For those of you that like to watch movies, you might recognize the three words of the title to this installment of my blog are all movie titles, too. They’re not necessarily good movies, but they more or less sum up what’s been happening in my life for the last few weeks.
The featured image for this post is the album cover from Pink Floyd’s ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here. It was released in 1975, and it’s probably my favorite album from the Floyd boys.
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Perhaps Little Known Fact About This Band: The name Pink Floyd was created on the spur of a moment in 1965 by Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of the band. The name came from two blues musicians in his record collection: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.
Yeah, I’ve never heard of them either.
Wish You Were Here is essentially a musical tribute to Syd, who was booted out of his own band in 1968 due to mental illness and increasingly erratic behavior secondary to profound psychedelic drug use. Seven years later, his band mates still missed him.
It’s a musically sad album, but also very sweet and beautiful. It’s grief and anger, interspersed with doses of love.
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Cats is a 2019 feature movie directed by Tom Hooper, that was based on the 1981 play composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which was based on the 1939 poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. I’ve never seen the movie. Or the play. Nor have I read the book. But I’m pretty sure I’ve heard a song or two from one of those productions.
Here at the Chula Vista Resort and Spa, Cats has been translated into los gatitos cuatros, and a great majority of my waking life has been focused on the care and feeding thereof. We gave Gremlin and Pixie, the two starving orphans that found us in early August, full run of the house 12 days ago, and then we held our breath.
Operation Kit-ten Integration is in full swing.
Mika and Mollie haven’t exactly been friendly with their new house mates, but there hasn’t been any overt declarations of war either. So this is probably going about as smoothly as it can, at least as far as Lea and I are concerned.
I was kind of hoping our adult cats would be a bit more welcoming. Now I’m hoping Mika and Mollie will simply come to grudgingly accept Gremlin and Pixie over the next several months. Or years…
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Gremlin and Pixie are snoozing on the couch in the living room as I type this. It’s a good thing because Pixie had been walking on the keyboard a few minutes earlier. I appreciate her trying to help me, but she doesn’t type any better than I do… The babies are about four months old now. They’ve been very entertaining to say the least. They’re cute as kit-tens, and almost irresistible.
Mika and Mollie are a little over four years old, and they don’t appear to anywhere near as taken with the cuteness of the babies’ antics as Lea and I are. Maybe they don’t remember they were once cute little bundles of furry energy, too.
The babies are finally healthy, having recovered from damn near starving to death, being covered with fleas and fungi, and being infested with intestinal worms. They have fat bellies, and their fur feels like silk. I’m not sure they could be any happier or more content with their new lives.
From my point of view, our older kit-tens should be happier with the new circumstances of their lives. They’re certainly getting better service and more attention from Lea and I because of the newcomers. I clean all four of the litter boxes twice a day now, and we both take the time to check on Mika and Mollie throughout the day to make sure they don’t look too miserable segregating themselves from everything and everyone.
It reminds me of the approach I used to take with my Borderline Personality Disorder patients back when I was a psych nurse. I’d meet with them first thing in the morning and go over a few reasonable and attainable goals. I’d drop in frequently during the day to give them little pep talks, give them whatever PRN medications they desired, and prayed for the best with those bitches. You can never trust a Borderline to do the right thing for too long.
Yo, Mr. Psychiatry. This is interesting and all, but what sort of fungal stuff did your cats have, if you don’t mind me asking…
Not at all. They had ringworm.
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Ringworm of the body (tinea corporis) is a common skin infection that is caused by a fungus. It’s called “ringworm” because it usually causes a circular rash (shaped like a ring, duh) that is very red and extremely itchy.
I can personally vouch for the truth of the above statement.
It’s also very contagious, therefore, extremely easy to spread. You can also get ringworm of the scalp (tinea capitis), which is worse than ringworm of the body, mostly because it’s much harder to treat. And there’s also the possibility you could get ringworm of the groin (tinea cruris).
It’s unfortunate our veterinarian didn’t notice the ringworms the first two times we took the babies in to her office for treatment and vaccines and stuff.. Lea and I didn’t know we had been fungally contaminated until we were on the second week of our —
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Vacation is a 2015 American comedy film written and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. It’s the fifth theatrical installment of the very popular National Lampoon Vacation film series. As far as I’m concerned, they should’ve stopped at two. And there are literally thousands of movies that have the word vacation in the title, so if you don’t like this movie either, you can easily chose another.
Vacation is also a song released by the all-female rock band, the Go-Go’s in 1982. The song was the first single from their album of the same name. Vacation, the song, became one of the Go-Go’s highest charting singles, reaching No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was the band’s second US Top-10 hit.
And there’s this little tidbit from a couple of the band members, “We still saw videos as an annoying waste of time,” Jane Wiedlin said. “After seven or eight hours we sent out someone to sneak in booze.” Kathy Valentine recalled, “…we drank lots of champagne. Lots.”
Yep. Being a rockstar in the 1980’s was every bit as banal and boring as you might have imagined it was.
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Lea and I flew back up to the States at the beginning of September, and we spent two weeks exploring the State in which we had resided the longest, Minnesota. We visited with a select few family members the first few days we were there, we shopped our asses off. We visited a few places special to us, and attended one activity that we loved.
We went to the State Fair — The Great Minnesota Get-Together — it’s a very big deal in Minnesota. There were just under 250,000 people at the fairgrounds on the day we went, and we spent the entire day with our youngest daughter, Abi. That was probably the best part of our visit — we never get to spend much time with her anymore.
We went to the North Shore of Lake Superior, where the entire population is less than 250,000 people. It’s probably my most favorite place that I’ve ever been.
I have to remind myself that we actually had a great time, most of the time. The timing of our trip ended up being perhaps the worst time we could’ve picked to leave our home. And all of our kit-tens. And then Queen Elizabeth II got dead!
Fortunately, our oldest daughter and her husband and their dog had just returned to live in Mexico for the next several months until they get bitten by the Travel Bug again and take off to…wherever…again. Gwen took care of the kit-tens. John took care of everything else, and he sent me pictures of all of the kit-tens every day while we were gone. What a guy!
The first week of our vacation flew by, and that’s when things started going a bit south for us. Ironically, we were on the North Shore when I realized the itchy red circles that had erupted on both of my forearms, and Lea’s forearms, too, was fucking ringworm.
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If I had been a Med/Surg nurse instead of a Psych nurse, I probably would’ve recognized the hallmark symptoms of ringworm sooner. And then I might not have ended up looking like unto a leper, or someone who had snuffed out half a pack of cigarettes on his forearms.
Lea had a milder case of ringworm than I did, but I had spent way more time with our malnourished orphans than she had. I ended up with seven fulminating lesions on my right arm, six on my left. Fortunately, I didn’t end up with ringworm of the scalp. Or on my groin, thank you Lord. The treatment was relatively simple. A lots and lots of antifungal ointments. And hand sanitizer.
My arms look almost normal again, whatever that is.
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Once we realized what was afflicting us, Lea and I cancelled all of our remaining visitations with everyone, simply because we didn’t want to take the chance of passing our fungi on to anyone else, and we just wanted to go home. Unfortunately, if we wanted to fly back to Mexico with the tickets we had already purchased, we had to wait four more days to do so. They were some of the longest days of our lives in recent history. We bunkered up in our Airbnb in St. Paul and binge watched TV shows and movies.
We flew home on September 13th. I wanted to scream at our veterinarian, Dra. Bereniece, when we brought the kit-tens to her office to be treated for ringworm the following day — but I remembered I used to be healthcare worker — and sometimes shit just happens. And Dra. Bereniece has given our kit-tens excellent care all of the other times we’ve had to bring them to her office, so I kept my temper on a short leash, and told my mouth to sit down and shut up.
It took ten days to complete the oral meds for the kit-tens. And I gave them antifungal shampoos as often as I thought they needed them. Somewhat amazingly, the babies endured all of those treatments remarkably well. And Gremlin just might be the coolest cat that ever lived because he essentially let us do whatever we needed to do to him without so much as a hiss.
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But wait, there’s more! If you’ve been following this blog, you might remember this is the Rainy Season in the Lakeside Area. We’ve had over 30 inches of rain since mid-June. And when you get that much rain, you better have a leak-free roof.
We didn’t think we had any leaks in our roof before we went on vacation from retirement. Yeah, we were wrong about that. But I’m pleased to say those leaks have been sorted out by Tacho and Lupe. The mold that appeared on the ceiling of the master bedroom has been remediated. The ceiling around the fireplace in the living room is going to need some cosmetic work, eventually, once everything dries out.
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All of that crap was bad enough to come home to, but Lea and I both came down with terrible head colds when we were flying home. This isn’t the first time we’ve had that happen, but we’re hoping it will be the last time. We’ve been sicker than hell for almost two weeks, and have just now started feeling better enough to want to live again. It’s not COVID, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve had that shit, and I know what it feels like. And Lea appears to be immune to it.
We were expecting an actual true-to-life visitor to the resort last week, but I ended up begging her not to come down, and pleasepleaseplease reschedule her trip. Thankfully, she decided she’d like to celebrate her next birthday here at the resort in January.
Thank you, Jaye. You did the right thing.
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And that brings me to the third part of title of the post —
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Earthquake is a 1974 American ensemble disaster/drama film directed and produced by Mark Robson, starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and a cast of thousands. The plot concerns the struggle for survival after a catastrophic earthquake destroys most of the city of Los Angeles, California.
I’ve seen this movie, probably more than once. I guess it was okay. My kinda/sorta roommate when I was in the US Army, Specialist 4th Class Randy Paul was from Los Angeles. The movie gave him nightmares after he saw it because, “…that’s where I fuckin’ grew up, man! You don’t know what it’s like to see almost everything you know get wiped off the face of the earth, man.”
He had a point, so I stopped laughing at him.
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September 19th. It’s historically been a tragic date in Mexico. Three earthquakes have hit this country on that date. In 1985 at 7:17 AM, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake hit Mexico City, destroying huge parts of the city and killing at least 5,000 people, and injuring tens of thousands of people.
In 2017 an earthquake struck at 1:14 PM with an estimated magnitude of 7.1 and strong shaking for about 20 seconds. Its epicenter was about 35 miles south of the city of Puebla, Mexico. At least 370 people were killed by the earthquake and related building collapses, including 228 in Mexico City, and more than 6,000 people were injured.
We were living in Mexico when that earthquake hit, but we didn’t feel so much as a quiver from it.
This year at 1:05 PM a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck between the Mexican states of Michoacán and Colima. There were only two reported deaths attributed to the earthquake, and less than 500 people were injured. Somewhat ironically, there had been a nationwide disaster drill about an hour before the quake. Maybe that’s why there were so few deaths or injuries. Everybody already knew what they were supposed to do…
Like unto almost every earthquake that has ever quaked, there have been several aftershocks here of varying magnitude in the days that followed. We haven’t felt any of them, but several of the people I know here have felt them, and they haven’t been any more fun than the first quake had been.
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I was sitting in a restaurant waiting for our take-out lunch order to be filled when the earthquake hit. I was sitting in a wobbly chair — you know, it kind of rocked from side-to-side because of uneven ground. Or uneven legs. Or both. And then I noticed my chair wasn’t the only thing rocking back and forth in the restaurant, and I started feeling like maybe I was drunk or something.
Everyone seated at the restaurant was looking around trying to figure out what the hell was happening. I know I was.
“Earthquake! Everybody get outside! NOW!” I’m not sure who said that, but it was someone that had definitely been through an earthquake before. In terms of terror and destruction here in the Lakeside Area, this wasn’t much of an earthquake. Only one business that has closed because of “earthquake damage”, and it probably wasn’t in that good of shape before the quake hit…
The lack of terror and destruction aside, I have to admit it felt very weird to feel the ground beneath my feet jiggle like unto Jell-O. I immediately tried calling my lovely supermodel wife to make sure she was okay, and she didn’t answer her phone. This has happened every goddamn time there’s been an emergency, and I absolutely needed to talk to her, right now!
Seriously. That’s not a joke. So, in a way, I was used to it. I told myself she was okay, and paid for our take-out order. Hey, we were hungry, and if we weren’t dead we going to need to eat… The restaurant I was at is less than a mile from our house, so it was a quick commute back home. Lea was intentionally standing in the doorway when I pulled up to the gate to let me know she really was okay.
When the earthquake hit, she had done the same thing I had. She ran outside just in cases the house decided to collapse. And when she got outside she realized she had left her cellphone on the couch. By the time she had retrieved her phone and tried to call me back, the circuits were so busy from everybody in Mexico trying to call someone else to see if they were okay that no one could call anyone.
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I don’t think I have ever hugged her so hard. And I could not stop myself from shaking. When I was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to vomit, we sat down and had lunch with our kit-tens. French dip sandwiches. And peanut butter pie for dessert.
Life will go on for us, and thankfully, almost everyone else in the seismic country we have adopted as our new home.
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I had no idea how to end this post, so I took a break from it for the last two or three weeks. I’m still not sure how I’m going to wrap this up, I only know that I need to do it. It’s time to get moving again.
I meet with a few guys every Monday to discuss our individual life experiences, and anything else that pops into our heads. I just came back from this week’s meeting. I call it A Meeting of the Two Wise Men. It gives us a certain amount of leeway, just in cases one or more us decides to do something stupid.
Yeah, it still happens, even though we’re supposed to be old and wise by now.
One of the sometimes Two Men is a guy named Bill Merrill. Bill is a much more social animal than I am, and a lots of people stop by to say hello to him when we meet. I don’t know most of the people he knows, so Bill introduces me like this, “This is my friend Mark. Mark is on a spiritual journey.”
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I can’t argue with that intro. I am on a spiritual journey. I spend more time communicating with God, the Universe, and Everything than I do with anyone else. Including my lovely supermodel wife, and I know have to start doing a better job at that.
I have found God to be almost totally unlike everything I was taught to believe about God. And my relationship with Him. Perhaps the most surprising part is how easily approachable He is. And how near. My prayers don’t have make the Kessel run to reach him. Nor do I have to wait 78.24 light years to hear a response from Him.
The guy that wants a lightsaber will understand that reference.
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The fact that I have to essentially un-learn almost everything I know is somewhat daunting. The fact that I’m totally willing to do it might somehow shorten the process, but I really do possess a headful of crap in my brain. And how does one actually empty one’s mind? This task leads me to comparisons with Hercules cleaning the Augean stables. And even the Star Wars guy might have to Google that reference.
I don’t know where this journey will lead. I only know that I’m committed to finding out, and I’m not sure I could stop now even if I wanted to. From my point of view, the ending can’t be worse than anything I’ve already seen.
So there’s a better than average chance that will have to be an improvement…
Reflections/Life in Mexico 