Our Dumb Blog

2-20-95

Someone around here has been accepting the mail and hiding it away without telling me! Not that I’ve had all that much time to write anything anyway.

I regularly stay up till 2 or so on Friday nights. Sometimes even on Saturdays. Other nights, however, I try hard to be in bed by midnight. Late at night is when I get the whole house to myself and, more importantly, the computer and can do anything I want to, as long as it’s silent. It’s my freetime. It’s also when I end up doing most of my homework, since I tend toward procrastination. Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after tomorrow.

Things have been going along at full speed without much time for procrastination around here. My grandmother had pneumonia, but she’s recovering from that. The last time Mom spoke with the doctor, he said it would be about 2 weeks until my grandmother would be discharged from the hospital. That means she could be moving in with us Thursday next week! We have a lot of preparing to do in the meantime. My brother will have to move out of his room into the living room. We’ll have to care for her constantly. Right now we really don’t have a clear idea of what’s going to happen.

Some bad news on the chemistry front. When the professor was handing back lab reports, me and my lab partner didn’t get them. We asked him why, and he said that he didn’t have them. We did put the in the correct box outside his office and everything just like we were supposed to after lab. I went back the next day to see if mine was still there because I wanted to change something, but since it wasn’t, I figured that he’d already collected them. But he said that they are not in his office. The weird thing is that both lab reports are missing. They weren’t together or anything, just in the box. Either he has lost them or someone hates us. It’s all very odd and disconcerting. He says that we’ll have to do a make up lab. That stinks.

I wrote my first formal lab report last night. It took a lot longer than I thought it would because everything had to be just so. I turned it in today. Let’s hope that it doesn’t end up missing too.

The theater department did a production of Wait Until Dark last weekend. I was very impressed. They did a great job. It was really suspenseful, I was on the edge of my seat almost the entire time. I went back another night to help serve with the dinner (it was a dinner theater) so that I could watch it again. This time it wasn’t nearly as scary since I knew what was going to happen, but I caught several of the details I missed the first time. It’s a story about three con men who try to weasel a doll filled with heroin out of a blind woman, whose husband brought it unknowingly from Canada. The girl who played the blind woman did it excellently.

I’ve got a couple stories of stuff that has happened to me lately that I want to write out but haven’t had the chance. I’ll see if I can get to it one of these days…

My grandmother spoke today!

Since her stroke, she hasn’t been able speak a word, only sign yes or no with her hand. Yesterday, Dad asked for prayer at Integrity Music’s weekly staff worship service on behalf of my grandmother. That same day, she relearned how to speak in therapy. She could count and sing Amazing Grace and other things by rote.
I went to visit her today. She has pneumonia, and hasn’t felt like eating anything, so I took her some chicken soup and tapioca pudding my mom made for her. As I prepared the soup for her to eat, my grandmother started signaling to me that she wanted something. It’s often hard to understand what she wants, almost like an endless game of twenty questions.

I pointed to something, “Do you want this?”

She made her hand into a fist, the sign for no.

“Well, what do you want?” I asked.

She opened her mouth, the syllables coming haltingly. “Oh… yesss…” she said. “I… can… talk…”

I laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in more than a month.

“That’s right, you can talk!”

“I… can… talk…” she said, “you… can… talk…”

She has to try very hard to get the words out. It takes many false starts and a lot of concentration to get out what she is trying to say. Many times her syllables are so slurred that I can’t understand them. But she keep trying. She asked me,

“Ees… Booger… Oh… Kay?”

“Is Buller okay?” I repeated, talking about our neighbor’s dog (who, nevertheless, stays up at our house most of the time). “Yes, he’s fine.”

She asked me something about Stephanie, but I couldn’t understand her. “What… happened… to… day… at… school?” she asked me. I told her, but her ears are stopped up, and she was having trouble hearing me. “I… can’t… hear… youuuu…” she said, putting her hand behind her ear.

She ate all her chicken soup and tapioca, which is more than she’s eaten in a few days. She got me to open a package that arrived at the hospital for her. Inside was a box of thin chocolate mints from a friend. As I was leaving, she told the nurse, “I want… one of those…”