Still more

Bad news, that is.

Bob's mom had a stroke on Thursday. She's doing really well, though--it was apparently a fairly mild one--and might be able to come home in the next couple of days. [Update: Monday - She's home.] My dad is doing well, he's been going to physical therapy and feeling pretty good, and my sister may be get out of the hospital in the next few days, too. [Update: Monday - She's home, too.]

On Saturday I was talking to a friend, and I said, "Well, I'd better get over to the hospital," and he said, "For a change?" I've certainly been spending a lot of time in hospitals lately, it's true. And getting quite a variety. The one that Bob's mother is in is a very nice one. Brand new. Her room is almost like a suite, with big windows and a couch. The one my sister is in is brand new, too, so new that the kitchen isn't finished, so they order their meals from a restaurant. And they don't have enough towels, or, even more important, nurses.

Anyway, I'm hopeful that everyone I love will be able to stay out of hospitals for awhile now. I think we've reached maximum saturation.

My new favorite television show is, of course, Touching Evil. A brain damaged police detective--how could it not be?

Seriously, I really enjoyed the pilot, I thought it was wonderful. The show Friday night wasn't quite as good, but it was still pretty good. I like the guy playing the detective (Jeffrey Donovan), and I like his female partner (Vera Farmiga), and I really like Pruitt Taylor Vince, who plays a homeless man who believes that he is actually from another planet, and that his dreams are his real life, and real life is the dream. He does a wonderful job with a quirky character.

I especially loved the ending of the show last Friday, when he was singing Creegan to sleep with "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay," except with his interplanetary place names substituted in, the way his mother sang it to him.

I almost hate to admit this. Heck, I do hate to admit it. But I took the Christmas tree down yesterday.

Or, actually, I started to take it down.

We always leave it up until mid-January, but this year I had surgery right about then, of course, and didn't feel like doing anything with it, and then with my dad going into the hospital, and everything else that was going on, it just didn't seem very important to bother about it.

And we got to kind of liking it, softly glowing over in the corner. And since we don't have any furniture in the living room anymore, well, it kind of fills up space.

I got all the ornaments off of it, and started on the lights, and Bob came down and said, "Why don't we leave it up?" I thought he was just kidding, just giving me a hard time for leaving it up so long, but he was serious. He said we should leave it up and decorate it for other holidays. Well, I thought, I guess we could do that . . .

So I went to JoAnn and bought a couple of boxes of pastel plastic Easter eggs (and judging from the number of things I found, we must not be the first people to have thought of this) and a string of white lights and a string of purple lights, and now we have an Easter Tree.

It gets even weirder, though--Bob called me today and said, "You're going to think I'm nuts, but maybe we should look around and see if we can get a Christmas tree on sale." Yes, I do think he's nuts, but I already did, of course. The tree we have is a little the worse for wear, since Dinah has climbed it a few times, but I hadn't actually thought about replacing it in order to have a better multiple-seasons tree. But maybe. I guess we can look.

He said we could put little patriotic things on it for Independence Day, and a Halloween tree could be pretty interesting. What else? Turkeys for Thanksgiving, I guess. Little cornucopias. Shoot. We missed Valentine's Day. Well, there's always next year.