ErkkilaDotOrg

Merry Christmas, or you can just have a nice day if you’re not into the whole Christmas thing.

-us and the dogs and the chickens

Ditto from here ;)

Thanks to Brian for “The Devil in the White City”. I wish my CD player held more disks!

There is some weirdness going on in my mom’s family right now. My mom has two brothers and a sister; one of the uncles we see all the time because he comes up to cut wood (he and my mom have wood stoves and have benefitted greatly from our abundance of fallen trees). Another of my uncles, I see more rarely because he’s pretty busy, but we get along well enough. The weirdness comes in with my aunt.

I don’t know who said what or when, but my mom and her brothers seem to be estranged from my aunt. It hasn’t always been that way; things seemed ok my freshman year in college (coming up on 16-17 years ago! Wow!) when my parents owned a house on the same street as my aunt. Then my parents moved back to California and didn’t return to town til about 2001. Sometime during this period, things went really bad in the family. I don’t have any idea why, nor why my uncles and aunt don’t seem to get along now either. It seems to have spread to my cousins, too; I seem not to have gotten a return Christmas card for at least the past year, probably longer, from one (maybe she didn’t send any. No idea).
At any rate, it seems things are coming to a head now that my grandfather is gone, because my grandmother’s probably going to be moving in with one of them and no matter who it is, somebody’s going to be upset, because it means to see my grandmother, someone will have to go to someone’s else’s house to see her (no more neutral grandma-house ground). I heard that one of my cousins was very upset to hear she might move out to my mom’s house, because she felt she’d never see grandma again.

I was rather flabbergasted by this. I had no idea things were so bad. I certainly hold no ill feelings toward anyone in the family (I really don’t see them that much, you see…) and I really don’t know why anyone would feel they couldn’t come out here (heck, I’d be happy to see anyone who felt like showing up). I know my mom wouldn’t mind at all, either. But nobody asks anyone else because things are just too weird. I have no idea what the problem might be; I do know of one incident that upset my mom a bit at one family gathering and she had pretty good reason, but other than that, nothing specific that I know of. I’m sure there’s lots of stuff from my aunt’s point of view, but I wouldn’t be privy to that. Maybe there was some incident or series of incidents; I just don’t know.
Anyway, file that under ‘WTF?’

Man, I really would like not to be sick any longer. It’s been 16 days now and I still feel like my head is going to explode and my lungs keep rattling; last night I even got a somewhat scary blind spot in my vision on one side for a few minutes. Picture me panicking, trying to google ‘temporary blind spot’ and being unable to read the results. :P Got another doctor appointment on Friday and will probably go unless all the symptoms suddenly disappear tomorrow.