You Know You're Busy When...

There's nothing I like more than wasting my time doing blog entries. It's such a wonderfully wasteful use of my time. It's not like there are more than ten or fifteen of you who actually read these entries, but I love doing them.

It's so much more interesting than finishing reports or grading papers (not that I actually assign papers, but never mind details; this is a world where fiction can pass for fact in the halls of publishing, so don't worry).

So, you know you're busy when you can't find time to do a blog entry in two weeks during winter break!!

Nothing gets done in Los Angeles from Xmas until New Year. In fact, very little gets done in all of December!

I did see a few movies and I did fly back and forth to New York to bury my Dad and help my Mom. I did try and juggle some reports and hire some teachers. But I spent over a solid day of flying time and didn't find the time to read one book??? Whazzup with that?

An interesting thing happened to my Mom as she was cleaning up my Dad's drawers -- cleaning out old socks and the like. She found an envelope with some cash in it -- not much, just about fifty bucks. But she didn't know that my Dad had stashed it there.

Then she found another one.

And another one.

Then she found one behind the bed end table.

And some more in the sock drawer.

By the time she was done, she had found $1900 in a ton of envelopes.

I'm told that one of the things that is not uncommon in Alzheimer's patients is that they will squirrel things away -- money, change, keys, etc. I don't know if this is true, but he must have been doing this for years.

In any case, the good thing is that my Mom's got some money to help her through these times when the paperwork for pensions and life insurance etc. take forever to go through.

$1900. Out here, you could easily go for... oh... two weeks on that.