She's gone

I guess this entry won't be as funny as some of the others.  It's a shame, because my uncle was over here tonight telling all sorts of tales of time-travel, teleportation, and aliens on earth, but at around 8:23 Mountain Standard Time, my mother died.  Now I don't feel so much like musing over my uncle's beliefs.

She was doing the whole death rattle thing.  All day.  She managed to swallow a few times and stop it, so I thought she didn't have long, but that she might have another day or two.  I guess not.  She gurgled a bit, but I think it just slowly reduced the oxygen in her body until she stopped breathing regularly and then stopped completely.

My brother and I were both with her and holding onto her when it happened.  I guess you couldn't ask for much more than that.  I was going to make an Arkansas joke about being able to combine dying during sex and holding onto your family members to really get the ideal death scenario, but I'll just tell you about the joke instead of making it.  The first writerly thing they tell you is "Show; Don't Tell," so I don't know how much writer I've really got in me.

Now she's lying on the bed next to me.  I sat here most all day and it just seems natural to keep doing it.  I guess we should call the hospice people soon.  We'll do it, but first we're going to let her doggies say goodbye.

And she's famous!

Well my aunt left today.  She's a nurse by profession and has been staying here helping with my mother.  By 'helping', I mean 'doing pretty much everything'.  That includes balling out the hospice nurses for not doing their job to her satisfaction.  It was awesome, and they were stepping lively around here after that.

So we sat up last night and talked about her.  I talked in a hushed tone, but everyone else talked pretty loud, and we were one room over, so I felt kind of bad about that.  But my brother had similar nightmare episodes living with her that I did.  The difference was that he didn't have any other decent family to go to for normalcy.  Apparently mom's side of the family was totally screwed up beyond belief.  I got a lot of much more reliable perspective from my aunt.  She seems open, honest, and remarkably less fucked up than most of the rest of that family.

I realized that my swiss cheese memory is nice.  I don't remember too many specific incidents, only general behaviors.  I used to hate this when I would fight with my old ex-girlfriend.  She used to lay into me with everything I had done since the beginning of the relationship, and I would try to respond, but I would have no particular incidents I could recall.  But in this case, it works.  My brother has tons and tons of very specific memories about incidents, and I'm glad I'm not carrying that stuff around.  Although maybe it just means I've been wired in a certain way and won't ever be able to fix it, because it's no longer anchored to anything I could work through.  Who knows.  Maybe not remembering them means I worked through them already.  But all of this "working through issues" stuff seems a little silly when you're old, like me.  It's funny how your parents can make you feel like a kid no matter what age you are.

Oh and now mom is famous.  I was going to keep this semi-anonymous, but what the fuck.  here's a link to the article if you want to see it: http://www.demingheadlight.com/deming-news/ci_22475167/my-bff
Mom would absolutely hate this.  She hates anyone knowing anything about her, or anyone talking about her, or anything else like this. Apparently she had cancer for 2 years before she even told me anything.  This girl was coming and visiting her frequently, and even wanted to come when she was really bad.  I let her come in the other night and tried to warn her that mom was in bad shape.  The girl left crying.  I'm not going to tell anyone, though.  I'm sure the news will rattle back to the family sooner or later.  An old family friend came by to see her after seeing her in the paper, which is how I found out.  The girl would die if she knew how upset this would've made mom.  But now she responds to almost nothing, she has trouble swallowing and tumors are growing all over her body.  She barely drinks water (from the syringe we use to give her morphine) and doesn't eat at all.

And yes, I'm aware of the hypocrisy, or whatever you want to call it, regarding me blasting all sorts of shit about her in this blog.

Subject: Detention of First Class Mail

Dear **** ***,

The purpose of this letter is to advise you a First class package addressed to you is currently being withheld from delivery as there are reasonable grounds to believe its contents are non-mailable, and possibly in violation of Federal law, specifically, the Controlled Substances Act.  Our attempts to contact the sender to obtain additional information have been unsuccessful thus far.  The envelope is approximately 5" x 7" and the return address is listed as:

   James Barris
   1455 Griggs #2
   Las Cruces, NM 88003

The above described envelope is currently being held at my office.  If you want to claim the envelope, please call me at (***) ***-**** so mutually convenient arrangements can be made for this purpose.

If we do not hear from you or the sender within thirty days of your receipt of this letter, the envelope will be deemed to be abandoned, and it will be disposed of in accordance with U.S. Postal Service policy.  If you have any questions concerning this matter, or do not understand the reason this letter is being sent to you, please contact me at the above listed number immediately.

Sincerely,

**** *****
Postal Inspector

Double moron bonus issue

Well, based on the questions my brother just got through asking me, it seems that he was the one who carefully soaped and scrubbed the cast-iron skillet while I was gone for less than a week, and then didn't season it again. I found this out when I...well when I saw it, I knew it, but then fucking bacon was sticking to it. It's a minor thing, but the kid is really driving me nuts. He's really full of how smart he is, but he's kind of a moron. He's also a complete stoner burnout. I can't even really have a conversation with him, because everything he says is just too dumb to continue talking about it. He also exhibits a lot of the signs of having a mother who treated him like a bit of a baby his whole life.

I don't know how that happened, because she used to say, "What are you crying about?" in a sour tone when I was simultaneously bleeding and five years old.  My reluctance to share anything crappy emotionally also came from her response to me opening up at all with, "Stop whining." That's why I get online and flush this off into the void because I know at least that if I whine here, nobody has to listen to it.

He has exactly one passion: drugs. He's completely baked all the time. He's growing mushrooms in his room right now--three different varieties. I have no idea how he doesn't get popped in a random drug test and fired from his job. I guess it may just be a matter of time.

I guess your dopey little tag-along brother remains so his whole life. He wants to go to Germany with me and live there now. He wants to teach English. He wants to write a book (despite that his response to "have you read X" is "I ain't got time to read") which he has explained to me and it's basically what someone would write if they'd never read a book. He also doesn't like to watch movies or watch many television shows.  In fact, he only liked Breaking Bad (drugs) and came home with Easy Rider the other day all excited and then had to bail on it about 20 minutes in because it's not presented in a way that's easily digestible for the ADHD crowd. I mean I think the movie sucks, but that's just because it's about not doing shit but riding around taking drugs and getting whores.

Argh, he just brought his bag of harvested mushrooms in to show me for the 4th time. Yes, you're proud of yourself. You're proud of doing the same work that a pile of shit might do automatically.

Don't get me wrong, I don't care if you do drugs, unless I don't know you and you're doing meth and crawling on my roof. Then I might kill you. But surely you can have other aspects of your personality than a love of drugs.

My brother is a MORON

So, I get a package delivery message.  Someone tried to drop off a registered letter for my last name, and I have the USPS slip.  So I call my cousin who works at the post office and he says it's for a different first name, but it's my last name.  So I think, "What the fuck? Well it's gotta be for me right?  How else would a package come with my last name on it?"  So I had him sign for it, because I'm here with my mom, and I just really don't get out much.

So this morning, my brother goes, "Look man, I gotta come clean with you.  My buddy mails me drugs under this alias which has your last name on it, and I got a note that they intercepted a package.  But it's nothing to worry about, we'll just play dumb."  "Yeah, well, the package that you gave me the note for, I had someone sign for it." "Oh shit!"

Why is my brother such a screw up?

He may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean he's wrong

So I hauled ass back, and I'm here with my mom now.  She still looks like an unwrapped mummy--smooth skin, slack mouth, no expression--but with the difference of having bulging eyeballs, that can be called upon to focus on you, but most of the time they're each doing their own thing.  She's speaking very very little, drinking less, and eating nothing.

So, of course, my brother uses any excuse he can to go party.  So when I thought it would be both he and my aunt here, that really meant he went to get wrecked in Las Cruces, and she stayed with my mom alone.  The meth-head neighbor decided to fuck with the two women, so he was walking around in the dark at night peeking into the windows and then got up on the roof and skulked around at 2 A.M.  He should try that again while I'm here.  So, all my brother's stoned paranoia may not have been without cause.  It just goes to show you that the town drunk may have actually seen a Sasquatch despite his utter lack of credibility.  But now we're both here so my brother went to Las Cruces again today with the promise that he'd be back around 5.  Since it's already 5:20, I think this is indicating that his credibility and everything else is on par with what I've experienced so far.  Whoopee!

So my great aunt Thelma visited today.  I didn't know who she was because I haven't seen her since I've been attending school.  I was going to begin P90X in earnest, but yeah, same problem.  I can't workout in 10 minute spurts, so I can't workout.  But my mom isn't having non-family guests now, so that trims that down a lot.

My regular aunt is staying here with me now, and she's awesome.  The last time I saw her, I was in something like 7th grade.  Can you tell I was estranged from this side of the family?  But, it's not just me.  The whole family was estranged from one another.  Two aunts, an uncle, and my grandfather had a mini-reuinion in the living room last night.  For all my mom's fucked-upness, it's pretty clear that she was the thing holding the family together.  They all interacted with her, though not with each other.  Now that she's going, they're pulling together.  I guess it goes to show that she's been a good woman in her own fucked up way.  She might've failed on some of the day-to-day stuff, but she did well in her over-arching schemes to do good.  I'm glad she gets to let go of that, and let her siblings pick the job up for themselves.

Which reminds me, I asked my uncle how his wife was doing without realizing she recently lost two family members, and he burst into tears.  This guy is a tall, historically slim (though he's rounding out a little now), cowboy type.  He doesn't show emotions, and he rarely talks.  So I didn't know what to do when he started blubbering.  I guess I should've grabbed him and hugged him or something, but I didn't want to make it worse.  I'm usually the guy who grabs and hugs when someone's crying; it was just too weird last night.  My aunts came in right then and the whole thing reminded me of that feeling when you were a kid and you are being annoyed by a smaller kid, so you push them down to get them to leave you alone or something and then they start crying and you're like, "Oh shit, I don't know what happened, I was just standing way over here, and he started crying...for no reason!"

I also kind of feel like an ass generally because I don't cry or get emotional when other people are around.  When they're all gone, I can get weepy, but I just don't join in in the group cry.  I guess there must be some cowboy in me somewhere too.

Whirlwinds go 'round and 'round

So I'm back!  Back in New Mexico, that is.  I was cleaning out my storage facility and selling things at rock-bottom prices to come back for the long haul and I got a call from my brother who was crying and sort of hysterical in this weird way he gets, apologizing furiously.  I was eating lunch, so I finished, paid, threw all my crap back in storage, went back home, loaded up most all my crap there, and then hit the road.  I still didn't get my damned ipod.  On the way out I burned a bunch of CDs, so that was okay, but they weren't music CDs, so they didn't hold up so well to a second listening.  If I'm alone in a car, on a 10 hour road trip, i can only listen to music for so long, and then it cuts the trip into 3 minute segments...or worse, a punk cd can cut it into 1.5 minute chunks.

So I got back at 5AM and now I'm here.  Mom's face is so slack that she's actually looking a little like those mummies with their wrappings off.  I would take a picture because it's kind of uncanny, but then I don't really want that picture, and...well...I was going to say "I wouldn't want someone taking a picture of me in that state," but I'm not sure if that's true.  If my kid came in and said, "Whoah, you look like a mummy when you sleep," I would probably say, "No shit?  I gotta see this.  Why didn't you take a picture, goofball?"

So, I'm back.  We're three in two beds, so that should be fun.  But it looks like our new task is to give her the morphine drops every hour, so maybe we need to be sleeping in shifts anyway.  All right.  I guess it's time to get up, brush my teeth, shower, and stop pretending like I'm still asleep just so I can get some alone time before the shit starts.

Road Trip!

Soon I leave for Austin.  I wasn't expecting to have to stay when I rushed here for xmas, so I just sort left everything hanging back where I thought I would be leaving.  The plan is that I go, get there, sell all my shit, pack what's left in a car and come back here.  Hopefully it'll take a week, but if I'm lucky, it'll take two :)  Despite all that, I wanna not be gone too long.  She's getting really sleepy now.  She wants drugs constantly, and she slurs her speech a lot.  She also says things like, "Go get those fossils your dad gave me.  They're in the....in the *waves hand for 1 minute*..... over there."  Uh, okay mom.

Okay, I'm going to Austin soon.  My Brother got here, so I need to school him on a few things having to do with mom and then I'll be able to leave sometime very soon.  But, we did talk a lot last night and I think the weird paranoia thing should be settled.  All that old venting may not even be pertinent...

Things are looking up all around...well except for mom.

They Waterboard Horses, Don't They?

Well, I don't know why, but it looks like my blog blanked out for no real reason.  So I went tinkering and got it back working again.  So what has happened in the last few days?  I've gotten a couple of care packages.  (I'm going to go ahead and mention names here) One came from Rebecca and Adam with a ton of goodies on the day of the last post, when I was really needing a pick-me-up, and one came from my cousin Keri with the book I most want to read right now.  It is nice.  I also got a letter and calendar from Pip in Germany a little while back.  Between that and Jesse, Clinton, and Doris visiting, and James building facilities to store all my stuff left from my dad, I'm feeling pretty loved.

My little brother is being a shit, though.  But I think I may have come up with a solution that at least works for me.  It may work for him, or it may blow up in his face, but it doesn't matter.  It'll be headache-free money for me, and he can be the master of his own ship without feeling that I'm trying to fight for control of the wheel.

And, I told my mom last night.  "I'm going to leave the water running fairly mightily, so that it doesn't freeze for the third day in a row, so don't go waking me up to tell me there's water running."  5 hours later..."JERM!"  "*Grumble* yeah?"  "I hear water running."  I may start waterboarding her whenever she says this until she's trained to shut up about it.

...And she went to bed at about 6PM, so of course, she woke up at 1:20 needing several things.  It's fine, I gave her drugs, water, and dumped her pee.  But I warned her not to wake me to tell me water was running, because I know it is.  Okay, posting this and passing out.

Have gun, will unravel

Big fun this morning!  My mom's assurances that she had just farted turned out to actually mean that she had shit herself.  I normally wouldn't just get graphic about something like that, since despite that I'm laying bare her insanity in order to help stave off my own, I figure that everyone has some idea what the nitty-gritty details may include when you're caring for someone who is slowly shutting down, and she has enough moments of total loss of dignity without me spelling every awfulness out.  I think the one today where I had to clean her up was probably a fairly low point in her life.  Anyway, the main reason I bring it up, is because in the midst of all this, I discover that there is no water.  My aunt brought some over to help and then we went to see why.  The answer was because the fucking dogs broke into the pump house yesterday (most likely) and tore off the insulation my cousins and I put on the exposed pipes.

Now, I just inherited a pistol, which is sitting on my desk right now, and it came with only two bullets.  There are two dogs.  Is this a sign?

Mom says, "Reverse everything I told you all your life."

Ah, the fun never ends!  She kept me up pretty late, late enough that I ended up totally passing out the second I got back to my room.  But I did have the presence of mind to turn on a small trickle to keep the pipes from freezing when it decided to get cold as shit overnight (-5 or -15C) and tell her about this.  Of course, she had done her mind eraser, so she made sure to wake me to text me at 5:30 AM to tell me she heard water running in the house somewhere.  Maybe it's a good thing she got rid of that shotgun when she did!

I would say she might actually prefer being shot to laying there in bed based on how often she says she wants it to be over quick, but then every two hours she wants another fistful of miracle vitamin supplements and to tell me a story about what she's going to do if she recovers.  I don't shoot her down--you know, figuratively speaking, the jury is still out on the other--but jesus woman, you're refusing treatment and you signed up for hospice.  How the hell do you think this shit works?  Maybe if I loaded the shotgun shells with gun powder, B vitamins, and kelp, she'd be into it.

Oh and right on cue, my mom told my brother what she said she would, and my brother responded by saying "No mom.  Trust my judgment.  I'm pretty sure I know what's going on there."  I don't think it's too far of a reach to assume he has decided that I've brainwashed her in order to pilfer her goods and redistribute them to the people she taught him to hate.  It's fine.  If he doesn't want to do something that's positive for everyone, either because he thinks that while he's getting something good, he's not getting all that he can, or because he wants to make sure that someone he dislikes doesn't benefit from it, then that's fine.  I'll just get my mom to change the will, and give me some extra money and remove my claim.  Then he's free to make a huge profit, or ruin himself trying.  Maybe things will work out, but where this side of the family is concerned, I am not so hopeful.

So my mom's boss came by to sit with her for a few hours and let me go out into the world.  Of course, I wanted to take the opportunity to go work out, but instead I just visited with my aunt, uncle, and cousin.  I was just too tired to do much else after the water incident.

My mom keeps saying, "He just needs to let it go." With regard to the house and everything else.  I've lived my life letting her be delusional and not correcting her.  But this time, it's not going away, because she has set my brother up to want to declare war on me once she's gone.  So I keep saying shit like, "If you've spent years working him up against them, he's not going to be okay with that."  Just to keep bursting her bubble.  I wonder what sort of mess I'm going to step into once I get back from Austin.  I'm assuming it'll be a dead mother due to extreme neglect.

In unrelated news, the "wetback trailer" behind my mom's place burned down tonight.  I didn't know what it was, but she informed me.  I find that term offensive.  There's not a drop of water between here and the border.

One bag of cats isn't enough

Well, it was a nice day.  My mom slept a lot (though I did pay for that later in the evening) and then quietly watched a pirated Django screener.  She loved it.  Of course, it was her idea to want to see that movie, so I it was acceptable when I offered.  Then she wanted to get up and out of bed shortly after I gave her the sleeping pill that seems to now just cause her to be more annoying...and then holy jesus fuck!  The confessions that followed were insane even considering that my mom tends to be fairly full of shit.

So it turns out that while I was thinking that she got sadder and kinder and bonded with my brother out of desperation, the truth is that some of that may have happened, but what she really did was foster some really dark shit in him.  And she's been doing it non-stop until he's pretty close to being completely out of control.

Here's the latest.  So a good friend pointed out to me that it sounded like she has borderline personality disorder.  And of all the aspects of her that get pegged when I assume that to be true, there is one that is more true than any other: She either believes someone is her most beloved and amazing friend, or else they are her nemesis.  She told me all manner of horrible things about my dad my whole life.  At some point, I realized she was chronically re-writing history with regard to everything else, so rather than take her word,  I just decided to let people's actions speak for their character.  So who was the better person, the kindly creative guy who everyone loved or the bitter and venomous woman who was doing all she could to convince me he was the poisonous one?  I figured out where the poison really came from.  Then, my dad was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer this summer and she came to see him and drive him nuts with Jesus bullshit, and suddenly he's the greatest and she should never have divorced him, and thinks that they had a connection that persisted until today.  I am not my dad, so I can't speak for what he thought, but based on what I do know, nothing could be further from reality on his end.  She also told me how awful some other people were for my whole life, but now she can't stop singing the praises of those people too.

Once upon a time, she was trying her bullshit on me directly.  She used to do this obnoxious thing when I would come to New Mexico to visit people for 6 or 7 days, and I would devote one or two to her, so I'd call her to say I was here.  Then she would make me talk to her for 2 or 3 hours.  After having done this a few times, I would feel like I wasted a huge chunk of my visiting time letting her tell me her super hero stories and blowing off anything to do with me, so I'd cut off a day of visiting.  Well, one time I decided to tell her off for all the shit I was upset about my whole life.  She called me a coward for not standing up for myself when I was 5 and whatnot.  She asked why I was so distant and I stopped managing her rage and just told her everything all at once.  It ended up being a gigantic screaming match, and I don't remember if I saw her again that trip.  There were a few trips after that incident where I would meet her for dinner in town somewhere and not go to her house at all.  Anyway, apparently she wrote something really shitty about me and saved it, because she begged me to destroy it without reading it when I find the thing.  I'm dying to read it.  But part of the reason she wants me to find it and get rid of it is to not let my brother see it.  Now I'll tell you why that's important.

So, my mother has someone who buys into her crazy shit (half of which exists only in her head) and then acts on it to the level that she feels it (turned up to eleven).  That means my little brother vandalized the office belonging to the doctor who "gave her cancer"--okay, those quotes should really say, "gave me cancer" since my mother said it, but whatever--and now wants to kill him when she dies.  She just told me a story about how she got really upset with a pharmacist here and came home and then whipped my brother up so that she had to call someone because he had a loaded gun and was going for the guy.

So apparently there's some marching orders for hating or hurting me written somewhere in the house.  I can't be sure because she was vague, but I'll find out where and get them.  I'm dying for a good read, and the new (and final) Wheel of Time book that my cousin awesomely bought for me won't be here until Monday.

She also gave away a gun she promised him because she's afraid that when she goes, he may go waste some of the doctors responsible for "killing her."  Crazy.

So all of her "don't go giving your money away" was directed at someone specific.  I'll be vague here, but she is apparently jealous of some of the familial relationships I have with people who didn't treat me like shit, and it turns out she's been working to turn my brother against these people for a long time.  Her latest trick was regarding something she's going to leave behind and my brother and I are going to have to unload.  She told my brother, "don't let person X have it no matter what," or something to that effect.  Then her crazy brain has now flipped and she's in adoration of that same person, and she tells me, "make sure person X get's this thing."  To which I said, "You're just setting us up for a horrible battle if you've whipped him up against this idea that you're now in love with."  And she said, "well I'll tell him it's okay."  To which I said, "Well, he's just going to think I had you here and worked on you to brainwash you."  So she started crying and saying she was always so jealous.  I just couldn't help thinking how bitter and pathetic she is to decide that she's jealous of a relationship I have, so she's going to make sure to drive a wedge between me and my brother.  Well congrats, mom, it worked.

Oh and there's something else I want to vent.  In the past several years, I've been seeing my mom for longer, and multiple days.  I think I visited her every day except for one last xmas, and that was when the roads out of my dad's place were likely impassable.  Anyway, when this whole thing first went down, my brother offered to buy me a ticket with a text message that basically said that I had to stay here the whole time and couldn't go see my cousins.  I believe he said, "none of this one hour shit."  Anyway, I didn't respond.  I was already driving down here and was just trying to get shit in order like my car to work and be legal to drive...  But someone pointed out to me today that he basically did the exact fucking thing he wrote me a shitty message about.  He was here very little.  Even now, he lives four hours away, but didn't bother to come see is deteriorating mother over the weekend.  A person could leave at 8, be here by noon, hang until 6, and be home at 10 on Sunday, and still have a weekend day free.

It turns out that I don't like douchiness, but I detest hypocrisy.

This isn't that special

It keeps feeling like something special and horrible is happening just to me: that I lose both parents in what will probably be six months or less.  They were/are both pretty young for this sort of thing.  But you know, people lose both parents all the time.  I didn't appreciate how that could be for my dad, uncles, and aunts.  They had a few years between the deaths of their parents and maybe a couple of extra decades with them, but it's the same thing.  I have a good friend whose mother died in her sleep recently and she was considerably younger than my own mother and not sick in any obvious way. It just happened.  This kind of thing just happens.  My aunt put up with a situation much more difficult than this for years while her mother, my grandmother, died.  I think about all this when I go trying to feel too sorry for myself.  It's definitely bad luck, but it could be worse.  With both my parents I got time to see them when the end was coming.  I got time to talk and share things, suspecting what was coming.  Death always hits you out of the blue, even when you know the odds are high, but your parents should die before you, if things are to work out properly.

Most everyone ends up becoming an orphan eventually.  The ones that don't end up dead too young. Given the choice of the two, I'll take the former over the latter.

Getting more real all the time

I had started a nice long rambling post to vent about all the shit she put me through this morning, but I took her to the bathroom and cleaned her up.  She's definitely dying, and I'm not having such an easy time with that today.  I guess it seems more real than it has before.  It's one thing to have that mother that always drove you nuts half-paralyzed and therefore driving you nuts on a level that you've not experienced before; it's quite another to carry a befuddled, wilting creature to the toilet who doesn't have the will to sit there without falling over while you wash her hair.

Spoke too soon...

Mom's new favorite hobby seems to be staying up until 1 A.M.  She's still not asleep.  But, she did think the ideal thing to do after she took her sleeping pill and pain pill was to wait an hour and then have me get her into the wheel chair and go inspect my bedroom.  She decided she needed to find some drawer pulls that she bought to put in a dresser that has had the living shit beaten out of it.  The best part about this, other than me totally not giving a shit about her unfinished projects is that the pill she took to fall asleep affects her memory, so it's like searching for something with an alzheimer's patient.  Look in that drawer, now take me to the back room, now look in this other place, let's go to the front, now look in that drawer, now take me to the back room...

But now, if there is a god, I think I know why he chose right now to paralyze my mom.  She was apparently about to paint every scrap of bare wood either blue or green.  I generally find that to be a travesty.  Hey mom, why don't we just paint the bricks around the stove too, and maybe there will be enough left to put a coat on the windows.

Don't worry, though.  There's no god.

Pretty good day - with an addendum

I managed to stay up past midnight to start a billion torrent downloads, and then fell asleep writing a script to make the torrent app close at 4:50 AM. Oops!  So when I woke up at 9AM, I was a bit worried I may have massively reduced the amount of internet I'll have this month. Oh well.  That act also came with a side bonus of leaving the lights on and Howard Stern blaring, so I looked like hell and felt not terribly rested this morning. Oops again.

Tomorrow the temperature drops, so I got up today with the intention of insulating the pump house. Two cousins in this town helped me in this endeavor, though the parameters of it changed mid-stream.  Instead of insulating the pump house, we just insulated the pipes inside. Mom's dog got into the pump house while we were gone back to the store to return most of the insulation I bought and pick up a few supplies. A moderate amount of the work was chewed on or undone. I wonder if she's got an itchy tongue now.

I wasn't interacting with mom much today. My aunt sat with her all day while we worked on that project, and then she had a number of visitors in the afternoon and evening. She didn't manage to drive me nuts tonight until I went in to sit with her to watch The Office. Of course, it didn't come on, since Mountain time is so fucked up. It was probably on earlier, but who knows. I guess I'll watch it online after midnight sometime. I had forgotten why you don't ever let a woman have the remote control. When The Office didn't come on, she surfed around a bit. It was excruciating. I decided to observe a woman using the remote as she would in the wild, without input from me. As a consequence, we watched ten minutes of Desportes Caliente. Neither of us speak Spanish well enough to really follow it, nor do we give a shit about soccer. But it was internally amusing. Then I got my first taste of Downton Abbey.  It's really hard to watch when your mother insists on talking over it to tell you shit she's already told you a hundred times. She would totally get kicked out of The Alamo Drafthouse, because I remember her talking through every movie I've ever seen with her. It used to bother me so much, but you can't get her to shut up.  I tried everything, including telling her the ending of the movie when she asks, "Do they make it out okay?" She continued to ask me questions after that. She'll even ask that sort of stuff if she knows I haven't seen the movie. I can't figure it out.

So the primary aggravation today came not from  my mother, but from the itching from the insulation. I think that's called a pretty good day.

EDIT: Woops! Spoke too soon. My mom's favorite hobby of trying to convince everyone she's a badass sometimes has the opposite effect. I know for a fact that she'll walk up to anyone and tell them off. I found this horribly embarrassing when I was young, because about half the time it's for some slight that didn't actually happen and that she just perceived wrong just to make something fit in the narrative she's running over her life. Tonight she told me another story that undermines her bad-assedness fairly severely. I have to be vague on a few things in this story for practical reasons, but let's just say she was dating someone who was a creep. The story went like this:

I was dating this guy, he was a real creep and the dogs hated him. Then one day he did something super horrible, the kind of thing that should get someone sent to jail. Well I wasn't going to settle for that, so I told him he better stay the hell away and if I ever caught him doing that again, I'd kill him myself. So the next time we went out, he said, "You'll have to get rid of those dogs if we get married," and I said, "I get rid of husbands before I get rid of dogs."

So these two stories of her own badassery, while individually, if true, don't necessarily speak well for her taste in men, but aren't so bad. But, the fact that she was still talking marriage with a guy who had done the awful thing quite undermines both stories in such a way as to make me believe she's less of a badass than when she started talking. Is it just me?

Another day full of not much

So I forgot how much I hate being around someone who is high while I'm not. This hatred extends to someone that I, myself, have drugged with prescription medicine. She drank a big giant glass of iced tea today, so instead of going to sleep at 6:30 PM it's now 11:30, she's had a sleeping pill and a pain pill, and she's just having a  slurred and rambling conversation about all awful shit through the bedroom wall at me. Luckily, she has never really needed me to be part of a conversation. I do say "yeah?" or "yeah" or "really?" every once in a while, to avoid the "are you listening to me?"

I didn't really realize how ghetto mom is. It never really showed before, but she has all sorts of shit that should've been thrown away, and hasn't been. So I've been chucking that. There was a spatula that was broken so that it hinged in the middle a bit and its handle had been melted repeatedly, so that it had become nigh unwashable. She dated one really broken-down old hillbilly when Gary was a boy, and that was just bizarre for me to see, but I think the biggest indicator lately has been the things she's warning me against. "Don't go giving the money I leave you away to anyone." "Don't spend all that money on a ring for a girl." She's also worried I'll loan the money out to some redneck relatives that I don't even know. She clearly doesn't know me at all.

She doesn't have a remote for the television in her room, but she can control the digital converter box. Unfortunately there was a setting for it to shut off after 8 hours, so if nobody did anything, it would turn off, and then the TV Static sound would blare and wake everyone. I went in and shut off the timer, so that she wouldn't have to wake me at 3AM to turn on the TV for her, nor would I necessarily have to turn it off to prevent that static blast from waking us up. But now she's drugged and dopey and clicking  the power off to go to sleep. Then it blasts and wakes her up, so she turns it back on and calls me to tell me something dark. Then I stay for a while, but eventually I leave, and then she does it again.

But I'll give her one thing, she was well-liked in her circles. Today I got nothing done despite being almost rested enough because she had 13 visitors. Yep, 13. I had one of my own, my cousin who picked up some Munchkin cards for me. I need to get the rest of my deck from Austin and then the games will be ridiculous.  My cousins and aunt came and played some Munchkin with me last night and it was awesome.

So, I fixed the door yesterday. The handle wouldn't latch. I fixed that problem. It's just too bad nobody told me that the door knob also isn't working. So while I can get the thing to latch, when you turn the knob it just won't quite open. I need to take it apart and fix it, but I'll have to find the energy somewhere.  For now, I filled the hole where the door should latch with pennies so that it can't. Now it's back to working like it did before: you have to close the deadbolt to keep the door closed. Unfortunately, this means that I must let in and let out everyone who visits.

My mom constantly talks about the things she wishes she had done. I guess when you're 60, 70, and 80, you're more okay with not having gotten around to stuff because you had years of not doing it and being okay with that, but at 58, not so much. That's understandable. She always talked about doing stuff, taking a trip to Ireland, but never managed to pull it off. I think she just kept planning for the future. My brother and I are going to reap a relatively decent life insurance payout. Instantly having no school loans will be wonderful, but I can't help but wish she had done a little something for herself. She still has 44 sick/vacation days left after taking weeks and weeks off for the first round of cancer treatment. The woman just never took time for herself.  Even coming to Deming was done to take care of her mom. Despite that she and I aren't close at all, it's stuff like that that make it so I can't just let her go to a nursing home or something. Plus, that's just not how we do things around here.

Why I get nothing done every day, and why someone may have to be killed

Here's why I get nothing done every day. First of all, I don't get time to myself really until after my mom goes to bed the second time, and I've been so exhausted lately that it's been tough to do anything productive then, so I've just been chatting and writing emails and even doing that distractedly and half-assedly.

So as an example:

I went to bed around 12:30 AM or so last night (I don't remember exactly) and I fell asleep around 1 or 1:30. My mother zonked out at 6:30 PM or something ridiculous like that, and I took her to pee at 11 something. At 3:45, she needed to pee again. So between taking her to the bathroom and getting her water and helping her brush her teeth and all the other things I do, that meant I got her back into bed and am able to go back to mine around 4:30. Then I fell back to sleep around 5 or 5:30. Of course, she chugged the first glass of water I gave her when she woke up, so I had to get up at 6:30 to help her pee again. Then back into bed around 8 (I had to make her juice), and sleep around 9. Then my mom woke me for a phone call at 10:30. And then I amazingly went right back to sleep (because I didn't have to do anything but walk to the phone and take it to mom). Of course, she honked (I got her  bike horn to summon me) 15 minutes later to have me hang up the phone. The phone could've happily sat there by her side, but clearly she's trying to cut this endgame short. There aren't many who have seen me have my sleep fucked with, but I don't think any of those people would recommend doing it. So after that the nurse came, and then I moved her old bed to the spare room, and then a new hospital bed showed up, all the assembly and whatnot took until around 3:30 PM. I went to lie down and zonked out around 4:00, and then someone knocked on the door at 4:15. I could keep going, but you get the idea. After the 4:15 thing, I just decided to deal with a splitting headache for the rest of the night and stay awake.

The one silver lining is that the nurse put a catheter in my mom, so I may get 8 hours of sleep in a row tonight instead of spending the entire day getting....let's see....2.5+1.25+1.5+.25....5.5 hours. Jesus christ. I got 5.5 hours of sleep in 4 increments!?

The part that killed me is that when the catheter lady came, Mom tried to back out of doing it again (She should've had it in already on Friday). It struck me as aggravatingly cowardly. I can understand that it is obnoxious, but she's been talking big about getting it, but every time the lady is here, she's scrambling to come up with reasons not to do it. I guess I just don't understand irrationality in people.

She did finally do it, and it's a good thing. A few more days of this and I would've definitely murdered someone. It would've just been random as to whether it would've been her, a nurse, or a visitor.

Ghosts love dimes, apparently

I got it again, the silly deathbed promise about kale

"Promise me when I'm gone you'll eat kale smoothies twice a week."
"I'm not promising that, Mom."
"But it has three times more bioenzymes than any other vegetable!"
"What does that mean, exactly?"
"It will keep you from getting cancer," says the woman who is dying young of cancer after years of kale smoothies.

I'm not saying she's necessarily wrong, I'm just saying that it's silly.

She's also started telling me that someone is holding her hand at night while she's asleep. She also got my very impressionable little brother to say, "I hear you talking to someone in there at night." I think she wants me to tell her it's my dad. She tells this to everyone. Some people, like her nurses, say it's probably Jesus. I, unfortunately, think it's her imagination. I don't tell her this, of course, but I wish she would quit telling me about it and trying to get me to acknowledge that I'm totally in the wrong in my non-belief. I was thinking I should make a stuffed dummy of Adolf Hitler or something and have him sitting and holding her hand when she wakes up, but I'm content to let her die of cancer and not a heart attack. I hope when I'm dying and driving my very Christian son nuts I'm not laying in bed going, "Oh in the night nothing was holding my hand, because there is no afterlife. Admit that you didn't hear me talking to anyone!"

Oh and the dimes! At first she was telling me that I should stack up dimes somewhere and after she died, I'd know she was watching over me or something because she'd knock them over. First of all, I need a control. Maybe I'll say, I'll put up 9 stacks of dimes. Knock over only the middle stack if that's really you.  I think I gave her crap one time when she was on about this a few days ago and asked what she would do when I was in Germany and didn't have access to dimes.

Anyway, today she started something new. She said, "You know, they say that when someone tries to reach you from beyond, you'll start finding dimes everywhere. So if you notice a lot of dimes after I'm gone, that's me." Of course, if my mom dies and I go looking for dimes, I'm going to find them. I won't notice that I encounter way more nickels or pennies because I'll be fixated on the dimes. My response to her was, "What the hell? Why don't you just leave me $100 bills everywhere? _Then_ I'll believe it's you!"

I need to start inviting people over at about 6 PM to talk to her. She's going to sleep earlier and earlier, and waking up earlier and earlier. Today she went to bed around 6:15. Last night it was like 7:30, so of course, when she was up to pee at 4:50 AM (there was one in the 11 PMs that she went back to sleep after) she wanted to chit chat. I went to bed at 12:30 :/

But she's getting a catheter soon. I actually don't mind the fractured sleep so much. It does totally wreck my day, but I'm also pretty sure that having to get her up every 3 hours has been doing wonders for keeping her from getting bed sores. I'll have to set an alarm or something to do it just for that purpose. It will, however, be nice to be able to stay asleep all night. It'll also let her drink as much as she wants. She has been trying to hold back as much as possible. I'll give her kindness points for that.

Man, in two weeks, her limbs have really gone from normal to having absolutely no muscle. I saw the same in my dad's arms when he was first diagnosed.

I'm getting a lot more of Grandpa too. Today he came by again without Jesus people, and apparently he had dismantled his washer and couldn't reassemble it. It seems that I might have to try to do that for him soon. I hate that doing that will mean I'll have to see Granny. Now she is a nut squared. She always had some sing-song fake voice and personality, and when you could get her to crack it, she was all evil. She was like a more saccharine Dolores Umbridge. But now she just sits all day and stares. She says almost nothing, she just stares. Every so often, she'll let on that she's aware of what's going on, but she just doesn't give a shit. She's definitely the reason my mother is screwed up, just like my mom is the reason I'm screwed up, and if I have kids, I'll probably be the reason they're screwed up. My mom has a couple of sisters. I haven't seen one since I was a kid, but the other is batshit crazy. She once came to visit my grandparents (not the ones that belonged to her) while I was staying with them, and wouldn't say a word to me. It was weird as hell. She used to stalk a guy from one of my sculpture classes. She also looks a bit like the Goblin King from The Hobbit movie, only with somewhat smaller testicles for a chin.

Jesus is a comin', hit the road, Jack

My mother's father (Grandpa) showed up at 11:45 to tell me the nuts from her church--sorry if you're offended that I consider church people to be nuts by default--were on their way to give communion.  He's funny because he has a light brown suit that he wears that is straight out of the 1970s. It's like what any of my family might've worn to my parents' wedding. Fifteen years ago it might've seemed ridiculous, but now it's so retro that it doesn't look half bad.

When I found out that they were on their way, I started throwing on clothes and asked Grandpa to watch mom while I went to the store to pick up some stuff. I had a few things I needed, but not much, really. So I managed to get out of the driveway just before I got trapped in. I have no interest in either the symbolism of communion or eating the world's shittiest cookie, and drinking grape juice. You know these American nuts. Wine the drink of Satan, or something, so they take the only bit of religious service I would remotely be interested in, namely getting a shot of wine, and get rid of that. So either Jesus turned water into grape juice, or he was not very christian. Or the third option is that these people are all full of shit.

So I tore out of there so fast that I forgot my glasses. There was a lot of squinting going on at the Wal*mart. And speaking of that store, what the fuck is up with the large storage tubs? The tubs themselves have absolutely nothing to do with any of the lids nearby. There seem to be the same number of lids as containers, but nothing matches. It can be tricky at Target, but usually you just try one or two lids before you find it. I found the tub I wanted, and no lid fit it anywhere. So I started just trying to see what lids would fit what and more than half seemed to have no partner.  I finally bought two bright red tubs because I could at least tell which lid they went with.

Oh, and in my gluttony to stuff myself with American things I missed while in Germany, but didn't really even eat while in the US, I bought unfrosted strawberry Pop Tarts. That's like a day's calories in a tiny box.

ZZZZzzzz..... *HONK!* *tinkle* ZZZZZzzzz....

A short entry before I try to squeeze a little more sleep in between the 5 AM peeing and the 9:30 AM one: I know it's all statistical and that my mom lived a fairly healthy life, but if I were in her place and dying of cancer in my 50's, I don't think I would be giving every passerby anti-cancer advice. It's not like, "Oh don't smoke like I did or you'll end up this way." It's more like, "I got here eating kale constantly and taking red yeast rice tablets and overdosing on B vitamins, you should too!" Maybe that's my excuse for why I bought 6 crap grocery store cupcakes yesterday and ate 5 of them on the drive home. Yeah, it's not because I'm a glutton or anything.

My first post regarding how caring for my dying mom is driving me bonkers

This is going to be a blog where I share silliness, frustration, and all sorts of other things that go along with taking a break from graduate school to sit in my semi-estranged mother's house and take care of her while she dies.

In this first entry, I'll give you the story and catch you up on some weirdness up to now.  I was in Germany working for a research institution and doing my next-to-last thing before I come back to grad school, write a dissertation, defend it and get a Ph.D..  I was in the US for about a week when my mom called me to tell me she was falling at work and that her cancer had probably come back.  I set about getting my shit in order to go visit her, and then I started getting even more urgent texts from the family.  So I hustled here to see her.  She's now paralyzed on one side.  That means that every 3 or four hours, someone has to drag her into the bathroom, plunk her down and let her pee, then move her back.  That person is me.

My little brother was supposed to share in this responsibility so that I could go see the rest of my family.  Here's how it went down:  I showed up, and slept on the couch because my mother was complaining that he sleeps too hard so she's dying in the morning when she needs to pee and he won't get up.  This, I imagine, is because he smokes pot all day, and gets drunk all night and then goes to bed at 3AM.  But then I was here so I could deal with that 5AM peeing.  Then I thought, "It's a couple of days before Christmas, and he has a 'girlfriend' in the next town over, so I'll let him have a day or two off to spend with her."  I told him this, and he vanished for 5 days.  He popped in for a couple of hours on Christmas day, but then, he just bailed on me again.  Every once in a while he'd shoot me a text and say "oh, I'll be in tomorrow" and then he wouldn't.  When he finally did come back, I took a night off to go to my aunt's place and visit the people I'm closest to.  I didn't really get a night off though, because every time mom needed to pee, she had to text me to wake my brother.  Then he bailed for NYE too, and came back long enough to pack to leave for good.  Now he's whining from his job, "Oh I wish I could be there to help."  It doesn't seem much different from my perspective.

Now I'll bitch about him a little more.  He means well, but he does not fucking listen at all.  If you say, "Could you pick me up cupcakes?" he'll forget.  If you remind him, he'll bring back a cake.  You have better odds of getting what you want if you don't say anything and hope he randomly brings it.  The last thing was when he didn't want to eat anything in the fridge and called to order Mexican food.  First of all, he forgot that he ordered it, so after about an hour I said, "Uh, aren't you going to pick up the food?"  Then he came back with what he had ordered.  I had asked for double beans and no rice.  Of course, mine had double rice.
He does one thing that I thought he'd grow out of, but he never has.  When you talk to him he tries to end all your sentences, even if that means he can only do the last syllable of the last word.  It used to annoy me, but like with most things that annoy me, I try to figure out a game that can be played to make the annoyance fun.  It turns out that if you end a sentence with an unexpected word that starts out like the obvious one, you can get some real enjoyment out of this.  "I'm going to the grocery store to get some gro--tesque bakery cupcake."
I would bitch more about him, but I haven't seen him.  Well there was the one night where I tried to bond with him and we ended up getting chased by the border patrol...

Now the following stuff is just bizarre.  My mom is bed-ridden except when I haul her out.  She's taken to eating a billion supplements of every kind.  She has always been kind of nutty insofar as believing in ghosts, alien abductions, that she has psychic powers, and that she's seen heaven and whatnot, but I think I never got the full experience because I'm skeptical, and that causes her to hold back.  Her brother, who is desperately trying to save her, is the same kind of nuts.  When they get together, it's crazy town!  They talk about guys they know who work for the government as psychics, alien craft that routinely fly over Mexico.  Pretty much everything that you can find on Fringe or X-Files, they believe.  It's not even like, "oh I think there may be aliens." It is that aliens exist, they're all over, everyone knows about them, and how can you be so dumb, Jeremy?

Here's a snippet of conversation verbatim:
Brother: You know they're finding giant skeletons all over now?
Mom: I heard that they were crossbreeding with angels.
Brother: Yeah. The Watchers.

The guy is super nice, but that's outrageous.  He brings so many supplements and then has these wacky websites that tell him that she needs to eat 6000mg of lysene a day or something, and then the supplement come in 150mg tablets.  So she's trying to scarf down fistfuls of crap that isn't doing anything except upsetting her stomach, making her smell terrible, and possibly harming her liver.  I wanted to kill that sweet motherfucker when he came over and convinced her she needed me to start giving her coffee enemas.  He bought expensive organic coffee for it too.  I considered giving that to my brother, and just letting her shoot Folger's Crystals up her ass if she really insisted, but I don't drink coffee, so it doesn't really break my heart.  We did one coffee enema, and it could've been worse.  I squoze the bag, but I made her do everything else.  She was sitting on the pot, so that wasn't so bad.

My mother has been driving me completely nuts, in other ways too.  I can give you a long list of reasons why:

1) She is completely self absorbed.  This is part of why we drifted apart.  Well, we didn't drift so much as she threw me out of the house and I ran and didn't look back for 10 years or so.  A bit of back story: My dad, to whom I was extremely close, just died in August and it was fairly sudden.  She now constantly wants comfort and reassurance _from me_ about that, because it was so hard on her.  Keep in mind that she divorced him when I was two, and talked shit about him until I was 37.  She also gets me up at 4:30 to pee, which is totally fine, and then wants me to do chores right then.  "Can you get that book from the top shelf?" "Will you wheel me over to that thing?" "Go find the red power drill that belongs to your uncle."

2) The last sentence brings me to the second thing: she's retardedly micromanaging her death and distribution of goods.  Let me break something to you people out there: when you die, nobody wants 90% of your shit.  Maybe a homeless person does, but no, I don't want those broken glasses you saved from when you were married to my dad.  I think it's more of her self absorption.  She wants to have all the glory from giving away nice things and wants to be able to see someone appreciating it right now.  There are at least three problems with this.  The first is that she gives people things they don't want, or tries to, and then gets totally hurt when they say "nah, it's okay" to the offer of a shitty watercolor painting she got at the flea market.  On the other hand, I tried the tactic of saying, "oh yeah, that'd be great," and it failed too, because her response ends up being, "Well okay. Your brother really wanted that, but I'll tell him I'm giving it to you instead."  Let me see...I was listing something.  Oh yeah, the second problem with giving away all your crap before you're actually dead is one that made me giggle the other day, "Would you take this turquoise necklace that your dad gave me?" "Sure." Then her friend came to stay with my mother for a few days--she is a woman that I have absolutely zero complaints about--and my mother said, "Oh, uh, can I have that necklace back to give to her?"  'Indian giving' on your death bed was a new one for me.  The third serious problem is that I'M NOW LIVING HERE!  When you give away all your DVDs to people coming in, I'm just getting robbed of stuff I could do to pass the time.  And yes, I know I should be writing my dissertation or novel or doing any number of things, but when you are totally sleep deprived it's hard to do anything productive.  It's not all her either, sometimes I'll take her to pee, lay down for a nap, just drift off and someone bangs on the door...DESPITE A NOTE SAYING "NEED SLEEP, DO NOT DISTURB BEFORE 2PM"!!!!  Argh! Oh and a side note, "I saved this hat pin that your uncle gave me.  He said if anything happened to him I should give it to you.  I think he might have known something would happen, because that's the trip he died.  Would you give this to your aunt?"

3) She sends me for a photo album, then puts it back, then sends me again.  I swear I get this stupid album about thrice-a-day for her to just make sure it's in the house.  She also does stuff like telling me twice-a-day that I need to make sure Grandpa gets the digital converter for the television and I have to show him how to use it.  Pointless repetition is driving me nuts.

4) She complains that she's bored, but when I try to help she outright insults me.  She has this habit of hating anything you recommend, on general principle.  She said something like, "Oh I'm so bored, there's nothing on TV" just as she flipped past that Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson movie, Mutiny on the Bounty right when it was beginning.  It's not the most amazing movie, but I thought it was pretty good, and fantastic if we're talking about having a movie come on randomly on antenna-accessible channels.  I told her she'd like it, so she begrudgingly watched for about thirty seconds.  I think Anthony Hopkins was handing over his sword and almost nobody had even spoken a word (except to tell him to hand over his sword), and the she changed the channel to a Mexican station.  She then proceeded to complain about how awful Mexican television is.  I walked out.  She did this more pointedly to me when I responded to her cry of "boredom!" by playing her an episode of Radiolab.  It was called "Wild Talk" if you're interested.  She got about 30 seconds into it, just past the intro, and yelled "Come turn this off, I don't give a shit about Diana Monkeys!" I had actually played it for her because I thought she'd like the bit about the monkeys, but knew she'd love it five minutes later when they started talking about prairie dogs.  So I said, with a little bit of spite, "Okay, I just thought you'd have liked the bit about prairie dogs."  Then I turned it off before she could give it a second chance.  She has routinely done this stuff to me my whole life, though.  I once tried to get her to buy Born to Run by Chris MacDougal and she wouldn't even acknowledge the book.  It was like I handed her something and said, "here, put this back on the shelf without looking at it."

5) She thinks that she can get me to make all sorts of ridiculous deathbed promises.  Seriously, people.  You get one or two deathbed promises for things that are very important to you.  If you have so many that they're on the order of, "Promise me you'll eat kale twice a week when I'm gone," then perhaps you should shut up about them.

6) She is completely logically inconsistent.  "Just let it go when I'm gone, I don't want this to be a burden on you...also, sue the hell out of all the doctors that ever worked on me."  "I'm ready to go, I just want it to be quick....now hand me 13 ester C pills and a fistful of barley grass."

7) She rewrites all memories to fit the narrative in her head where she's the protagonist and everyone else is insane.  She then confronts people about the things that they've done that they may not have done.  It's awkward and embarrassing, but at least now she has brain tumors that I can blame it on.  When I was a kid I just thought she was a liar, and that made me lie a lot then too.

So, I'll bitch a little more about that I woke up today and the water pipes were frozen.  She said, "Oh yeah that happened last year.  It's the fault of everyone else, because there's supposed to be a strip along the bottom of the door to keep the cold air out.  There's a lightbulb in there, so it should be warm enough." So I went out to inspect the place.  Let me tell you, that in 24 degree weather (-4 C) that a lightbulb in a completely uninsulated building with a gigantic window will not do shit.  I went back and said, "it's not the weather strip, it's that there's not a scrap of insulation anywhere, and that a normal lightbulb isn't going to change the temp by my than a degree or two."

I have more, but I'm running out of steam for this post, but I want to leave you with a quote from my mother just the other day with regard to someone who ran over a dog.  Her narrative for the event for which she wasn't present was that the driver swerved specifically to hit the dog.  Her brother denied that bit, and he was actually there.  The quote was, "There's no reason to harm an animal for no reason."