In the history of weekends that suck, this one is taking the proverbial cake. I took Friday off of work to go and see my Auntie. She knew me. We talked. I took her putlejon, but she was too weak to eat it. Yesterday I went to see Mummy for the first time in two weeks. I hadn’t been because of the chest cold from hell, and I didn’t want to visit her while hacking up lung and sniffling. With the Auntie, what the hell. She was actively dying, so what was a cold germ going to do…kill her? Hah. I was so shocked at my mother’s appearance, that I went straight to a bar and downed a shot of scotch. She had knocked her shin on the wheelchair and had a bruise that went from her knee to her ankle, and was highlighted by a skin tear about two inches long, in a v-shape…She had a blood blister on her big toe the size of a dime. Her “good” eye was weeping and half-shut. The psoriasis had come back on her scalp with a vengeance. She was grinding her teeth. And then, she said the Girlcousin’s name. Whee. Drink!

Today, I tried to sleep in, and got a phone call around ten from the family at my Auntie’s bedside. If I was on the road, they said, I should put the pedal to the metal, because it didn’t look like there was going to be much more time. I woke the RLA and tossed on my clothes, all the while moaning that three days of this in a row was taking its toll on my mental health. And before I got my jeans zipped up, the phone rang again. Never mind. Dilemma has been solved. Auntie is gone. We’ll all meet at the funeral. Tomorrow or the next day.

I keep telling myself that I can’t possibly be an alcoholic, because the shot of single malt I downed at 10:15 this morning nearly killed me.

I have locked myself in my studio for the remainder of the day. I’m going to rearrange the space and make it a sewing room again, instead of my computer lab/knitting storage.

6:00 p.m. I lied. There was just no way I could concentrate. Instead of organizing, I washed three skeins of yarn and hung them to dry. I finished a book. I did the crossword. I changed the bedding. I smoked cigarettes and stared into space. Time to feed the dogs.

Because in the dead of night last night, the oven started beeping. Three a.m. Beep. Beep. Beep. Only, there was nothing in the oven, no reason for it to be making that noise. F1. It’s an F1 error. The manual says to call a repairman. Probably not a three a.m. Reset the stove. Beep. Beep. Beep. The RLA, with lightening-fast reflexes, puts music on in the bedroom, to mask the noise coming from the kitchen. He chooses the soundtrack to Blade Runner. Loudly. I bury myself under a few more blankets and hope that the white noise of the cat purring will mask the sound of the masking music. I proceed to have nightmares about my mother and finding another stash of her needlework magazines, patterns and supplies. I start to cry in my dream. And then, through all of this, I hear the metallic sound that my alarm clock makes that it says are “bird calls”. It is 6:15. Welcome to my day.

The RLA drags himself out of bed and into the dark to attempt to pull the breaker on the still-beeping oven. The cat wants food. The dogs want a walk.

My cough is becoming productive (again), which is the way it always goes when I get one of these chest colds. Tomorrow, I need to take a day off of work and drive north to visit my father’s sister, for what is predicted to be the last time, before we all meet at her grave side. This is getting old. She will be the third aunt to pass away in 6 months.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The Hatikvah is the national anthem of Israel. It means “The Hope.” These are the English lyrics:

As long as deep in the heart,

The soul of a Jew yearns,

And forward to the East

To Zion, an eye looks

Our hope will not be lost,

The hope of two thousand years,

To be a free nation in our land,

The land of Zion and Jerusalem

To be a free nation, in our land.

And yet, the Israeli government has turned Gaza into another Warsaw Ghetto. I’m not pro-Palestine by any stretch of the imagination, but what is being done in my name (and as an American Jew with the right of return, the action in Gaza IS being done in my name) is just wrong. It’s wrong, not on a humanitarian level, but on a human level. It is wrong to deny medical supplies. It is wrong to withhold food supplies. It is wrong to bomb schools. It is wrong. It is wrong to use the schools, as Hamas does, as a shield against possible military action, but (and here is where I become totally inarticulate) it is a compound wrong to ignore that a school or a hospital is ultimately a civilian target. Chris Hedges, over at Truthdig, says this far more eloquently than I.

And when you have turned a community into a walled and isolated ghetto, it is wrong to imagine that the civilians will not take arms against the oppressor. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I can’t support Israel’s actions. But this is not, for lack of a better word, very yiddishkeit. This whole war goes against everything my rabbis ever taught me about what makes a Jew a Jew. Love of life. Love of education. Taking care of the sick, the poor, the old. Defending the rights and liberties of everyone, even those who would kill us.

There is an editorial from the Haaretz , which sums up my horror better than I can. I give you the first two paragraphs, but the link above will take you to the whole thing.

The legend, lest it be a true story, tells of how the late mathematician, Professor Haim Hanani, asked his students at the Technion to draw up a plan for constructing a pipe to transport blood from Haifa to Eilat. The obedient students did as they were told. Using logarithmic rulers, they sketched the design for a sophisticated pipeline. They meticulously planned its route, taking into account the landscape’s topography, the possibility of corrosion, the pipe’s diameter and the flow calibration. When they presented their final product, the professor rendered his judgment: You failed. None of you asked why we need such a pipe, whose blood will fill it, and why it is flowing in the first place.

Regardless of whether this story is legend or true, Israel is now failing its own blood pipeline test. As Israel has been preoccupied with Gaza throughout the entire week, nobody has asked whose blood is being spilled and why. Everything is permitted, legitimate and just. The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest.

Finally, I see in the morning news that the Israeli government says that the Gaza action will be complete in time for Obama’s inauguration. I saw that floated as a theory last week, that this push was Israel’s response to the end of the Bush administration, wherein this kind of war crime was acceptable. That the Gaza action would be over by January 21, because an Obama administration is still an unknown. I laughed when I read that, thinking that it was just typical conspiracy, tin-foil hat thinking, even if it was being posted in the mainstream media. And then, today’s headline.

I’m ashamed.

Dammit. I wasn’t going to watch the Inaugural concert on HBO. Too much hype. Too much everything. I even slept through my wake up call from Star, telling me that Springsteen was opening the show. But I got up anyway, and I’m watching from the sofa, fuzzy slippers on, and swathed in my fuzzy bathrobe. I’ve endured a ton of “great” musicians doing heart-felt, but less than magnificent songs. And then came U2. Fuck that Bono. He was the only one to dare. He called this a dream come true for not just America, but for Ireland. For Europe. For Africa. For Israel. And (deep breath, judges the mood of the crowd) for Palestinians. And then sang the most political of the songs.

And here’s our new president, calling out the challenges that we face. If only we could name names, and say that this is all the fault of that rat bastard, George W. Bush and his evil overlord, Dick Cheney.

I am so inspired by Mr.Obama. What an orator. This is a new Camelot. A call to service, a call to unity and a call to reclaim our country from the venality of the past eight years.

Damn it. Maybe it’s my cold, and stress, but I have a feeling that I’m going to be crying a lot over the next few days.

Oh great. Pete Seeger, his grandson, Bruce, and some school glee club and we are all singing “This Land is Your Land”. Do we get my favorite verse? The one about on the other side of the sign, it didn’t say nothing… Oh my fucking god. We do. That side was made for you and me. Dammit. Crying again. And so is Pete.

You know what?  After all these years, I think we won. And by we, I mean the liberals and activists of the 60s.

I’ve still got the croup. Woke up late, drank coffee, spun a bobbin of single in my studio, and went back to sleep. This isn’t good, but it isn’t bronchitis or pneumonia. Still, it is sapping my power to think and write, so in an effort to keep this blog alive, I’ve stolen the following meme from RJ, who claims to have stolen it from someone else, anyway. It’s a life experience thingy and while doing it mentally, it seemed to make me a lot more interesting than I’m feeling, so here it is.

Link to the person you got this from (see above)

Bold the things you’ve done

Italicize the things you’d like to do

Underline the things you wouldn’t do on a dare

  1. started your own blog

  2. slept under the stars

  3. played in a band

  4. visited Hawaii

  5. watched a meteor shower

  6. given more than you can afford to charity

  7. been to Disneyworld (and the mothership, Disneyland)

  8. climbed a mountain

  9. held a praying mantis

  10.

  11.

  12. visited Paris

  13. watched a lightning storm at sea

  14. taught yourself an art from scratch

  15. adopted a child

  16. had food poisoning

  17. walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty

  18. grown your own vegetables

  19. experienced a natural disaster (hurricane, tornado, etc.)

  20. slept on an overnight train

  21. had a pillow fight

  22. hitch hiked

  23. taken a sick day when you’re not ill - be honest!

  24. built a snow fort

  25. held a lamb

  26. gone skinny dipping

  27.

  28. ridden a gondola in Venice

  29. seen a total eclipse

  30. watched a sunrise or sunset

  31. hit a home run

  32. been on a cruise (and not just a cruise, I made the Atlantic crossing)

  33. seen Niagara Falls in person (on my honeymoon, of course. The RLA and I are big on irony.)

  34. visited the birthplace of your ancestors (This is a debatable point. I used to summer in Newport, where my parents were born, but I’ve never been to Romania or Russia)

  35. seen an Amish community

  36. taught yourself a new language (but only if HTML or pig-latin counts)

  37. had enough money to be truly satisfied

  38. seen the leaning tower of Pisa in person

  39. gone rock climbing

  40. flown in a hot-air balloon

  41.

  42. seen Old Faithful Geyser erupt

  43. bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant

  44. visited Africa (It’s a big continent. There’s things I’d like to see)

  45. walked on a beach by moonlight

  46. been transported in an ambulance

  47. had your portrait painted

  48. gone deep sea fishing

  49. seen Mount Rushmore

  50. been to the top of the Washington Monument

  51. gone scuba diving or snorkeling

  52. kissed in the rain

  53. played in the mud

  54. gone to a drive-in theater

  55. been in a movie (or long-form music video… Springsteen’s Live at Madison Square Garden)

  56. visited the Great Wall of China

  57. started a business

  58. taken a martial arts class

  59. visited Russia

  60. served at a soup kitchen

  61. sold Girl Scout cookies

  62. gone whale watching

  63. received flowers for no reason

  64. donated blood

  65. gone sky diving (this is on a technicality. I went, wore a chute, but didn’t jump—I was taking pictures of the jumper)

  66. baked your own bread

  67. bounced a check

  68. flown in a helicopter

  69. saved a favorite childhood toy

  70. visited the Lincoln memorial

  71. eaten caviar (NOMNOMNOM. Not recently enough.)

  72. pieced a quilt

  73. stood in Times Square

  74. visited the Everglades

  75. been fired from a job

  76. seen the changing of the guard in London

  77. broken a bone

  78. been on a speeding motorcycle

  79. seen the Grand Canyon in person

  80. published a book

  81. seen Michelangelo’s David in person

  82. bought a brand new car

  83. walked in Jerusalem

  84. had your picture in the newspaper

  85. read the entire Bible (Old and New Testaments)

  86. visited the White House

  87. killed and prepared an animal for eating (Fishing is fun. I had a boyfriend shoot squirrels, and prep them, and I cooked them. Does that count?)

  88. had chickenpox

  89. saved someone’s life

  90. sat on a jury

  91. met someone famous

  92. joined a book club

  93. lost a loved one

  94.

  95. seen the Alamo in person

  96. taken a road trip

  97. been involved in a law suit

  98. ridden a horse bareback

  99. been stung by a bee

100. met the love of your life

Okay, so I won’t tag anyone, but you are most cordially invited to play—let me know if you do, so I can visit yours!

Yeah, like that Dooce.

What a sad day for fans, today. First Patrick McGoohan and then KHAN!!!!!! (I’ll see you in HELL, Kirk!) That’s actually the only thing I was ever able to stomach ole Ricardo M. in. But he was fierce in the movie version, with his manscaped (and I think latex-enhanced) pecs, and his Tina Turner hair.

But the Prisoner was epic. I used to get nightmares from Rover when I was a kid and used to watch it.

The RLA and I own the series on DVD and have promised ourselves to vacation in The Village before we die. An Italianate folly in Wales. How random is that? An Italianate folly cum artist colony no less.

The cold remained a cold, and didn’t settle into bronchitis, which is a major win for me. I swear by the trinity that is Cold-Eeze, Zicam and the netti pot. And also the hot toddy. Lemon juice, honey, a couple of fingers of brandy and water to fill a glass. Heat and drink. And pass out under a pile of heavy blankets. Works like a charm.