42 thoughts on “December 22, 2017: Scheduling Jackpot”

    1. He called the Saints game the day after my wedding. Several of my college friends bumped into him at Cafe du Monde the morning if the wedding, and then he watched the second half of Adrian Peterson's 290+ yard game against the Chargers with my brothers at the airport bar after the Saints game had ended.

  3. Last night my mom told me my uncle (74) has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He’s been her brother-in-law since she was four. He was her calculus teacher in high school, was still teaching calc when I was in high school, and stayed another decade after I left. In total, he put in very close to fifty years in the classroom. He absolutely loved teaching, coaching (softball & basketball), and his generations of students. The last year or so it’s been clear he’s not been himself; he’s always been a quiet, steady, dependable presence in the family, and that hasn’t changed, but his conversations have begun to drift and gradually his handle on certain things has begun to slip. For a guy who relied on pretty acute mental powers & radiated genial mentorship, I’m sure this has been frustrating & disquieting. Despite the slips, he still plays racquetball every day; he was regularly beating guys twenty years younger into his late fifties. I hope he’ll get to continue playing for quite a while, but we’ll see. Looking forward to seeing him this weekend, but I’m not sure how I’ll keep from showing the anguish I feel for him.

    1. That's a tough diagnosis. It is getting more and more prevalent. I hope they come up with a breakthrough soon.

      1. So do I. My great uncle (different side of the family) has Lewy Body Dementia. It’s probably what his dad/my great-grandfather was afflicted with later in life, but back in the late Seventies it was not possible to diagnose as a specific condition – it was just dementia. My mom observed that, when Alzheimer’s diagnoses started becoming more common, she would hear her elders refer to it as “old timers’ disease.” I’d heard that from much older relatives & neighbors before, too. I suppose being able to name things is the first step to treating them, which is a step toward curing or alleviating the worst symptoms. Here’s hoping.

        1. It's "Oldstimer's Disease", a take-off on Alzheimer's -- we still call it that.

          Both of my mother's parents had Alzheimer's prior to dying, so I have had concerns for my mom for quite some time. She's outlived her mom, and is a couple years from her father's age when he died, and I think she's sharper now that she used to be! That said, I have a good friend who had to retire a few years back in his mid-60s with a dementia-related issue. I haven't noticed much decline, but I think if I were with him more it might be more noticeable.

        2. Lewy Body Dementia is what took down my wife's uncle. In his case, it presented a lot like Parkinsons.

          1. My wife's grandfather died of LBD as well.
            We bought his house when he attacked his sister-in-law with a mug because he thought she was a demon or something when she stopped by to visit unannounced.
            He had always spoken of "seeing angels" at times in his life, but he saw his deceased brothers and some scary things he wouldn't talk about at the end there.
            He survived another two years (one in an "Alzheimer's Ward") after he moved to a small town where my MiL could look after him more regularly. His widow is still there in the house, 14 years later.

    3. Looking forward to seeing him this weekend, but I’m not sure how I’ll keep from showing the anguish I feel for him.

      A tough proposition indeed. I hope the time you get to spend with him and your family is full of joy.

    4. My dad's sister, just 55 or so, has early onset dementia. She'll temporarily forget who I am while talking to me, and she'll be straining to remember as I tell a story about the past. Her husband is devastated, and blaming himself for not immediately looking for answers when her memory issues started cropping up; he is, of course, not at fault but he's a self-hating stoic Irishman, so he's gonna do what he's gonna do.

      It's hard watching her spiral. It came up just weeks after my grandfather (her father) died, and the aggression of her memory loss represents the worst case scenario.

      I intended to write this post factually and anecdotally, but it's hitting me hard that I'm absolutely not ready for her to go.

  6. Well, I got the snow blower running. Just needed to clean the jet in the carburetor. Of course, I removed a wheel to access it easier and reinstalling, the drive great no longer engages with the axel. So yay!

    In better news, I made risotto in ten minutes in the instant pot. This thing really is amazing.

  8. We were already on our way out of town so we missed it, but there were some big goings on in the sky in our neck of the woods. A student I had this past semester even emailed me to ask if I knew what was going on.

  9. Strib has St. Thomas' Robert Delahunty and Mitchell Hamline's John Radsan listing 39 greatest books, trolling for 40th.

    THE FIRST 39
    • Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner
    • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
    • Animal Farm, George Orwell
    • Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
    • Antigone, Sophocles
    • Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    • Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
    • The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
    • Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    • Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
    • Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
    • Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
    • Emma, Jane Austen
    • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
    • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
    • Hamlet, William Shakespeare
    • Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
    • Iliad, Homer
    • The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
    • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
    • King Lear, William Shakespeare
    • Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
    • The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
    • Moby Dick, Herman Melville
    • Odyssey, Homer
    • Rabbit, Run, John Updike
    • The Road, Cormac McCarthy
    • The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
    • Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
    • The Stranger, Albert Camus
    • The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
    • Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
    • A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
    • Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
    • Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré
    • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
    • Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
    • Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
    • War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

    Really, The Road? Nasty business, there. Swap Greene with Golding. Tinker is good spy rot but not top 40 novel - swap in Bulgakov's Master & Margarita. Like: Conrad HOD, Hnos Karamazov, TKAM no brainer. No Pynchon! - you can't handle Pynchon.

    3. I understand feeling the need to include Shakespeare, but King Lear is not a book. (Nor, for that matter, are Antigone or Canterbury Tales.) His Sonnets were published in a book-length collection during his lifetime, however.

      Speaking of, this list is really light on poetry. No Blake, Dickinson, Whitman, Pushkin, Eliot, Akhmatova, Hughes, Cummings, Williams, Neruda, Frost, Ginsberg, Brooks, Snyder, Tranströmer, Komunyakaa, Rich, Dove, or Szymborska.

      Murakami published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle twenty-one years ago. I'd consider it for this list.

      2. No poetry because it's really a list of "essential works of fiction." I really dislike when someone says "book" but actually means "fiction."

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