One of my favorite Traveling Willbury's tunes. Played it on the way to the 'rents' house and found there a pleasant surprise.
Daddy is looking a little better, and eating a little better. Mummy could string a whole sentence together, coherently. Of course, it was totally delusional and angry, but it was a sentence. By the evening, we were back to disjointed words, strung out to sentence length.

I also got to go out to a movie with my brother and sister in law. I figure I haven't seen a movie with my brother since we were teenagers. He couldn't remember the last time, either.

We went to see "Pirates of the Caribbean." What a hoot. Now I love swashbucklers, anyway, and I'd watch Johnny Depp read the phone book, but this was just a delight.

There's humor, of course, and fabulous special effects, but it is Depp's movie.

What an underrated actor. Everyone talks about how he can play the odd characters, but nobody recognizes his gift for physical comedy. The opening scenes are reminiscent of Buster Keaton. (And I will never forget the compelling version of the "Oceania Rolls" (Charlie Chaplin, Gold Rush) he did in "Benny and Joon".)

Where was I? Right. Physical comedy. Depp's said that he fashioned the character of Jack Sparrow on Keith Richards and Pepe le Pew. It is clearly so. From the squared shoulder, lead-with-the-pelvis, I'm not-so-drunk-that-I-can't-walk walk, to the dangles of beads in his hair, to the smudgy eye-liner all the way to the squint and flopping wrists, Depp has Richards pegged. And it works, beautifully.

Orlando Bloom, the bleached blonde Legolam (whoops, sorry, Legolas) from "Lord of the Rings" makes a lovely, and I do mean lovely, straight man slash love interest. Geoffrey Rush does a fair turn as a skanky bad pirate. But the movie belongs to Johnny Depp. There are times he's not on the screen, and you just want those moments to end, so you can watch Depp some more.

Definitely a see-more-than-once flick.

And then, yesterday, I got to spend time with my cousin. We went shopping, which was more like an improv comedy routine as we trolled the clothes.

All in all, it was a good weekend. And I've been promised that this weekend coming up, I can just hang in my own home and not answer the phone. Can it get any better?

Having had a long weekend with only a short family visit with the other side of the family last week, it's back on the road for us tomorrow. Going to see the 'rents.

I really don't want to go into this here. But. My mother was one of the smartest women I ever knew. She ran the family business in partnership with her father and brother and my dad. She could tally an inventory sheet in her head, faster and more accurately than anyone else could run it through a calculator. She did the New York Times crossword in ink. Over breakfast. With no mistakes. She was a volunteer (in her "spare" time) at the library. She read voraciously, and taught me to do the same. She taught me to cook, and was as skilled in that as anything else she turned her hand to.

All of that is past tense now, but she is still with us. In body, if not in spirit. My mother has been stolen by Alzheimer's disease. She can't read. She can't cook. She can barely feed herself. She is mean. She is a pod person, but she lives in my mother's body.

I have to go visit her this weekend. I'll take my husband and my dog, because she remembers them and loves them both. Although, to be honest, sometimes she thinks the dog is a cat.

For those of you who have been, or are being affected by Alzheimer's grip on someone you love: my condolences. It sucks. I read a great book this spring about one woman's struggle with her mother's case. I recommend it, but be forewarned, it is a hard book to read. Eleanor Cooney's "Death in Slow Motion."

And my father is ill, too. When I was a kid, there was nothing he couldn't make. Nothing he couldn't do. Nothing he didn't know. I'm not in the least bit sarcastic when I tell you that I worship the water he walks on.

He taught me how to fish, and how use shop equipment, how to read animals tracks, how to make an orange into a squeezable juice container, and how to figure out almost any mechanical problem.

He was never a large man, but to me he was (and is) Paul Bunyan. And now his disease is turning him into a frail little old man. That, more than anything is what makes me sob into my pillow at night.

Tomorrow I'll go and visit for the weekend. I would rather be on the beach. I would rather be in Paris. I would rather eat fucking glass. But I love these two people more than any words could ever begin to express, and so I'll go and listen to the person who is not my mother anymore tell me the same stories she tells me every time she sees me. I'll spend the day in the kitchen, cooking and freezing food. I'll spend time with them, because in the end, that is all we have left, and a precious fucking little of it, at that.

On Monday, there was a very funny Dilbert. It was especially funny to me, because I think it came from a story I sent to Scott Adams.

Here's the story, what do you think?

I while ago, I sent a request to the infamous PR office, asking for all the newest, most up-to-date information about our satellite facilities, because I knew for a fact that what was on the web was out of date.

A week later, via interoffice mail, they sent me their response. They had printed out my own web site, and sent it back to me, along with a floppy disk of the downloaded files. All clipped together with a bulldog clip.

Yeah, I'm still speechless over that, but it always gets a rousing laugh when I tell the story at web seminars and conferences.

Our new CEO starts on Tuesday. The crack PR staff has made his arrival the lede story in the company newsletter. It reads thusly:

"Welcome, Mr. *****. Our new CEO of ********** and president of the **********, officially will become part of the ******** family on Wednesday, July 15. He wants to meet as many employees as possible, so plans are being formulated for an Employee Open House and System visits. Watch for further details."

Yep. That would be wrong. July 15th falls on a TUESDAY. That ought to give him a really good idea of the quality of the staff he's got in that office.

Written, edited, proof read and published. AND sent to me to post on the website, and nobody ever figured out that the date was wrong. Except me. And my friend that I called up to read it to. Of course, we are not PR professionals, so any aptitude on our parts is negligible.

Forgive me while I make rude cackling noises behind my hand.

That's me. I'm a book whore. If its got ink, I'll read it. Here's the summer reading list. It's incomplete, and some of them are already finished, but for the bookworms among you (and you know who you are) this is what's on the current stack.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)
Fluke (Christopher Moore)
The Sweet Potato Queens' Big Ass Cookbook and Financial Planner (Jill Conner Browne)
Gramercy Park (Paula Cohen)
Absolutely American (David Lipsky)
Benjamin Franklin (Walter Isaacson)
Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd (Richard Zacks)
The South Beach Diet (Arthur Agatston)
Designing Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen)
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Hands On Training
ColdFusion MX with Dreamweaver MX
Dreamweaver MX Killer Tips

In the case of the Sweet Potato Queens, I've already read all of the others. Ditto for all of Christopher Moore's books. Brilliant, spew coffee from your nose funny work.

The South Beach Diet is working for me, so I recommend it for anyone else who hates the concept of dieting but still needs to lower their cholesterol or drop a few pounds.

I am converting from Adobe GoLive to Dreamweaver/ColdFusion MX at the office, that explains the pile of code warrior texts.

But as you can see, my tastes are eclectic. Got any suggestions?

Here's a question for all of you: why is inane drivel spoken into a cell phone infinitely more irritating than that same inane drivel spoken to a physically present person? And why does the volume go up when delivered into a cell phone?

For the last time, I do not wish to be privy to every detail of strangers' lives. I barely tolerate being privy to those of my friends.

I don't want to know what is missing from your pantry, as you cruise the grocery store aisle with your cell phone attached to your head, asking your significant other if there is enough toilet paper under the sink. Use a pencil and make a list. Then take it with you and check the items off.

I don't want to know what kind of trouble your children gave the baby sitter, or any other thing you need to tell your mama at eight in the morning as we sit on the train going to work.

And here's something else: put your makeup on before you leave the house. Trim your child's fingernails after they get out of the bath, not as they sit next to me on the train. There is a lesson you are teaching them, and it isn't very pretty.

Private acts should be done in private. Don't floss your teeth in a restaurant. Don't piss on the side of a building. And don't teach your children to do it, when there is a public bathroom inside that very building: the lobby to the public hospital.

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite of Ms. Hepburn's movies was this:

"We're all barbarians."

It was from A Lion in Winter. Rent it. And the next time you feel like shouting into a cell phone, remember it.