The Dowager Empress

 OK, different people out there know different amounts of this, so...

My birth-mother, the Dowager Empress, was hospitalized due to more strokes and a heart defibrillation. the next day, she fell and had another stroke scare. Like magic, she was whisked away to an interim care facility - the kind that I'd asked about in the beginning, and got a lot of blank stares - and so is no longer staying with me.

She was also, FINALLY, approved for Medicaid. (Arse-covering, hypocritical, bureaucratic bitches...)

If only they were this cool.

However, the amount of time that trying to force any bureaucratic arm to do their bloody jobs is such that, even with her no longer living with me, school is making a speedy placement of her in to the assisted care she needs a slow and arduous process. Well, actually red tape and the people who refuse to do their damned jobs have been doing that. But either way.

In addition, the place she's staying cares for her body well enough, but she still needs care for the rest of her being; it is too easy for her to become isolated in her current situation, and she's a very social person.

Trying to take care of all this, plus school, has proved to be a failed experiment. It took two weeks just to get the cancellation of her bloody LifeAlert pushed through. Trying to get anything accomplished with these desk-flying swine is apparently a full-time job in and of itself.

(And to all of you who work at desks: if you actually answer your phone, if you reply to email, if you don't duck out when clients or prospective clients seek you, and if you don't deliberately give false information to avoid being bothered by people in need, I am not talking about you. Just so we're clear.)

I am therefore going to be taking the next semester off from college. And yes, this raises various concerns on my end. However, I am doing my best to see this problem as an opportunity. I will therefore be spending that time helping shore up my family in general as best I can, and if there is time remaining perhaps working on a few projects that have been shelved for far too long.

On the bright side, I did finally get hired somewhere. Lo, I have a pittance.

Sometime again,
--Coyote.

Next time: an interview with role-player, software engineer and author, Michael K. Eidson. You can also check him out on his weblog now at http://www.trollmystic.com.

(Werewolf pic courtesy of  mysticinvestigations.com; Empress image courtesy of freewebs.com. All rights reserved by those who reserve them.)