Thinking in the night

I am a light sleeper, and have inherited my sleeping patterns from my mother. Usually, I wake up around 2 a.m. Nowadays, at my age, nature calls me to the bathroom about three to four hours after I fall asleep anyway. I am usually awake for at least two hours after that. That's the time when I think through recent events and what I may be doing after I get up in the morning.

In the last few days, this pattern has been disrupted. The reason is obvious: Derek's cancer medication has become ineffective. Today, I was awake all morning from 2 a.m. on, thinking about Derek, Airdrie, Marina and Lauren, Airdrie's parents, us, our other family members - what is ahead? As Derek says in his blog post: Time to walk into the unknown future again.

Bad news

Today Derek and we found out that his cancer has grown substantially in his lungs.

This is devastating.

Back home

We were away in Germany for a couple of weeks and since our return, I've been catching up in my business. So today is the first chance I've had to relate some things related to the trip.



We attended the 40th wedding anniversary of close friends who live in an area not too far away from the North Sea, and had a Family meeting in Berlin as well. I have two aunts in their mid-nineties there, and we visit them as often as we can. One of them is my mother's sister - she's the last one of her siblings. She's in good shape, but unfortunately totally deaf. We communicate by writing our comments on paper. The other aunt is a former sister-in-law of my mother. Both she and my mother were widowed twice; in each case they lost their first husbands because of the second world war. She is slowly going blind, but lives in a first-class old-age home, has a friend there, and the two support each other.

I have another aunt in Vienna, also of that advanced age group. We didn't get there this time and we're hoping to see her next year, if our family situation allows.

It's important to maintain family connections.

The Ghouls at work

Last Hallowe'en night, we had a large number of kids, and also teenage "kids", collecting their "dues". We must have done something wrong, because, as I write this, we've been subject to a power failure for about an hour by now. We had another one about a week ago as well - before that, we hadn't had one in a long time. I suppose the ghosts are evolving along with our technology; how else, considering that they've been around since the dawn of humanity, would they know that a power failure would be exactly the right thing to stop us in our tracks and make us acknowledge them? Now I have to go around and reset all the digital clocks in the house AGAIN!

One thing the ghouls couldn't interrupt is my access to the internet. I connect through one of Rogers' portable modems, and I have backup battery power for it. I run my stuff on a laptop, So I can be independent of the power grid for this purpose at least. A small defiance...