, I wasn’t terribly happy about that! I asked who for, and it was for her. She was washing walls and fell, possibly she passed out, something that’s happened before due to a peculiar but not particularly deadly heart problem. Last time that caused injury she was walking on the canal with a neighbor and she passed out and fell straight forward, breaking her nose. It looked like dad had punched her in the face, classic two black eyes. This time it produced two broken ribs. So she’s now patched up, but we obviously have the further problem that if I rush off to Ohio to get married, my parents might not be there!


Such fun.


Well, hopefully my sister can arrange somehow for my niece to be taken care of, my parents have been taking care of Nicole most days. Dad just finished a project and can handle her for now, but once he gets another project going that will change. And my brother lives at home and theoretically can help do the things that mom can’t do for now, the question is whether or not he will.


Sometimes life sucks. At least everyone is alive for now in my immediate and Russet’s families.

BLECH.