A Somewhat Educated but Even More Opinionated Post Regarding Caesarean Deliveries

  It's just after 4:00 a.m. PST, and I've been out of the house on my fourth call since I left work at 8:15. I left work later than usual because a baby announced its intent to its entrance into the world just as I was headed out the door for home at 6:05.  If anyone missed the news in an earlier reference, I'm nearly through the first week of my OBGYN rotation.

     OBGYN is not a branch of medicine that is well-suited to those who like and/or insist upon regular working hours. Babies choose to make their appearances into the world at whatever hours are convenient to them through some process that is still a mystery to all of us.  Doctors use  measures to reduce the inconvenience. They trade on-call nights so that any given doctor's sleep isn't disrupted every night. Some doctors attempt  lot of labor inductions during normal working hours. Some obstetricians perform a disproportionate number of caesarean section deliveries, the majority of which happen during normal business hours, in order to reduce the number of times they'll be called in at odd hours to deliver the babies.  

     This, in my opinion, isn't as terrible as it sounds to some. Any given baby in the United States has almost one chance in three of being born via c-section regardless of the best-laid plans of mothers and doctors. Some mothers are predisposed to a greater likelihood than others of delivering via the surgical route. Some caesareans happen through the luck of the draw. Some doctors resort to surgical deliveries at the first sign of difficulty. Whether the baby in question is dealing with his own odds or those of his or her obstetrician, there is an element of wisdom in determining what would have been the forty-week point of gestation for the baby (which is actually thirty-eight weeks, but that can be discussed at another time), shaving a day or two off the time so that labor doesn't start, and scheduling a c-section delivery.  I AM NOT SAYING OR EVEN HINTING THAT EVERY BABY SHOULD BE BORN BY C-SECTION. I am saying, however, that if a surgical delivery is safer for mother or baby, it should happen.

     Gone, in most parts of the U.S., anyway, and even in most parts of the world, is the idea of a woman delivering her baby in a potato field, then carrying him in her apron to the farm house, where eventually someone might come to her aid. (That actually happened to my great-grandmother in giving birth to her third child.) That happened because it was the best people could do with the circumstances they faced. It in no way meant such was the ideal way in which to bring a child into the world.

     Pregnancy and childbirth are now very much dealt with in medical capacities. From the diagnosis to early care to late care to delivery itself, the medical profession is involved.

   There are those who would have it otherwise. Some of them are actively fighting medical intervention -- even actively fighting others' right to medical intervention. Others are quietly going about their own lives, hoping their own rights to use widwifery and to bear their children at home will not be taken from them. I feel they are endangering their own well-being nd the lives of their own unborn children, I'm still willing to champion these women's rights as long as they do nothing to undermine my right to treat pregnancy and childbirth as a medical procedure.

     Where I feel that these women and their families have gone wrong [in my opinion]  is that they seem to value to the process of unassisted labor itself over the end product of producing a healthy newborn. To my way of thinking, it's all about producing the healthiest baby one can have. The simplest and most logical way of doing that is not to stay home for the birth and to give birth on one' toilet [although I do suppose that's one way of exposing the neonate to bacteria right away] or to kick all the doctors out of the birthing setting.

     While there's no reason for a child to be born in a more harsh environment than is necessary, when my day comes, I'll keep the lights dim util the OBGYN says he needs brighter lights in order to see what it is he's (or she's) doing. I'll have soft music played in the background, but if the doctor gets a bit loud and causes me not to be able to hear the Mozart or Bach that's playing softly in the background, I'll consider it a natural casualty in the name of modern medicine. If my OBGYN suggests that things are not moving along a quickly as they should be, and insists a caesarean is the safest way to move things along, he or she will not get any argument for me.

     The reasons for this are that most medical personnel do their bast work following a decent night's sleep and knowing in advance what is scheduled for the day and time. Healthy babies are born all the time, whether vaginally or abdominally, at odd hours.  A tremendous advantage to the baby in this process is that most labor ad delivery personnel, from the doctors to the nurses to the technicians of various sorts, genuinely thrive upon bringing new babies in the world at whatever hours the babies manage to be born.  I can understand the mentality that goes into this. There is a rush present at the birth of a healthy baby that I've never seen  and probably never will ever see elsewhere. 

     Caesarean section deliveries (the name supposedly came about due to Julius Caesar having been delivered in this manner, though much debate surrounds the origin of the name) were major surgeries at one time. They're still considered as such, as any opening of the body to major organs is typically classified as "major surgery."  The procedure, though, is now also considered routine, and, depending upon the nature of the hospital in question, is often the most frequently performed surgery in any given day.  Unexpected complications can arise in a caesarean delivery, and recovery time is definitely longer for a caesarean delivery than for a vaginal delivery, but I personally do not believe that it can be rationally concluded that a vaginal delivery is safer for the baby than is a caesarean delivery, particularly when a surgical delivery of the child has been anticipated in advance. While a baby whose is delivered vaginally works mucus and fluids out of his lungs through the natural process, which is a good thing, modern medicine is equipped to deal with any issues related to the absence of this happening due to the manner of birth. Additionally, a child born vaginally is exposed to bacteria through its mother while traveling down the birth canal. While the idea of bacteria may seem like an automatic negative to some, we all need exposure to bacteria in order to develop our immune systems. This is especially true for newborns, and the initial exposure to the newborn to bacteria through its own mother is probably the least harmful way such can happen. Nonetheless, it is my opinion that the positives of a vaginal delivery for an infant are outweighed by the negatives, with the negatives, in my opinion, is that throughout [in particular, a lengthy] delivery, so many hazards are present that, even disallowing for human error, a baby is usually safer through a surgical delivery.

     Where the mother is concerned, more risks are, at present, associated with Caesarean delivery than with vaginal delivery. The single greatest risk for the mother is the risk of death due to blood clots, which is at present  three times greater for mother who delivered by c-section as opposed to mothers who delivered vaginally. The rate of maternal death in childbirth or following childbirth is still incredibly low in the U.S. Other risks cited include frequent delay in breast-feeding by mothers who have given birth surgically, the greater pain as associated with a surgical delivery, and the economic impact of longer hospital stays. As far as economic impact of extended hospital stays is considered, it should not be a concern, in my opinion, if the surgical delivery is otherwise better either for the mother or for the baby. Where breastfeeding is cited as having been interfered with by surgical delivery, I personally do not believe it. yes, it may be delayed by up to a dy, but my experience is that it happens when it would otherwise have happened irrespective of the manner of delivery.  Where greater maternal death is taking place due to blood clots, this is obviously not something to be taken lightly.  It's a reason not to automatically sign up for caesarean deliveries when no other indications for surgical deliveries are present. Still, women develop blood clots or otherwise bleed out following vaginal deliveries as well.  

     Many studies detracting the practice of caesarean section deliveries are paid for or otherwise promoted by insurance carriers. This is a fact that should not be taken lightly in forming conclusions regarding the safety of one manner of childbirth over another. Insurance carriers have a vested interest in slowing the rate at which caesarean deliveries because the norm as opposed to the exception. Because there is a considerable difference in cost to the insurance carrier for the more invasive surgical delivery, it is entirely reasonable that an insurance carrier should not be forced to bear the full cost of a purely  elective surgical delivery. It seems logical [and is current practice] that the patient should pay the difference between the cost of a caesarean delivery and a vaginal delivery in cases where the choice to opt for a caesarean is entirely elective. That alone will not solve insurance carriers' cost issues, though, as doctors have been known to be creative in advocating for their patients' needs; it's not inconceivable that  the most elective caesarean ever performed was done so at full cost to the insurer through skillful wording on the part of the obstetrician. It would be nice if a happy medium could be found here. I know that there is supposed to be discomfort associated with giving birth to  baby. If I elect to have the pricier option that gives me the least amount of agony through the actual labor/delivery process (the pain may be greater later than if I had opted for the more natural process of delivery itself) I should expect that it will come at greater financial cost to myself. 

I came across this piece of my mom's writing on a related topic. She gave me permission to use it.

     When I was taking civics and economics my tenth-grade year (I would have been thirteen, turning  fourteen, at the time, but most of my classmates would have been seventeen or eighteen), a girl who sat directly in front of me was in early stages of pregnancy at the beginning of the school year  but by June, was great with child. The child was conceived quite legitimately. The mother's own parents, in their infinite wisdom, had allowed their daughter to marry the love of her life  on Valentine's Day of her junior year of high school.  The baby who appeared as a result of his parents' love was due to make his official appearance into the world on the day in June on which graduation was scheduled. 

    Our economics instructor was in his twenties, and his wife, also in her twenties, was expecting her first baby close to the time my classmate's baby was due. (As it turned out, my classmate's baby beat the instructor's baby by six hours give or take a few minutes, but the two babies were roommates in the hospital's neonatal nursery.) Our instructor  was especially interested in his student's and my classmate's pregnancy. Each day as she dragged herself into the 7:55 a.m. class (her attendance was exemplary that year, as she had been told that if she experienced undue absences due to pregnancy-related matters, she would be transferred to an alternative high school program) our instructor would first ask her how she was feeling, but would soon launch into his daily speech, which he supposedly picked up from his wife's OBGYN, that pregnancy was neither an illness nor a medical condition, but  instead, was a perfectly normal part of life. This must have been difficult for my classmate to hear at the various phases of her pregnancy. Early in her pregnancy, there wasn't enough concealer or foundation to cover the shade of green that her face had become. I recall following her out of the classroom on numerous occasions to offer water, damp paper towels, breath mints, or whatever else she might want as she sat in the damp dirt of the flower beds outside our classroom on cool October mornings after having tossed up whatever breakfast she had been able to get down. The two of us had not been especially close prior to being seated one in front of the other in this class. I don't think we'd even before been enrolled in the same class previously. It was simply a mother-of-invention sort of thing. Melinda needed someone to attend to her needs, and I, in addition to being seated nearby, could afford to miss a few notes from the teacher's lectures. He lectured straight from the book and I, unlike most of my older classmates, had actually read the required readings.

     Things got better for Melinda for awhile -- I hear that the second trimester of pregnancy is often the easiest -- until they got worse. She wasn't sleeping well; each morning the circles beneath her dark brown eyes seemed to grow a bit darker and more deeply ingrained.  The heartburn probably would have killed her had the pregnancy gone on for twenty-four hours beyond the doctor's initial estimation of the length of the pregnancy. Melinda's walk progressed to the classic pregnancy waddle, which no one dared to make fun of  primarily because of our civic/economics teacher, who, while spouting nonsense about pregnancy being not an illness or infirmity but  a perfectly natural condition, was also hearing another side of things from his wife. The teacher's wife understood that pregnancy was sufficiently uncomfortable as experienced on her living room sofa. She couldn't have imagined what it would have been like as a barely-eighteen-year-old, dragging herself from one high school class to the next while feeling pains in places she didn't even know existed. The thoughtless comments from dweebishly immature high school jocks, not to  mention the snide cat-like commentary from too much of the female enrollment -- not about what landed her in the state she was in, but, rather, pertaining primarily to her resemblance to a whale and her difficulty in making her way for one class to the next, were almost more than Melinda could tolerate, and Mrs. Roche, our instructor's wife, had heard of Melinda's tormentors. She - Mrs. Roche -- made it her mission to insure that her husband took it upon himself as his personal crusade to put a stop to any and all harassment of Melinda.  Sexual harassment laws had been recently enacted, and Mrs. Roche saw to it that those laws were used to for the benefit of Melinda's protection. Eventually other faculty member got on board, and it became difficult for anyone to make the most benign of jokes at Melinda's expense without soon realizing that the few laughs one might get from such a joke were not with the faculty harassment and possibly even office involvement Melissa still had to face the near-terminal heartburn,  the baby's favorite trick of stomping on his mother's bladder at the most inopportune of times, the awkwardness of her body's vastly different dimensions as compared  a year earlier, her related dwindling wardrobe, and other related indignities almost too numerous to count. Still, she was spared harassment from the student body, which was only fair. While I have as much a problem with slut-shaming as does the next person, Melinda wasn't guilty of it. She was, as far as anyone in our high school could prove, as pure as newly fallen snow on the night she married. While her choice or non-choice (I have no idea, nor have I any need to know, how "planned" this pregnancy was) of conceiving her child so that she would be in a state of enceinte throughout that vast majority of her senior year of high school, it was no one's concern other than hers and her husbands. The reason it was treated as such was largely because of the commitment on the part of Melinda's civics/economics teacher's wife  to insist that her husband act as a protector to this seventeen-to-eighteen-year-old girl. No one could spare her the physical discomforts inherent to pregnancy, but she was at least protected from the vast majority of demeaning comments from the student body.

Credit for one aspect of Melinda's comfort belongs chiefly to my own father. He was at this time out of the air force and was flying commercially. I casually mentioned at dinner one night (even though it was just the two of us at home, we usually ate dinner together whenever his schedule permitted it) that Melinda could no longer fit into the desk that had a chair attached to it. Her midsection had grown so large that she didn't fit into the space allotted for a body any longer. He didn't even appear to be paying attention as I told him of this situation. Nevertheless two mornings later, about an hour before class was to start, he appeared on campus with a local furniture owner. They carted in a not-inexpensive plush recliner. After custodians were located, the classroom was unlocked, and the previous desk was moved out, the recliner, complete with matching cushions and a board of sorts which Melinda could hold on her lap in order to write as she needed to , was loaded into Melinda's spot in the front row.  I recall her actually crying when she came into the room and saw it. It hadn't occurred to me jut how self-conscious she must have felt wgiile trying to squeeze her body into the old wood-wire-and -plastic model student desk.

My teacher may have felt that he was doing the right thing in telling Melinda that pregnancy isn't an illness and that it is a very natural biological process, but the truth of the matter was that he was incorrect. There was also a time when -- while I don't think anyone was saying it wasn't an illness, dealing with cancer was a very natural process as well. Since not much could be done for anyone suffering from it, in the end, a whole lot of morphine was injected until the victim finally succumbed. The same probably could have been said of numerous illnesses. 

RIP, Alan Thicke

     At some point in the midst of finals and the wedding in which i participated just before going to Europe,  Alan Thicke left this world.  He had  a relatively varied career - singer, composer of TV theme songs, talk show host, actor, and I don't know what else. I knew him primarily through watching reruns of his sitcom Growing Pains.

     Growing Pains initially featured two parents and three kids. (At some point the brought in a fourth and maybe even a foster kid.) The only kids in the series to which I paid any attention were the oldest two - Mike and Carol. The character of Mike could have been loosely patterned after my brother -- a bit of a cool jock trouble-maker. carol's character, on the other hand, so eerily resembled me that one might have thought the creators of the show had bugged our home for character development ideas were it not for the fact that the show predated me by a few years. Carol Seaver was the quintessential brainy nerd.

    The Seaver parents were so much cooler than my own parents were that I wanted to escaped to the land of TV and be adopted by them. There were many people, both real-live people and fictional characters, whom I would have paid my entire inheritance (which may not be much; I know neither how much money my parents have, what they plan to do with it when they make their final exits, nor, for that matter, if I'll even outlive them).  Suffice it to say I would have given anything to be spirited away by the Witness Protection Program to the Seavers' set that pretended to be their house.

     Part of my affinity for Mr. Thicke would undoubtedly be a "Canadian pride" thing. I'm U.S.-born but hold dual citizenship due to my father having been born a bit unexpectedly on a trip back across the northern border for a family funeral after his parents had already relocated to the U.S. I'm American to the core, but there's a part of me that clings to things that are and people who are Canadian as well.

    With the deaths of both Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, among others,  it's been a rough season for celebrity deaths. Still, I didn't want to let Alan Thicke's passing go without any notice. I hope you're still out there somewhere, Mr. Thicke.

Odd Relatives I Have Previously Neglected

too small to be my actual extended family on either side, but it gives the reader an image with which to work

     I've ragged about my father's family almost ad nauseum, and for good reason. They're some of the strangest creatures ever to walk the planet. In using -- perhaps even overusing -- this obvious source of mirth, I may have neglected another source that, while not quite so pure a personification of Theatre of the Absurd, is still noteworthy in its aberration. In short, my mother's family has not received its due share of attention in this blog. I shall attempt at this time to correct this injustice ever so slightly.

     My mother is technically the youngest of seven. I use the term technically to note that in the caesarean delivery that produced both her and her twin brother, Kevin, she came in second (and last) in the lottery or the coin toss or the placement in utero or whatever influenced the OBGYN to pluck her brother out first. As far as I know, it was the very last time she came in second to Kevin in anything. She walked earlier, talked sooner, learned to escape cribs and playpens at an earlier age, outran, out-jumped, and outscored her brother in virtually every known measure. Despite having no intention whatsoever of joining the military (that would have made Private Benjamin by comparison to appear as a documentary), she took the ASVAB (the test that is given to prospective military candidates) and thoroughly kicked his butt on that measure as well. 

    At the time my mom was twelve and in eighth grade, she drove herself (and her brother, too, if the two of them were on good terms) to school each day in the new TransAm that she purchased with winnings from a gambling ring. Her football betting operation was successful in part because she was able to start out with large bets due to having banked a large sum of money from organ-playing jobs at church services, weddings, and funerals. She probably could have paid for the car solely with her earnings from musical gigs, but she saw a source of income (high school boys who thought they knew a great deal more about college and professional sports than they actually did at a time before the Internet was up and running) too promising to pass up, and in possession of the capital to back up potential early losses, she was able to start out full-steam. Early losses by her clientele seemed to compel them all the more to want to win their money back, but their bets seemed to grow increasingly desperate, to the extent of taking ridiculous underdogs. All my mom had to do at this rate to make money was to bet on the favorite unless the opposition was willing to give up a ridiculous number of points. She closed out her shop after football season of her junior year, before any authorities had even caught wind of her operation. At that point, in addition to her car and steady gas money, she had put away enough cash to pay for the first two years of her college education. She chose to end her high school career after just three years at the age of fifteen, and her nest egg was even not needed to fund her education because of the amount of scholarship money she earned.

     My mom's twin Kevin stuck around the high school for an additional year until he was admitted at the age of sixteen to the U.S. Air Force Academy's prep school. (Perhaps it was one of several prep schools the academy operates or operated, or it may have been just the one; I really don't know.) At seventeen, he moved on to the actual academy, and made it through in the typical four years, graduating as a pilot. He's still in military service. I don't want to interfere with his career, so I'll hold off on sharing the juiciest bits of information about him. Let me just share with you that he irons his underwear, that he won't eat anything that is yellow in color, that he takes his own bedding to hotels (even really nice hotels) because he doesn't trust what is provided, and he carries a pair of dice with him in his pocket at all times (I don't know if he wears pjs with pockets or keeps the dice on his night stand when he sleeps) because he cannot force himself to make decisions -- major ones, minor ones, any decisions at all -- and is thus forced to settle matters by the roll of dice. I'm sure it would be highly comforting to many military personnel (and to their parents as well) that many decisions concerning the lives of Uncle Kevin's subordinate military personnel are made on the basis of the roll of a couple of dice. In the interest of preserving U.S. military security, I shall not dish any additional dirt pertaining to Kevin. Kevin is married to Diane, who supplements their family's income as a belly dancer when opportunities for her service are available.

Next in the chronological rankings of my mother's siblings is Uncle Brian. He did his stint at the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, too, and also became a pilot.  After fulfilling whatever the minimum of time for military service is or was following receipt of an education at a U.S. Military Academy (Six years seems right, but I wouldn't insist upon that as fact. Perhaps Knotty knows. I could call one of my relatives, but I don't think any one of them particularly wants to hear from me at this moment, so I'll leave the definitive answer concerning length of time for mandatory service following an academy education up in the air for now) he chose to take his talents to the private sector, working for a commercial airline. One of Brian's distinctions is that he was considered too tall at 6' 6.5" to be a pilot and was required to obtain a waiver. Certain jets he was not allowed to fly due to his inability to fit comfortably into the cockpits;  other planes were found that he could fly. I don't think the height thing has been a problem in the commercial airline field. 

     Uncle Brian, a lady's man, thrived in the life of an airline pilot. At one point, the family believes he had "serious" girlfriends in at least eleven different cities. At least he didn't knock any of them up as far as we know. I may have cousins I don't even know about all over the place. If or when I decide to get serious and consider marriage with someone, I probably should have the prospective suitor's background very thoroughly checked, because it would be an utter shame to be set to walk down the aisle to marry some guy, only to learn that the man of my dreams is actually my first cousin via Uncle Brian. It would be even more of an utter shame for any children we might produce to be defective due to fallout from consanguinity. Just the idea of boinking someone [particularly if it was good, if you get my drift] only to find out he's my biological first-cousin is enough to give me a serious case of the creepy-crawlies. The odds are against it, but odds have been defied before. It happens all the time in soap operas, not that I base my reality on soap operas.  Uncle Brian dislikes red hair, which, unfortunately, is his natural hair color. He rotates between shaving his head all the way to the skull (which is a bit odd for a man with a full head of hair) and dying it various colors. All of this hair treatment makes him appear almost as a member of the witness protection program. Brian has allegedly given up on his womanizing ways and has married a beautiful woman -- we'll call her "Nancy" in order to protect the innocent. As far as we known, the leopard has changed his spots, or the zebra has changed his stripes, or whatever, and Uncle Brian is faithful to "Nancy." But do leopards ever truly change their spots? Time alone, and perhaps the services of a private investigator if "Nancy" has reason to be suspicious, will tell.

   Aunt Victoria is next in the pecking order.  When my grandfather was stationed at Castle Air Force Base in central California and she was still in high school, Aunt Victoria met up with the love of her life, an Azores-Portuguese Future Farmer of America. He was technically a future dairyman, but that's not what the organization is called. He was and is a cowboy as well. Looks can be deceiving. He's also an uncannily shrewd businessman. When dairy families all over central California were living the high life until the day their dairies were foreclosed and they lost everything, Aunt Victoria and Uncle Ralph were quietly buying the foreclosed dairies. They were able to take advantage of properties on which pesticides and not been used within X number of years, which made the properties eligible to be organic dairies. Organic dairies were thriving while other aspects of the dairy industry were going belly-up all over the place. Aunt Victoria worked for public utilities long enough to buy the modest home they were living in outright. They lived on her salary alone for several years so that their share of the  dairy money was able to go back into the dairy. They were able to buy land connected with riparian rights (water is now, and will be for the foreseeable future, an issue in California agriculture)for pennies on the dollar. They were then able to diversify a bit, getting some of their money free and clear of agriculture. In the event that every dairy or farming operation they own goes under, they have sufficient solid assets elsewhere that they and even their children are essentially taken care of for life. 

     My aunt and uncle are legitimately wealthy by the standards of almost anyone, with the possible exceptions of Donald Trump and Bill Gates. Agricultural wealth is usually quite different than wealth in other forms, as money in an agricultural operation is a commodity as much as it is capital. Because my aunt and uncle have been so astute and have diversified to the degree that they have done, they're beyond their wealth being merely a commodity. They're bona fide rich people. Most of us have preconceived notions concerning rich people -- of how they conduct themselves, how they dress, how they speak, etc. Aunt Victoria and Uncle Ralph defy these notions. They lived within a small city until it became impractical for them to be so far from all of their dairies. At that point, they sold the house my aunt had purchased with her salary as a public utilities worker and moved into a house on one of their dairy properties that was intended to be a dwelling for one of their milkers and his family. In most modern dairy situations of which I know, dairy owners no longer treat their workers as though they're Dust Bowl relocatees straight out of The Grapes of Wrath, housing them in tents or worse with no running water. Nevertheless, a house intended to be occupied by the family of a milker would be considered modest at best by most of us. It would typically have one bathroom, two bedrooms (three bedrooms if the milker is highly esteemed by the dairy owner), a small living/family room, and a kitchen. (I know the typical design quite well, because my family lived in a milker's house for two years. It was clean and adequate, but it was a downward move from the most basic home in which we'd ever lived before.) The house in which Aunt Victoria and Uncle Ralph lived was a very typical milker's  house, and was very much a step down from the modest home in the small city in which they had previously lived. The plan was for this home to be temporary. Land was already purchased for a more substantial home. The land had lain dormant for six years, and as far as appearances indicated, it would remain dormant for at least another six years.

     Uncle Ralph had his recliner, his remote control with Direct TV, providing him with every sports competition he would ever want to watch, good food that my aunt cooked, and a comfortable bed. Why would he want more? His motivation to build the house he had promised his wife receded by the day until he reached the point that he finally declared, "I have everything I need right here! We don't need a new house!" 

     My Aunt Victoria, a large part of the dairy operation's success, wasn't so dumb as  to blandly go along with her husband's proclamations. Charitable functions, organization dinners, awards banquets, and such are held and hosted  by people of their stature on a regular basis. Often these  events are scheduled far in advance. In November of 2009,  Aunt Victoria volunteered to host at her home in December of 2012 the annual recognition dinner for the local chapter of the Grand Holstein Dairy Society (or something like that; there are too many organizations of that ilk for me to properly track).

     Aunt Victoria played it very cool. "We don't have an actual driveway. Maybe we could clear out a barn for the guests to park,"  she mused brightly. "We can set up tents over there," (she pointed in the direction of a pasture). "The port-a-potties can go over here," she pointed to the family lawn. "The guests can enter through our front door, pick up their complimentary gift packages from our kitchen," [which would hold maybe a 2.5' by 5' table at best], "and walk out through our bedroom door to the tent holding the cocktails and hors d'ouvres, then on to the dinner tent. It will be quaint."

Uncle Ralph had an epiphany of sorts -- a mental picture of the expressions on his colleagues' and their wives' faces when they beheld for the first time his actual home. Within forty-eight hours, he had hired an architect. Eleven months to the day that my Aunt Victoria announced the hosting of the annual dinner for the Grand Holstein Dairy Society, the family moved into a 5,300 square-foot home at which the event was actually hosted.

But lest I paint a picture of my Aunt Victoria as being a cut-and-a-half less eccentric than her siblings, I shall share with you a recent conversation concerning a bridal shower for her future daughter-in-law.  The morning bridal shower, which will be held in the garden setting of a restaurant, will be fashioned after an English Tea. The restaurant opens up to the covered garden,which features a full-sized grand-piano in the opening. Aunt Victoria thought it would be perfect for me to play the piano  to add to the ambience of this shower.  I am more than happy to oblige. "What sort of music do you think would be fitting for this 'English Tea' shower?" I asked her.

"Country music, of course," she answered. Of course! Why didn't I already know that? How could one have an English Tea without country music? When Queen Elizabeth gets up every morning, she puts on her slippers and does a line dance to "Achy Breaky Heart." Everyone knows that. 

I wouldn't even know any actual country music except that a very good friend of mine sent me The Great American Songbook -- Country Edition for my most recent birthday. I will try to Muzak the country music a bit and slip in a few semi-classy things that aren't country, but I believe I can make everyone happy since I am in possession of this marvelous book.

Moving on next is my Aunt Elizabeth.  She raises meerkats. She has a habitat for them in her backyard. She cannot understand why the rest of us aren't interested in spending time out in her meerkat habitat. Her husband, Uncle Todd,  has little interest in even looking out the back door. Once the habitat got so unwieldy that the meerkats formed rival gangs and, for all intents and purposes,killed each other off. It was a dark day in Aunt Elizabeth's life. Now she controls the population and staves off future meerkat holocausts by trying to give away meerkats to unsuspecting friends and relatives. Matthew and I each got one for Christmas when we were eleven. They went straight to the SPCA. She and Uncle Todd have a son who is willing to spend time with the meerkats and to help his mother interact with them. His name is Chalmers. It isn't actually the meerkats Chalmers enjoys spending time with. Rather, it is his marijuana garden, which grows just beyond the meerkats' back fence to their enclosure, that occupies Chalmers' interest.

     Nest in line is Aunt Colleen. Her full given name is really "Mary Colleen." Actually, all the daughters in the family have "Colleen" as a middle name. There's Erin Colleen, Victoria Colleen, Elizabeth Colleen, and Mary Colleen. I suppose my grandparents  thought they had a good thing going, and that they might as well stick with it. They were similarly uninventive in naming their sons, all of whom have the middle name of Patrick. With all the names out there, I'm not sure why parents would limits themselves to one male middle name and one female middle name for seven children. Hell, if they were going to do that, they should have found a unisex name (maybe Shannon, since they're partial to Irish names) and given all seven kids the same middle name. Or they could have done the "George Foreman II, George Foreman III, George Foreman IV, Georgetta Foreman"-like theme. I asked my mom whose idea the middle name thing was. She said she's sure it had to have been her mother's doing. Her father would have been happy naming all seven kids after his favorite racehorses or the Green Bay Packers' offensive and defensive lines.

     Anyway, Mary Colleen, otherwise known as Colleen, is a wonderful, kind, generous person. She is also the most gullible person I've ever known in my life. (Could there be some correlation between her gullibility and her being the only member of this side of the family to convert to Mormonism?) Someone could walk through her front door on a 100-degree day in July and announce, "It's snowing!" and she would run to the door or window, fully expecting to see snow falling from the sky. Her husband, my Uncle Douglas, is a medical doctor who pulls in a decent salary, but despite his decent salary and the fact that they have only four kids (I say only because they're practicing Mormons; four is a small number of kids in a Mormon family) because Colleen wanted to invest in every sales pyramid scheme that came along, and a whole lot of those sorts of things seem to materialize in areas where Mormons proliferate. We often have received as gifts  products from the multi-level marketing schemes with which my Aunt Colleen has affiliated herself. She's not being a cheapskate in giving the gifts to us. She legitimately thinks we'll benefit from Neo-Life vitamin supplements, or LIV International supplements, or Nerium skin products, or DoTerra essential oils, or XanGo wellness products. She never really tried to sell the stuff to anyone. In a way, she was the prototypical worst nightmare to all of these MLMs because she had no interest in selling. She just bought as much of the stuff as she could and gave it away.

     Fortunately for Aunt Colleen's and Uncle Douglas' bank account, Aunt Colleen has an incredible singing voice and a doctorate in music performance with vocal emphasis, and they live in a university town. Now that chicken #4 has flown her coop, Aunt Colleen has become a full-time professor of vocal music at the university in their town. She has less time to be hustled by church members trying to get her to buy into just one more pyramid scheme. 

     Uncle Kent is the oldest of the seven offspring my mother's parents produced. He, too, went to the Air Force Academy.  He stuck around for several years afterward, teaching and coaching. When his service obligation had been fulfilled, he went to work as a professor and tennis coach for an Ivy League university. He spent the bulk of his career there. while at the Ivy League school, he had the opportunity to buy into an existing Tennis Camp for kids and teens. (I think they run a few adult and family sessions as well.) Matthew and I used to attend the camp until my scholarship was rescinded because my uncle did not think I had what it took to become a legitimate tennis prospect. (He was right about my not having the physique to succeed as a high-level tennis player, but I had misunderstood the intent of his gift. I thought it was to help Matthew and me to be the best tennis players that we could be while having fun at the same time. My uncle was apparently more serious about it. Matthew got even with him the next year by choosing baseball over tennis when the choice had to be made in high school.) Uncle Kent was and is, in addition to a tennis coach, a serious wine connoisseur. These two vocations/avocations didn't blend all that well. Consequently, Uncle Kent wouldn't make it to the courts until he had sufficiently nursed his hangover from his previous night's indulgence. This was usually around ten o'clock, after the campers had already been on the courts for two hours. At noon we would break for lunch and a brief rest period, then be back on the courts by 1:15. Uncle Kent would make it to about 2:30, at which time it was time for him to once again begin connoisseurment (made-up word- I know) of wine.We wouldn't see him again until the following morning. 

     One summer my brother cut his leg when he ran into a jagged piece of the chain-link fence. The nurse on staff concluded that it needed to be stitched and cleaned out better than she could clean it without anesthetizing it, which she didn't have the supplies to do. My mother had authorized only Uncle Ken or his wife Natalie to give consent for medical care for Matthew or for me. This would not have been a problem except that A) Aunt Natalie wasn't usually within seventy-five miles of the place, and that day was no exception, and B) It was well after 2:30 when Matthew cut his leg. Uncle Kent would have been into his third bottle by then. The nurse drove in the camp van. A counselor rode shotgun. I sat in the second seat by Matthew, holding a towel over his leg to control the bleeding. Uncle Kent was, for all intents and purposes, passed out in the back seat.  When we arrived at the local hospital, whose personnel had been notified we were coming, the camp nurse and I helped Matthew into a wheelchair. Then the accompanying counselor and the nurse practically carried Uncle Ken to the registration desk, where I basically held Uncle Kent's hand on the pen and moved it into some form of a signature. The nurse and counselor helped Uncle Kent back to the van, where he remained semi-comatose until we returned to camp to hours later. By then, he was coherent enough to ask both what had happened and where his wine was.

     The evening activities went off every night without Uncle Ken's presence. For five years in a row I won the talent show by dislocating my arms at the elbows, then putting them back into place myself. I don't know what counselor thought it was a good idea to allow a little kid to do this, but I still have the trophies to prove it. When my parents saw the "Talent Award" trophies I brought home, they probably assumed I had played the piano, but they assumed wrong. Matthew kept his mouth shut because he thought it was really cool. It was probably the only cool thing about me as far as Matthew was concerned. I was about the un-coolest sibling a boy could have.

     People are still sending their kids to my Uncle Kent's tennis camp. They think their kids are getting high-quality coaching. They may be receiving it, but not from my uncle. My uncle has a diagnosis of geo-aphasia supposedly brought on by traumatic brain injury incurred through years of high school and college (1 year of college) football. It's not impossible, but I suspect another diagnosis is more apropos. It begins with a and ends in m. I'll leave you to fill in the blanks.

     So you, my few readers, see that if I am ever-so-slightly off-center, I come by it quite naturally from both sides of my parentage and heritage.

overbooked-flights and the perks that can accompany giving up one's seat and flying home a few days later

a cool castle in Bavaria that we saw courtesy of our extended stay

I was supposed to be home by now, but our plane was overbooked, and several members of my traveling party chose to tour central Europe partly on the airline's money.  I'll fill in a few more details, but we skied or snowboarded (snowboarding for me) in Bavaria and hit tourist spots in Frankfurt and Munich. 

Before we're finished, we will have spent time in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen before flying home.

Alyssa, my brother Matthew, my former friend Tim ( we go from besties to not speaking to each other on a semi-regular basis to the point that it's no longer awkward for others around us when we're on the outs), my uncle Jerry, my dad, and I had the luxury of being able to give up our seats and take the perks the airline offered for our flexibility. 

Alyssa and I are good friends and are sharing hotel rooms on this extension of our trip, but by day, she's spending most of her time with Matthew, as they're becoming something of an item by day. The two of them would probably love to be an item by night as well, sharing a room, but on this family-oriented trip, with Alyssa's parents being the conservative Mormons they are, and with my dad and Uncle Jerry wishing to remain on speaking terms with them, it's not going to happen. It is my choice not to be the third wheel on their tandem bicycle, so my day activity companions are limited. I can hang out with my dad and Uncle Jerry. Imagine that. If you conceptualized it, you realize that it's not going to happen. I could conceivably do a solo tour of the European cities we're visiting, but neither my dad or my uncle Jerry would be OK with it. 

My remaining choice is to tour with the person with whom I'm not speaking. It sounds logistically difficult-to-impossible, but we're making it work. We're not silly to the point of texting each other when one of us needs to find a restroom because we absolutely can't talk to each other, but conversation is limited to logistics. Tim s paying for everything because the cause of our current rift involved my having to pay for the two of us to ski in Innsbruck because my nosy and controlling mother told Tim that I needed to pay for his and my own skiing fees because it was my illness that caused me to be unable to ski on the two days that the extended group skied in Innsbruck. Tim foolishly listened to my mom's ludicrous instructions regarding payment of skiing fees. 

Even my dad agrees that he and my mom should have paid my fees and Tim's as well if they required that I have a companion while skiing. he didn't know what my mom told Tim. no one else did. Tim's dad, Uncle Jerry, was irate about the situation. he told tim that if he goes somewhere with a girl, he should pay for himself and the girl; to require the girl to pay for him should have been demeaning for Tim. Tim just said he was following my mom's wishes. Uncle Jerry said it didn't matter. I got my money back from tim. I don't know if it was actually his money, his father's money, or my dad's money. I don't really care as long as my mom didn't get her way.

My mom is the last person who should be critical of anyone else for getting sick on occasion, as she's the Kidney Stone Queen of North America who has had Grave's Disease and Leukemia. I cannot begin to accurately list the illnesses she's had in the past two years, so I will not even try. Suffice it to say she's caught just about  every bug that's flown or crawled within five-hindred miles of her. so who is she to make an issue of my having experienced a relapse of myositis?

My brother, in his toddler wisdom, expressed it best when he heard my mom complaining on the phone to a friend that she had to cancel a trick-or-treating outing with a friend and her child because, in her words, "Alexis is sick for about the thousandth time in this calendar year!" (Matthew and the other child still trick-or-treated. I think the fathers took them while my mom stayed home with me.)

Matthew interrupted Mom's telephone conversation to assert his opinion. "Why you mad at Baby Lexus cuz she sick again? [Please ignore Matthew's not-yet-three-year-old syntax.] It not her fault. You the one that had a bad baby." At two-years-plus of age, Matthew hadn't yet deduced that two biological parents were required in order to conceive a child. In his mind, my mother had single-handedly produced a defective product because I was frequently sick. Now, after the fact, I'm somewhat inclined to agree with Matthew. All my illnesses are my mom's fault. Actually, it would be neither here nor there, except that she shouldn't foot the bill for Matthew's and my cousin Joshua's (who my parents have legally adopted) skiing but make me pay for it myself just because I had to ski on a different day due to illness. 

We toured one city today. we'll catch a short flight the first thing tomorrow morning, then tour another city. We'll do the same thing one more time, then hop on a longer flight home. I'll you tell you more about the frivolity (or alleged frivolity) once i've returned home and had at least seven consecutive hours of sleep.

Mood Instability

What if I'm not happy 100% of the time? Does that mean I am guilty of having mood swings? What if it only happens when I'm sick? Am I still guilty? Does it still mean there is something inherently wrong with me or that I am a bad person because of it? Do I need to hide this from everyone I know? Is it necessary to plaster a smile on one's face or even metaphorically do so upon one's writing at all times even if the smile is phony?

Pianos, Fevers, Franz klammer, Debbie Reynolds, and Carrie Fisher

This is the best picture I could find online, but it doesn't do the instrument justice. The Kawai satin oak is a lovely finish if you want natural wood without gloss, and the sound is great considering the price. My mom's is a bit darker and has  more red in the wood.

one of Elton John's flashy Yamahas

Steinway = pure quality

Boston gives a consumer Steinway-like quality at a more affordable price.

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If there's only one day for it, I will ski rather than snowboard. a person does not travel all the way to the land of Franz Klammer to snowboard. I haven't skied since my leg was broken when I was fifteen. I'm a bit nervous, especially if the slopes are crowded, but I will be cautious and give the right-of-way to anyone who wants it. It's still possible to fall and get hurt, but I'm careful.

Claudia's parents have a Bosendorfer piano. I don't get the hype where bosendorfer pianos are concerned. They're damned expensive for one thing. At the upper end, Steinways are as expensive, but I don't think you can get a new Bosendorfer grand of any kind in the U.S. (they may be a bit more reasonable here nearer where they're made) for under $70,000.  They're supposed to be so much more nuanced than Steinways where delicate passages are concerned. I can play delicate passages with the best of them, but, all things considered, I think my mom's Boston or even my Kawai gives at least as nice a sound, if not nicer,  to delicate passages.

Claudia has a 9-foot Steinway with an ebony satin finish. I personally prefer the high gloss finish, but steinway hasn't made their ebonies with high gloss finishes for all that long. Regardless, it has a very nice sound. Claudia lets me play it as much as I want, since I can't do much of anything else.

Some people in the U.S. buy Yamaha grands and honestly delude themselves into thinking they're getting Steinway-quality pianos. If you want a grand and cannot afford a Steinway, there is nothing wrong with buying a Yamaha, but a person is delusional who believes he or she is getting Steinway quality  from his or her Yamaha piano. For that matter, Kawai is superior to Yamaha in the opinions of far more people than just myeslf. Kawai doesn't get quite the hype Yamaha does because it doesn't do custom funky-colored pianos for people such as Elton John or Liberace. (Actually, I think it was Baldwin with whom Liberace had the deal.) Kawai does what it does very well. If a person wants a Kawai, he or she must select from the models Kawai makes. (Perhaps Kawai makes secret deals with artists to glam up pianos by painting nude bodies on them or whatever, but if such is the case, it is a well-kept secret.)

The whole Carrie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds thing was a bit eerie, though perhaps understandable. There can't be anything much more difficult and stressful for a parent than watching his or her child die and planning the funeral. It's not much of a stretch to see how that sort of thing could send an older person to a fatal stroke. I wish the deaths had happened in the reverse order so that Debbie Reynolds did not have to be aware of her daughter's death. it has to be easier for an adult child to bury a parent, especially once the parent has reached at least middle age,  than the reverse.

I'm still fighting this bugger of an illness but my temp is only 102 now. I'll ski as soon as my temp has been no higher than 98.6 for 24 hours.

Terrible Day

This is especially not a good day and I don't foresee anything improving in the foreseeable future.

I'm not sure why this is here, but I found it and decided it was worthy of sharing. I may add more photos if I find them and they are worthy of sharing.

From Illness to Snowboarding in a Few Short Days

I didn't take my cell phone. A stock photo will need to suffice.

    Today I eased my way from the world of convalescence back to the real world with a snowmobiling excursion. The terrain here is filled with an abundance of snow, and my hosts have cutting edge equipment enabling themselves and their guests to take advantage of nature's bounty. Claudia, our former exchange student, whom I initially knew as my introduction to all things wild, dangerous, and fun when my parents were out of direct line of sight and ear-shot, though now a respectable and responsible oncologist, wife, and mother of two, had very kindly pre-purchased winter attire for me so that I wouldn't be any colder than was absolutely necessary. A person will inevitably feel the cold outside in this glacial environment, but the proper clothing in layers creates the difference between standing stiffly as though one is as frozen as the poles, trees, and whatever other projectiles spring vertically through the snow and actually becoming one of those frozen vertical projectiles. Claudia did well; the drafting of my epitaph can hold off at least for the immediate future.

     Snowmobiling, for one who has never undertaken it, is probably a great deal like you would imagine it to be.  It's not entirely unlike riding a motorcycle except that the very basics are easier to master, and the very basic mishaps are less catastrophic than they would be if experienced on a motorcycle. Falling into snow won't cause quite the level of abrasions,contusions, and worse than will falling and skidding along the pavement or gravel of a road. This is not to imply that snowmobiling is an inherently safe activity, but, rather, to suggest that if a person does not consider himself or herself to be the Evel Knievel of snowmobiling on his or her initial ride and conduct himself or herself accordingly, even in the scenario of a nasty spill, one  will most likely walk away from it. Furthermore, it's easier in basic situations to remain upright and not have the nasty spill in the first place on a snowmobile as opposed to on a motorcycle.

     The snowmobiles I rode today were well-maintained, and I didn't experience mechanical failures.  I was lucky, if the stories told by others around me can be counted as reliable. Snowmobile malfunction is apparently the rule rather than exception. Traveling alone by snowmobile  through lightly traveled terrain is virtually asking for an account of one's story to be retold in Reader's Digest (if the periodical still exists anywhere other than in the offices of doctors who re-stock their magazines once every decade or two; does anyone know if Reader's Digest is still in print?). My hosts pride themselves on buying only the most reliable of snowmobile makes and models, and have them maintained regularly as well.

    Some motorcycle riders refuse to wear helmets despite all the evidence pointing to the efficacy of helmets in motorcycle riding. These people have a nickname: organ donors. Snowmobilers who refuse to wear helmets are risking almost -- though not quite -- an equally grim fate. Just once, take a brief ride down a straight path without a helmet to feel the force of arctic winds against one's face purely for the thrill of it. If you've done it once, you've done it a thousand times. Then put on a helmet and keep it on as long as you ride. Someone very close to you will eventually be glad that you did put your helmet back on if you intend to make snowmobiling a habit.

    I am by nature a very cautious person. With all the other snowmobiling novices, Claudia's father was incessantly cautioning them. He left me alone. I'm the person who looks four times before crossing a street and who never goes through a yellow light. I was not harassed. 

    We were in an area not-well-traveled, but there were enough of us and we stayed close enough to our home base that the off-the-beaten-path nature of our trails worked to our advantage. It was the perfect environment under which to perfect our previously non-existent skills and to learn the basic workings of the equipment. Being there must have been non-stimulating to the point of boredom for our hosts, but they were good sports. Franz, Claudia's father, was happy with the outcome by the end of the day because neither snowmobiles nor snowmobilers had been damaged in the process of introducing us to the equipment and to the sport. It was difficult for my brothers (and probably a few of the other young males as well) to follow the guidelines of Franz and the others offering direction, but they (my brothers, anyway) were told by my parents that if they wanted to be wild and stupid with snowmobiles, they would need to rent the machines elsewhere and assume their own financial responsibility for them. (Mom and dad made no such warnings to me. My level of caution in everything I do is well-known and documented.) Claudia's younger brother indicated, though, that tomorrow (now today) we, the "adolescents" of the group, would venture a bit further away from the geriatric group and would have a bit more fun with the machines. 

    Once the morning chill lifts, we'll take the snowmobiles out for more adventurous rides without the extreme supervision of yesterday. we'll spend the day touring the area. Somewhere along the trail we'll find a place for lunch, and we won't return until the sun has set.  My muscles and bones will ache before we return, but it's a price I'm more than willing to pay. 

    Today will be our final major snowmobile excursion, as future days -- weather permitting -- are reserved for snowboarding and skiing. I cannot recall if I told anyone in advance of the trip that I dreaded traveling here because of the boredom factor, but if I said such a thing, I was obviously speaking out of sheer ignorance.

Christmas in Austria: when the Blue-Bloods Meet up with the Irish-French-Canadian-Cuban Hillbilly White Trash Segment of Society (and we're just guessing on specific ethnicity because we haven't yet received our results from Ancestry.com, but we're right on the mark where the White Trash Hillbilly part is concerned)

None of these pictures

have anything to do

with my family

     After being awakened by younger children who wanted to tear into presents. (Claudia's family's tradition is for Claudia's kids and all of their cousins to spend Christmas Eve overnight at Claudia's parents' home and to wake up at unGodly early hour to begin devouring presents and every bit of sugar they can cram into their mouths for the next eighteen hours or so; if I'd known of this tradition earlier, I could have conveniently arranged to spend the night elsewhere -- anywhere but here; even the city's jail would have been an improvement -- but hindsight is typically 20/10.) Those spending the night elsewhere felt obligated by peer pressure to be transported by their hosts to Claudia's parents' home as soon as the phone call came just before 4:30 alerting the parents that their children were awake. Once the group reached the big house en masse, I told my approximate contemporaries that I was going back to sleep and that if they were still in possession of functioning brains, they should find beds wherever they could. Aunt Aletha was a bit taken aback, but what could she really do as everyone under thirty ransacked her house in search of unoccupied beds? 

     Matthew and Josh crashed on the beds in the room where my parents had been sleeping. Alyssa bunked with me. Tim took his parents' room. Claudia's nephews took their grandparents' rooms and a few other hideaways they knew about. Scott and Jillian's kids were still asleep, and they (Scott and Jillian) weren't stupid enough to wake them (Andrew and Baby Camille) at 4:30 a.m. and have them be cranky all day, so Scott and Jillian slept along with their kids until a more civil hour. Aunt Aletha was at first discombobulated about the gathering being incomplete, but then concluded that overly tired adolescents rarely have a positive impact on any group and that we should be allowed to sleep. Those of us to whom she referred as "adolescents" were, in descending order of age, 33, 29, 27, 26, 25, 25, 24, 23, 22, 22, and 21. That would seem to be a major stretch of the borders defining either adolescents or adolescence, but then, what do I know? I haven't even graduated form medical school yet. And, for that matter, what do I care about how Aunt Aletha delineates adolescence? As long as I'm allowed to decide for myself when to sleep and when to get up during my vacation times, I am a happy camper. Call me a preadolescent, a toddler, or even an octogenarian as long as you let me sleep until I'm ready to get out of bed.

Most of us made it out of bed before 10:00 a.m.  We opened real presents from the Austrians, and they opened real presents from us. Uncle Jerry, always practical, had decided that it would be stupid for the Americans to lug presents across the Atlantic, only to have to lug them back to California, paying overweight baggage fees each way, or paying to ship the presents. Instead, Uncle Jerry said, we should take pictures on our cell phones of the gifts and then send the pictures on Christmas morning. 

This might have worked had the people to whom my Uncle Jerry made the suggestion been slightly less deranged. I don't think anyone even collaborated on the picture project -- everyone here possesses a sufficiently borderline-psychotic personality to have come up with it on their own --but I sent Matthew a picture of a very homely fourteen-year-old girl holding a sign that said "I'm yours for one night." He sent me a picture of a crate of disposable douches (It's a long story based on a theft my Uncle Mahonri made and was caught and charged for in the Utah Valley).  My Aunt Jillian didn't bother with pictures. She just handed out condoms to everyone. Her husband, Scott, gave out certificates for free prostate or pelvic exams. I sent a picture of a framed picture of Charles Manson to my cousin/brother Josh. To my friend Alyssa, who is my Uncle Scott's sister's daughter, I sent a copy of Charles Manson's prison address. I included a copy of Scott Peterson's prison addy as well, as he's quite a bit better looking than Manson.  My parents got a photo pf an updated version of The Joy of Sex -- the original edition, dated 1974 give or take a decade, is in their library at home. (There's a long story related to me and their copy of The Joy of Sex. I think it's in this blog somewhere, but I may share it again sometime if I feel inspired.) I sent Aunt Jillian a copy of a gift certificate for a boob job at a swanky practice in Beverly Hills. I had my Uncle Steve write out a prescription for Viagra for my dad just long enough for me to photograph it. He tore it up immediately after I snapped the picture. I took a picture of a picture of the White House for my Uncle Jerry. Uncle Jerry cannot legally hold the office of President of the United States because he was born in Cuba, but he can buy it when Trump puts it up for sale. When that happens, I will help him. I'll contribute anywhere between one dollar and ten-thousand dollars to his effort, depending upon my financial status at the time the White House becomes available for sale. My available contribution is likely to be closer to a dollar than to ten thousand dollars, but that's just between you and me.

A large buffet table of breakfast foods including but not limited to fruits, meats, and pastries, was available, and guests were encouraged to eat heartily. I took and ate enough food to keep aunt Aletha from crying anorexia. It was my gift to her.

I won't waste any more of your time sharing stories about the lame gifts my family pretended to give each other or even the actual gifts that will in at least some instances will be given. That's not what Christmas is about in my family.

In my extended family, Christmas is about who defeats whom in the medical edition of a trivia game similar to trivial pursuit.  It's about who eats the most and who becomes the most inebriated. It's about which baby steals all the other babies' toys. It's about the Oakland Raiders losing. It's about how much of a wenis Derek Carr is because the fibula is hardly even a weight-bearing bone. It's about taking turns shooting apples off the kids' heads using plastic arrows. (Aunt Aletha was horrified even though we offered the kids the option of wearing sunglasses and only berated them mildly if they took us up on the offer.)  It's about who can come up with the most obnoxious prayer at dinner time. It's about just how farcical the annual nativity pageant can be made to be, especially when juxtaposed with what is happening on the other side of the world simultaneously as told by the Book of Mormon. It gets even worse when two of Aunt Aletha's children and two of her grandchildren want to lip-sync a song from the sound track of The Book of Mormon, the musical. When it got to the part with the pool noodles, the woman turned pale and looked as though she might be in need of resuscitation, which would have been OK because there were more than ten doctors in the house, not counting the four medical school students.

     I'm afraid we may have given Aunt Aletha a somewhat distorted view of just how generally crass, irreverent, and crude Americans are. I say "somewhat" because Americans really are, except for the fundies, at least a bit crass, irreverent, and crude. and that's the good side of the Americans. The fundies, in all their holier-than-thou splendour, are much harder to take than are the rest of us.

     To our credit, we did at least provide Aunt Aletha with a powerful choir to impress all of her neighbors when we went out caroling. I use the term "we" ever so loosely here, as I'm not a good singer and did very little to contribute to the overall sound of the group. I'm the queen of on-key-yet-astonishingly-lousy singing. You don't want me in your choir unless you have no one else who can sing on-key without an anchor.

     The visit still has another week or so to go, during which we will either redeem ourselves or dig even more deeply into the hole of depravity.  We've invited Aunt Aletha and her family to spend Christmas with us next year or the following year -- whichever year works out better for them.  Will they show up, or will Aunt Aletha conclude that her progeny have already been so corrupted by our presence on her own turf that God only knows what might happen if they're allowed to run loose on our native soil? 

     Only time will tell.

 . . .nuclear OR extended . . .

I'm including them only to show

that there are people out there even worse than we are

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire and Other Miscellaneous Bullshit

                                        I do not own this video.

Despite a few physical limitations getting in the way of my frivolity, I am managing to have a bit of it [of frivolity, that its] despite all the admonitions to the contrary being directed at me almost every time I even  think doing anything remotely fun.

I've reserve the best and most exciting of the fun for when i'm  bit physically stronger. I'm trying to keep in mind that there re tons of people around me every day whose physical limitations cause mine to appear, by comparison, as physical strengths. Keeping this close to the forefront of my thoughts help me to feel gratitude for what is, in the grand scheme of all things related to health, a lifetime of good health, Most maladies I have faced have been minor. Those that weren't necessarily minor were ones I have defeated.

Tonight I overheard a  portion of a conversation between one of  our hosts, Aletha (my brother and I call her and her husband "aunt"and "uncle" even though they're not related to us because in our family, children -- even adults children -- do not call adults by their first names) and my parents. "Aunt" a=Aletha was suggesting as carefully as she could, as criticizing a person's parenting skills can easily lead to hurt to hurt, that my parents do not take as good care of me as they perhaps should.My mom responded that I'm now 22, and it is essentially up to me at this point to take car of myself. Aunt Aletha conceded this point to a degree. She said that when I' m healthy, I'm probably more than capable of caring form myself, but that when I am sick -- and that I seem to be sick more thn a person my age should be -- my parents need to step in and see that I am taken care of if i'm unable to make wise choices or to stand up to the medical school to ensure tht I m not forced to work more than is good and for me.My mom answered that as an adult, I have to learn at some point to manage my own affairs to stand up to those in direct charge of my schedules. Aunt Aletha suggested that while such may be the ideal, ideal don't really matter if students contract illnesses with permanent repercussions or, God forbid, even death. (Claudia, Altha's daugher, had a friend and roommate who contracted an upper respiratory infection during year three in medical school. An overly zealous supervising resident insisted that she work through it. One night at work he temperature spiked st 105. She was diagnosed with pneumonia, which turned out to be a virulent form. Someone had to pull the plug on her about three days later.) Since then, Aletha has been something of  helicopter parent on crack when it came to her kids and illnesses they contracted in medical school. Her intrusion probably would not have been tolerated had her husband not been relatively important  in the local medial school scene.  She's become a crusader of sorts.

My parents listened but didn't say much in response to her.  Truthfully, they've been somewhat "hands-off" in term of our  medical school careers, and that's mostly the way I would have it. i don't need my parents running interference for me. As far as when I'm genuinely sick and the school is expecting more than I can offer, I don't know whether or not they should be involved.  I'm sure i would find their interference embarrassing, but would it be a god thing? I don' know.

I've tried throughout this vacation to be sensible in terms of what I did and didn't. The others were snowmobiling today, I didn't participate even though it would have been lots of fun. I'm hoping the opportunity comes up again when I'm a bit stronger in a day or two. The same is true of skiing and snowboarding.I really want to participate, as how often does one get the opportunity to snowboard of ski in one of the truly premier wintersports  sites in the world? In the end, I'll do it whether i'm ready or not if the end of our vacation nears and I'm still dragging. Still, i'm hoping it does not come to that point.

In absence of the ability to participate in the fun and games available everywhere around me, I've tried to take advantage of some of the more spiritual aspects of the holiday n this region.  I've made no secret in recent months of my increasing disingenuous feelings toward organized religion. Being in Austria cannot change that.  Still, at this point, I'm inclined to believe, despite what some scholars are currently saying, that there really was a baby Jesus. it's a bit easier to focus on him when I'm a little closer, geographically speaking, to the places were he walked the earth, and, perhaps more importantly, where so much great music about him was written.  And regardless of a person's stance on the divinity or even of the existence of Jesus, without the Protestant Reformation, much of the music of J.S. Bach might never have been written. Without Bach, W.A.Mozart -- born just a figurative stone's throw from here--  might never have reached the stature to have compose and for his compositions to have been published and remembered to this day,

Perhaps my real religion is music as opposed to any organized theological structure.

And religion notwithstanding, Christmas is as good a time as any to show gratitude for the people in one's life.  I have a delightful if flawed nuclear and extended family. Numerous times many of these people have given what to me is the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of a friend: they have donated their blood for me. What more could  anyone ever ask of a friend?

Then there's dear, sweet Alyssa, who keeps logs burning in the fireplace in my bedroom so that I will stay warm. That, too, is the act of a true friend.

Matthew, my brother, functions as a friend and a brother. Without him I wouldn't be on this trip. He was willing to give it up if I were not included.

My friends from school are too numerous to mention, but a few I will. Sophronia, Kal Penn, Raoul, Raoul's older brother, Troy, Cool Guy and Raptor Jesus are too great not to mention. Every day one of them does something that makes life a bit more worth living.

My girlhood friends who are still friends will, I hope, always be with me. Megan just married my former boyfriend. it was obvious that they were right for each other, and he and I were clearly no longer an item, but she refused to date him even once without my OK.  She had the freedom to do what she wanted, but he valued our friendship too much to jeopardize it but dating my former boyfriend without an OK from me. That action speaks more loudly than any verbal expression of friendship she could offer.

Claire was my very close friend who is no longer here. I can't speak or write at depth about her yet. Maybe someday I will be able to do so. I miss you, Claire.

Meredith and Caitlyn, any list of  my friends would not be complete without you, who also date back to the days of my girlhood.

Tim, we dated for something like a week, but our friendship was and is strong enough to survive having dated. 

Becca, we've never met, but we have a special friendship that is more tightly intertwined than I would consider most of my face-to-face relationships.

Judge Ferrer, our friendship is difficult for me even to understand, much less to try to explain to anyone else. Suffice it to say that I'm really glad I can  count you as one of my friends.

At this point  shall make an abrupt and somewhat non sequitur turn.

Many of you know that I am a musician. Among my friends are musicians as well. One is much older than I and is actually a closer friend of my mom than of me, but still I consider her a friend of mine independent of her friendship with my mom. For the sake of protecting both the innocent and the guilty, let us call this friend Kristy.

Kristy is a pianist and a church musician. Her formal training as a musician was as a pianist and as a string player. As a church musician, she must sometimes play organ, which she does quite competently, though her strength is as a pianist. Because the organ is not her first (or even her second or third) instrument, she has to put in considerable time in practicing it, She can play any hymn without having first practiced it, but if she ants preludes or embellished anthems to should polished, she must practice them, and she does.

The church for which she works had a previous organist who moved onto bigger and better things. he was an organ major in university and  has a masters' and doctorate in organ performance. He was overqualified fr the position at the small church. 

Occasionally the previously organist comes back for  guest performances. Last night he came to play the prelude for the Christmas Eve service, and played the carols until it was time for him to leave for his service at his current job. My friend said his playing was spectacular, as it always is. My friend knows her organ playing is nowhere near as good as his is, and she's relatively comfortable with things the way they are 

Then she made the mistake of logging into facebook.  Several church members made separate posts expressing the joy at having a REAL  concert organist at the service, often going back to comment on their original posts, clarifying with remarks that  "JEFF was there" lest anyone make the mistake of confusing Kristy with  the concert organist to whom they referred,

My friend will get over this small indignity, and it's probably not the last time it will happen. Still, I wish people would stop and think about how their presumably intentionally harmless posts do cause hurt feelings. Non-musicians don't always stop to think about the difficulty of being even a lowly church musician -- about how the person is putting himself or herself on the line week after week for very little pay but with a great deal of exposure for criticism - real or imagined, and about how very hard it can be on a person's sense of self-worth. 

Some of you who are in positions to either make or ruin someone's day. Facebook postings, however harmless they may seem, can sting, and they may hurt people who usually don't deserve the sting of others' words.