Update

Dad, Brother, Gardening, John Holmes and Writing.
It's been a rough few days. I've been hesitant to make an entry, mostly because it's getting to the stage now where I'm never sure how much I can safely say about my Dad's condition. He was due to go in to hospital again, for a procedure. It looks like they will have to remove some glands from his neck (lymph glands, I believe) and he was taken in on Sunday when they finally had an available bed.

Well, he's back home today. They didn't remove anything, but have taken a swab of the tumor and a CT scan, and we'll have the results on Friday fortnight. As much as it is a great relief to ME to have him home, it is even more of a relief for him. He was really convinced when he left on Sunday that he would never come home again. It was heartbreaking to see him say goodbye to my mother, and thank her for the decades of married life they have shared. It was also strange to see him asking her to pray like she'd never prayed before. He's a self-proclaimed atheist, but it was almost like for a moment he believed there was a God, just that He wasn't going to listen to a fox-hole atheist. My mother is a life-long devout though.

He's always seemed like a strong man, both in character and conviction. But it's something else to face the possibility that you're going to die in the immediate future. I know it's churning him up inside, but he's not one to share that with anyone, even his wife.

I guess it's one of the things I've inherited from him, as I take my personal privacy to an extreme degree.

My brother and his girlfriend flew in last weekend to spend a few days with him before he went in. It was great to see them over. As I believe I've mentioned before, she is from New Zealand, so in an effort to make her feel more at home, we had a barbeque on Saturday and Sunday. Plenty to drink, as you can imagine, and it made me feel particularly pleased that my recent efforts had made the garden presentable.

We had a slug infestation, which I managed to deal with. Harsh chemicals and pesticides are the only way to go. After I had treated the entire garden with some blue pellet stuff (a gardening technical term) every little colony space (about 8 of them dotted around the garden) had white viscous slug trail stains scattered all over. As I was hosing the place clean, I remarked to my brother that it looked like John Holmes had jizzed all over the grass. He thanked me for that particular image. Guess my penchant for the unusual turn of phrase is undiminished.

I've still been unable to write something (storywise) which hasn't been tinged with meloncholy and melodrama, but I'm trying. I still have a few ideas which I haven't been able to commit to paper properly, including an idea based on cross between cyberspace and the Neil Gaiman "Dreaming" concept,, concerning subdermal PDA's, neural links, and an IPv6 address category for lucid dreamers using their PDA to access the internet while asleep. I'm probably not doing it justice in a few lines like that, but I think it's a neat idea, if I can only find a story for it to fit into.




posted by Manchild at 1:03 AM