In the past two weeks my life has suddenly become like some kind of made-for-TV movie, the kind featured on the Lifetime Network.

The good news is that I got a job. And not just any job, but the job I've been wanting since the early spring. I'm working for a very cool product designer and his new small company. And I'm not the one answering the phones.

The bad news is more complicated, but I've hit a little rough patch, and I know I'll get through it soon enough. But I do feel like I'm living through the old "when it rains it pours" cliché. I'm not ready to write about this stuff yet, if at all.

That which does not kill you makes you stronger, right? I'm trying to remain optimistic, but I'm having trouble feeling happy about the new job at the moment.

I went to my 20th college reunion this past weekend.
It was the first time I’d been back in about 19 years. The place looks great, and clearly I didn’t appreciate it at the time. The best part, of course, was seeing old friends, and it reminded me that I miss them terribly.

It's been a long time since I've posted here.

And I'm still unemployed.

There was a slightly major dad-incident a week ago. Looking back on it, it makes some sense: he got sick, and the illness made the Parkinson's much worse, to the point where he could barely move. I sprang into action, something that I hadn't had to do in quite sometime. My mother really couldn't deal with anything. I took over and made sure that she was OK, and went out and rented a wheelchair(against her strenuous objections) and dealt with a home-health aid agency that sent over some lovely Ugandan women, and then met with the geriatric care manger(maybe the most wonderful woman on earth, I'd met with her over a year ago previously) with my brother a few days after the flare up had calmed down. In fact, today I expect that the geriatric care manager is going to be trying to reach my mother to have a 'talk' with her. Much like the principal of your child's highschool might call the kid into the office for a 'chat'.

After the bad week my mother seemed to forget that she really needs help each morning, help getting my father out of bed and dressed and cleaned up. He returned to the adult day care place this week, and they had missed him. The saddest part of this flare-up was that, since starting to take one of the new medications in the fall, my father's mental state has drastically improved, at least for part of the day. And since he was mentally not out-of-it for this flare-up, he was immensely depressed once he started to get better: he saw how bad it had been, and was mortified that he had to be helped in such ways, and that he had been so incapacitated. I have a feeling he would drag himself off to a nursing home to be less of a burden if he could, when he's in his most lucent state. It was extremely upsetting to see him like that.

"no, you're just obsessinating."
This is my new favorite word, very apt description of my current state of mind.
Thank you to M. for coming up with it. You roXor.

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fikrad: so is this bad, me being all happy and chipper?

B: no, it makes me feel good

B: I sort of felt bad about ruining your life and all

fikrad: hey thats nice

A recent hit to this blog was via a search for these words:
psychotic + break + from + reality + what + is + it

I've become like an absentee-caregiver for my father lately.
Today I met the new man that we hired -to replace the previous man that was fired- who helps to care for my father. The fired guy was from Uganda, and this new guy is also from Uganda.

The guy we fired was really nice but didn't show up a couple of times, which was trouble. Situations like that lead to all kinds of chaos at home, especially when my father is alone and expecting the guy to show up and he doesn't. This happened not that long ago when I was arriving later to relieve the helper-guy, and I walked into a big mess: my father had gotten hungry and had attempted to make himself a hotdog. The hotdogs were in the freezer, and he got them out of the freezer, but the package proved to be too much for him to handle: he couldn't cut it open. The kitchen was scattered with knives and implements, including a screwdriver. The entire package, not really opened, was in a pot of water sitting on the counter. After giving up on the hotdogs he had gotten out some crackers and had left cracker bits on every surface. Every drawer was half pulled out, and it looked like the kitchen had been ransacked by thieves. He was sitting in the living room when I got there, very confused about where he was, and where everyone else was, and where he was supposed to be. He has always tended to be a worrier, and he was extremely worried. It wasn't good.

So it happened one more time, the guy not showing up, and we fired him and gave him a month's pay as severance.

This new man is older, his beard is graying. His name is Samuel and I think my father likes him a little better than the previous guy. He was cleaning the bathrooms and floors when I came over, doing the laundry, and then taking my father for a very short walk around the house. We just changed my father's medication schedule slightly and the neurologist warned us to be on the lookout for more hallucinations.

I just changed the name of this blog.
Change is good, isn't it?