Grandma got screwed

And now for an update on the patient.

You'll remember back in October I published this post talking about how my mother-in-law had fallen on our top step, broken her arm and was about to have surgery. Well, a lot's happened since that post.

For starters, as you can see by her x-ray, grandma got screwed good and hard four times right after her fall. Given her age and the position she was in, it was exactly what she needed.

Yeah, I'm making sexual innuendos at the expense of an 85-year old woman. Deal with it.

At her recent doctor visit, he was very pleased at her progress. Her arm had regained more movement than he would've expected from someone her age so soon.

She's also lost more than twelve pounds since she's been staying with us because she's eating much better thanks to my wife's cooking and not munching on all the chocolate she has lying around her house.

I don't know what the hell my excuse is.

Where she used to walk up our driveway so she didn't have to climb four steps, she, well, she still walks up the driveway. Except when I'm with her I make her walk the steps. She's a bit set in her ways and severely exercise resistant. Going up the steps is good for her. And of course, making an 85 year old woman work harder is just one of life's great joys.

My living room couch is her bed, and she has everything she needs pretty much within arm's reach - the good arm. And while I can't parade around half-dressed as I'm prone to do, I can still watch the flat-screen late into the night because Grandma drifts off fairly early and her hearing isn't what it used to be.

She'll have her driving privileges back soon, and then I imagine she'll be moving back to her house which she visits once a week after church to pick up a bag full of an obscene amount of junk mail I can only hope for the sake of our forests not all seniors are getting.(Yes, that sentence had 54 words - let's see you do it.)

Every once in awhile Grandma complains about the unfamiliar ache in her arm. Having had a steel plate and five screws in my arm from an auto accident years ago, I completely understand the feeling. It's a unique kind of pain, only made worse when the weather gets chilly or it rains. But it does have its benefits. I used to love setting off the metal detector at the airport. In a pre-9/11 world it was a lot of fun.

Anyway, I make a point of cutting off her complaining at the pass, because it doesn't help us or her in the long run. Instead, what I do is remind her she's not the first person to have a broken arm and she won't be the last (although this is the first broken bone she's ever had).

What I should do is tell her about the great racehorse Barbaro, and the 27 screws he had to endure. And then tell her in that gentle, compassionate, caring way anyone who knows me knows I have, the four little words that would make it all better.

You got off easy.

Wheel Of B-O-R-E-D-O-M

I once told my son I couldn’t imagine a more boring television host than Nick Lachey on The Sing-Off. He took a beat, then said, “Carson Daly.”

He was right of course. But if he said that today, I’d come back with “Pat Sajak.”

A few of you may remember from this post that my mother-in-law, Grandma to the kids, fell at our house, broke her arm and had to have surgery. That was back around October 19th. Since she got out of the hospital she’s been staying with us.

Seems one of the routines we’ve fallen (see what I did there?) into has been following up Jeopardy, which we always watch, with WOF, which we never watched until Grandma was invited to use our couch for a bed for a few weeks. It always reminds me of the old joke that Vanna White is so stupid they have to light the letters so she knows which ones to turn.

But just a few viewings tell you that's the least of this show’s problems.

Let’s start here – apparently the contestants are coached to ar-tic-u-late every word in the answers clearly, distinctly and loudly.

You know, the way people talk in the real world.

Sajak always saunters over to them in his neutral color suit that totally clashes with his spray tan, makes some lame joke in a voice that has no modulation or energy, and then has some excruciatingly awful jokey exchange with the announcer before prizes that the contestants are playing for are announced.

It should replace waterboarding at Gitmo.

Here’s the thing that probably makes it even more unbearable: Grandma is a little hard of hearing, so the volume has to be up. Way up. Hear it from down the block up.

I’m trying to stay social given the circumstances, but I’m finding it too much to take. I wind up doing exactly what I tell my kids not to do: going in my room, closing the door and shutting out the world.

Or at least lowering the volume on it.

Drive envy

I don’t like to talk about it because it’s embarrassing. But not long ago I posted a piece about how small my hard drive was, and how I'd get a bad case of drive envy every time I saw a larger one. It’d gotten to the point where I’d get all excited when an app or file would catch my eye, only to be let down knowing my drive would just limp along, unable to handle it.

So I started looking into drive enhancement options. Ways to make my hard drive bigger, improve its performance. I didn’t know which one I’d go with, I only knew I wanted it to be as big as possible.

Well, the waiting paid off. Thanks to the ever-forward march of technology, today I have a really big, shiny hard drive. In just a few hours I went from 320GB to 1TB, and it didn’t even hurt at all (except maybe a little in the wallet).

In the past it wasn’t possible to upgrade to a 1TB drive for my model MacBook Pro. I always thought the problem was the heat, but come to find out it was the size.

No matter what anyone says, when it comes to hard drives every millimeter counts. Since the 1TB drive is now two millimeters thinner than it used to be, it fit perfectly when the technician carefully slid it inside my laptop.

If it comes down to buying a new laptop or upgrading the one you have, I’d suggest looking into the upgrade.

At first you'll be waving it around, showing off how big it is to anyone who'll look at it. But try not to do too much of that. Keep it in its case. Nobody likes suddenly having one of those shoved right in their face when they aren't expecting it.

You might also feel a little cheap having gone for the upgrade instead of a new one. Don't worry, you're not alone. That feeling will pass.

And besides, your improved performance will be well worth it.

Life of pie

I loves me some pumpkin pie. Always have.

I remember when I was a kid my parents bought a pumpkin pie from Ralphs and had the bad sense to leave me alone with it. I polished off that baby in no time, and when they got home all that was left was an empty pie tin and a kid with a bad, bad stomach ache.

Of course that pie was about a fourth the size of this one.

This is a pumpkin pie from Costco, the mecca of pumpkin pies. Smaller than a crop circle, larger than a manhole cover, this unbelievably tasty dessert is what I've been snacking on since our first Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday night.

You read that right - our first dinner.

Every year, we have the official TG'ing dinner with the family. Pretty routine. The same stories, faces and fights that we have every year. But then, we have a second one on Saturday night with our close friends.

And while the faces may change, the pie remains the same.

Of course, these pies don't just appear by themselves. Although what a great world this would be if they did. On Wednesday before TG'ing, I make the trek to Costco and pick up three giant pies for the holiday meals. You don't know what fun is until you're fighting for a pumpkin pie at Costco the day before TG'ing.

Anyway, it's Sunday morning and time for breakfast.

Or as we call it here, the sweetest meal of the day.

A good day for almost everyone

Before.

After.

Good vs. Evil

It’s not so much a movie as a direct assault on the nervous system. The first time I ever saw The Exorcist was at the late, great National Theater in Westwood. It was also the last time. Well, the last time I saw it in its entirety.

I can say without hesitation I’ve never been so terrified at a movie, any movie, before or since. There was more than one time I had to close my eyes because I didn't want any one of a number of horrifying images burned into my memory.

So when I saw The Exorcist on my cable channel listings, I thought maybe it’s time to get past my fear and see if I could get through it start to finish a second time, although I use the term “start-to-finish” in the loosest sense of the words.

I knew I had to lay down a few ground rules for myself. First, as I implied a second ago, I wasn’t going to watch it literally start to finish. I’d take breaks, maybe watch a little bit every morning before I went to work – which is what I wound up doing. And that brings me to my second point: I wasn’t going to watch it at night.

It’s not that I’m afraid of things that go bump in the night. I’m afraid of things that levitate, vomit pea soup, spin their heads around and sound like Mercedes McCambridge in the night. No, this was going to be a daytime viewing so I’d have plenty of hours to make sure it wasn’t top of mind just as I was drifting off to dreamland.

Or attempting to.

Now that I’ve seen it again and had a chance to think about it, it wasn’t nearly as scary as the first time. At least not in the same way. I can see now the effects, which while still great, were limited by the technology of the time. The head spinning doesn’t look quite as real as it did. The levitating looks like a magic trick. The blood, hers and others, looks a little too red to be real.

What is even better than I remember is the caliber of acting from the entire cast. The subtlety and nuance in each actor's performance is nothing short of remarkable. It would've been easy to drift into the expected horror film hamminess, but no one in the movie treats the material as anything other than real.

But what's as scary to me now as it was then is the idea of good versus evil. I’m a believer there's evil in the world, and there's a constant battle going on. Don't believe me? Pick up a newspaper (or an iPad).

The scene where Father Karras says to Father Merrin, “I believe there are three distinct personalities.” And Father Merrin replies, “There is only one.” rings true to me.

The tricks the devil uses in the movie to deceive - a combination of lies with just enough truth mixed in - seem eerily similar to what goes on in the world around us every day.

I think that's the power of the film, reminding us that the battle between good and evil is ongoing and real. And if we let our guard down for a second, the wrong side wins.

Which makes The Exorcist a film worth watching with your eyes open.

Quit asking

From presidential debates to housing values to climate change, people have to stop asking the question, "Is this the new normal?"

Don't get me wrong, I liked it the first time I heard it - a hundred thousand times ago. But like "at the end of the day," "having said that," "___ is the new 30" and "______ is the new black," I've heard it more than one time too many. It's worn out its welcome.

What bothers me about it is the fearfulness it represents. The minute anything changes, the question is asked. But how can one really know, because by the time you give or get an answer, things have changed again.

Catch phrases get popular fast and spread like wildfire: it's hard to know why one becomes timeless and another just becomes annoying. For every "And there's nothing wrong with that." there's a "Really?" gasping for air in the gutter.

I know, you read this blog for an occasional smile and witty end line, and today all you get is complaining.

I know what you're thinking.

Don't ask.