Last week I quit drinking and eating at happy hours.  I’m not drinking at all and I’m cooking at home again.  Whew.  I don’t see how people do it.  It was fun and my brother and sisters and I really got reacquainted.  Every day since June 17th we worked on getting my mother set up and every night some of us would get together and compare notes and plan who was taking care of what the next day.  Somehow I was always there.

Now I can’t wear some of my summer clothes and the thought of fried food gags me.  I even went to two parties, one in the heat of the day and one tonight, and only once did I glance longingly at someone’s drink.  I’m over it.

The party in the afternoon was a street dance.  The woman I used to teach bellydance to and her husband, along with two of their neighbors, have a band.  For years they’ve been having a block party.  My friends are always busy hosting so I sit with this married couple and more recently they have invited his best friend and the wife.  I don’t even feel like I’m the odd-man-out with these people.

Over the years the music has gotten really good.  Tonight they had a world-renowned pianist from Japan who played keyboard while this guy who used to be in one of the top bands in Oregon played harmonica.  They were playing tango music and they were fantastic.  One of the guys in the blues band  he’d been in knows my friends and sits in with them sometimes.  They hold a jam most Friday nights in their basement.  The neighbor who is also in this basement band owns a place where a lot of good musicians play so that explains the top entertainment we heard.

The married couple always bring me a wine glass from their house and he is quick to fill it with a good red so it threw him off that I wasn’t drinking.  He and his wife are the nicest people.  He reminds me of John Updike.  I hope she didn’t mind that I talked to her husband so much.  We were comparing stories of our parent’s demise.  He’s such a great guy.  She’s lucky.

As their kids have gotten older and younger people have moved into the neighborhood the number of babies has increased.  Before there were none and tonight they were everywhere.  I can’t wait to have grandbabies, not that any of my girls are married.

I left around 8:30 to go to another street dance.  They billed it as that but really it was a band in a beer garden.  Some of the high school people said they were going to meet up but I didn’t pay attention to when, assuming it was when the band played.  But the only person I ran into was the baseball coach.  Remember the guy who housesat when I went to Florida?  I’m sure fond of him but the music was so, so bad I had to leave. 

Shoot, I keep forgetting to tell you about Alaska.  Next time.

There is trouble on the foster-care front.  Not that I care, particularly.  My little sister (10 years younger) gave my mother a pedicure last week — It gives me the creeps just thinking about touching her “hooves” as my sister referred to them.  My mother was so out of it she barely opened her eyes once. 

I guess she filed her nails and washed and lotioned her feet and Lois remained comatose the whole half hour.  My sister made some crack about spending an hour driving all the way over there and my mother being too drugged up to even notice.  Well, the Romanian woman whose business it is was so upset she called my brother, assuring him she would never give Lois anything not prescribed by the doctor.

My brother kind of likes that she’s drugged up because it makes his job so much easier while we wait for the conservatorship to go through.  He needs her to sign checks.  He doesn’t want her to know she’s paying for this place so we put up the money for the first month.    She’s so high she’s hallucinating and my brother just pretends like he sees the stuff, too. 

I agree with my sister that we should get the doctor to prescribe something not so intense.  My brother is over at that sister’s house tonight having dinner because his girlfriend is in Greece for a month.  I hope the drug thing doesn’t become an issue. 

Meanwhile the sister who drinks vodka has not been back to see Lois once, that we know of.  We sort of took her off the email list, though.  I guess the court visitor — They interview the petitioner and family, along with the respondent to make sure everybody is on board with the appointed guardian and conservator.  The woman had a chat with Robi… and got the impression she’d been drinking.  Two of us in our interviews mentioned the possibility when the woman brought up her unusual responses, saying Robi…’s tone was most like my mother’s (referring to the Queen of England act).

Anyway, that’s boring.  Let’s talk about my trip to Alaska.  Wow, I just scrolled up and realized this is already too long.  Later, alligators.