GLIMMER OF HOPE

HIGHLIGHTS:

- Lunchtime cheese veggie burrito at Baja's in Lee with Tory and Wendy (and leftovers for supper).

- Learning that the woman in the bed next to Peg's is a Mrs. Becket, who lives in Becket. 

- Finishing 2 more Blue Books

- Only having to tell Odd that Peg is at Laurel Lake Nursing Home seventeen times instead of thirty.
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STAFF ON CALL:

Terri, who looked after Odd so I could go eat burritos and hit the post office with twelve tons of Great Books of the Western World, plus Volume IV of "Hütte: Des Ingeniuers Taschenbuch", am sure you're familiar with it. Berlin: Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn, 1935-36? The 26^th edition of a German engineering handbook belonging to my father, Odd Knut Ronning, which sold, somewhat miraculously I thought, on eBay last week, but which I for some reason neglected to include in my carefully wrapped package consisting of Volumes I, IV and the Index, so have taken a hit, yet again, on postage. 

Terri reported that when Daddy got up from his nap and asked where I was and she said at the nursing home seeing Peg he yelled "Shit!" and banged his walker, then apologized and she gave him 2 Pecan Sandies and some orange juice and he was fine.

Dominick, entertaining Peg for 4 hours at the nursing home.
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Mama was sitting up today for the first time since The Episode, and in a wheel chair. Bright and chatty. Said when she'd passed out in ER and thought she was dying she saw St. Peter at the Gates and bawled him out--"All these people you've got waiting here? They're just sitting here! Nothing to eat, nothing to do, no magazines--what's all the rush to get here if we're only just going to sit around?"

When Mrs. Becket groaned in the next bed, Peg--in her wheelchair, not yet able to walk, hooked up to oxygen--says "Can I get you anything?"
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LATE-ONSET BLUE BOOK PANIC:

Mama has asked me to bring in a box of stills from her TV show--little 2 inch square black and white contact sheet pics, about fifty pages of badly xeroxed blurry images on typewriter paper--so she can go through them and "mark them". She told me exactly where to find it, very specific directions to a particular bookcase in her room, next to so and so, under a pile of this, balanced on that--and I am now convinced she has CCTV installed in there, like parents have in baby's rooms now so you can see what your kid is up to when you're busy having a martini downstairs, because of all the piles of Blue Book crap in that room that we lugged out here to organize and "load", that is the one box I took one look at, said "Well! She'll never miss THESE things!" and pitched, immediately.
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Woke at 2 AM last night fretting and at 3:30 rang husband in England, just getting out of the shower. Called to whine and whinge and hear his reassuring Voice of Calm and Reason and ended up chewing him out for always asking questions about stuff here he should know, am always repeating myself nine hundred times and finally I said "It's in the blog! Do you not read it???" and turns out no, he doesn't. "I don't know where the link is," he says. So ended up having my feelings hurt as well as fretting and not being able to sleep but hey, am over it, besides which I got a lovely long email from him later. Which actually I only glanced at since I was rushing out to get to the burrito place--so had maybe better go read it properly, but it looked lovely at least from a distance.
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I have come up with a plan for Odd-Care that allows me to return to England. Will hold off talking about it so I don't jinx it.