Fun with Family - the December Visits, Decorating, and Hospital Stays



Have a Nauseatingly Adorable
Christmas!!

My lovely sister visited our fair state this weekend and we drove to Bellingham together (with special guest appearance by Mr (W)right). We had plans - magnificent family-filled fun and decorationining family plans. They went a but askew. It all worked out. (In legal memos, you're not supposed to "hide the ball" but give your concise conclusion at the begining, at the end and many many many times in between, so that's your nutshell).

Rachel's plan was to come out for my mom's second to last chemotherapy treatment and hang out while the gradual descent into annoying side effects took hold and subsequentially abated. It would have worked well, since Rachel is 2 months pregnant and thus experiencing many similar symptoms (nauseau, fatigue, really BIZARRE changes in culinary taste). My mom, however, wanted to go the extra mile for her and so decided to instead get herself checked back into the hospital with a bowel obstruction. A bowel obstruction isn't too far off from a clogged pipes, except it seems like you can't just snake them out and draino is counter-indicated in this case. Also it would work better if instead of just getting something clogged in them, pipes actually could twist around. Anyways it's all a symptom of her surgery and relatively unpleasant.  But it did allow us to rush straight from the airport to the hospital and dally there for a couple of days. Far more exciting than your regular milling about at home after chemo, although definitely not lacking in comparitive boredomosity.

Artist's Rendition

In the meantime, Andrew had come up and we went to the The Blue Moon Ballroom's formal winter dance party thing. This was fortuitous both in giving me a chance to dance and to offload some baking frenzy bi-products that had been hiding in my freezer! I wore a dress that was surprisingly revealing! I had come into it with full knowledge of the potential for a Janet Jackson - pleasantly the nipples demonstrated an impressive amount of modesty - but I hadn't anticipated the full height and breadth of the slit and was inadequately prepared for the amount of underwear flashing that one becomes somewhat accustomed to after all those legs flying about in tango. My underwear did have pretty flowers on it, but no sparkles at all! Pshaw. Anyways, Andrew even let his hair down for the event, making him look kind of like an assassin in an indie movie in my opinion:

After confirmation that the obstruction had cleared, we expected my mom out early Saturday, but of course this denies the general complexity of hospital forms, papers and discharge policies. She did get home... eventually. Just in time for the power to mysteriously go down on the morning that every one had already made plans to be out (decorating day at Dad's house!!). Anyways, we spent the morning at my mom's house and the confusion about our one block power outage verged on slapstick as PSE trucks stocked up and down, performing U-Turns at random and otherwise substituting presence for action. Yes, the lights eventually came back on. Phew!

The decorating binge began at my Dad's, worked itself up to a crescendo and crashed down upon my mom's house. It was the holliest, jolliest decorating frenzy of... ok at least my month so far.

I also wrapped presents in my most bohemian and artistically imperfect way on Monday and crafted a somewhat incessant pandora holiday station just to bring home that whole "christmas spirit" nonsense. I believe sharp corners and delicate applications of tape are totally and absolutely bourgeoise crypto-facist, man.

On Tuesday, Rachel and I drove back through some of the oddest and randomest weather patterns known to man in order to get her off to the airport, I worked, I attended a team meeting for Andrew's new racing team (which I had somehow gotten into my head was a holiday party, but which featured food and wine, so I guess it wasn't too far off), and then went out tangoing at the Century! As it would turn out, I still know how to do this AND still connect with the partners I used to connect with. I feel like with old favorite partners, it's much like an old friendship: you may not be in contact much, but you just kind of know that you can pick up where you left off. Sometimes you don't know that years of different classes, moves and styles will set your connection awry, but I definitely lucked out this evening. Perhaps it's a sign that once you learn a certain degree of competency, your essential dance changes very marginally, particularly if your focus is social. I did discover one of my favorite milonguero style partners also does nuevo, which was a complete treat!

As an additional treat, the music was fantastic. Ben Thomas of Tangabrazo was dj-ing and I have to say playing tango live apparently really lends well to playing other people's tangomusic too. He read the crowd beautifully and presented arrangements I'd never heard before, but very much wished I had! It was really delightful. Last night I'm hoping to hit the floor a couple more times this week, although making the transition from my morning schedule to night-owlery is challenging, particularly when I had a morning meeting today (that of course, one of the mediators didn't show up to - har  har). There will also be blues dancing on Friday.

Oh right, so legal style conclusion: Family was involved. We had plans. They were a bit mushed by fate. But it was still fun (and a random aside about tango...)