been working on a new esl site, a place where I can link to my work and to what could become a new novel, as soon as i get organized. lots of links will come from here. Lots of links will go directly here. it's an old backwater but has a good url and a completely ESL perspective which will help me remember my career with a good clear glass.

my first step was to put squares on it, but the sharp observer will notice that the squares are the same as the ones on my professional site, and that's because they go places that are vaguely related to my teaching or esl in general. i have squares here and also at my grill site.

another truck accident happened near scattergood; this time a single truck flipped and burned, at mile marker 257, best i can figure, just east of where delta road crosses i-80. several developments here. i am still tracking down whether the comments of someone i met at scattergood in the eighties is relevant. they said, basically, that ancestors of nixon and hemingway resided in the cemetery; that because of the cemetery, they had move i-80 over; because they had to move it, they had to put a curve in it and run it on a hill; and that it could be the only curve in the interstate in the whole state of iowa. now my guess is that curve is just east of delta road, but stare as i do, i can't pinpoint it exactly. another commenter pointed out that the wind hits the road at a different angle right there, whereas in the entire rest of the interstate the wind comes right at you, right there it doesn't. so it's really a matter of what you get used to and whether you feel like you can keep going 70 on an icy interstate when you have no evidence that the road will ever turn or curve. now in the "mass casualty event" of about december 12, right before my surgery, there were accidents in a six-mile stretch on both sides of the road, somewhere east of west branch, and i never was able to place exactly where. but i'm getting the distinct impression this isn't just an only-one-time thing. fortunately nobody has died that i know of. but commenters did say that west branch was kind of like the befmuda triangle of i-80.

it's very cold here, and the snow blows around a lot, and even lands sometimes but doesn't seem to stick much or make solid ice to confound us on the galesburg streets. i, still being sick and all, get steadily more militantly against any driving at all, out there at night, after ten or before it. just getting tired of it. i want to stay home like an old fuddy-duddy, car in the garage, all things locked, sleeping in at every opportunity.

today i'm depressed because i did a bad thing to our one main car. i somehow failed to shut it completely after changing the battery; perhaps a battery holder prevented it from shutting completely (i'm referring to the hood). while driving the hood flew up and smashed up against the front windshield, fortunately not breaking it, but damaging the hood itself.

i lost most of a night of sleep cursing myself and wondering if the damage could be more severe than it appeared. the car had been giving me the creeps because of the appearance of electrical issues, and this was bad on that night when none of the four windows would open, though that appeared to be more because of frozen rain which did after all melt after it had run for a while. by the time i got home three our of four opened, enough to convince me that it wasn't an electrical problem, and that the car was otherwise running fine, though there were still somewhat random signals of electrical issues. don't know why a car would do random electrical blips for no apparent reason, like some fuse is coming loose.

the whole thing has left me somewhat damaged. what am i some kind of idiot? i can't relive it and "do over." it happened, now rest and let the morning sun come through the window.

two boys were fired over the last week, in unrelated situations and places, so leaving me the feeling that it was directly related to my incompetence or perhaps my adhd which i'm sure i freely contributed to them. there is nothing for it, for me, except to be here and watch as they work it out, as they have families and people depending on them. they'll have to find something and all my efforts to help will just kind of make them feel worse, besides what do i know about trying to make it in los angeles or portland. in my family we were talking about back-to-the-land, subsistance farming and my sister mentioned a place called drain oregon where they had something going. all i could think of was east jesus, a desert subsistence community out near the salton sea. move your family to one of those? i'd say, all options are on the table. i send them my prayers.

meanwhile another cold spell is coming here. my wife won't even go out in it though she'll do some minimal exercise for her dog who doesn't seem to ever get enough. way too cold for her. and getting worse.

went up to iowa to get my second cochlear implant turned on (story here), and people had no idea what i was talking about when i mentioned the "mass casualty event" of three and a half weeks earlier when cars and trucks smashed each other all apparently outside of, or not far from, scattergood school. this hopefully meant the school was not intimately involved with any of the wreckage or survivors (everyone survived though 20 ended up hospitalized), which was good. nobody in the state knew what i was talking about, it's all distant history to them.

back up, rest, take care of our own. days are getting longer, and we will get out of this, to the point where spring will arrive, and we'll see flowers.

just finished an interesting book, You and I Together, which deals with reincarnation. in brief, two souls keep reappearing together, as man and woman, in love but separated violently and dramatically, repeatedly. Finally in this current life they find each other. The psychologist is vexed; he's spent a lifetime convincing people that "regression therapy" is good for dealing with your own subconscious, not your past lives. But he too has to admit that it appears to be real.

the book was a page-turner, and that's why i went through it so quickly, but it left me with lots of questions. for the record i believe in reincarnation, and i'll also buy the theory that the five or six people we deal with most closely in this life, have been with us in different forms in other lives. we could recognize each other, if we weren't programmed not to. we could unravel a tangled web of relationships, but we have conveniently forgotten everything about the previous one.

which brings me to the first question: is it possible that there are people out there who don't forget everything about the previous one? who can, for some reason, remember all the details of a house they've never set foot in? who can identify, in another person, someone who they have known "forever?" I think it's at least possible though i won't get sidetracked into proving it, or trying.

but then, why would life make you a woman every single time, and make the same frustrating and deeply wounding experience, time after time, with the same guy? that, it seems to me, is not how it works. or, it hits you six times, separating man and woman, then voila lets you be together and have love win. that also, is not how it works. not in my opinion. it seems to me it would only come out ok if you did something karmically regenerating in the next-to-last life, and also, the only reason you would have gotten punished or tortured so severely in five lives in a row would be something very karmic, very demonstrable, something with a reason for it.

i like the idea that love can carry over from one era's circumstances to another, so that, basically, the two people have the same connection, an enduring one. damaged yes but still there. five stars for all "love wins" books. as jimi hendrix says, meet you in the next life, don't be late.

pouring down rain here. it's landing on piles of unraked leaves, muddy paths, places where the dog's been digging. it's gray, cold, wet, dismal. i'm glad to be inside, dry and warm. may i stay that way.

at one point the older of the two girls asked me what kind of new year traditions we had. i stumbled. our last two or three kids were disrespectful to our traditions to the point that we gave up trying to instill a strong sense of family tradition by doing things together. in the old days, we'd watch back to the future, all three of them, or just one or two, or whatever. and we threw in a bunch of clint eastwood and good bad & ugly, just so we'd be all movied up during the cold season. but these days i don't even want to sit by a movie. i might get one out for them, or find it, but i was eager to go back upstairs and do my writing projects.

some cultures have a tradition that making a lot of noise is good luck. lots of the traditions come to what they think is good luck: jumping from a chair, not eating chicken, etc. if so we'll be very lucky. having a nine-year-old and eight-year-old in the house has made a lot of shrieking, running, shouting, that kind of thing. and i actually like it, as long as it's innocent, which most of the time, it is. kids are cooped up, indoors. it's been a long winter, already. they have lots of energy and we'll be glad when school takes them off our hands.

it reminds me that, really, we have a clean slate. they are supposed to be with us only five months or less. nevertheless i strongly suspect that we'll see them a lot if not just keep them our last hard ten years of life while we go steadily downhill and become less mobile, less able to get around. we're already wearing out. social services can see that. yet these kids need stability and hopefully to stay in galesburg to give their dad time to be ready for them. they need to set him up and ensure he stays away from their mom who is apparently all that bad stuff.

my point is, they're kids. they're innocent. they don't know from a new-year tradition and if i give them one, they'll keep it and always have something. they are already truly loving the stability, the good cooking, the dad who is gentle but somewhat deaf - and of course they adore the dogs who seem willing to take infinite abuse just for the ability to hang around them and absorb their boundless energy. it seems good all around. the house is alive again.

toward the end of raising our adopted kids, last of ten, we got tired. they absolutely couldn't tolerate school in a way that none of our biological kids had experienced. it was either that, or it was so well worth it to us to pretend that way that that became their entire life, and they won: we let them drop out. all three of them. it was kind of over my dead body but there wasn't much i could do. i couldn't make them go to school, and couldn't set up homeschooling myself without support. i let it happen. in the dead silence aftermath i think all are sorry they didn't finish. they'll have a lifetime of explaining why they just couldn't make it through high school and all their explanations will sound hollow after a few years given the fact that they could have made it through school, except possibly the youngest one, but just didn't. they have no one to blame but themselves. and now we have to stand here biting our tongues and hoping they make it anyway. they might. it will be a miracle if they find actual jobs. but it can be done.

with these younger ones, i'm afraid our benevolent spoiling might ruin them, too, if we carry on long enough. after all it's only a matter of time before school becomes a chore and in our kids' case it's their only chore. if they beat us, they cruise. and we're easy. that's my hostility speaking. deep down i don't think we did the older ones any favor.

we have a seventeen-year-old, their older brother, who is very casual about school. in the last week he only actually went two days out of five, and whether the ride was impossible given his staying with his girlfriend, or not, didn't matter, because he just wasn't there. he is having trouble with motivation at this late stage of the game; he only has to finish two classes in his senior year but just getting there is an issue. it's obvious that having everyone: me, my wife, the social worker, his birth mother and father, and his girlfriend, all pressuring him, isn't working. the more pressure, the harder it is for him to just finish. we try to make it clear to him that being so poor in the attendance department is a red flag for the social worker and that she may have to move him to some place with better security, or at least a better track record for getting their kids to school. we tell her, if he's not home, we can't get him to school, and if he doesn't come home, there isn't much we can do about it. it's agony watching a kid go through what our kids did, knowing full well the sentence of years of explaining why you just couldn't make it looms over you, thus it could be the most important choice he makes. he's pretty good about going to work. he's not a behavior problem.

but i have doubts how long that social worker can watch him slowly drop out more and more, to the point that, well, he's 17, and he's her responsibility, and she could put him some place that actually makes sure he gets to school. away from the girlfriend of course. hoping he doesn't just run away, come back around, refuse to attend altogether. all of which could happen.

so i watch the moods of my wife and the social worker, wondering at which point they'll just say "enough."

lots of friends and family members. are critical that we could let our three just drop out as they did, ruining their own lives, etc. everybody has their own line before they cave in, give up, and say, ok if it's that torturous, you can't go, absolutely can't, then you can't. you win. you stay home.

i know our own line is pretty high, and we didn't want to do that to any of them, let them drop out. if what they were doing was acting, it was pretty slick. they were in deep pain. it'll take a few years before any of them can even revisit it.

with that kind of trauma behind us, it's hard to believe we'd take on an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old, but yes, it's time to start over, and make sure at least these two follow through and finish what they've started. so far, not so hard. galesburg schools aren't that impossible for a kid to do.

Happy New Year!

life goes by so quickly - so another year has gone by. we have a new family now, two girls, nine and eight. i will document. in fact i've started below, sticking to a tradition, not always adhered to, to catch up to the family over the holidays. no christmas card this year; this is the closest. to it.

had surgery dec. 15, my ear still hurts, i'm only hearing out of the remaining one, and then only when the battery is charged. but i'm beginning to like the silence and the crickets - late at night, when the battery is taken off - at that point i have what is called "residual" hearing or about 1% in each ear and that's it. silence. it's a little risky to drive with it but i've tried it - mostly because the one battery dies at inopportune times.

will get the whole family picture on this blog a s a p. if that's a resolution it's one i might keep. i have writing projects too - more about them later. now i'm enjoying the freedom to choose what i'll work on.

peace and prosperity - the spiritual kind - to you in the new year.

christmas blues III

i don't want this to simply be an account of what everyone got, how they felt, where they went off to, etc., but a certain amount of that can't be avoided. kids were here, sharing gifts, hanging out, having a good time. my son got a vlogging camera and that seemed to make him happy though he left behind a few things, like the directions and maybe a charging cord. that means both of our own children who are around were happy, as were the three foster children, two of whom really raked it in.

but there are a few kids out on the edge of our circle, and we didn't get anything for them. specifically two boys, half brothers, who have been staying with our son indefinitely and will probably stay there indefinitely. we take food over there so they don't starve. we did tell our son, please don't let these two stay, because we can't afford to feed them. but these two have no other place to go. totally bereft of job skills, or any skills for matter, they make us feel like there isn't much for it but to feed them or watch them starve. so we spent christmas money feeding them, and then, had no money to buy them a christmas. no hoodie, no stocking full of candy, no nuthing. so there are a couple kids with the blues i guess. other kids got something. everyone got a feeling of family. i should be grateful. no violence. no anger or tantrums. no passive-aggressive either. people are just grateful for what we can do.

soometimes i say, i look to survive christmas, not enjoy it. you can't have this huge crowd of kids hovering around and exxpect everyone to be happy. slowly they have to learn that they'll make their own christmas, even if it's walking over to the woods, gathering up some evergreen, and decorating their own space with it. these guys are well into the habit of doing nothing, what gets done is what others do for them. why should their expectation be my problem? i've started assuming that's how they wanted it. but the fact is they just weren't able to learn how to do such things themselves. get a job, haul in some money, get some presents for friends and family, all stuck at the source: getting a social security card, so they can get a job. even this, apparently, is more than they can handle.

back at home, the house is peaceful. it's a cold, foggy day, grim and gray, and i should go out walking but i'm babysitting as my wife goes out for an aa meeting. she feels a special commitment to covering it on the holidays because she knows that's when people need it the most. and so off she goes, passing along a commitment to sobriety even as some of us are kicking back, enjoying the calm holiday's sunset descend into night.

these short days, it doesn't take long. it's like four and i can see it coming. and i'm already tired, and i wouldn't mind calling it a night and starting new tomorrow. but i work the night shift - take meds and something to eat to the son, and do what i can to keep things running. means that, whatever, i'm up 'til about ten.

this year more than ever i'm thinking about christmases past, old times, things we've done and carried on. the luminaria, the violence, the notes to santa, the long walks and tours of lights, the silence by the tree at night. the aa meetings to keep it all together and carry into the new year. the bad weather, or in this case, warm, wet, gray. contemplative. at this point i'll let it go and say, hope i'm back for another year. i'm still recovering from surgery.

christmas blues II

the previous post (see below) was written before the big present-opening splurge which just happened. as one who was up until midnight, ho-ho-ho, i have to say that it was unusual that i could wake up, at about eight, and have time for a cup of coffee and to write that anti-materialistic diatribe/rant before the splurge. ultimately everyone woke up and we got right down to business.

as i was saying before, the remarkable thing about this christmas is two foster children, eight and nine, who really had no idea what to expect. a seventeen-year-old also had no idea. another seventeen-year-old has been throuugh it many times and was excited for all it meant to her.

but the one seventeen-year-old foster kid wanted to spend the night with his girlfriend, and did. texted me in the morning for a ride. i went over there, and sat twenty minutes waiting for him to answer the text. i'm here, i said. hurry up, your sisters are. waiting to open presents. no answer. maybe it was like one of those times i waited half an hour, no answer, because he'd gone back to sleep. summon me and then go back to sleep? anyway i didn't have the twenty minutes. of all the days in the year to take an hour out of my life, ten to fifteen to go over there, ten to fifteen to come back, and a half hour to sit there looking at my phone, waiting for no reply, wrong day. everyone wanted to open presents. i turned around and went home.

our own son, twenty, is holed up in a trailer three miles from town. we ended up not making arrangements with him, as he has two or three kids staying there and we didn't really want them all to come around. these guys can come open presents when they're ready i guess.

leaving all that anxiety, broken-family angst aside, let's just exxamine the present-opening splurge. the two foster kids seemed to get a huge windfall from the foster-care side and had what you could call a wrapping-paper frenzy which is like a shark when it smells blood. they were satisfied and will have plenty to do for days. that's kind of like it was when i was growing up - parents buy a day or two of peace as kids dig in to every imaginable game/doll/toy/puzzle. i was miffed when a couple games actually went unopened one year because 1) kids didn't get along, or 2) their ages were too split apart, or 3) they were just too into media, not about to sit around with siblings figuring out some new game. ok that was it for games for a few years, but now as i said is our chance to start over. these kids eight and nine can play a game together, i'm sure of it. not sure they will, but i'll at least give them a chance.

christmas blues I

christmas is a deeply personal family time and lots of families are severely dysfunctional, so it's not easy to talk about. it reminds me that my own family was relatively healthy in that regard and when i try to remember what was good, what worked, i sometimes hope to just recreate that, but it never works. in recent times christmas has been a time of bitter disappointment, sometimes even violent bitter disappointment. what went wrong?

an obvious culprit is blatant materialism and entitlement, but even that doesn't really explain everything. everyone in the family is far more focused on material goods than i am, which means that when my wife sends me out shopping they are invariably disappointed in what i bring home. my wife has evolved into just telling me exxactly what she wants me to bring home, since i'm better at actually driving, parking, braving the mobs, and walking back out with something. ok so that relieves the actual responsibility on my part of actually picking something out for someone which obviously i'm quite bad at anyway. but i come around to one more year and this time we have two new girls, eight and nine, who have never experienced a christmas with us. we have two seventeen-year-olds, one of whom has been around for years and is walking on clouds again hoping for the perfect material-drop that will make her life just perfect again. the other is a foster kid who, like his two sisters, will probably be overjoyed at whatever is given to him and in fact his life has been considerably improved materially by his removal from his parents and his placement here where there just seems to be money to get what he needs. to his credit, he doesn't just grab what he needs like some of the others, and doesn't seem to be as blatantly materialistic as our kids. so i can't blame the entire generation and i don't.

in a way i'll do what i always have done, which is to not worry so much about the stuff, and let them be disappointed if that's the way they're inclined to be. you can tell that i've kind of withdrawn from that aspect of it, blaming my wife or them for being so focused on something that doesn't make them happy anyway, and just let the chips fall where they may. it seems that no matter how much we spend on an uninterrupted flow of stuff, it's still a bitter and dangerous time of year and i might as well just back off, do what makes me happy, retreat into my own shell.

but wait, with three new people, i could reestablish the old customs that i used to enjoy, that make it a family time, that in a way take precedence over everyone waiting for what one of us got from amazon or walmart. but this year following my surgery i got sick and have been barely able to get up out of my chair and produce what i need to. one thing we always did was luminaria - this year, no luminaria, i forgot, and then it got all drizzly and foggy anyway. the luminaria probably would have worked, though the drizzle was off and on all night, but by the time i thought of it i was way too tired. also there's the trains. a lot of work, but if you clear out the table in the garage, there's enough room to set up trains and it can be really fun. it's a christmastime thing. another new year tradition is watching back to the future, one two or three, or all three, or just the third one, which is our favorite even if it may not be the best. we don't watch movies anymore thouugh, not together anyway, and nowadays i have almost no patience with just sitting down and watching any movie with anyone, we don't have a couch, so kids who want to watch a movie shut their bedroom door, get in bed, and then turn it on and sit there for a few hours. not me. my hearing is too bad anyway, and i find it too upsetting that this kind of thing has become what our life is reduced to.

i got the girls a "barbie monopoly" game. i figured you might as well combine the two most garish symbols of commercailism and materialism, put them all in one place, and let them concentrate on the lessons that any monopoly game will provide: namely that one person will get rich, another will get crushed, it's all about money, and all that glitter and nice names and apparent wealth and luxury just looks shiny and unavailable to the vast majority of us who are schlubbing away working some routine job. i don't care, in the end i'm not going to let my happiness be derived from having something others don't, or from having something i didn't work for, or even from having something period. i eat, i live, i write. i don't consume much. i don't own much, i don't want it. i'm not sure my kids can even see that.

no note for santa this year. my wife asked if she should bring the girls downstairs, make a plate of cookies, and have them write a note telling santa that they've been good. in return santa writes them a note that says indeed they've been good, enjoy. lost my spirit this year. it's a charade i'd been losing patience with anyway. i didn't sign the note santa, but rather just put ho ho ho, and began to concentrate on trying to tell the truth in such a way that it was relatively obvious that everything came from us, the parents, and that there wasn't some clown stuffing himself down through the chimney to fill the place with fancy electronics from amazon. what i'm feeling is more a barely concealed contempt for the whole process, wanting stuff, getting stuff, pretending that someone somehow deserves it. they're not especailly bad kids, in fact, they're lucky they just got placed in some place that can deliver to them, if ultimately they learn how to verbalize what they want, can deliver whatever they want. the money is not so much a problem, the state will provide it, all we have to do is convert it into whatever works for them or whatever they want. obviously i'm letting wife handle that so the question is, what to say to her so this doesn't get converted into blatant materialism, cruel disappointment, even violent threats over some mal-distribution of the goods. the girls may only be with us this one year. but it's become a matter of principle. how do you hand out tons of stuff and not turn kids into material-focused kids?

let's look at the other side, to help give me perspective, i always do this just to get the incentive to actually go out and do what i have to do. and that's slipping, obviously. but the other argument is that presents represent your love for them so when you go out and turn that love into money and then stuff you are proving that you love them in a very direct, materialist, tangible way, unlike say just spending time with them or teaching them how to tie their shoe or drive. you're saying this vlogging camera represents our love for you so don't go saying that we don't love you or don't give you whatever you want. now my daughter, whose mother rejected me many years ago, is very much a part of her mother's family which also is entirely materialistic and subscribes to that general theory. you have to get a good present for every member of the family and this is an obligation you start working on in october and of course making, having and producing the money necessary to keep this system running is a major part of life and of course you're amply rewarded for your hard work by receiving all kinds of things from various corners of the extended family. i can't actually speak for whether this makes them happy; it certainly makes their christmas a huge materialist splash, with wrapping paper very visibly all over their floor. but she's glad to visit me partly because i'm just not in that world. and she couldn't manage two families anyway.

people are awake. got to go. it may be a choorb, as my yiddish relatives would say, but it's my choorb, and i have to tend to it.

i'm draggin' like a big ol' chain, because i got sick after my surgery. it was a combination of taking lots of meds, being cut into, having bad weather, being under a lot of pressure, being needed for rides and such, never really resting well upon my return, and then losing a night's sleep on finding out that my one remaining hearing aid had lost its battery charger. I had nothing for a few days! In a panic i retreated into a sore-throat flue kind of funk.

sometimes i come around a corner and feel much older. such a thing happens when they cut into my jaw and insert a tube so that it will delever electric signals to my brain and i can stay in the game, socially. all music, gone. all hearing of little things, gone. but the implants are picking up words and helping me understand them and this presumably will keep me in the game so i can hear what people say or are saying about me.

but oh the pain of hanging around with a sore jaw, and an earache related to the sore throat, and the blahs, real bad, that make me want to just roll over and go back to bed. every day three or four cups of coffee aren't enough. i ignore my main writing project not to mention all the others. i just don't feel well enough to tackle stuff.

puppy and i haven't been out for walk in weeks. it's been real cold and only now is warming up a little. puppy just pees and poops wherever he wants anyway so he's acting like it doesn't matter that much - but if i do go, it actually matters way more to me than to him. i need the fresh air and the exercise. I need to be alive again.

outside, things look grim. it's been real cold for a long time. leaves are soaked down on the ground as the last of the snow has melted on them; that snow lasted for over a week, which is very unusual. christmas will be warm, though, and that too is a little unusual. we went right past the solstice and now days are getting longer - that's as it should be.

then there's the ho-ho-ho. we have an extra kid this year. took in another foster kid, sister of the two who are already here. i see the two little girls, nine and eight, at the dining room table, making noise, being girls. there we go again. twelve and thirteen, and lots of the concerns of the younger generation. main one is, you gootta have a phone, and know how chargers work. don't know if these two, nine and eight, will actually have that chance while in our care. i've become against the whole business.

for reasons too numerous to explain. a seventeen-year-old will watch some media while we're driving around, because media is life and saves you from the discomfort of actually talking to someone. there may be something to see on the street but if so multitasking will take care of it because the media is like glued to the attention vortexx. i worry about the future of this country but so what, these kids are nowhere near the worst. but exactly what is it on media that's so attractive? nothing, really, not even worth finding out probably. it's just a placeholder, it holds their attention so they don't attract it from others. in a cocoon, they can make it to another day.

resting in my chair after a long day & night yesterday in which we went to iowa, i had surgery, and came back to see many many trucks on the side of the road east of west branch, after a harrowing set of accidents on saturday night.

the surgery went well but took too long; i was getting another cochlear implant like the first so i knew what i was getting into, and was somewhat drugged up as my wife drove us through it, stopping for gas in west branch before we saw the remains of the accident.

though the accident was saturday and this was monday night, there were still dozens of cars and smashed trucks on the road, and in two cases trucks on the shoulder with their blinkers on. this was probably because they couldn't move them, and were told to leave the blinkers on, but it slowed traffic down so we could all have a proper rubberneck on the other destroyed trucks that were also on the shoulder and the median. quite a lesson on truckers and ice!

over sixty accidents were involved in that one, just east of west branch, but nobody died. apparently back at the hospital they'd had to decide who to treat first as so many came in. but this had been two days earlier and still wasn't totally cleared off, though the roads themselves were in much better shape, and there were two lanes going all the way through. still it was about a ten-minute delay.

the ironic thing was that i once lived just east of west branch and the accidents could have been right there, near scattergood school, but i'm not sure really because i was in kind of lousy shape to look in the darkness across lanes to see exactly where we were. I spent a couple of years there but didn't recognize anyone at the west branch casey's, in fact that casey's might not even have been there when i lived there. time has make a new west branch. i am in my chair, dog on lap, getting used to the new hearing condition.

what will happen is that they will turn on the right implant in a couple of weeks and slowly i will hear better in that ear as i do in the left. in the meantime i have only the left and have some adjusting to do. with implants out i have almost nothing, as opposed to before, when i had very weak hearing on the right and implant (if charged and functioning) on the left. now i have to be more vigilant, and make sure i always have left, especially when out on the road.

as i began to come to this morning, i became aware of several crises, washer broken, kids need stuff, way behind on everything, laundry, christmas to organize, etc. but sun is out and it's warmer. snow is coming off roofs naturally.

And the dog is very attentive, and sticking right on my lap as i more or less stall in getting up and organized, and take my time. the accident took almost as much out of me as the surgery. my son is, after all, a new trucker deciding whether to go 50-state, as opposed to just CA-AZ. The truckers were heavily criticized for driving too fast (on ice/snow) or carrying 'dry loads' but i don't know exactly what happened, more than sixty people were unable to stop at some point, and whose fault is that? it could have been anyone.

vaya con dios, truckers. welcome to iowa!