The story thus far...

Okay, so Grandma Guthrie went into a nursing home. She's very unhappy about it and I can't say I blame her but neither of us got a vote in the matter.

I was a bit apprehensive about losing such a big percentage of my meager income heading into what's going to be a very lean winter. The garden sucked ass this year, thanks to 4 months of almost no rain. The big freezer is only half full. At least I put in a bunch of extra hours during the two weeks preceding Grandma Guthrie's incarceration so I was able to have all my utility bills paid up before going into a budgetary lockdown.

Fortunately, I snagged another job immediately afterward - picking vegetables at a small organic farm. Unfortunately, I am currently only being paid in food. If I can hang in there for a while, there is some paying work down the road.

I was introduced the the organic farmer at a local Slow Food gathering where I finally met the secret underground group of cool people who live in Randolph County. It took almost four years to find the cool cabal here but I finally did it. I was beginning to think they didn't exist. You'll surely be reading more about them here in the future.

My other assorted odd jobs earn me enough every month to scrape by for about three weeks. Property taxes are due soon. So is the property insurance but that bill will just have to go in the shredder because there is no room for it in the budget. Not to mention (but I will anyway) that my car has been out of commission for what seems like forever.

In a couple of weeks I'll be helping Chickenfight Girl and her husband butcher a couple hogs and will get paid in large quantities of meat. At least I will not starve this winter.

So far, the worst part has been being out of coffee for the last two weeks.

The decline of Grandma Guthrie

As I predicted, Grandma Guthrie has gone downhill since the death of her husband almost two months ago. It hasn't helped that she's had quite a few falls in that time. Each fall made her that much weaker and that much more likely to fall again the next time she tried to stand up by herself.

She needs someone to keep an eye on her pretty much 24/7. She won't sit still. Turn your back on her for 5 minutes and she tries to stand up and walk to another room.

I'm proud to say, she's only fallen once on my watch - and that was over a year ago. She wanted to go outside, walk around the yard and look at the summer flowers. Back then, she got around pretty well (if pretty slow) with her walker and I didn't need to shadow her as closely as I do these days. She stumbled over some uneven ground and fell to the ground. She begged me not to tell her children about it for fear they wouldn't allow her to go outside anymore. Since I never did tell them, they actually think my record is spotless.

These days, she falls a lot. Like I said, turn your back on her for 5 minutes and there's a good chance you'll be picking her up off the floor. She needs help getting dressed. She needs help going to the bathroom. She is afraid and so desperately wants you to just sit with her because she doesn't want to be alone.

I talked to my mom in Michigan today and her stories about watching her toddler grandson (my nephew) sounded eerily like my stories of watching 89-year-old Grandma Guthrie - right down to our matching tales about letting them wash dishes because it made them feel useful but re-washing the dishes when they weren't looking so their feelings wouldn't be hurt.

Grandma Guthrie's children are divided on whether or not she should go to a nursing home. Grandma Guthrie has made her feelings very clear on this matter: She does not want to go to a nursing home. I'm with her on that. It'll kill her sooner and create a hell of a lot of paperwork. Also, I'd be out of a job.

I'm putting in a lot of extra hours right now. I used to stay with her about 14 hours a week. This week I'll clock in around 30 hours. Her son and I took her to a doctor's appointment today for the shoulder she injured in a recent fall and she ended up being admitted to the hospital. This was not unexpected. Tomorrow I will spend the day sitting by her hospital bedside. Somebody has to be close by to make sure she doesn't try to get out of bed by herself and to help her go to the bathroom. The hospital staff doesn't do that stuff. That's up to the family.

I don't mean to knock the local hospital. I'm sure they do the best with what they got. But it is a sad, dingy place. My judgment probably has a lot to with the fact that the majority of my hospital experience comes from thirty years of watching General Hospital, so take my opinion with a grain of salt (and a shot of tequila). I'm just saying that stains on the walls, dustbunnies under the hospital bed and a fly in the room made me wonder just exactly where and when I was. Sadly, those are the two things Grandma Guthrie wonders about too. At least we both still know who we are.

Have you missed me?

Just haven't found the motivation to post anything for a while but I'll be damned if I let an entire month pass without a single post to show for it.

Grandma Guthrie has been extra depressed since her husband died. Her memory is also slipping further away and she knows it which makes her even more depressed. It's getting more and more like babysitting a toddler - except the toddler talks about death a lot.

By all accounts, she was the hardest-workingest woman that ever was. Even at 89, she can't sit still for very long. She's up and down all day, shuffling from room to room. She's not allowed to cook anymore except for the microwave. She's too likely to start frying something and then shuffle off to another room, completely forgetting anything is on the stove.

She tries to do the dishes but does such an awful job, mainly due to her poor eyesight, that I rewash them when she's not looking. If she catches me rewashing dishes, she either gets mad ("I already washed those! They don't need to be washed twice!") or she gets sad ("I just can't do anything anymore.").

About the only thing she can do without risking bodily harm is laundry. And she does a metric fuckton of laundry. It makes her feel useful and I don't have to pay the electric bill so who am I to stop her? Aside from the one day she put too much soap in the washer and produced an almost sitcom level of soap bubbles, it's a harmless pursuit.

She washes dirty clothes, clean clothes and even unworn clothes with the tags still on them. She washes them, dries them, folds them and puts them in piles in her bedroom or crams them in the overstuffed closet. Sometimes she has me iron clothes - which I hate to do. I am from the school of unwrinkling clothes by tossing them in the dryer for a few minutes.

I usually do a half-assed job of ironing for her. She'll never know anyway. The freshly pressed clothes will just get crammed in the closet and washed a week later anyway regardless of whether they're dirty or not.


Anyhoos...If I'm going to get this post in before midnight CST, I'd better wrap this up. Here's a photo I took of a praying mantis eating a big moth on my livingroom window.

Praying mantis + dirty window + flash = MANTIS IN SPAAAAAAACE!

So long, Grandpa Guthrie

Grampa Guthrie died a couple days ago. He's the husband of Grandma Guthrie, the little old lady I help take care of.

For a little over a year, Grampa Guthrie has slowly withered away in a nursing home 30 miles from here. He went from being a big, strapping galoot to a frail, bed-ridden shell of a man. I often took Grandma Guthrie to visit him at the nursing home. Sometimes they were sweet and tender. Sometimes they fought. Often during the same visit.

Today is the funeral. I'm trying to whip myself into presentable shape. Scrape the chicken shit off, comb the twigs and leaves from my hair, paint my nails to hide the always-present dirt beneath. The hardest part is deciding what to wear.

Most of my wardrobe came from Alaska with me. The only new clothes I've acquired since arriving in Alabama are shorts, t-shirts, overalls, work boots and flip-flops. There is very little in the closet appropriate for a church funeral on a very hot & humid afternoon. All I know for sure is there's no way in hell I'm wearing pantyhose.

And I can't just duck in and out. I'm sorta "on call" during the funeral. Grandma Guthrie probably won't have the stamina to stay for the complete church and graveside services. When she is ready to go, I'm to swoop in and carry her home where we'll wait together for the others.

This is going to be a trying day. There had better be food.


But rather than leave this post on a downer note, I'll show you these pictures of three baby birds that recently hatched in the old electric meter box on the back of Frankencoop.


I think they're nuthatches. At least that's what the internet told me when I first tried to identify the tiny eggs.



I hope they don't fall out of the nest. The chickens below would probably gobble them up.

So long, Uncle Ted

Damn. I always thought Ted Stevens was too ornery to die. I was wrong. But then again, I'm wrong about a lot of stuff.

If I was back in Anchorage tonight, I'd head downtown to one of my favorite watering holes and get drunk with friends while swapping Uncle Ted stories. Everybody in Alaska has an Uncle Ted story.

But I'm not in Alaska. I'm in Alabama - in a county with no bars. Nobody here knows who Ted Stevens is which means nobody wants to hear my Uncle Ted story. Instead, I am drinking a strong coffee and watching my tape of the 1996 debate between Ted Stevens and Theresa Obermeyer.

I was surprised to find that I couldn't find any of the debate posted online. So, in honor of Ted, I'm posting one of my favorite moments. Sorry about the quality. It's an old VHS tape and I'm just recording it off the TV with my digital camera.