Brief update

 It's been a while since I've blogged.  I've been going through a long period of several months when my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder has been especially severe, and a lot of my energy has been spent coping with that.  This means that most of the other facets of my life have suffered at least a little bit - both the OCD and fighting it take a lot of mental focus and energy.  At times like these, I tend to become more withdrawn, have difficulty focusing on work and other everyday tasks, eat more (and gain weight accordingly), and spend much of my free time doing nothing in particular but thinking and going through tumultuous emotions.  

In spite of this, I have been able to give my Dad some help for his upcoming move.  Most of the assistance he has gotten, however, has come from a company that helps with arranging and packing materials in preparation for moves.  Their assistance has been vital - he is probably 75% of the way through packing, whereas him and me alone would be much less far along without professional help.  I can only go over to help on weekends, and he has both a bad knee and a bad back, so it's a bad idea for him to do too much.  Picture a 4-bedroom house with 2 stories and a basement, filled with 30 years of material accumulated by what was once a family of 5 that lived there, most of whom had at least slight "pack rat" tendencies, and you might have some idea of the size of the task.  A lot has been thrown away or donated, including books (Dad estimated that he had over 2000 books before we began the process).  Within a couple of weeks, though, most of the boxes and furniture should be moved into his new house, and then the task will be unpacking.


There's obviously nothing going on in the garden to photograph lately.  Overall, we've had a very mild winter, with little snow after the freak storm we had last October.  We've had some cold spells, but overall the temperatures have been less cold than usual.  Today has been very, very windy, and the power even went out for a short time.


Well, that's my brief update for now.

Autumn storms, odds and ends

Two weekends ago, we had a freak autumn snowstorm that dropped a little more than a foot of snow on trees that still had the majority of their leaves. As a result, some people lost power for a week, and trees and tree limbs went down everywhere. (I was lucky, losing power for a mere three days, but darn was it cold at night in my house!) A maple tree in my yard had a large, horizontal limb partly break off and fall onto a privet hedge. Part of it was sticking out into the street, and I had to grab my pruning saw and go out while it was snowing to cut that part of it off so that it wouldn't block cars. The part that wasn't sticking out into the street is still where it fell, still partly attached to the tree. The tree-pruning companies are so booked up that I couldn't get an appointment for someone to come and remove it until the 22nd of this month, still a little more than a week away. Here's the branch:

Here's another view:

Here's the tree just a little more than a week before the storm - you can see the branch that broke off in the lower right:

In other news, my father will be buying a new house this week. I will be helping him gradually pack and move stuff out of the old house where he has lived for almost 30 years, and where I grew up, and into his smaller new house. We will be able to do this gradually because he plans to sell the old house to neighbors who are interested in it, and they won't be ready to move in until around March.

Death in the family

My grandmother died yesterday. She was my last surviving grandparent, and the one that I was closest to. She was 94 years old, and had been declining a lot over the last year, so it wasn't completely a surprise, but it was still a painful shock to hear this news, since I hadn't heard that she was doing worse than usual.

She had a strong personality - loving, sociable, opinionated, and stubborn. We always got along very well, even though I am quite different in some ways. I remember one summer when I was 12 or 13, spending most of a month visiting her, going out every day to see sights in Washington, DC and Maryland, having a great time. It was difficult to see her gradually decline physically and mentally, even though this is almost inevitable at her age. My father and I visited her in Texas, where she went to live close to my aunt, on her last two birthdays for the last two Septembers. I am glad that I got to see her when I could still talk to her, although she couldn't handle much talking on our last visit.

She lived a long, full life, working full-time when my father was growing up, at a time when this was the exception for middle-class women rather than the rule. She had a very interesting career - she was a computer programmer, starting shortly after World War II when computers weren't even programmed with punched cards, but by rearranging wires within the computer. She spent most of her career working with punched cards.

About a year ago, I started writing letters to her. At first, she wrote back, but after a while, she could not do this anymore. I kept sending letters periodically. For the last few months, my aunt would have to read them to her when she visited every few days. I think that they did help cheer her up a little at times, and that she liked to hear from me. The last one I wrote was a little less than a month ago. I just wish I had sent one last one right around Christmas, rather than procrastinating, though she might not have heard it anyway.

She lived a long, fairly happy life that affected many other peoples' lives in good ways, and died peacefully. She will be greatly missed.

Stuff that's going on in my life

On Friday, I signed a purchase and sales agreement for a house.  It is a very nice place, in good shape, about 1000 square feet, and only about 2 miles from where I work.  Closing is not until early January, so I won't have to worry about moving stuff right over the holidays (though I will have to be packing, of course, and looking for some new but cheap furniture).  Overall, I am happy about my decision.  It does of course mean a large debt and less money in the bank, but I have calculated that I can handle it.  I'm not a big spender in any case, and I don't have many expenses beyond the basics of housing, food, utilities, etc. (though a good internet connection is almost a basic necessity to me!).  I've even gotten into the practice of keeping the heat lower and taking less showers to use less water, though I'm not sure if these will really have much of an effect.

My whole immediate family will be together for Christmas this year - me and my father, both my brothers, and my sister-in-law and niece.  Both of my brothers are living in Europe - the one with a family in Dresden, Germany, the other one going to school for a Ph.D. in Oxford, England, UK - so they will be making long trips.  I am looking forward to this.  The Christmas season has usually been one of my favorite times of year because I am lucky enough to have a family that gets along so well that our gatherings have a lot of the atmosphere of meetings of old, close friends, only even more so.  The older I get, the more I have realized how lucky and privileged I have been to have this kind of relationship, and I sometimes feel ashamed of taking it for granted too often.


I continue to wrestle with the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, sometimes with a lot of success, sometimes with no success.  In spite of the generally good condition of my "outside" life lately, my internal mental and emotional state has been veering between a combination of great happiness, confidence, and determination, and a combination of anxiety, self-hatred, depression, and negative thoughts and behaviors toward others and myself.  In the course of my internal struggles, I am making the disturbing discovery that I am very ready to ignore the interests and needs of other people in my struggle to defeat or at least contain many of my negative emotions.  I have long suspected that my OCD and the internal struggles that go with it have made me very self-centered in some respects, but recently this has become more serious and blatant than ever before.  On the other hand, I am not even sure if I am doing any actual harm at all - my anxieties include an obsessive fear that I am causing harm to others without fully realizing it, so I tend to not trust my own perceptions.

News, good and bad

The good news is that I have agreed on a price for a house of my own, one that is nice and only about 2 miles from where I work.  The agreed price is $156,000, which is very reasonable in this part of Massachusetts even for a small house in a down market.  I haven't talked much about my house-hunting, but it has been an interesting process, and there are still quite a few steps left.  I am going to the inspection on Monday.

The bad news is that my grandmother's health is going further downhill.  She is my father's mother, my one surviving grandparent, and is 94 years old.  She lives down in Texas, about 100 miles southwest of Dallas and some 40 miles west of Waco, near my aunt, who visits her at least once every week.  She often described me as her favorite grandchild, and we were pretty close as I was growing up.  My father and I have visited her the last two Septembers for her birthday, and I still write to her from time to time.  For the last year or so, however, her health has deteriorated.  She sleeps a lot, has lost quite a bit of weight, and needs more assistance taking care of her everyday needs like getting dressed, etc.  She has usually been unable to hold extended conversations, and sometimes gets very confused.  She moved from an assisted living area into a more complete nursing home area of the same facility.  Now she often completely forgets where she is, which is considerably worse than she was just this past September when I visited her.  My aunt and the people at the nursing home both think that she sleeps so much at least partly to escape the confusion and anxiety that she feels because she can not remember where she is or what is going on.  I feel somewhat guilty for not writing to her since earlier in November, although I believe that she mostly relies on my aunt to read my letters to her now, and may not always fully understand them.  

Overall, her health and quality of life, which were not good even over a year ago, are tragically declining more and more.  It happens to almost everyone eventually, but that does not make it any less painful or sad when it does happen.

Other news

My sister in law in Germany is doing fine after the surgery she had 10 days ago. It wasn’t that serious, and while she stayed home from work last week, she is returning this week.

There has been a mix of about 20% wet snow and 80% rain here since last Wednesday, with the net result that much of the older snow has been washed away along with the new snow. We are now in what I consider the ugliest time of year – everything still dormant from winter but not much snow to cover the brown muddy ground. I shouldn’t complain, though – further north and west and at higher elevations some places got all snow, which came out to about 3.5 feet over the last several days.

I have started waking up really early and not being able to get back to sleep, which is something that as far as I can remember has NEVER been a problem for me before in my life. Part of it is that I have been making a conscious effort to go to bed earlier, but the early waking up is often taking twice as much time from my sleep at one end as I am gaining at the other, leaving me frequently very tired.

As long as I can find the time, this spring and summer will be “garden simplification time”. For three years I have taken care of the sprawling and productive flower beds that Mom set up over the years, but now I will be moving at least a little further away, and Dad is not a gardener. In practice, this means that I need to transform beds packed with various perennials into beds with a few perennials or shrubs and everything else covered with thick mulch to keep out the weeds. It also means that I will have a whole bunch of perennials to try and give away to anyone who will take them.

Because I need to post something, dammit

I live a pretty dull life. I actually like it that way a lot of the time, but it does give me precious little worth writing about. Still, since not having anything momentously important to say hasn’t stopped millions of other bloggers, so why should it stop me? So, in no particular order ....


My youngest brother has been accepted into the physics doctoral program at Oxford. That's the Oxford in England, one of the world's more prestigious educational institutions. Yes, he's pretty smart. Not only can I not understand the sub-field that he specializes in - I can't even remember what it's called. (I'll have to ask him if he plans on trying to pick up an "Oxford accent" while he's there - that would be ... disturbing.)


Far less welcome was the news last Friday that my sister in law in Germany had to have surgery. She is apparently doing OK - nobody in the USA has heard from my brother since this past weekend, but since he would always contact us if there was a serious problem, we are going by the principle that no news is good news.


I have several important things that I need to start working on, the most important of which is looking for a new place to live. I have responded to these challenges so far in my usual fashion -- by procrastinating energetically.


I met an old friend who I hadn't seen in a couple of years for lunch this past weekend - he and his family seem to be doing pretty well, which is good news. We caught up on stuff that has been going on in our lives and reminisced about the "good ol' days" when we were growing up (in our case, mostly 80s and early 90s).


It's snowing here now - we're supposed to get mixed snow and rain for about the next 3 days. There isn't supposed to be too much accumulation, though, partly because the rain in the day will help melt the snow that fell at night. Unfortunately, all this freezing and thawing will probably make for a lot of ice on the roads.


There's more stuff that I don't have time to cover (or can't think of) at the moment, but it will have to wait ....

Holiday season, etc.

This may sound bizarre to some people, but being with my immediate family has generally been my favorite part of the Christmas holidays. I could easily leave all of the hype and stress and marketing associated with the holiday. When I was a kid, receiving lots of presents was important, but in more recent years I could totally skip that too and not miss it much at all. Going through Christmas without seeing anyone in my immediate family, though, really would take all of the personal meaning out of Christmas for me.

Why am a sounding like a sickly-sweet Hallmark card? The weird thing is, those cliches about Christmas being a time that brings families together and full of warmth and love and all of that stuff that makes many people feel sick - they have been pretty much true for me. Of course things aren't perfect, and there is sometimes stress and sadness, and there have been some Christmases that are much less happy than others, but overall the Christmas season is still strongly associated in my mind with fairly happy times together with family.

A couple of things help. For one thing, my brothers, parents, and I have generally gotten along fairly well for most of our lives. There have been times of anger and tension, but these have actually been very few and far between. Once me and my brothers were all adults, the sibling rivalry and adolescent-parent strife mostly faded into history. We really enjoy each others' company most of the time, so once we were all adults family gatherings took on some of the same atmosphere as gatherings of very good, old friends, with an extra dimension. The second thing that helps, I think, is that we all have a pretty casual attitude about the holidays. Nobody expects elaborate or expensive gifts. We don't worry about putting out lots of decorations. The main elements of our family Christmas are time spent together, lots of unhealthy but tasty food, a little simple decorating, and a mix of serious conversation with plenty of joking and good-natured insults.

The holidays inevitably remind all of us how much we miss Mom, though. This will be the fourth Christmas since she died, and there is a huge empty space in the family that will never be filled. My father and brothers and I still enjoy the holidays, though. The last thing that Mom would have wanted was for us to stop enjoying being together as a family, and we have not stopped.

Last Christmas was very distinctive because I went over to Germany with my father and youngest brother, and we celebrated Christmas with my middle brother, niece, sister-in-law and her family, who are from Magdeburg, a city to the west of Berlin. The year before we were in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where my brother and sister-in-law were living at the time. In fact, this is the first Christmas that I will have spent in Massachusetts in 5 years. Staying near home for Christmas actually feels a little "exotic" this year.

I have taken this week off from work and am spending it with my father and one brother at the "old family home" where I lived the majority of my childhood and part of my adulthood as well. My middle brother is staying in Germany with his family, but my other brother (unmarried like myself) flew in today from Colorado. We are also joined by a friend's dog who I am taking care of over the holidays.

Rio, our temporary family member for
the holidays - friendly, intelligent,
and generally furry and adorable.

The weather here has been seasonally appropriate. We got about 10 inches of snow from late Saturday night through Sunday afternoon, in a storm that was unusual in that it pounded places further south and along the coast with much heavier snow than the inland towns here got. There is enough to cause some problems, but not very serious, and it looks right for Christmas.

Canadian Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) in Dad's front yard.
At about 15 feet tall, it has outgrown any possibility of being
used as an indoor Christmas tree in the house.

On a less scenic note, it is really cold - partly because of the actual temperature, which has been between about 12 and 30 degrees Fahrenheit (about -11 to -1 Celsius) over the last few days - but also because of the wind. The "old family home" is near the top of a hill, and it has an open field behind it to the west. This means maximum exposure to cold winds.

View behind the house, with an area cleared out for Rio's use.

I was saying to my brother that with the cold, dry, windy air and blowing snow, coming to central Massachusetts now from Colorado Springs might not seem like much of a change. One key difference is that instead of seeing the Rockies just to the west, the best we can do is some Massachusetts hills. Well, what can ya do?

Not quite the Colorado Rockies, I'm afraid.

Saddest anniversary

I recently passed the saddest anniversary in my life. Three years ago this past Sunday, October 18, my mom died from leukemia. I have been meaning to post about this for the past several days, but I find the subject difficult to write about, or sometimes even to think about.

She had a rare, aggressive form of the disease that caused her a lot of pain and that moved fast. It was just about six months between when she showed the first symptoms in April 2006 to when she died in October 2006. They didn't even realize that it was leukemia until early June, and she then spent more than two months in Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston, where she got some of the best treatment that I think is possible in cooperation with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, but it still did not work. She came home in September and was at home for the last month of her life, with my father and visiting nurses taking care of her with some assistance from me and my brothers. The pain was often intense even with pain medication, and for the last few days she was asleep or unconscious most of the time. It sounds wrong to say or think this, but my father and brothers and myself all felt a sort of relief along with the great sadness when she did pass away, because she was in such pain and had great difficulty moving or being moved at all, even adjusting her position in bed, toward the end.

Mom carried very heavy emotional burdens for most of her life, from depression and a dysfunctional family life and a deep-seated and unshakeable sense that nothing she ever did was good enough. In spite of all of this, she was determined to do everything possible to give her own children a happy home and the kind of childhood that she had not had. She succeeded beautifully, far better than she would ever acknowledge. I hope that she realized this before she passed away, and that she realizes it now. If there were more people like her, the world would be a vastly different and much better place.

Off to Texas

I'm flying down to Texas today with my father to visit relatives. The main purpose of the trip is to visit my Grandmother (my father's mother), who turns 93 today. She is my last living grandparent, and also the one that I was closest to and knew the best while growing up. She lives in an assisted-living facility in a small town west of Waco, Texas, near where my aunt (my father's older sister) and uncle live. She is doing all right as far as I can tell, and she gets to see one of her children frequently, but I'm sure she will be thrilled to see my father and I, since she doesn't get to see anyone from our side of the family very often due to distance. When I was a kid growing up, she lived near Washington DC, in the same house that my father had grown up in, and we went down every summer for at least a week to visit her and my grandfather. I loved those family vacations - going to a bunch of different museums and tourist sites in Washington, digging through the huge volumes of old stuff in the basement (I especially remember my grandfather's stamp collection, the old 1950s stereo system with vacuum tubes, the big old TV that they bought the day that JFK was assassinated, and a 1950s vintage calculator or adding machine that must have weighed at least 15 pounds), and probably bugging Grandma half to death with all of my questions about the various junk and what life was like when my father was a kid and earlier. The only downsides were the intense heat and humidity of Washington, DC in the summer, and the 8-hour drive from Massachusetts to Maryland, which to a kid seemed as long as a major geological epoch.

In any case, I hope that Grandma will be happy to see us.

Weird weather and a garden that grows too well

Whoever is in control of the weather this summer apparently decided that late April or early May has the ideal weather, and so they would just replay it over and over again instead of giving the normal warm and humid summer weather. This has irritated a lot of people, but it was just fine with me, because I really hate warm and humid weather. Then again, I really hate cold weather, too. My ideal climate would never go above 70 degrees or below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (that's between 10 and 21 degrees Celsius for all you non-Americans who insist on using slightly more rational systems of measurement). Then, this week, the weather went back to being seasonal, i.e., warm and humid. Well, the window air conditioners are finally getting a workout after sitting around and doing little but collect dust for over 2 months.

The cool, rainy weather has been great for my lawn and garden. Actually, that's a lie, since I don't have any lawn and garden, since I don't own any land. What I do have is my father's lawn and garden, which I help take care of, and often lapse into thinking of as sort of mine. The gardens are what really stand out. As I grew up, I watched Mom expand the gardens over a larger and larger portion of the yard, and at times I took a casual interest in gardening myself. Mom passed away from cancer in late 2006, and my father and I have tried to keep up the gardens since then. Unfortunately for the gardens, neither of us has the dedication that mom did, and so the nicely arranged cultivated plants are often mixed in with quite a few wildflowers and outright unattractive weeds. I will periodically attack the weeds in part or all of the garden, then see a whole fresh crop of weeds come up, sometimes in just a few days. The rainy summer seems to have encouraged an especially lush growth of weeds.

Still, some of the unasked-for plants have turned out to be very attractive wildflowers, and I've kept most of those, which leads to a somewhat chaotic and unkempt but colorful garden:

There was once a grove of pine trees here. Then, there was an above-ground swimming pool.
Then, there was a formal garden, which a certain amount of benign neglect
is in the process of turning into a wildflower patch. At least it's colorful.