Silver lining: With the temperature having taken a sharp downturn a couple of weeks ago, this month's power bill is only $230.
Associated cloud: if we don't manage to get out of here soon, we're going to have to get the heating oil tank filled up for the winter. (We've already been notified that we'll be receiving a low-income energy-assistance check sometime in February, but come on, last year's was $28. It's a bad joke.)
My last surviving grandparent, my Nan Harris in Devonshire, England, has been doing poorly for probably the last six to eight months, since being diagnosed with bone cancer in her arm. The last few weeks, she's been in and out of hospital with one problem and another, and her calcium balance has been going very high despite the doctors' efforts to control it. Now I just got mail sent late last night saying that her cancer's gone berserk, her blood chemistry's completely haywire and her kidneys are failing. In short, she's terminal.
And there's no possible way we can get there. We simply don't have the money. She's never going to meet her great-grandkids, and they're never going to meet their great-nan.
As previously mentioned, my grandmother Harris in Devonshire is dying. She has three great-grandchildren here who she's never met, and we've been flat broke for the last two years (for those who don't know, I got laid off in 2001 and haven't been able to find a new job since).
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cymrullewes and I have a request (cymrullewes' idea). I don't like asking for favors I don't know when I'll be able to pay back, but ... this is my last surviving grandparent, and I didn't manage to get back to England when my grandfather died about six or seven years ago. We'd like to ask all of our online friends if you have any frequent-flyer miles you can spare to the cause of getting the five of us -- myself, cymrullewes, and the three girls -- to Devonshire in time to at least say goodbye.
I can make no promises as to when we'd be able to repay anyone. We've been thinking for the past three years that a job's got to come along Any Time Now, and it hasn't. (Part of this is probably that I doubt I could jobhunt my way out of a wet paper bag.) But if any of you can spare any miles you don't expect to use, it'd be hugely appreciated, and we will repay what we can, when we can.
Our current "best fare" is a $366/seat flight from JFK to LHR Tuesday evening on Kuwait Airways, arriving Wednesday morning and returning Oct 30. (Thanks go to novel_tharkun for finding it.) We have an offer from ehintz for America West air-miles to get us from here (well, from RDU) to and from JFK. We still have to figure out passport issues; I have an EU passport, but cymrullewes doesn't have one at all. I should be able to get her an EU passport on the strength of mine plus our marriage certificate, but same-day emergency service from the British consulate is $180 plus regular passport fees. Most or all of the girls could probably travel without passports in a family-emergency situation.
I still don't know whether this is feasible or not. cymrullewes is more positive about it than I am. I think I am inspired to pessimism by the repeated setbacks and failures of the past five years.
...anyone need any DEC hardware? I have three Digital Alphaservers here that we can't spare the power to run and don't have any OS media for right now anyway (one fully-loaded 4100, one fairly-stripped 4100, and one semi-stripped 2100), plus more DEC StorageWorks arrays, controllers and rackmount kits than you can shake a stick at. (There's, like, 10 disk arrays and 8 SCSI RAID controllers.) Any or all of'em can be yours for a song, and the truth is, if we can't find anyone who wants the stuff, most of it (at least the two stripped Alpha Servers) will probably end up being scrapped.
(I might still try to load the "good" 4100 up as far as I possibly can with the available parts and see if I can get it running, but not until we're somewhere with better power than here.)
Our current "best fare" is a $366/seat flight from JFK to LHR Tuesday evening on Kuwait Airways, arriving Wednesday morning and returning Oct 30. (Thanks go to novel_tharkun for finding it.) We have an offer from ehintz for America West air-miles to get us from here (well, from RDU) to and from JFK. We still have to figure out passport issues; I have an EU passport, but cymrullewes doesn't have one at all. I should be able to get her an EU passport on the strength of mine plus our marriage certificate, but same-day emergency service from the British consulate is $180 plus regular passport fees. Most or all of the girls could probably travel without passports in a family-emergency situation.
I still don't know whether this is feasible or not. cymrullewes is more positive about it than I am. I think I tend to be inspired to pessimism lately by the repeated setbacks and failures of the past five years.
Thanks and appreciation go out to our friend Snack (who has no livejournal to our knowledge), thanks to whom we now have most of the cost of cymrullewes' passport covered.
(yeah, I'm going to keep frobbing the time on this update entry as the situation changes, so I dont end up with umpty-'leven different update posts.)
I have another update from my parents. They don't know where there would be to put all of us; there'll be no room in Nan's house, and we won't be able to afford a hotel. At most, there might be room for me to go on my own, and ...
"Even more frankly, I am not sure that I could cope myself with this stressful event AND visitors to cater for - even if they are beloved family. I am working hard at trying to avoid the stress that leads to my devastating migraine attacks, which is no mean feat nowadays." (From my mom.)
There's considerable doubt at this point whether Nan will even survive until they get there (they're flying to England on Tuesday), and she's slipping into dementia from all the blood chemistry weirdness. My aunt Pat in Ilfracombe waited three precious days trying to decide what to say and how to say it before she passed the latest news on, and that delay appears to have closed the window of opportunity. In short, the odds are she'd be dead before I could get there, and that even if still alive, she'll be either comatose or too deep into dementia to be aware of anything.
I want to remember Nan as the happy, laughing grandmother with the broad Devonshire accent, who always had a smile for everyone and always had the energy for climbing the Capstone or a walk across the Downs. It sounds like it's too late to see her again that way, and I don't want the last time I see her to be as someone who's barely aware of her surroundings and needs 24-hour hospice care.
So taking everything into consideration, I'm taking discretion as the better part of valor and calling the effort off.
I want to repeat my most heartfelt thanks to all of those who have given or offered help (novel_tharkun, Snack, ehintz, ttocs, technoshaman, omahas, tww1fa, beckyzoole) or expressed support (ilcylic, juuro, iphy among others), and I hope all of you understand how much it means to me that people we've (in some cases) never met are willing to go to bat for us like this. But I want it clearly understood that I appreciate and respect all your generosity too much to take it when it seems it's really too late to do anything but stand at her bedside and wonder if she knew anyone was there anyway.
Thank you all, immensely. I just wish things hadn't gone downhill so suddenly. More, I wish we weren't in such a lousy situation and had been able to visit back when she first started going downhill, or last year before she got this bad at all.
I'm going to stay up and call my aunt in Ilfracombe in a few hours, to ask how Nan's doing and if she's still lucid enough to talk to her on the phone (I don't actually know if she's even home from the hospital yet; I know they're going to bring her home, but I don't know when that's happening), and if we can do that, then we will. But I think trying to do any more than that now would be more for our benefit to feel that we'd done all we could than it would be for hers. novel_tharkun found another flight leaving from Dulles tomorrow that could get just me there on Monday, but it'd clean us out, I don't know if even that would be in time, and it would burn resources that are needed here to support cymrullewes and the girls. cymrullewes insists I should go, but I feel it would be irresponsible.
There's a time to hang on, and there's a time to let go.
This is one of the times to let go.
There's a house on the hillside,
Where the drifting sands are born,
Lay down and let the slow tide wash me
back to the land where I came from,
Where the mountain men are kings
and the sound of the piper counts for everything.
Where the real mountain men are kings
and the sound of the piper counts for everything.
Feel the naked dust beneath my toes
while the future sun calls winds to blow
and the past and present black-eyed crow
flies hunting high and circling low
between dream mountains of our Eden.