Facie’s Ramblings

 A few days ago, I decided to do gratitude posts on FB. I was good the first two days. Day 3 I got a little snarky as I posted about "doing the right thing" in regards to Covid. The Covid cases in Allegheny County have been on the rise. For a while, we had daily counts between 50 and 100. After July 4, we saw a spike for a few weeks, and then cases were back below 100. Unfortunately, other than one "low" day this week, where "only" 288 cases were reported, we have had between 500 and 620 daily cases. Fortunately, only a few people have died this week. But of course, any death is too many. I started to keep track of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations on 6/12/20. On that day, since 3/12, Allegheny County had had 2,034 cases, 352 people had been hospitalized, and 172 people had died. On 11/19/20, the county has seen a total of 22,042 cases, 1,724 people have been hospitalized, and 465 people have died from Covid since 3/12. In just over 8 months, we have had...

I hate to say that I am still working through my grief. I mean, in some ways I can imagine I will always be grieving. But I feel pretty confident it will get easier, and I will cry less and less. But, yeah, I guess I am still working through it. Yesterday, a thought occurred to me: I had not hugged my dad since the end of February, and that will now be the last time I ever did. I did not see him for almost three months because of COVID, and then at the end of May, he started his series of hospital visits with skilled nursing stints in between. I was always afraid to hug him then. What if I gave him COVID? And yet when my dad had really bad ICU delirium during a few different hospital stays, I fed him. If I could do that, why not hug him? So I cried a bit last night thinking about that. I am not necessarily a big hugger; I used to hate it, and then probably before Jordan was born, I got back to doing it again. Before COVID, I hugged my friends goodbye (and sometimes hello). I always wou...

Two weeks ago today, my dad died. At this time (9 a.m.) I was either getting ready to head to the hospital or on my way. The day before, we thought he probably had days left, which was good in that it meant we had more time to spend together and he was in no pain, but bad in that he was just lying there, not reacting. Why keep going on? Plus twice I had gotten a phone call saying he had hours left to live. Those calls are awful. I typically think about my dad when I first wake up. Today, he was not my first thought; it was, which cat is lying next to my feet. But he came to mind soon after.  Most days I have cried; some more than others. I had a run of 2 or 3 days where I did not cry at all, but then on Monday, I got some more sympathy cards in the mail. Even Verizon started their letter about discontinuing my dad's service/phone with "On behalf of Verizon Wireless we would like to extend our deepest sympathies to you concerning your recent loss." Verizon has made me cry ...

I more or less gave up blogging a few years ago. FB replaced it. But since my dad died on 10/8 (one week ago today), I feel that I might need to start back up again. I have things to say. A lot. So here goes. I will start with how we got to where we are now, which is my dad no longer being of this Earth.  My dad did not always make the best decisions. But during the last year of his life, I was there for him a lot. He needed me. He could not keep track of his many, many ailments, so I was the one who talked to doctors, nurses, etc. Frustratingly, he had two (main) competing health issues: congestive heart failure/blocked arteries for which he was told in November 2019 he needed open-heart surgery within a few months, and hematuria. For months, urology was afraid to put him under to figure out why he had blood in his urine, and cardiology did not want to operate on a man who was losing blood. I spent a lot of time going back and forth with those people. Then stupid COVID came. My hu...

For the second Sunday in three, during the "Prayers of the Faithful" at mass, we prayed for victims of something. Two weeks ago, it was the Paris attack. Today it was for the shooting in San Bernadino. Each time, I find my eyes welling with tears. When will it stop? Pretty sure not in my lifetime, unfortunately. As with so many other arguments, I get both sides of the gun debate. But at this point, shouldn't we at least try to have stricter gun control? A gun can kill. I don't think it should be a big deal if someone has to wait in line for a couple of hours, take some tests (like a driver's license), and have their background looked into. As I write this, I think it is pretty clear that I have no idea what is involved in getting a gun. I realize my suggestion would make buying a gun at a gun show a little challenging and maybe impossible, but whatever we are doing now is not working. I also don't understand (and I have said this before, in this very blo...

As regular blog readers know (and at this point, I think there might just be two of you), my family said goodbye to our beloved pit bull mix Sadie, a few months ago. Since then, three months and almost two weeks later, I still miss her. I can honestly say that I probably have not gone more than a week without tearing up. But, to be fair, I cry over silly things. When we adopted Sadie, we were not sure we were going to have kids, so the fact that Sadie was partially a pit bull did not concern me. And, honestly, when I first saw her, I did not know that was her dominant breed. But once we knew I was pregnant with J, I started to worry. Back then, there was not social media, but there was still the internet, so I did occasionally read about pit bull maulings. I very clearly remember my first day home alone with J. She was a week old, and my mom, who had been staying with us, and my husband both headed back to work. I was freaking out to begin with, just being a new mother. But havin...

Two months ago, I started a blog for/about our dog Sadie, just after we found out she had cancer. I was hopeful writing would be cathartic; I was particularly concerned how J would handle it and thought if nothing else, it would give her a chance to write happy things about our beloved dog. As with a lot of things, J started out enthusiastically, but in time, she did not have much to say. Plus school got in the way.  But I managed to write a good bit and post some good pics. I hope to continue it for awhile.  But just 23.5 hours removed from Sadie's death, I am still devastated. I never would have guessed it would have affected me this way. Sure, I'm a crier, but as been documented here, I cry for strange things. Not for my own wedding or birth of my child, but for strangers on TV. I definitely cry for tragic events (9/11, in particular), but I also cry when I see certain commercials. I did not cry when my aunt or Bri's grandfather died a few years ago, yet every year when ...

Pretty sure I've used that as a blog post title post before. But it fits.  Yesterday, we found out Sadie, our nearly 13-year old dog, has cancer and likely only a few months to live. She had a growth by her tail, which hindered its usual question-mark shape. I had thought it had to do with her injured ACL (maybe she was overcompensating). But when I really looked at it, I decided maybe we should get it checked out.  When we walked into the vets's office a few days later (last night), the vet took one look and said it was bad. No need to biopsy. He knew. And because of its location, he could not operate (though at her age, I would not put her through that anyway). He said things will probably get bad; she'll have trouble going to the bathroom, particularly if/when the mass grows. She is struggling with that now, but she can still go; everything else seems okay. She did get sick a few times this evening, but I am hoping it is a fluke and not the beginning of the end. I am cou...

I took a vacation day yesterday. Things have been slow at work, so I figured I might as well take the day (even though I will probably want/need that day this coming school year when J has about a dozen, somewhat random, days off). J and I were finishing up a visit to my mom's, which included my adorable, but somewhat whiny and very good storyteller, nephew. I did a little cleaning and laundry at home, nothing too exciting. Mostly I was just glad to be off on a Monday because who likes Mondays? Except by "losing" my Monday yesterday, I got punched in the gut by Monday's evil sister, appearing on a Tuesday. It started off as it had for the last week, which was with a slight pain in my back from something (cyst maybe?) that I will now most likely need to have removed. Try not to visualize that too much. After I was nearly ready, I went in J's room to wake her up. I act as her snooze, which allows her to slowly awaken over a period of 5 to 10 minutes. During th...

If you live in or around the Pittsburgh area, you know right now there is a deadly batch of heroin going around western PA. People do a bag (I don't know if that is the right way to say it), and then they typically die. The more hardcore druggies might not die from that bag, but they will likely end up in the ER. In about about 10 days, 22 people have died from it. For the love of Pete, the story made the LA Times. It sickens me, for many reasons. First, I hate needles. I am very open about that. My fear of needles had kept me from getting a tetanus booster for 17 years. So I cannot even fathom wanting to do drugs via a needle. Second, I have never gotten over the movie Transpotting. I watched that in 1996 or '97 at a theater in Oakland (the name escapes me, but it is no longer there). I to this day am still haunted by scenes from that movie, which chronicled the heroin use of a handful of young men in Scotland. Third, like the vast majority of people, I know addicts. S...

This post is going to be about George Zimmerman being found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin. But not completely. Let me start off by saying I did not follow the trial closely. I did, however, read a few AP articles over the past week or so. About the only thing I can say with certainty is that I was neither in the courtroom nor on the jury. So I do not have the benefit of all that testimony and evidence. And neither did you (unless you were there). But the comments I have read on Facebook? They are all over the place. Based on various comments, George Zimmerman could have been a racist (a Hispanic man can be racist against a black man), a vigilante, someone trying to protect his neighborhood, or someone trying to defend his life. He could have started the fight, or he could have been the one fighting back. He may have been following neighborhood watch guidelines, or he could have been overstepping. I think he had some sort of a record, but not sure. Trayvon Martin could have...

Many people have blogged, tweeted, and commented on Facebook about the horrific bomb explosion at the Boston Marathon and the subsequent days-long manhunt, which included gunfire exchange and additional deaths. Mercifully and thankfully the tragic saga now appears to be over, at least the scariest part. Because there is so much information and misinformation out there, I won't bother to weigh in on the specifics. I don't think I can add anything new or insightful anyway. I do, however, want to respond to people who feel the word is a dangerous, sad place. You are correct; there is really no denying that the world is hardly all sunshine and lollipops. And I think I can speak for the majority of people around my age by saying that "back in the day" we did not have to worry about someone shooting up many people in a school, a movie theater, or at some event, or setting off an IED and injuring scores of people at a sporting event. (Of course I grew up in a small town,...

This afternoon while at the pool, J told me to put out my arms as she was going to jump into them. I obliged for some reason, but quickly regretted it, as her weight put quite a strain on my back. I grimaced in pain, which made J feel bad, and she immediately said, "I don't want to get older. I just want to stay like this," amid tears. She then went on to say that she does not want to grow up and that she wants to always live with us. I told her, as I have before, that of course she can always live with us, but I also said that when she is a teen, she probably won't want to be near us. Then she will go on to college and have fun and again won't think home is so great. Eventually she may find someone to marry, and she will want to be with that person. And she may one day have kids and will love them as much as I love her and they will be whom she wants to be with. Her response to this? "But when I have kids, you'll be dead." Sheesh, girl, it's n...

I have been trying to come up with something to say about the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday. But even though I can normally "write" a coherent, meaningful post in my head, this topic has not allowed my brain to do that; my thoughts are all over the place. Even worse, this tragedy came about 12 hours after the mother of one of J's classmates died, so I was already sad. So I am pretty much just going to do a free-write, and we'll see what happens. One of my first reactions when I read about the shooting was the schools are supposed to be a safe place. If you read my last post, which I wrote about an hour before I heard about the shootings, I said school was the one place that I did not worry about when leaving my kid. You know what, after my initial shock and sadness, I still feel that way. I have also written about how I sometimes think about how easy it would be for a deranged person to walk into the church where I attend daily mass. Wh...

Last evening, the mother of one of J's classmates passed away. This woman had been sick for quite some time (really her daughter's entire life), and her health had recently taken a turn for the worse. However, when I had spoken to her last week and the week before, she sounded pretty good, even optimistic. To help makes things easier for the family, I was planning to take her daughter and J swimming today, and we were going to finalize the plans yesterday. Unfortunately, because this woman had gotten so sick over the past few days, my conversation with her on my birthday was the last we will ever have. Sigh. In my opinion (and the opinion of many others) the worst thing that can happen to someone is to lose her child/ren. But a young kid should not have to lose one of her parents either. To a kid, that is the worst thing that can happen. I remember one time as a child my brothers and I were supposed to spend the weekend at my grandmother's, about an hour away, and I refus...

That extra-long title is courtesy of my nine-year-old and was something she uttered during "Say Yes to the Dress" on Friday evening. I watch very little reality TV, but I make an exception for this show because I like to look at the dresses. And sometimes, the stories are heart-warming. Typically at the end of the show, a snippet of a wedding is aired. In this particular show, a woman who was confined to a wheelchair was exchanging vows with her fiance. After the two of them finished, J made her comment. I asked her what she meant as I must have been on the computer while the TV was on, and she explained that because so many people just get divorced, why do they even say "as long as we both shall live"? That is tough one, kid. I tried with what I thought was a sound explanation: Most of the people who get married truly believe they will be together the rest of their lives, but sometimes it just doesn't work out. But if you don't think that you will be ...

On Monday, I wrote about how I was going to try to limit my 9/11 exposure. In case it was not clear, my intent was not to diminish the day or pretend it did not happen. I can guarantee I will never forget. Rather, I was concerned that perhaps I spend too much time rehashing the events and crying about them. Is it really healthy to re-watch a plane crashing into the WTC for what is probably the 100th time for me? But, as I suspected, I did watch more TV than I wanted. Here is how the 24-ish hours unfolded for me. Not that most of you (or probably any) care, but here goes. Monday night, I watched snippets of a few programs on the H2 and either the History or the Smithsonian channel. One program, which centered on people who escaped, I had seen before. The other, which I cannot remember, might have been new to me. I was so tired from staying up for the Steelers game the night before, that I was asleep by 9:30, so my about one hour of 9/11 rehashing seemed pretty respectable. Before ...

"And what matters at the end of the day is the small things. It’s not the trivial things that so often consume us in our daily lives. It’s how we treat each other and love one another." -President Obama, speaking to a crowd of supporters in Fort Myers, Florida, today Some days I get so weary about what goes on the world. Today is one of those days. I could write about gun control, mental illness, violence in the media, the over-present media in general, or how society has gone to hell in a hand basket. But I instead want to think about being compassionate, doing the right thing, and treating others as you want to be treated. I try to do those very things. Sometimes I fail, even though I so want to succeed. But as I often tell students the day after they have treated me less than kindly, every day is a new day. Here's to tomorrow.

I am unsure how many times in my life I have questioned why people do the things they do. I have probably done it in this blog a half dozen times or more. I know I wrestle with this at least weekly. I get that people have free will. Any one of us can decide on any given day, hour, or minute whether we are going to do something good or something bad. Something that will help others or something that will hurt others. Something that is "right" and something that is oh-so-wrong. I realize that most of us don't generally do really good or really bad things; we just live our lives. Sometimes we perform a random act of kindness and we are hopefully mostly nice to our family and friends. Other times we say something unkind, are not truthful, and do things we probably should not. But the truth is, I grapple with those little wrongdoings as much as I struggle to wrap my head around the really heinous things people do. Yesterday a man walked into Western Psych, a hospital/ins...

Later today, the 2012 Penn State IFC Panhellenic Dance Marathon (known to many simply as THON), the largest student run philanthropy in the world, will come to a close. For those us of you who may not know, THON is a yearlong effort to raise funds and awareness for the fight against pediatric cancer. But the most well-know and longest-running THON event is the actual 46-hour dance marathon. Back in 1993, I danced in THON as part of Phi Sigma Pi, a coed national honor fraternity. A good friend of mine, who was born the very same day that I was, had recently died from cancer, and I really wanted to participate in THON for "Big Al." However, having never pulled an all-nighter in my life, I had no idea how I was going to stay awake and standing for 48 straight hours (not sure when THON removed two of the hours!), on top of the hours I would have already been awake before the event began that Friday night. But I figured if Al and so many others could suffer through what they did...