I can attribute my recent lack of posts to the fact that I prefer to write about the more humorous, good stuff that happens, but there has simply been a terrible lack of things of that nature occurring anywhere near me.  In fact, it just keeps getting worse & worse.

I will post a few pics of Sasha’s eyeball themed Halloween birthday party & the world’s cutest killer bee for now in hard hopes that it stops raining crap very soon.

This is part two of the stressful road trip to California.  For Part One: LIFE SUCKS, please click back one.

The funeral was held at St. Ignatius church in San Francisco where John had actually gone to school and his old principal even presided over the service.  It was a giant and beautiful church which was completely filled with his friends and family.  John managed to pack a full house!  I doubt I will even be able to fill up an RV trailer with enough people for my funeral.   The service was your usual churchy funeral with the priest somehow working in John’s name when talking about Jesus and Lazarus.    It was not until my brother’s eulogy that I felt John was finally brought into the room.  I did not have to ask my brother if he was going to give the eulogy, I just instinctively knew he would.  He has given at least a half a dozen in his lifetime; 3 of which I was honored to see him perform.  The first was for a young girl in his 8^th grade class who died unexpectedly.  The next was for our own mother.  My brother has a gift for words and I knew it was important for him to speak on behalf of his best friend who was like a brother to him.  As part of his tribute, my brother read a letter that John’s 8 year old son, Seamus wrote for him.  Not a single eye in that church was dry during that moment.

It could not have been a more beautiful day in San Francisco.  When we were leaving the church, a red tail hawk flew by and caught our attention as he swooped repeatedly over our heads calling out to us over and over.  Hello John, we called back, not surprised by his transformation into this glorious bird.  He loved nature so much.  The reception was held at the yacht club with a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge.  We sat and watched flocks of pelicans and even saw a porpoise and a harbor seal.  This is when it all became more real as his loved ones gathered and shared hilarious and heart breaking stories about our friend.  He was a teacher and many of his former students came and spoke about how he had affected their lives.   It was a day of tears and even more laughs; a day of life affirming beauty and tragic loss.

We just had one day in between the funeral and my Grandma’s 90^th birthday, so my sister had a little impromptu celebration for Finn’s 2^nd birthday, which was just right around the corner. 

We had been planning my Grandma’s party for months.  She is the beloved matriarch and even at 90 years old, she is sharp as a tack; my role model for accepting people for who they are.  Both of her living children, all 5 of her grandchildren and 5 out of 7 of her GREAT-grandchildren were present, plus a myriad of other family and friends.  It was another beautiful day; this one celebrating the other end of the spectrum; a full life.  I was extremely grateful I could be a part of this momentous event.

CAR SAGA SUMARY

1. On Thursday, September 17^th, we are on day two of a two day road trip to California
2. While driving up a steep grade in Grants Pass OR, I accidentally put the car into reverse
3. The car instantly breaks
4. Mentally thinking: This is going to take HOURS to fix
5. Get towed to a dealership instead of a cheaper, faster transmission place
6. Spent 3 hours just trying to figure out what to do
7. Town was sold out of rental cars
8. Decided to have the dealership fix it, because they had a car we could rent & we really wanted to attend a funeral the next day, 400 miles away
9. Dealership suddenly remembers they do not rent to folks needing to drive out of town
10. I cried in front of the dealership guy
11. He gave us the car
12. Hoping for a cheap, easy fix, we transfer all of our stuff to the rental and head to California
13. Mentally thinking: The car will be ready by the time we are driving back to Seattle in a week and we can pick it up as we head back home
14. Do not hear from dealership until 11:00am the next day
15. They say the transmission is dead
16. They need to order a new one
17. The only new one they could find is in Texas
18. It will take them a week for the new transmission to be shipped & then a few days more to fix it
19. Estimated cost is $3500
20. Our plans of picking up the car on the way home are dashed.
21. Rental car costs $25 a day
22. We will have to make another trip from Seattle to Oregon once it is fixed
23. Decided to just be glad it was this we are dealing with & that we were not in a terrible accident instead
24. We take 3 days to drive home and drive along the glorious Oregon Coast
25. We get home exhausted on a Wednesday
26. On the following Saturday, we throw a birthday party for our son’s 2^nd birthday
27. We are hopeful we can plan to pick up the car the following weekend & not have to miss any work
28. We call to confirm we can pick up the car on the weekend
29. Dealership cannot guarantee
30. I tell them that I know this is the name of the game, but it is still shocking it could take this long
31. Still driving the rental car
32. The rental car is nice, but it has manual door locks and windows, which is annoying
33. By Wednesday, October 7^th the car is finally fixed.  I will believe it when I see it
34. Sasha leaves at 5:00am on Friday to go pick up the car 23 days after it broke
35. Hallefuckinglujah

This is the story of how in one weekend I went to a funeral to mourn the death of a 45 year old man and then went to a birthday party to celebrate the life of my 90 year old Grandma; but first I broke my car trying to get from Seattle to San Francisco and almost missed the whole thing.

PART ONE:

LIFE SUCKS

 We had been planning my Grandma’s 90^th birthday party for months.  It was going to be a big event with all her friends and family in a special restaurant in Santa Rosa, California.  Sasha & I were going to take a week off work and drive down with Finn in my reliable ’97 Buick Le Sabre.  It may look like an old, white man’s car, but it runs like a dream and I have never had any problems with it after buying it off Craig’s List 6 years ago.  It is like a couch on wheels.  We were going to take a few extra days at the beginning of our trip and drive down the coast, making several beautiful, ocean-side stops along the way.

My company had been for sale for an entire year and the sale had finally just gone through about a week before my vacation.  We had a staff meeting soon after the announcement of the sale.  I assumed the meeting was to celebrate, but it was only to tell us that the company that bought us as an attachment to another, more successful company, did not really want us and were putting us back up for sale while they kept the other company they were really after. Thus, within a few days, we were for sale, bought and for sale once again.  After learning the news I became depressed for about 24 hours.  Over the last year I had become accustomed to living in a black hole, not knowing what was going to happen.  I did not want to live in darkness any longer, but at least I am used to it, so I quickly moved on from the crappy news.  I still had a job for the time being, after all.

Then, on 9/11, I received an unexpected and terrible blow on a personal level.  A family friend and old San Francisco roommate of mine was killed in a terrible motorcycle accident on his way to work.  He was my brother’s best friend, a good friend to my sister for 30 years and an all around good person.  He left behind an 8 year old son.  The funeral was going to be the following Friday morning in San Francisco, where John was born and raised.  I wanted to go.  I needed to be there.  In order to make the service, we would have to alter our plans and save the coastal drive for our return trip. We would get to my sister’s house in Ukiah by Thursday evening and then would drive the last two hours to San Francisco early Friday morning.

Two nights before our trip, Sasha got food poisoning.  I woke up in the middle of the night to find him lying on the bathroom floor in a pool of his own sick.  Sasha is a fantastic barfer.  Most people are able to sense the impending upchuck and get to a toilet in time.  Not Sasha.  His vomit is always sudden and plentiful.  Our first new years eve together in 1999 (party!), he damn near destroyed the carpet in my studio apartment.  This time he at least made it to the bathroom, but the flowery, silk outer shower curtain bore the brunt of the reappearance of his Ezell’s fried chicken.  I was relating the tale of Sasha’s stomach woe on top of my work & grief woes to my friend and I had the audacity to ask the universe: What Next?

Day one of our two day drive to California could not have been improved.  Sasha was feeling better and Finn slept most of the way.  We were going to try and get as far as Medford, Oregon which is just under eight hours of driving.  As we got closer, we kept seeing signs for the Seven Feathers Casino Resort, who had just finished a remodel.  We knew we could get a nice room for the same price as a crappy room at a random Best Western, so we ended our day of driving a bit prematurely and took full use of their pool.

Sasha usually ends up doing most of the driving, but I wanted to do the first leg of day two, because I don’t like the last stretch into Ukiah.  I forgot that I would be driving the mountainess area of Grants Pass, Oregon.  I was doing fine, but the steep inclines and huge logging trucks all around us made me a little nervous.  At one point I was going up a steep grade and made a grunting sound trying to encourage the car to get a little power.  As I was driving up and up on Interstate 5, Sasha said it would be easier if I put the car into 3rd gear, but instead I accidentally put it into reverse and instantly knew we were screwed.  The car made a terrible, sick sound.  I had just enough momentum to avoid giant trucks and pull it across 2 lanes of traffic to rest it on the shoulder.  The shoulder part of the road is also used by giant trucks who are trying to let faster moving vehicles by, so they had to steer around us making the moment that more terrifying.  and yes, it is near impossible to throw your car into reverse while moving in the forward overdrive position on the freeway, but somehow I managed it.

For a full minute I sat with my head in my hands.  The engine was running, but the car would not budge.  I knew this had happened because we had failed to renew our AAA membership that year.  The rule is, if you have AAA, you do not need it.  We called them anyway and they let us renew our membership before coming to get us.  They said it would be 40 minutes for a tow, but the guy arrived within 20.  No car seat, so we strapped Finn into the truck with a regular seat belt.  Our second moment of bad luck was getting towed to a dealership instead of the local transmission repair shop. 

We spent 3 hours at the dealership going back and forth over how they could help us and this was before they even looked at the car.  This was smack during Finn’s nap time, plus he did not get much lunch, so he was like a wild animal.  If we waited around to see what kind of repairs the car needed, we would miss the funeral.  I called the two car rental places in the small town, which were completely sold out.  We considered trying to get the car towed to the repair shop that would be cheaper and quicker, but the dealership had car rentals for $25 per day.  This decided us to use the services of the dealership.  When I tried to arrange for the rental car the guy suddenly said: “Oh, I forgot, we don’t usually let people take our cars out of state”.  This is when the culmination of stress, heartache and anxiety caused me to burst into tears in front of this total stranger.  I told him I have the most awful luck on earth and that this was the 3^rd worst month of my life.  The tears worked.  He let us have the car.  We quickly transferred our tons of luggage from the Buick, gave it a kiss and abandoned it in the parking lot in this weird Oregon town. 

STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO:

LESSONS LEARNED

HAPPY 2ND BIRTHDAY, MY BEAUTIFUL BOY!

Happy 90th birthday to my Grandma, the woman who taught me to be tolerant,  to include EVERYONE and to always keep my chest warm! 

9/11 just became more tragic for my family as we lost a friend yesterday morning in a motorcycle accident.  His name was John.  He was one of my brother’s best friends.  He was a teacher who just started a new job and was running late. 

I have known him as long as I can remember and we were roommates during a pivotal time in my life.  He had an 8 year old son named Seamus.  John had lost his own mother when he was just a kid in an unbelievably terrible way and it fucked him up for years.  Now John’s own son has to endure such a monumental loss.  How do you tell an 8 year old that your dad is gone?

Today it feels like the world is ending and God is taking us one at a time.

I could not sleep.  It just does not seem right.

Although I had not talked with him in so long, I loved him.  He was family. 

John, I am so sorry that you are gone.  I know you will still be here in some way as a guiding, loving force for your son. 

I have not been able to update because I have been very sick and have not wanted to just blather on in disgusting detail. Today is day 17 of my illness. Parts of me are feeling better and other parts are feeling worse. I am certain it is the swine flu as I have run the gamut of each symptom.  I went to the doctor too late to be tested however, but they made me wear this mask:

On Saturday I could barely move, but on Sunday it was my friend’s birthday & she wanted to go to the fair. I did not want to miss it and was thankfully feeling mobile that morning. Finn loved all the fair craziness, especially the petting zoo and carrousel. I got my second wind toward the end of the fair adventure when the Deep Fry booth was spotted. I had never tried them before, so we got a deep fried Twinkie and Deep Fried Oreos to sample. The Twinkie was a thumbs down as the creamy center (and whole point of a Twinkie) basically just melts away into oblivion. The Oreos, however, were a waving thumbs up. They were essentially like a yummy donut with a warm Oreo cookie in the middle.

The sugar suicide was not worth it however, as today I feel like I have been trampled by a drove of pigs. I will never make fun of the swine flu again. I am not dead, but feel like yuck and that is not fun. Please wash your hands a lot and bathe in antibacterial gel doing whatever you can to avoid this mess.

The Culprit?

I wish I could say the experience of getting glasses for Finn, who is not yet two years old, has been a piece of cake, but it has been a bit of a nightmare from the get-go.

A few months ago, I noticed that Finn’s right eye turned in dramatically toward his nose whenever he was looking at anything close up.  It reminded me of my brother who had a lazy eye and needed to wear glasses by the age of three.  I hoped I was imagining it, but it just kept getting worse.   At the last visit to the pediatrician, she concurred there was a problem and referred us to a pediatric optometrist. 

Being that this was an optometrist geared specifically toward kids, I imagined we would get lots of personal attention and help.  Wrong.  She did some fancy things with a flashlight & cardboard with lines on it.  She then put drops in his eyes to dilate them and told us to wait in the waiting area for 20 minutes until the stuff kicked in. 

I had Finn strapped in his stroller with an arsenal of things to distract him, but I think the confusion with his eyes blurring was making him crazy.  He just began to screech until I let him out of the chair to play with some of the toys the clinic provided.  He could not see well enough to simply play, so he took to hurling plastic trucks and colored blocks across the room.  He found his way to the drawing table and I had some hope that he would behave while he quietly removed every single crayon out of the large bin and laid them on the table.  He then proceeded to throw every single crayon in every direction too fast for me simultaneously pick them up and stop him from doing it.  I could feel the eyes of the other waiting parents burning into my back as I scrambled on the floor, whisper-yelling at my kid.

Meanwhile, a couple and their bespectacled son who was about Finn’s age came into the room.  My heart fell a bit, because the kid for sure looked like a 4-eyed goober, but it gave me an idea of what to expect.  His parents said they worried about him wearing the glasses and not just ripping them off his face every chance he got, but it turned out he loved his glasses and wore them all the time, because viola!  He could see!

An excruciating hour had passed while I waited with an increasingly unruly toddler and I was getting angry.  When the nurse came to get us I gave her the 3^rd degree that it was simply too long to expect a little person to wait.  Finn was still on a rampage when we were back in the doctor’s office, which made me very stressed and in a large hurry to get the hell out of there.  Basically the doctor said Finn was farsighted and was over compensating with his right eye when looking at things close-up.  The good news was that the brain was not favoring one eye (this is when the brain literally shuts one eye off as it uses the other one to see; the muscles go slack and the eye will just roll inward).  She said we will try to correct the eye turning in by having him wear glasses.  If it gets worse, however, surgery is a possibility.  I did not hear much else after this, as my son was very literally climbing the walls.

The part I do not understand is that this optometrist did not provide the glasses, just the prescription.  Her only bit of advice about getting him the glasses was to find a place near our home as we may be going back and forth a lot.  I did not know what she meant by that at the time, but I soon found out.

The next weekend, Sasha and I took Finn to Lens crafters.  I envisioned that we would pick out a plastic-like rubber pair in blue that wrapped around his ears and we would be on our way.  Wrong. Turns out, Lens Crafters, whose sole job is to make glasses for the masses, did not have any glasses for toddlers.  They had some for older kids that basically looked like shrunken adult glasses.  I was flabbergasted!  The lady suggested trying JC Penney & Target, but it was the same story.  I then called every single place I could think of to see if they carried glasses for toddlers that were somewhat indestructible and wrapped around the ears.  There was only one single place in the entire Seattle metropolitan area that said that they did: Wal-Mart.  There is only one Wal-Mart in the area and it is in a neighboring town completely out of our way.  We headed over there only to discover that the pairs of rubbery glasses that wrap around the ears that they had on stock, were only for babies; they did not fit our poor, little farsighted boy.  The one difference that this optical shop offered was an employee by the name of Miki who was actually very kind and helpful.  Out of a combination of sheer frustration at the optical business and gratitude for Miki’s attention, we shelled out $100 clams for a pair of slightly too large kid glasses for Finn at the Wal-Mart location.  Since the frames did not wrap around the ears to help them stay on, we had to also purchase the strap that wraps around the entire head; otherwise known as the dork-strap.  The glasses are metal with hinges that looked extremely delicate, but the hope was that they are made for kids so must be at least somewhat indestructible, right?  Wrong.

It took a week for them to put the lenses in the frames.  When we picked them up, we did not get the help of pleasant Miki, but a cold-eyed trainee who did very little to even fit the frames on Finn’s face.  Let me just say that glasses for toddlers is just dumb.  They get smudged so easily as kids have sticky, wandering hands.  You have to clean them every two seconds, and once you take them off the kids face to clean them, it is near impossible to get them back on.   When we got home, Finn wore the glasses about long enough for me to take some photos.

The next day when I was dropping Finn off at daycare, I was demonstrating how to put his glasses on with the dork-strap.  Before I even got them on his head, the lens came flying out.  Are you freaking kidding me?!?!  We expected that there was a large possibility that Finn would break these glasses, but he never even touched them. Sonofabitch! 

I had ordered a few back-up glasses from an online store that was very inexpensive, but they would not arrive for almost two weeks.  We had zero time to drive to the neighboring town to drop the glasses off for fixing; I was finally able to do this yesterday and will have to drive back to pick them up and have them refitted to Finn’s face, so we are basically back to square one.

I know that young kids in glasses are rare, but optical shops should be at least somewhat prepared to help families like me. 

The good news is that the back-up pair just arrived.  Even though they only cost one quarter as much as the Wal-Mart pair, Finn immediatelycrumpled them up in his fist like a pretzel and then stepped on them, but they did not break!

Yet.

Ten years in a relationship with one person is an awfully lengthy time, so we commemorated the occasion with a long weekend on the spectacular Oregon coast. On the drive there, I realized something about Sasha: he is simply the nicest person in the world; he will do anything for anybody…except allow you to merge peacefully in front of him in traffic.

Finn loved running freely on the beach, he would just go and go and we did not have to worry about him getting run over by a car. I was concerned with the mighty ocean snatching him up and taking him away, but luckily the sneaker waves did not play any dirty tricks.  The best part was flying our giant Cyclops kite with spinning eye and spinner tail.