We had a stressful thing today. This part is over.
How I am now, is a little lighter. Still with a stress-induced migraine looming over my head despite the painkiller I took.
The thing is not quite resolved but we took another step even if it is not quite the step I wish it had been. But it is a step towards a conclusion. These are post-renovation woes… and I’ll leave it at that.(1) Mostly it means we’ll have to postpone the postponed stuff even more. Which all in all is a privileged position to be in even if I was unable to think of much else for the past 3 weeks.
(1) I have quite a few learnings from the renovations that are probably not country specific, I’ll gladly talk about these if anyone is planning something similar. Just ask. I have words. Lots of them (as you have probably all realized by now) and I type fast.
Dad wants to die*, which I didn’t know, and also as of last weekend may well be about to do so. Just two and a half months before I finally get to visit the UK after the trip last year got cancelled.
(* Apparently there’s an assisted suicide service operating out of Switzerland that he’s already paid a lot of money to, but only recently realised he’ll never be able to use because it requires travel to Switzerland(!))
I am so very sorry to hear this.
A parent dying and you can’t see them or be there for them is a very hard situation to be in. I hope you can find the strength that you need for this somehow.
I don’t know if this is of use to you, but you can talk to the Samaritans about stuff like this - they’ll speak to anyone affected by suicide, including friends and family. They take international calls and you can also contact them by text and email. If you’ve got some complicated feelings that you need to get out to someone who isn’t involved, there’s a friendly stranger who’ll listen
Update: death is probably less imminent than he thought it was, but no-one really knows. My brother, who lives hours away, is visiting semi-regularly and doing all the work communicating with health carers and lawyers to try and make things comfortable for him, even as he refuses most assistance and all tests.
Has he been enrolled in some end-of-life hospice program? If you can do so, I highly recommend it. This is what they do – make death less ugly and painful.
Yeah, dad’s refusing everything. Brother is working on getting power of attorney for healthcare matters, but that will only happen when dad isn’t capable of making decisions himself, and in any case he isn’t planning to do anything contrary to dad’s wishes - I guess it’s more of a safeguard to ensure DNR wishes are respected.
Dad’s got a fall monitor, occasional district nurse/doctor visits, delivered food, some cleaning assistance. He’s addicted to oxycodone, on about 30 other pills, blood sugar all over the place, body and mind failing in all sorts of ways.
Just got out of the doc’s office for Maryse’s cancer follow-up. Everything’s good, headed in the right direction, bones are healing very well! Blood tests are within normal range, too.
Turns out that Maryse had a small lesion on her liver, though, that we never knew about. But it’s also shrunk CONSIDERABLY.
Had a new experience today. Drove the car down past empty.
Modern cars all have that “light bar” so I didn’t get to see the needle float past E, just the bar disappear.
The experience was most reminiscent of the original X-Wing. Shut down shields, all power to forward drive (this accomplished via the air conditioning…)
I continue to be frustrated with the ‘range’ calculations, which told me I had 30 miles to go, then 10. And stayed at 10 for the rest of my 8 mile drive to the planned gas station.
We made it!
*
Separately, someone just responded to a 5 year old post on Reddit to tell me I’m stupid. Why do things like that get under one’s skin? Bothered more than I should be, but it passes.
Some stuff just bothers… as much as we tell ourselves it shouldn‘t. There is some part inside us that we can‘t control that says „meh, now I feel bad/off/annoyed…“
Luckily, the more we know that it shouldn‘t, the faster it passes (exceptions apply)
I imagine it’s because if they tried to give a precise reading to the mile and it was wrong for whatever reason people would sue them if and when they ran out of petrol.
Lots of equipment (like tractors and crawlers) in pre-fuel gauge days had gravity fed fuel systems. The fuel tank had a drain tube with two input holes. One was an inch or so off the bottom, which is what you got when you turned the fuel shutoff valve to open. The other was at the bottom (well a bit above, so crud would stay in the tank). When it ran out of gas, or started to act like it was (or if you’re reckless…) you opened the fuel valve all the way, and it drained from the second hole. Motorcycles used to do the same thing, some might still. 50s VWs used a similar system, with a foot operated reserve lever.
some cars also had a different system. Their reserve was a tipping bucket inside the fuel tank. It was arranged so it got refilled first and then fuel poured over it into the main part of the tank, so it would always have fuel in it, which is a big improvement over the reserve tap, which will get left in reserve. when you needed it, you flipped a lever, and it dumped out the reserve, where you could use it.
Some cars, at least in the UK, had a “reserve tank” which you’d manually switch to—and my wife’s family had a car with two separate full-size tanks, which was handy for the two people who both wanted to use it and pay fair shares of the fuel.
My 2007 motorcycle has no gas gauge and two “tanks” that’s probably what you’re describing. Ride on the main til empty then flip to the reserve to get to a gas station. Always fun to start sputtering while going 60 and try to get the switch flipped before slowing too much.
Some years ago, I used to regularly fly this Piper Supercub, which was built in the early '60s. It has an independent fuel tank in each wing, and a very sophisticated fuel management system which consisted of a small glass tube filled with fuel, with a little ball floating in it, and a switch to select which tank to use. Because both the tube and the switch were placed so that you had to turn 90 degrees and look up to see them, there were more occasions than I would have liked where I eventually remembered to look at the fuel gauge to discover that I had one empty tank and one full tank, with the switch set to the “empty” one
After many months, lots of paperwork, and even more solicitor-based nonsense, we have finally managed to buy a teeny tiny flat within a not-totally-unreasonable commuting distance from London. So now my husband can stop paying exorbitant amounts for sketchy hotels in central London every other week and pay a slightly less exorbitant amount for train tickets .
(He’s supposed to spend two weeks per month in the London office, and we worked out that the cost of hotels in London was equivalent to a mortgage )
On Monday he’s going to pick up the keys, and is also threatening to go to IKEA and buy a kallax…
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