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 Holly passed away last night, suddenly, as budgies do. Holly is the one on the left above; the one on the right, Pearl, passed some time ago. I think Holly was between 5 and 7 years old. He has some offspring out there somewhere, thanks to a little breeding holiday he took care of Cindy, our friend who used to live near here. Here is our current roll call of birds and other critters:
- Toby, a white, totally deaf English bull terrier / Jack Russell cross, male, neutered, drama queen, thinks he's a cat
- Max and Chewy, a pair of gorgeous Blue&Gold Macaws
- Fred, a cockatoo
- Leslie and Freddy, a pair of Amazons
- Four! Hahn's macaws (we now have more Hahn's macaws than budgies) : Han, Vernie, Kermie and Harry (we think they are all males)
- Three budgies : Bill-or-Ben, Little Bob (who is female, and she made babies with Holly) and Nelson (also female)
We are also temporarily boarding a pair of parrotlets, whom I have provisionally named Oscar and Lucinda. Of course, in truth, all these critters are Lewis's, although I do contribute a bit to their care. Quite a lot to Toby's, almost none at all to Fred, who would rip my hand off if I tried to handle him. Lewis has been making some forays into the world of web design on behalf of the charity he is an officer of, Soft Landing.
Well, I am on Google+, have been there a while. Definitely still on Facebook, where truthfully most of my online "activity" occurs. My problem with social media vs. old-fashioned blogging (funny that something becomes really old-fashioned in about 7 years) is one I have not heard expressed a lot. I really took to blogging, because it's sort of like being a self-published author and sort of like being an amateur journalist and sort of like keeping a diary. Social media, even if you post frequently and participate enthusiastically, is nothing like that. Here's the thing. I just last week submitted my (£900!) application for naturalization as a British citizen. I had to recreate my travel journal for the last 5 years for the proof of residency section. Now obviously the passport is the first place to check. But as an American, I didn't always get a stamp on entering the US, and amongst my UK stamps and one Spain stamp and two Ireland stamps, they are not all that legible. So back when I was posting regularly here, I had a record of my travels, all nicely dated and indexed. But as I lazily moved over to Facebook, well it might be there somewhere, but it's almost impossible to look up and the only way to access it is to page backward literally forever (or however long FB keeps them, and frankly, my paging finger got tired.) Here's another little gripe that may be almost unique to me: I am on this app for sharing blogs on FB, so this post will go there automatically (I think; of course, FB does keep changing stuff.) But to cross-post to Google+ is a major hassle, and you do wonder if it's worth it. Blogger and mainly this blog is now an aide memoire for me, and also a memory lane trip, having recorded a lot of major events in my life, like Thanksgivings spent with family, death of most of our pets, birthdays I got to celebrate with Savannah, especially nice meals I cooked or books I read. But from about 2007 onwards, I just haven't been posting enough, and there are gaps in the record. Of course, it's a cop-out for me to blame FB, let alone Google. I just need to proper-blog more.
My sister Cindy lost her husband of 31 years to cancer on Monday. I was blessed to be able to spend a few hours with them in his last week of life, and painful as it was, to say good-bye. The obituary in the Biloxi-Gulfport Sun Herald gives a hint at what an exceptional man he was.
My ex-father-in-law, Lisle Carleton Carter, Jr., passed away on the 10th of September. It had been many years since I had seen him, but my son was very close to him.
Lisle was not only a person who I really loved and admired, he was just generally a remarkable man, a polymath, in that he was a leading academic administrator, a former government official and a lawyer until his retirement some years ago. And also a poet and a patron of the arts and many charities. He will be missed and mourned by many. His many achievements are featured in this editorial obituary in the Washington Post.
This is definitely the longest I have gone without blogging. Also the longest I have gone without a holiday. The last time I was abroad was Thanksgiving 2007. The only trip I took in all of 2008 was a one-day trip to Portmeiron, not even staying overnight. I am determined not to let 2009 go by the same way. I just got back Friday evening from a six-day trip to "the North" (where we do what we want!) I have reviewed and journalled the trip in more detail at Deborama's Kitchen, so check it out there.
Part of the reason I didn't travel is that last year everyone in my far-flung family was in a state of flux. My older younger sister and her husband, one at a time, have temporarily abandoned the family homestead in Gulfport and set up house in Kansas. This has left my aged Ps behind in a little duplex bungalow they built mainly for them. So now my younger younger sister, an academic in Hattiesburg and her husband, a realtor, are buying a second home in Hattiesburg and moving the aged Ps there. My daughter has split with her ex-partner, father of grand-daughter Savannah. My son is still with his partner, who graduated last year from her PG Architecture course and got a job in her field - just as the property market crashed. My son's company was sold and he was offered a less attractive job than he had, but of course he's going to take it for the stability. But no benefits, no holiday, and the stability is not real stability, as nothing is these days. Both my kids have two extra sidelines for income: Aimee is a web designer for her main job, and also teaches web design and is a photographer. Carey works for an online game company, and does painting and web design free-lancing. I am so proud that I raised two smart, hard-working, creative and above all resilient kids. And like all parents and grand-parents, I pray things don't get too much worse before they get better.
I have been meaning to do a blog on here called "The Fifteen Year Depression of 2008 - 2023." I would say keep an eye out for it, but it may not happen. (The blog that is; I am pretty sure about the depression.)
 This was last night, outside Ebenezer Baptist Church. From right to left, my son, his girlfriend and a mutual friend. I don't know if the AJC covered this spontaneous street party, but the title link is about the more official Atlanta Dems celebrations.
 And here's the story behind this picture, from my son's message to me on Facebook.
You could even post a pic on your blog of me putting the Obama sign on Martin Luther King's grave and talk about how some woman told me it was wrong of me to do it but then thanked me and took a picture. I was confused, but I didn't care. It's what I felt like doing. Because Martin deserved to share in the celebration.
I haven't posted for a while here. Some personal changes are happening in the Deborama household. DH and I just got back from Manchester yesterday where DH had a gastric band operation. This was the first time he had ever had surgery of any kind, so it was rather fraught for me leading up to it (and probably for him too, but since he's British, there is no way to tell.) But he came through it just fine. He was a little grey in the face for the first hour I saw him, as he was waking up fully. (This was a good two or three hours after his operation, but they kept him in recovery and then put him into an ICU due to his sleep apnoea. I arrived at the hospital as he was just waking up, but they stuck me in a private room saying they would wait and give him a chance to "settle" before I could see him. The same nurse said this to me, along with "just 10 more minutes" about four times, and I was just about to explode with a very American "Settle, schmettle!" before she finally sensed my mounting anxiety and escorted me to his bedside.)
DH spent the night in the ICU (although he was very well, and hardly merited the extra care, but it was apparently hospital policy) and I spent the night in a Travelodge near Manchester airport. But now we're home. DH had lost an amazing five stones (70 pounds) in the six months preceding his operation. He is now expecting to lose perhaps another 100 pounds or so with the help of the gastric band.
Meanwhile, Deborama has been attending clandestine (it's a long story) Slimming World meetings and I have lost a stone since joining, having lost about 10 pounds before, for a total of about 25 pounds since I was at my heaviest. I joined a small local gym last May and I have been attending quite faithfully, an average of three or more days per week. I was very frustrated to not lose any weight in the first five months of this regimen, as I was not really regulating my diet at all, but hoping that building some muscle would cause metabolic changes that would "kick-start" a weight loss and give me some incentive to give up my beloved breakfast of an unsweetened latte and a croissant, my frequent cereal bar snacks and my occasional (but probably more frequent than I cared to admit) late night scoop of ice cream. I think it was around November of last year that I all but gave up the croissants and very slowly and painfully lost the 10 pounds, and when the Slimming World invitation came in January I decided I must bite the bullet and face the fact that at my age I need to do both diet-control and regular exercise; the days of "effortless" weight-loss are now well and truly past.
Now this is the last personal or diet-related post you will see in the main Deborama blog. I am doing a mini-relaunch, and I am going to confine the Deborama posts to serious news, comments on the world at large, religion, philosophy and ethics, sexual politics, the environment, humour and culture. The one exception will be photos and news of our birds. I will post these on Facebook or Flickr, with a link from here.
Simultaneously, I am going to relaunch my other two Deborama sub-logs. Deborama's Kitchen will become my new Diet Blog (keeping the name, though) and any personal journalling will be there, along with its usual fare (although it has been nothing at all for a year or more) of recipes, food politics and food-related news.
Deborama's Books is going to get the third relaunch/make-over. I plan for it to be more joined up with another of my recently neglected passions, Bookcrossing. I am hoping to get back into attending the Bookcrossing meetups, and now that I have a study (I was using the dining room table, in an open plan room with lounge with its almost always-on telly, another excuse or reason for the lack of blogging going on) I have huge backlog of books to register on Bookcrossing. Also, I have been planning to add some movie and television reviews to the books blog, as well as reviewing the books I have read but failed to mention over the past three years.
I know myself, so I don't expect this will happen overnight, or even all that quickly. If I achieve the three goals set out above within six weeks I will be satisfied (and if I fail to do it in that time, chances are it won't happen, so I had better get cracking.)
I am in Atlanta for the start of my fortnight-with-the-family. I have just met Carey's girlfriend Ashley. She is amazingly cute, smart and a great match for him in the personality arena, or so it seems to me. They hug all the time and semi-fondly bicker like an old married couple. She drives a Toyota Camry with a stick shift and she drives like my old high-school buddy and partner-in-anti-social-behaviour Margaret (or Maggie, as I began calling her, and I think it stuck.) I describe the driving style as "like a maniac with a guardian angel", that is, fast, confident and leaves the passengers more breathless and speechless than shaking and scared, as less protected maniacs do. It was actually kind of exciting.
I saw their loft apartment at the Mattress Factory. Nice.
We ate at R. Thomas, which I just cannot recommend enough.
I am now blogging from the Atlanta Public Library, which I also recommend; they're such nice people in Atlanta. I had sort of forgotten over the years.
I just discovered I can't capture a picture to illustrate this post. Oh, well, sorry. You'll have to find your own pictures.
Yes, yes, I missed Wednesday again. Now for the excuses. First, my life was disrupted a bit, but in a good way, by the visit last week of my sister, her husband and her son. It's a complicated tale so I won't go all into it, but I took some time off work, I wore myself to a frazzle and I had a good time. It is quite painful to me being thousands of miles from my family, so these brief visits are far more idealized and - well - enjoyable than family visits are to normal people who at least live on the same continent as the rest of their kin. Or so I believe, based on my memories of when I was a normal person. But my sister is partly responsible for excuse number two as well. I took her to my new gym, where I have been struggling to attain a goal of three times a week. She suggested that I would probably not see much fitness change unless I went for five times a week, which makes a bit of sense to me, so I now am on a resolution to strive for that. My job keeps me away from home about 11 hours a day, and then there is still all the little tasks involved in keeping me, the husband and the house up and running - hygiene, laundry, shopping, filling and emptying the dishwasher, doing at least a minimal share of the cooking. There are newspapers and blogs to read, parrots to talk to. Basically what I am saying is that I am running out of time in the day. Anyway, on to excuse number three. Which has two parts. Part 3A - my sister and I were talking about memories and stories, and how she is trying to get our parents to write down some as keepsakes for the future, for our kids. And we had this brilliant idea to set up a website for the family and post short articles of our various memories and stories. A meetup group I am involved with (another big time sucker, if you let it be, as I just spent four hours last night going to a meetup and had to ditch the gym!) has recently moved from our paid sponsor site to a free site called me.com. Now this website is not perfect; its interfaces and applications are chaotic and sometimes unpredictable, and I think it has ideas above its station, if you know what I mean. But it's free, and I mostly find these things are what you choose to make them (and are capable of making them.) So I am spending a bit of my precious "free" time administering this site. Excuse 3B is Facebook. I never planned to get addicted to it, but it is very seductive. Anyway, I am doing something else as the WWW, just after this (although you will see it before this, due to the magic of blogging.) Amongst the many worthy things I meant to blog, and didn't and quite possibly won't, are-
- the bridge collapse in my hometown of Minneapolis, which I have been following obsessively
- the foot and mouth outbreak, and especially a very affecting and poignant piece from a PTSD suffering slaughterman, which I now cannot find a link for
- the latest developments in my chosen focus areas of world news and politics: Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Nicaragua and the US presidential race
- the trapped coal miners in America
- the monsoon floods in South Asia
I have not blogged much because, even though I am at home. I have been on holiday since Thursday. I am going back tomorrow. DH and I have been hosting the visit of my middle sister, Cindy, her husband Shephard and their son, Tyler. We went to London yesterday on the coach for a whirlwind tour. While they were here, Cindy and I had this brilliant idea to set up a family website (participatory, not just a showcase) which I then did, using a free software called me.com. I am pretty tired now, but it's been fun.
Well, I am back from Minneapolis and I had a good time and accomplished most of what I intended to do there. I saw my daughter Aimee graduate from the U of M, I saw a lot of friends, I went to Walker Church and I saw the May Day parade. Sorry I didn't blog. I had only a few opportunities to get on the internet and mostly just checked e-mails when I did. I am lost without the internet. I do joke about it, but I was amazed to discover what a crutch it has become to my ability to plan, think and do anything.
 I will be away from Monday and I am not taking my laptop this time. Shame, really, because all the motels have free wifi, but for a number of reasons, mostly tediously technical, I am not taking it.
My trip has two main purposes: first, Aimee is graduating from the U of M after many years of world-wide learning and creating. Second, I will attend the May Day Parade in Powderhorn Park, one of the high-holy days of "my" Minneapolis. I will miss the Deborama's WWW of May the 4th. Sorry about that. Don't leave me! I am not going away for good. And who knows, I may even get a blog in from there.
In the interest of familial/filial fairness, and because it's the right thing to do, given the excellence of the site, the next Wednesday Website of the Week is another of my offspring hawking his art - at careycarter.com. Same thing as with Aimee's site, pretty much the whole thing is on my virtual wishlist. (Or buy it for yourself - he can always make more.)
I am being a little bit lazy this week with the WWW, in that I am showing a website that I am already very familiar with, as it is "owned" by my daughter. The featured website is one of the thousands of CafePress.com online stores selling T-shirts, posters, caps, tiles and other paraphernalia with graphics supplied by the seller and items manufactured by a mysterious "stuff" factory somewhere. CafePress is a great boon to any artist, graphic designer or fund-raiser but it can also be used for family reunions, community events or just plain vanity (get T-shirts that say "The world revolves around your name here", for instance.) The specific one is the Aimee Danger store, featuring the unique and haunting photographic imagery of Aimee Danger. If CafePress had a wish list, most of these items would be on mine.
DH's eloquent challenge to the continued existence of the Trident missile system
Today, DH wrote a long and passionate e-mail to our MP about the forthcoming vote on renewing (or not) the Trident missile programme. He sent me a copy of it, and reader, I was blowed away. I had no idea he could write, or argue, like this. He said (also something of a surprise) that he would not object to my posting it on the blog. But I decided it was too good for the ephemeral glimmer of being a Deborama post. I decided he needed his own blog, even if that was the only post he ever did, and I had to set it up AND post it for him. So that is what I have done. I hereby introduce you to The Ramage Letters, a new blog, and here is a quote from "the letter":
I would deplore Conservative support for renewal of Trident in this coming week for the main reason that the decision does not have to be taken this week, this year or this parliament. At the very least, the decision should wait for the current and discredited Prime Minister to leave office, and ideally it would form part of a manifesto commitment in the next general election, thereby giving the British people the opportunity to have say in matters in which, as I say, parliament has a dreadfully meek and compliant record. A referendum would be the ideal solution, since I imagine the average MP to be at least as clueless about the real substantive issues as the average citizen. Although my main objection to the vote is that it is needless at this time, before you – and other MPs – take a position I hope you have answered the following questions and are prepared to publish your answers after the vote: At whom are we likely to launch these weapons? What state/quasi-state or geographic area? a) I assume that Europe (including Russia), the Americas, Japan, China and the antipodes are not and are never likely to be viable targets, either because they are always likely to remain allies or are simply too powerful for us to drop a nuclear weapon inside their borders. So that leaves territory in the wider Middle East, Africa or parts of Asia as viable targets for our nuclear weapons because they are too weak to hit back. Surely the world is sick and tired of having the American Bully strutting the globe: do we want really want to have a weapon we can only deploy against the weak and defenceless (when the Americans let us)? Shame on us if we do.
- My youngest sister, Denise, has been appointed Dean of Arts and Sciences
- My daughter Aimee has bought a house in Portland
- My son Carey has got a dream job: testing computer game software
My boy Carey has finally got his website up and running. Go see it. Buy some art. I love it, and not just 'cause he's my son, either.
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Holly passed away last night, suddenly, as budgies do. Holly is the one on the left above; the one on the right, Pearl, passed some time ago. I think Holly was between 5 and 7 years old. He has some offspring out there somewhere, thanks to a little breeding holiday he took care of Cindy, our friend who used to live near here. Here is our current roll call of birds and other critters:
That's my boy sitting there with all that meat.
