Back on tract

Great news - my mom's back home again. After several days of just hanging out in the hospital, her digestive tract decided to allow food to move through the shoot again. Though no one is certain about what exactly happened, it seems like the best guess is that her guts started adhering to other organs. We're not sure if this will happen again. Or whether other odd goings on are going on. But for now she'll stick with her baby-food like diet and Monday she'll be back at work again.

Who can say why these things happen. All I know for sure is that this Saturday evening all is well. We can't know what's in store. And for the first time in my tend-to-overplan life, I don't want to.

Wait and see

My mom is still biding time at the hospital. No one is exactly sure why her body is behaving the way it is. So the plan for now is to just wait and see. The doctors hope that with time her intestines will just turn back on. I hope those intestines are aware of what is expected of them. I hope they got the memo. And I hope they're team players.

Is this thing still on?

Well hello again. It's been a while, no? Life has been rather busy these days. I'm still working a lot, we've been enjoying the beautiful onset of summer, and we're trying to buy a house. I have lots of pictures to post but no time to do it at the moment.

Instead, I'm writing to introduce what feels like Part 2 of my mom's epic adventure. Since we last spoke, my mom has lost most of her fingernails as a result of the chemo treatments that ended quite a while ago. And yesterday, after suffering from rather severe abdominal pains, she was admitted to the hospital because of blockage in her intestine that was effectively shutting off her GI tract. At this point the doctors seem to think this may be a side effect of her surgery ... from seven months ago. I don't understand this at all yet, but I'll do some investigating and report back soon. Let's just hope those dark clouds forming on the horizon aren't the ominous type.

Cavs 105, Hawks 85

Last night we caught a raucous playoff game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Atlanta Hawks. I was a little nervous about the game not starting until 8:00 because I am notorious for not being able to stay up very late, but the game was exciting enough and the crowd wild enough that I didn’t pass out until we got on the train to go home.

The night’s highlights:
- Giant indoor flame throwing
- Usher dancing on the sidelines to “Never Gonna Give You Up”
- Free t-shirts
- No-look passing, reverse dunking, and alley-ooping
- A 40-foot buzzer beating shot
- Dippin' Dots ice cream

Basketball doesn’t get much better than this.

A Wright weekend

A few years ago Sam and I decided to get caught up on some of the cinematic greats from before our time. We watched movies like Twelve Angry Men and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Apocalypse Now. While some appealed to us a lot more than others, we generally found that most of them were hard to appreciate. Even highly acclaimed films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest just left us more stunned than anything. We grew up with such a different cinematic experience that it was very hard to grasp what had been so revolutionary about these classics.

So when we went to see some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural landmarks this weekend, I had was a little nervous that I would walk away feeling similarly disappointed by what has been hyped for decades. It was easy to imagine that what had been great in its time would no longer feel relevant, but fortunately I found this not to be the case at all.

First we went to see Kentuck Knob, a smaller residence built in the lush hills of Pennsylvania. It’s difficult to capture on camera because it’s got so much going on in so many places (plus we weren’t allowed to take pictures inside), but it was a beautiful and clever little house.

Wright was never formally trained in architecture which seems to have had two effects; first, he almost always underestimated how much steel was required to prevent nature from reclaiming his structures, and second, his ignorance of such facts allowed him to create uninhibitedly. Both of these effects are seen in the second house we visited, Fallingwater.

This house was such an amazing experience. One of the most stunning, yet destructive, features of this house is its relationship to the river. Millions of dollars have been spent to restore and reinforce what the water continues to break down.

There were so many interesting features like the low ceilings that fit the slightly shorter humans of the 1930's, the built-in furniture, and the rocks that moved from the outside of the house to the inside.

So fortunately this weekend turned out nothing like our movie experience. While the appeal of older films might be totally lost on us, I'm glad to say we thoroughly enjoyed our sampling of classic architecture.