Joe

Joel B. Rockstead died early on a Saturday morning in Arlington, Washington, after he had been brought home from the hospital to be with his family. He was my friend.

We met at the first organizational meeting of the Lake Stevens Cub Scouts back in 2002 or so; the boys had been brainwashed by some of the other kids in school and decided to join the Scouts and so, like any father wanting his children to have all the good things in life, I took them to the meeting so we could get the lay of the land and meet all the other young fathers and sons.

The intent of the meeting was to split the boys up into dens and appoint den leaders from among the grim-faced adults in attendance. When they asked for volunteers to lead dens, Joe and Marilyn were among the first to raise their hands. That's the kind of people they were.

In this area of town, they stood out in ways that weren't always comfortable. They didn't wear the fanciest clothes, they didn't drive the latest cars, and their kids weren't the best-behaved. To some, they came across as a little bit backwoods, a bit rough around the edges. Lake Stevens was a bedroom community for many of the folks who worked down at the Boeing plant down in Everett; there were a lot of well-paid engineers and managers and other successful businessmen in town; there were also a lot of blue-collar machinists and other hands-on professionals. Joe and Marilyn weren't part of either of those groups. Joe was definitely blue-collar, but he was more of a jack-of-all trades, doing construction and road work and whatever else he could do to put food on the table. He'd worked at NAPA for awhile and really enjoyed that. But when we all gathered around to organize the Scout dens, he was just a care-worn guy who looked a bit older than the rest.

But he and Marilyn wanted to be a part of their kids' lives, and they were willing to put their money where their mouths were. They volunteered. And since we lived in relative close proximity to them -- they were just down the street a ways -- we were put in their den.

I noticed (but didn't say anything at the time) that the rest of the folks were not so eager to join Joe's den once they got a look at him. It was understandable, I suppose, as most parents want their den leaders to look a certain way, act a certain way. Joe was never one to cater to anyone else's whims. He was who he was.

Over the next couple of years, we had a lot of fun with them. Joe and Marilyn and I would work on putting the meetings together and going through the Scout handbooks to help the boys get their badges and ranks. At the beginning, there were quite a few families in our den. But as time went by, all of the rest of them either dropped Scouts or dropped us. There was at least one family that specifically dropped us because they didn't feel comfortable hanging out with "people like Joe". That really hurt. In the end, it was just Joe and Marilyn and I and the four boys. We kept it going right up to the point where we moved to Michigan.

And even after that, Joe kept in touch. He called just about every week for the next 20 years. Sometimes he was in a bad mood, complaining about something that had gone wrong or some financial stress he was undergoing, especially when either he or Marilyn came down sick. Since she was diabetic and he was epileptic and suffering from Crohn's Disease, that happened quite often. But they never let little things like that (!) get in their way. They continued to enjoy being with family and go on camping trips and help their family any way they could. And call us up often to share their lives with us.

Joe also called up when good things would happen, like when they'd get a new (used) car or move to a new place or when there was a new addition to the family. And most especially when they decided to become Christians after finding a church in the Granite Falls area.

Since they were both living on Social Security, they never had much money; but they managed to create a nice life together. No matter what kind of hardships came their way, they went through it together. And they shared all those things, good and bad, with us.

We were able to visit them a few times on the occasion we'd come out to visit our relatives in Washington. Back when they were living in Marysville, we took the family out for a nice buffet dinner. When they were living in Granite Falls, they hosted us at their place for a wonderful barbecued-chicken dinner. And when they were living out in Eastern Washington near Spokane, we took them out for dinner again. We had fun trading back and forth.

And then just a couple years ago, Marilyn got really sick, so sick that they had to move back to Western Washington to be near family. And so it was that just after Deb's wedding, I flew out to say good-bye to her at their home about four hours before she died.

For the next couple years, Joe continued to call me diligently, sometimes once a week, sometimes multiple times. He often cried as he told me how much he missed Marilyn -- but he believed that he would be seeing her again. Given the cancers that started ravaging his body, including lungs, liver and brain, he knew it wouldn't be long (but he sure put up a good fight!). And he started calling me every other day, right up to the time when his cancer took away his ability to speak.

He died February 10th. I didn't get a chance to talk to him before he died. And I didn't get a chance to see him at all. But as a good friend reminded me, he knew I was coming. He knew.

And although I am sad that he is no longer with us, I am happy that he is now at peace.

Visitation

The attendance at the little church on the highway was nearly doubled this morning owing to the great number of family and friends who had come to pay their respects to my mother, not only for her life-long faith in God but also for her devotion and loyalty to my father whom she had followed all over the United States as he performed the job for which he felt called.

It was one of those beautiful Texas winter mornings where the sky is blue and the sun is shining and the air is comfortably cool enough to warrant light jackets. As is our custom, Dad and I opened the building and turned on the lights and the heat and greeted folks as they arrived. The regulars came in and shook our hands and extended their condolences and then stood around to meet the friends and family and make them feel at home. Normally there are around 30 regular attendees; today there were well over 70.

Normally I would be leading the singing for both the Bible Class and the Worship service but today as one of the grieving family I was allowed to just sit in the pew with the rest and practice my harmonies. The Hopkins boys took on the song-leading responsibilities, and there was a guest preacher (Charles) so Dad could relax for the morning (although he would have been happy to do the lessons himself).

Charles taught the Bible Class and then did the sermon as well. My brain was far too foggy to remember what was said. I'm sure he understood our preoccupation.

As soon as the service was over, the family headed back to the ranch to eat a quick lunch as we were expected to be over at the funeral home prior to two o'clock for the Visitation. We ate quickly and spent a little while chatting; Dad went over earlier than the rest. Cheryl and I followed soon after.

The funeral home was laid out into four basic rooms: a conference room up front, a large gathering room in the middle, the viewing room with the casket to the left of the gathering room, and a smaller overflow room to the right. Most everyone milled around in the gathering room or walked reverently past Mom's casket, with the right-side room being used mainly by those who had brought small children. The video presentation of Mom's life was playing in the conference room and in the back of the gathering room.

We hung out for nearly the entire two hours, from 2 til 4 pm. There were lots of family and friends we hadn't seen in quite a while. We heard lots of stories about Mom and what a wonderful person she'd been, as friend, sister, cousin, mother, grandmother. It would have been nice to record them all -- but that would've been a bit unwieldy to arrange. It was sufficient to wander around the room and catch stories here and there, little bits of conversation that were passing around the room like loose balloons in the wind.

It was odd seeing Mom in her casket all done up like she was sleeping. Of course she doesn't really look like she's just sleeping; no one ever does. There's always some level of lifelessness to the bodies on display in caskets even if the makeup is perfect. There's a level of unreal stillness to a body that can't be faked by the living; or perhaps it could be said that there's an realism in the subtle motion of a living body that can't be duplicated by a corpse. Her hands in particular looked far too flat and still to be living. That helped to reduce the disquiet of being around the shell of what had once been my mother. It was obvious that she wasn't there anymore. She was gone; whatever soul/spirit had once inhabited that body was long gone. I don't like open casket visitations or funeral services as a rule. I don't need to see the body to know that it is no longer in use. I'd rather remember them as they were in life: vibrant, colorful, exuberant, in motion. I'd rather just look at portraits taken in their prime. Better yet, a sequence of portraits showing them from youth to middle age. We can skip the older, decrepit years. Those are just depressing.

After it was all done and they were ready to usher us out, we went back to the ranch to get some dinner. Dad and Mike Hardaway and I went to Dad's office and worked on the Order of Service for the funeral. I wasn't particularly hungry so took a walk around the property to do some thinking and then went inside to take a nap and try to remove the fuzz from my brain.

It almost worked.

Mom

Mom died early on a Monday morning with the blue sky outside her window and a little blue jay-bird pecking at the feeder. Jeanne was holding her hand as she took her last breath.

The last few days had been difficult as we struggled to deal with her pain and anxiety. 

When we first got here, she was surprisingly cognizant of the world around her, far more than we had been led to believe. It's difficult to adequately convey the mindset of an ailing person when you've been dealing with them day after day through a spectrum of ups and downs, highs and lows; you tend to focus on the frustrating moments, the failure moments, the blank-brain episodes when they can't quite remember the words or they can't understand yours; and then you amplify your them in importance as the despair envelops you and you need to make others understand the depth of your feeling. But there were moments when the clouds cleared and normality returned and it was as though there was nothing wrong in the whole world other than the fact that she was still dressed in her nightgown in the middle of the afternoon.

Jeanne and Jan and Dad had been dealing with it for weeks by the time we arrived. In that time, she had lost a lot of ground. Her mobility was nearly gone; she could not walk; she could not stand by herself; her only mode of transport between the bedroom and the bathroom and the dinner table and the back room was the wheelchair. While we were there, she became even more constrained and was confined to her bed. The hospice nurses were now coming every day. In the last couple of days, the hospice nurses were coming every day, and we were administering medications every hour. We were not getting a great deal of sleep. Dad was on the trundle bed in her room; Jeanne and her dog Wendy were in the room across the hall; Cheryl and I were upstairs in Dad's room. Sleep was difficult if not impossible. I lay on the bed with my face glued to the monitor which displayed the night-vision image of my mother as she lay dying, jumping to my feet whenever it appeared that Mom was restless and needing assistance. But my help was superfluous: Dad and Jeanne were right there on the spot and dealing with it. 

We tracked her transitions through the phases of death. Saturday morning was the last time I was able to talk to her with any kind of response. By Saturday afternoon, she had moved onto the self-focused phase where she was unable to communicate in any real sense. Her eyes were mostly closed and she breathed in rasping, rattling sounds which continued all night long. Her medication doses were increased to reduce the apparent pain and discomfort she was experiencing, and she slept more peacefully throughout Sunday, although her breathing was still loud due to some kind of aspiration.

Monday morning around 8 am, we administered a scheduled dose of pain and anxiety medications and then turned her over so that she could breathe more easily. Dad went upstairs to get a shower. Jeanne held her hand. I went into the kitchen to get a drink. And then Jeanne called out that Mom had stopped breathing.

And she had.

Front-Loader Issues

Several years ago we transitioned from the old-fashioned top-loader washing machine to the modern, fancy-dancy front-loader. Everyone said it was much better than the old ones: more convenient, more efficient, more durable, better for the environment, etc..

It does have a few little quirks, though. For instance, they recommend that you leave the front loading door open when not in use.

We didn't discover the reason for this recommendation until we discovered, much to our horror, that the front-loading door seal/gasket/thingie on our w    asher had turned into a mildew factory. And we didn't make this discovery via our eyes, but rather with our noses. The entire laundry room started to smell really bad. It wasn't hard to pinpoint the source of the smell, either. Just open the washing machine door and take a good, long whiff. Eww!

So we ordered a new seal for the machine and I pulled the old one out and installed the new one over the course of a couple days. Due to the extremely strong wire-and-spring mechanism used to ensure a good seal, it took me several hours of pain and torture -- and the purchase of a special spring-stretching tool online -- to install it.

I'm lucky to have all my fingers after that little jaunt into the world of appliance repair.

But this wasn't the only anomaly which presented itself with this particular design. At some time after we'd been using it for awhile, water started leaking out the front of the unit -- just under the dispenser drawer -- and onto the floor (which is just above the basement bedroom). We called the Help line for LG and were able to speak with a few different people (in some far-off land where English is not the primary language, e.g. India, Philippines, etc.) who assured us that it was due to the fact that we were not using the correct detergent; we were supposed to be using the liquid concentrate instead of the powder. That sounded completely ludicrous to me, so instead of taking their idiotic advice, I tore the washer apart and discovered that there was no one-way flapper valve to prevent the water from back-flowing into the dispenser once the fill/rinse cycle began, so every time the basket started to turn, it would fling water back through the dispenser mechanism and out onto the floor. Genius!

The little computer within the washing machine (everything has to have a computer inside these days) precisely calculates the amount of water to use for the rinse/wash cycles by 'weighing' the clothes and determining how much water is needed to ensure every nook and cranny of the clothing is filled with cleansing suds. But if the clothes are already wet, as sometimes occurs when those 'clothes' happen to be wet towels which have been used to mop up the occasional spill, the little computer will over-estimate the amount of water needed because it doesn't realize that the fabric is already completely saturated. The result is an overfill; too much water in the basket for the amount of fabric to be washed. Thus when the basket begins to roll to and fro, the excess water will back-flow up through the basket inflow hose. And since there is no backflow valve, that water rushes back up the hose and into the dispenser and then out onto the floor.

So we have to be careful about the types of things we put in the wash. Pre-saturated items must be thoroughly wrung out first.

(Also, we had to buy a shallow pan to put underneath the washing machine just in case it leaks for any other reason, it doesn't end up flooding the basement!)

As if that weren't enough, lately it began leaking from the bottom of the door. Not a lot, and only during specific cycles (i.e. Delicates) which was very confusing. It took us a few observations to discover that the water splashing up onto the front glass during those cycles was then coming down through a vent hole in the outer door seal -- a hole which is not a tear or rip in the seal but one which is apparently designed to be there! -- and then into the shallow pan.

But why now? Why after all this time? Another mystery to ponder.

My only recourse at this point, I suppose, is to order new inner and outer seals and replace both of them, and then see what happens. Of course, they aren't cheap. The inner seal is somewhere in the neighborhood of $90. I haven't priced the outer seal yet.

I'm beginning to miss the old top-loader.

Things To Do : 2024 Version

The end of 2023 caught me by surprise because there are still so many things that need to get fixed before the New Year.

But it's too late now! The New Year is upon us, and the things that didn't get fixed last year have been dragged kicking and screaming into this one.

House

I've got my office set up in the front room now -- probably the most usage this room has had in the nearly twenty years we've been living here -- but it's a disorganized mess and needs to be organized before my next job begins.

The basement is currently occupied by our tenant but needs to be finished, since there are still ceiling panels and baseboards missing. And the library room is only used for storage right now since there isn't room in the house for all my electronics and some leftover items from the Swiders.

It's too late now to find out where the wasps made their nest, but I still need to figure out how they got in the house into the little bedroom down there. I'm afraid they built it somewhere inside the walls. If I don't locate it, remove it and destroy the hibernating queen, it's going to be worse next spring. 

The back deck still has planters (with plants) on it, along with the outdoor table we purchased last spring. I was able to hide all the chairs up in the loft, but the whole deck needs to be cleared off before the snow falls -- because the snow generally remains on the deck all winter.

Garage

The 3rd bay of the garage is a cluttered mess. It is full of junk that needs to be sorted and put in the (1) attic or (2) loft or (3) trash. It always takes me way too long to decide in which category they go.

The 2nd bay of the garage containing my worktables is a cluttered, filthy mess. I need to toss the garbage, clean the work surfaces, and put away my tools.

The 1st bay of the garage has overflowing shelves and overflowing junk on the floor (e.g. unused flooring from the basement that we're keeping in case we need to perform repairs). It all needs to be organized.

The (dead) 2013 Elantra is still sitting askew in my driveway. The third bay of the garage, which was supposed to be its winter parking spot, is jammed full of other things that need to be placed elsewhere.

The 2001 Corolla has a weird headlight wiring issue which must be resolved before Adam can safely drive it to his second-shift job.

The 2000 Camry is still sitting in the storage unit waiting for my attention. One of the wheels has gone flat and I need to check the battery charge.

The new-to-us 2011 Camry has a non-functional heater which is a no-go for Michigan winters. I'm hoping it's a simple case of needing a radiator/heater core flush. Or maybe a bad thermostat.

Mary is still trying to find a car of her own. She got a pre-approval letter from the bank and is just itching to get into a loan situation so she can be like the rest of us debt-ridden citizens.

The 2010 Rav, while now possessing a functional parking brake system for both sides, needs to have the passenger-side cable replaced as it has been stretched too much and it doesn't match the length of the driver-side one. This causes a noticeable 'jump' point in the parking brake operation when one side has gone taut and the other side still has a ways to go.

The Yard

I probably shouldn't even mention the yard since it is winter and we can't do anything with it, but I'm still (kind of) using the compost pile to put our 'used' veggies in, so that needs to be raked over and prepped for winter. It would be nice to have a cover over it to retain some heat in order to keep the fermentation/breakdown of vegetable matter going.