Hello world.  <tap tap >  Is this thing on?

It's been a hard year-plus.

 My mother is losing her mind and her health.  As is often the case, we didn't see it when it was starting.  We think she has a parkinsonian disease called PSP, which is like CJD except confined to the brainstem.  In the course of a few months last year she went from living independently, to assisted living, to a nursing home, to a house of her own but with 24 hour care.   The disease has nearly completely destroyed her ability to create new memories, and the longer she goes without that ability, the more she delves into her past memories, grafting them onto her momentary self-awareness, to make sense of her surroundings.  Every few minutes, the reset button is hit, and she starts over.  There's *just* enough short-term to long-term memory transfer happening to make it so she is now jumbling the past and the present into a crazy mix.  This is called dementia.  She also has no balance -- she can't walk, or even stand up, without assistance.  But of course she can't remember that, and insists she can.

 If she could write, or manipulate technology (a recorder, a computer), or if she trusted her caregivers to act as secretaries, she could perhaps externalize part of her thinking... but she can't do any of the above, and even if she could, I think needing to be reoriented to reality every five minutes would be incredibly disheartening, and a very difficult exercise in patience by the care-givers.

So, she lives a few blocks from me, I get to see her often, she still remembers who I am...   she thinks my younger sister is about 30 years younger than she is, she thinks she lives in Chicago, or Texas, or any number of other places she's lived or travelled, and she weaves input from movies, TV, radio, conversations, and her own dreams or daydreams into her reality, with incredible facility.   And I've made the transition from correcting her (much), telling her the truth, to just improvising and going with her flow.  Then, if she "wakes up" in the middle of a conversation and accurately remembers something of the present...  she thinks *I'm* the silly one, which is fine.  They call this "validation" care...  and it does seem to be more humane and less confusing and painful to her, though it's like being on a a stand-up improv show to do it. 

 Everything else is a bit topsy too.  My ex-partner and I get along as well as we can, I miss her, I think she misses me.  I like her new boyfriend, and I like being around them, but it doesn't happen much.  My new partner and her partner are preparing for a new phase of their lives, which may separate us.  My position has been absorbed into a much larger, less humane department, and I'm in a cube-hobby-farm (four people in one office).  I'm learning  alot, which is always good, but tiring. 

So, that's where I've been.

 I'm feeling old.

PS: cdent   andinpetto   both showed up at Soma last week, that was fun.  I like their lives.