i'm draggin' like a big ol' chain, because i got sick after my surgery. it was a combination of taking lots of meds, being cut into, having bad weather, being under a lot of pressure, being needed for rides and such, never really resting well upon my return, and then losing a night's sleep on finding out that my one remaining hearing aid had lost its battery charger. I had nothing for a few days! In a panic i retreated into a sore-throat flue kind of funk.

sometimes i come around a corner and feel much older. such a thing happens when they cut into my jaw and insert a tube so that it will delever electric signals to my brain and i can stay in the game, socially. all music, gone. all hearing of little things, gone. but the implants are picking up words and helping me understand them and this presumably will keep me in the game so i can hear what people say or are saying about me.

but oh the pain of hanging around with a sore jaw, and an earache related to the sore throat, and the blahs, real bad, that make me want to just roll over and go back to bed. every day three or four cups of coffee aren't enough. i ignore my main writing project not to mention all the others. i just don't feel well enough to tackle stuff.

puppy and i haven't been out for walk in weeks. it's been real cold and only now is warming up a little. puppy just pees and poops wherever he wants anyway so he's acting like it doesn't matter that much - but if i do go, it actually matters way more to me than to him. i need the fresh air and the exercise. I need to be alive again.

outside, things look grim. it's been real cold for a long time. leaves are soaked down on the ground as the last of the snow has melted on them; that snow lasted for over a week, which is very unusual. christmas will be warm, though, and that too is a little unusual. we went right past the solstice and now days are getting longer - that's as it should be.

then there's the ho-ho-ho. we have an extra kid this year. took in another foster kid, sister of the two who are already here. i see the two little girls, nine and eight, at the dining room table, making noise, being girls. there we go again. twelve and thirteen, and lots of the concerns of the younger generation. main one is, you gootta have a phone, and know how chargers work. don't know if these two, nine and eight, will actually have that chance while in our care. i've become against the whole business.

for reasons too numerous to explain. a seventeen-year-old will watch some media while we're driving around, because media is life and saves you from the discomfort of actually talking to someone. there may be something to see on the street but if so multitasking will take care of it because the media is like glued to the attention vortexx. i worry about the future of this country but so what, these kids are nowhere near the worst. but exactly what is it on media that's so attractive? nothing, really, not even worth finding out probably. it's just a placeholder, it holds their attention so they don't attract it from others. in a cocoon, they can make it to another day.

resting in my chair after a long day & night yesterday in which we went to iowa, i had surgery, and came back to see many many trucks on the side of the road east of west branch, after a harrowing set of accidents on saturday night.

the surgery went well but took too long; i was getting another cochlear implant like the first so i knew what i was getting into, and was somewhat drugged up as my wife drove us through it, stopping for gas in west branch before we saw the remains of the accident.

though the accident was saturday and this was monday night, there were still dozens of cars and smashed trucks on the road, and in two cases trucks on the shoulder with their blinkers on. this was probably because they couldn't move them, and were told to leave the blinkers on, but it slowed traffic down so we could all have a proper rubberneck on the other destroyed trucks that were also on the shoulder and the median. quite a lesson on truckers and ice!

over sixty accidents were involved in that one, just east of west branch, but nobody died. apparently back at the hospital they'd had to decide who to treat first as so many came in. but this had been two days earlier and still wasn't totally cleared off, though the roads themselves were in much better shape, and there were two lanes going all the way through. still it was about a ten-minute delay.

the ironic thing was that i once lived just east of west branch and the accidents could have been right there, near scattergood school, but i'm not sure really because i was in kind of lousy shape to look in the darkness across lanes to see exactly where we were. I spent a couple of years there but didn't recognize anyone at the west branch casey's, in fact that casey's might not even have been there when i lived there. time has make a new west branch. i am in my chair, dog on lap, getting used to the new hearing condition.

what will happen is that they will turn on the right implant in a couple of weeks and slowly i will hear better in that ear as i do in the left. in the meantime i have only the left and have some adjusting to do. with implants out i have almost nothing, as opposed to before, when i had very weak hearing on the right and implant (if charged and functioning) on the left. now i have to be more vigilant, and make sure i always have left, especially when out on the road.

as i began to come to this morning, i became aware of several crises, washer broken, kids need stuff, way behind on everything, laundry, christmas to organize, etc. but sun is out and it's warmer. snow is coming off roofs naturally.

And the dog is very attentive, and sticking right on my lap as i more or less stall in getting up and organized, and take my time. the accident took almost as much out of me as the surgery. my son is, after all, a new trucker deciding whether to go 50-state, as opposed to just CA-AZ. The truckers were heavily criticized for driving too fast (on ice/snow) or carrying 'dry loads' but i don't know exactly what happened, more than sixty people were unable to stop at some point, and whose fault is that? it could have been anyone.

vaya con dios, truckers. welcome to iowa!

i swear god will take from you every drop of blood that you have in this life to help take care of the folks out there that are falling through the cracks. lots of folks, lots of cracks, and if you have trouble saying no you're in the line of fire.

speaking of saying no though i did pass up a trip to chicago, for the impulsive boy whose friend needs to go up to see a clerk about getting the right date on his birth certificate. one car, icy roads, at least two kids but probably four, some along for the ride and the fast food, and the possibility of visiting home. no thanks. it didn't sleep well and wore me out thinking about it. but this thirteenth kid, that one won't go away.

she's the older sister of the eight-year-old we're already fostering, and the younger sister of the seventeen-year-old. we have one more seventeen-year-old, and we're almost done with our own kids, the last three of whom were adopted. the foster kids, all three from the same birth family, would probably be moving on in may to their father who, if he does what they want, will be ready to take them by may. the seventeen-year-old would be moving on to complete independence. they could declare victory. they extracted him from a violent household, he lived, and he came out alright. it's a wonder they aren't all in trouble.

really what i've found is that if an adult is consistently present and caring, and providing what they need most, which is shelter, food, and a ride to school or work, then they are grateful to live a somewhat boring life, and be home at night, on the media, in a comfortable bed, staying up as late as they want. i'm talking about the seventeen-year-olds now, who we deal with extensively, and there's like three or four of them that have jobs, are very responsible, and it's a miracle they keep going given the dysfunctional families they started out with. i'm beginning to feel that the transition to work & car stable life is a luxury that many high schoolers don't have, having families that can't help them with driver's licenses, jobs or car. but given the choice, most would take that stability over drugs, crime or whatever the other choices out there. it's not a matter of rent, they have a place to stay. it's mostly a matter of food security and a ride to school or work.

with the younger ones, it's really a question of whether we have the energy to drive them around, do dentist appointments, school functions, that kind of thing, and we're on the verge of not having that energy. if it's only 'til may, we might make it, but something tells me it's a little more than that. and the weight of the noise alone is substantial. i've always said that having two kids is not 1 + 1 = 2, or even 30 + 30 = 60, but more like 30 X 30 = 900, with all their characteristics multiplying off each other to make far more noise and complication than simply adding two together.

one last push, one more chapter. she was out there - she was about to have to go to chicago, or somewhere else around the state, start over in a new house, away from sisters and brother, and now she's at least with one sister and one brother. there is, yes, another sister, a twin of the eight-year-old, she's also definitely out there, she did have to go away. we just couldn't handle her. if you go back to the origins of the family, one older boy, three younger girls all within three years, one girl completely uncontrollably violent and unreasonable, the mother also probably bipolar, violent and unreasonable, that's all it took to break down the family until we and the social services started putting it together starting from the saner edges of it, namely the seventeen-year-old, then the eight-year-old, now the ten, now the father, and try to very delicately keep it from moving into that trouble zone where kids are isolated and bitter, and can't function.

If they all come out healthy, and alive, and able to move on to the next phase, we'll all be grateful. the community or the village will have stepped in and raised the kids.

got a big snowstorm on friday night and basically i was in denial until the very last minute, and when i had to i finally got to driving around in it and shoveling the walks. i can do it. i've lived in snow country for most of my years and this is just what we do. i had my chance to move to cali or texas or even mexico, and i didn't. so now i scrape the windshield. naturally a really cold spell came right behind the snow and froze up everything especially the streets that they were too slow to plow and that were already a little packed in. so now there are a few that are solid ice and the main ones are actually quite reasonable, but i have to go to oquawka this afternoon and there's this one high bluff over it where you go down a steep hill to get to the town, and in my dreams at least if you can't stop you roll right down through the town and into the mississippi.

well that's an exaggeration, and i'll be ok, but in some ways i'm kind of dragging. my son now has three visitors with nothing better to do than live off a disabled kid, but we don't take a hard line and simply kick them out even though we can't really afford to feed them. it's like they're in suspension. no money is a permanent condition, and slightly-warm place with occasional food is better than what they're used to anyway. so they're not going anywhere even though my son has said it's a little too much. none of the three of us, son, wife, or I, is ready to just order them out.

one was here for a court date. what happened happened two years ago, when he was 16, but involved my son so i felt partially responsible to take him down to the county courthouse forty miles down the road and wait. fortunately they dismissed the case but again made us wait all afternoon. i felt like i was doing penance for every crime i ever committed and got away with. just waiting, in a courthouse, for them to look carefully at his case, which granted, was a little complicated. people were friendly. but eventually i took to pacing in the upstairs of that courthouse. how much penance can you stand?

to show how much i'm living in my head, i've come up with a philosophical question. if snow covers a stop sign, do you still have to stop? can you argue that you didn't know it was there, even if you've been at that intersection a few times and should know it's there? just curious.

blog reports are in, in case anyone is curious about how it goes, maintaining and tracking 28 personal blogs and 9 commercial ones. i do a pretty crappy job overall, but they are entrenched in the system and get lots of visitors. you can find some of them by going down in the template to the "some-o'-mine" tab where you might get clicked over to any possible thing. or follow the lighthouses, they'll take you on a little tour. my own carousel. if one blog gets a visitor, several will.

have a good holiday season and stay in touch!