Bears and life and stuff

This is a photo of the inside of a "cubby" (cloth fort) at Tammy's house in Australia.



I was adding this and some other cubbies at SandraDodd.com/youngchildren and Holly mentioned the middle bear was like Kirby's bear. I think she's right:



In the past week I've thought about England every day, for hours if it were all counted together. I'm quietly excited about getting to be there in July. This will be my third trip to England and sometimes I wish I had figured out a way, years ago, to just go there and stay there.

Yesterday morning, though, in the midst of a headful of England, I walked out on the deck to feed the birds, and I smelled the air and I felt the sunshine and I thought there is no better place to be than New Mexico at this moment. And that is my problem. I love where I live. If that's the worst problem I ever have, WONDERFUL!

Kirby is moving this week, from an apartment with one roommate to a house with that roommate and two others. They've been packing things up and cleaning. The real move is Wednesday and Thursday, his days off. Friday he flies to Phoenix to be picked up by the Sorooshians. I ride out with Holly and Brett to have dinner with Brett's grandmother and then go to the hotel and see Kirby, Pam and Rosie.


Keith's mom has tumors on bones and other places, has gone through three courses of chemotherapy and decided no more. But this week she's having her right arm amputated, whether below or above the shoulder they won't know until they see. The bone just broke itself—a tumor just ate thought the bone. They put a plate in a few months back, but the bone on either side of that just went away.

Keith's back ruptured or bled out or hemorrhaged (I don't know the word for it—a pool of redness showed under the skin about the size of the palm of my hand, stayed red instead of turning bruise colors, and after a week or so turned to blisters). it happened when he was camping in Arizona on President's Birthday weekend. Instead of going to an emergency room he came home and went to the nearby clinic, figuring they could get him in for an MRI and a specialist. Things have dragged slowly on. He's in pain almost all the time, but he's crazily strong and has a high pain threshhold, so what would have taken another person down just slowed him up and put him into the kind of pain most other people want to be made unconscious about. After being with Keith for 30 years, I'm used to his reaction to injury. It's odd, but he can still move when others wouldn't be able to. He says "ouch" when others would black out.

Holly read in MySpace comments of people she worked with that all the Zumiez employees in New Mexico had been fired and replaced. It wasn't true, but there was truth in part. At the store where she works, six were fired and four were retained (one of whom was a very new hire). Holly was kept. So she's been working more than she had wanted to, and will need to reschedule a routine appointment with the doctor Monday. If we weren't going to the HENA conference, they would likely want her to work two or three of those days next weekend.

I read that someone wanted a tumbleweed, in Florida. I had a cardboard box I couldn't decide whether to keep or flatten. A tumbleweed came into our neighbor's yard and was right half in our front yard, and I picked it up thinking I'd shove it in the hot tub's wood-stove, and thought *maybe* it would fit in that box. It does. It's a little tight, but that might (might) keep it in better shape for the journey.

My nephew Elijah spent the night because he came to town to see a Mystic Roots show and left us copies of his CD.