Friday, August 31, 2007

Another Death in the Family

We just received word that Grace's father, my father-in law, died today at about 6:10 p.m. He died just 13 days after my mother.

This means that this month we lost both my mother and my wife's father. Our children just lost two of their four grandparents in a span of just under two weeks. Isaac, at 13, was old enough to get to know them a little bit, but Veronica and Sam, at 2 years 10 months and 10 months, respectively, will never really get to know them.

It's been a hell of a month. Since bad things usually come in threes, it makes me wonder what we're facing next! Maybe it's my turn?


Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Dear Netflix Comma

Hello,

I am writing to report a database/labeling issue which may be also causing a problem with discs being filed in the wrong envelopes.

I have been repeatedly trying to get the correct discs that are part of the collection "Doctor Who: The Beginning collection," especially the second disc, "The Daleks." I have reported them as mis-filed several times, and gotten the wrong disc several times. I finally bought my own copy of the boxed set. I think the issue is in part in the database description. The title lines are so long that the information on which disc it is is not included on the white envelope until the bottom of the description.

"Doctor Who: The Beginning Collection" is a boxed set containing two plastic cases. As packaged in "The Beginning Collection," it is a 3-disc set in two plastic boxes. However, "The Unearthly Child" seems to have been also made available as a separate product (you can order it from Amazon) and it appears that The Daleks/The Edge of Destruction was also intended to be available as a separate product, although it is not currently available from Amazon. The two boxes that are packaged together in the set are labeled as follows:

Box 1:

"Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child (The William Hartnell Years 1963-1966)" (this is a box with one disc labeled the same as the box, and so there is no confusion in the labeling on the disc)

Box 2:

"Doctor Who: The Dalex/The Edge of Destruction (The William Hartnell Years 1963-1966" (this is a box with two discs; one says "The Daleks: Disc 1 of 2" and the other says "The Edge of Destruction: Disc 2 of 2").

I would recommend changing the titles of all three of these discs in your database as follows, to better reflect the packaging:

Disc 1:

"Doctor Who: The Beginning Collection: An Unearthly Child (Disc 1 of 3) (The William Hartnell Years 1963-1966)"

Disc 2:

"Doctor Who: The Beginning Collection: The Daleks (Disc 2 of 3) (The William Hartnell Years 1963-1966)"

Maybe the description of the disc should include a note that says "NOTE: this disc is labeled "Disc 1 of 2" even though in the "Doctor Who: The Beginning" collection it is the second of a three-disc set."

Disc 3:

"Doctor Who: The Beginning Collection: The Edge of Destruction (Disc 3 of 3) (The William Hartnell Years 1963-1966)"

Maybe the description of the disc should include a note that says "NOTE: this disc is labeled "Disc 2 of 2" even though in the "Doctor Who: The Beginning" collection it is the third of a three-disc set.

I would also see if you can get the word out to your distribution centers to check that the discs from the set are in their proper sleeves, since several times I have failed to receive the right disc and I'm sure this will affect other people.

Sorry this is so confusing and I hope this explanation is helpful. I tried to explain this to your phone representative but he suggested that I write it out instead, and gave me a partial credit for my trouble, which I did not ask for but which I appreciate.

Yours Truly,

Paul R. Potts

Monday, August 27, 2007

Raining and Pouring

We had another whirlwind out-of-town weekend for my mother's funeral in North East, PA. I read the shortened eulogy and the attendance was very good. I will update the eulogy text to reflect my final edits. It was also my aunt's birthday on Saturday, and since she, my uncle, and my cousins were all in town for the funeral, we managed to have a little bit of fun amid the sadness.

On our way home, though, before we even made it back into Ann Arbor, we had received word that Grace's father is very ill and in the hospital in Saginaw. So we took just enough time to cook dinner and do some urgent cleaning, and then late in the evening Grace and Isaac headed up to Saginaw to visit him, leaving me to tend to the babies at home. Grace got back about 2:30 in the morning. She is moving directly on to the next crisis without an opportunity to catch her breath. She is going to take the kids up to Saginaw for a couple of days while I try to focus on work. Between my mother's illness and all the travel to Pittsburgh and Erie and then the funeral a week later, I have used up all my available time off from work, and then some (over the last few weeks, I missed nine days in total).

This has been a rough year: since last October, anniversary of my hire date, I took time off for the birth of baby Sam, then time off because of my shingles infection, and then time off for my mother's critical illness, death, and funeral. As far as my sanity and health are concered, though, this does not add up to the restorative powers of an actual vacation, even one taken at home. I am tired, mentally and physically; I'm feeling burned out; and I'd be grieving, too, if I had time to let everything catch up to me. I'm just hoping that when my time off renews again in October that we can plan a real, restorative vacation for the family.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Blocked!

So, while staying in Erie, PA for my mother's funeral I found out that my family web site, http://thepottshouse.org/, is apparently blocked by Websense Enterprise as "Adult Content."

The site contains photo galleries of my family, my old blog, links to my new blogs, e-mail links, and links to our password-protected Wiki. None of these things should be considered "adult" in the sense meant by web censors, unless my years-old opinions about the war in Iraq are inappropriate for children. The blogs themselves (on Blogger) don't seem to be blocked by Websense.

Should I take this as a compliment?

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Eulogy (Shorter)

Thanks to Grace for her assistance with editing. This is a shorter version of the eulogy that reflects more closely what I read at the funeral.

It seems like I've been up here a lot recently. Just under five years ago [in September, 2002], I read some verses from Corinthians for my mother's wedding to Dick Zahner. Then not even two years ago [in March of 2006], I read a eulogy for my grandmother's funeral. Now I'm back to read a eulogy for my mother. This all has happened very quickly. You may be wondering just what happened. I'm still trying to figure it all out. So, I wrote this letter to my mother and I wanted to share it with you.

Dear Mom,

In the past few years, whenever something happened in my life, good or bad, I always got the urge to call you and bring you up-to-date, reassure you, and get your reassurance and advice. For the past few weeks, I've had that urge to call you constantly, because a lot of big changes have been happening. Now I can't call you, but I can still write you a letter. I can't mail it to you, but here is what it says.

The big news is that you have died. This was quite a shock to everyone. It happened very quickly. You had a lot of things going on -- oxygen masks, IVs, all kinds of doctors and nurses, and lots of family members with worried expressions. It must have been very confusing, especially at the end, so I thought I would explain to you what happened.

About three weeks ago, after a short trip to Chataqua, New York, you were exercising with your friends at the YMCA. Things didn't feel right, though; you complained about a feeling of bloating and pain in your abdomen. You said that you must have eaten something that didn't agree with you. You were only a few days away from your regular follow-up visit with your doctor. But when you called and told him about the problem, he suggested you go to the Emergency Room immediately.

From that point everything started moving with frightening speed. You had a CAT scan, and it showed tumors in your abdomen. It isn't exactly clear whether these were caused by cancer cells from the breast cancer or whether it was new ovarian cancer. It doesn't really matter much at this point. It would be easy to get very angry at your doctors and blame them for not spotting it earlier. However, this kind of cancer often has no detectable symptoms at all until it is very advanced. And I remind myself that the treatment you got two years ago restored your health and gave you two good and enjoyable years that you would not have had otherwise.

Next you went down to the Magee-Womens hospital in Pittsburgh for some tests. The plan was to find out what was going on and decide how to treat it. But your pain got rapidly worse. They admitted you. I spoke to you on the phone a couple of times; I was making plans to come on the weekend with my family, and trying to arrange with my father and brother to do the same thing. But then we got word that you had been moved to the intensive care unit, so we moved everything into high gear. We arrived in Pittsburgh the evening of Thursday the 9th of August, and came to visit in the middle of the night.

In the ICU, you were not doing well. You had your eyes tightly closed. It was a frightening environment. It took a while for us to find out exactly what had happened. You had a a partially collapsed lung, and fluid building up. It was hard for you to breathe. You had pneumonia in one lung. You also had some sort of kidney infection. But with tubes and antibiotics and a lot of moral support over the next day or so you improved. You were able to sit and talk with us. We talked about how you were doing. We told you about our families and how well everyone was doing. We talked about dying and what we thought it might be like, and what you believed and we believed would happen to you after you died. We told you we loved you.

You were moved back into a regular hospital room. Over the next couple of days you had a lot of visitors -- your husband Dick, your step-daughter Carolyn, my father Richard, my brother Brian, your niece Linda, and Grace and the kids. We arranged for people to stay with you around the clock. We read to you, talked to you, or just held your hand. Often one or two of us would be in your room and another one of us would be asleep in the waiting room next door. For a few days your condition went back and forth: you'd improve a little bit; but you'd get worse in the middle of the night. The tests the doctors had planned to give you were postponed again and again.

At one point the doctors considered putting you back into the ICU, but you didn't want to go back there. What you wanted was to leave the hospital and go up to a nursing home in Erie, so that you could die in a more comfortable place, surrounded by friends.

This brings me to the point of talking about your wishes. You made clear both in your written directives, and verbally, that if there was no chance of recovery, you did not want invasive procedures or extreme measures. It is one thing to check some boxes on a form, but I think it is quite another thing to realize that it is time for these directives to be carried out. I was, in fact, awed by your bravery.

So, we next focused all our attention on trying to get you moved to Erie. My biggest fear was that you would die before we could get you there. But on the morning of Tuesday, August 14th, the ambulance crew came and took you to Erie. I rode in the front of the ambulance with the driver while you were in the back with the nurse. For me it was the longest chunk of uninterrupted quiet time I had gotten since leaving for Pittsburgh, and I finally broke down crying for a while.

Once at Manchester Lodge, all of your IVs and needles were removed. You no longer had the heavy, uncomfortable oxygen mask. Instead you just had a simple tube in your nose. You were able to visit with family and friends. We got round-the-clock visitation going again -- which was easy, since so many were so eager to come and support you. Carolyn came back and brought Alicia. You had live music and grandchildren. You had a couple of good days.

You gradually became weaker. Your heart rate went up and your blood pressure went down. You began to accumulate more fluid in your lungs. We carefully monitored your medication so that there was no possibility you would be in any pain. The decision was made that you could not receive anything more by mouth to eat or drink. On Saturday evening, at about 6:30
p.m., you died. It was as peaceful and graceful a death as we could make it.

I just want to say a couple more things.

First, the way you faced your death was an inspiration to me and to everyone around you.

Second, while you had your share of doctors with poor bedside manner and nurses who treated you like an annoyance, there were also quite a few people who were very kind to you. The hospice nurse who was with you on your last day was wonderful. The palliative care physicians in Pittsburgh were wonderful. They spoke very calmly to you and asked you if you had any unfinished business. You said that you wanted everyone to know that you loved them.

Finally, I just want to thank you. You were a single mother in a difficult time. You had a hard and complicated life. You raised me and my brother. You did a great job. You re-married and brought new fathers into our lives. You cared for my stepfather Wence, and you cared for your mother, and you cared for your husband Dick. You enriched the lives of everyone around you. You had a lot of friends and you were well-loved, and you still are.

We'll go on. We'll miss you terribly. I wish you had gotten more time to enjoy your grandchildren. I wish we had gotten more time to spend with you. You said that you were concerned about the state of the world. The world will go on. It will be OK. We'll be OK. And we know that you are OK now too.

I'll see you again, before too long. And I'll be in touch.

Love,

Paul

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Sam is Walking

While baby Sam has been "cruising" (walking a few steps while holding on to furniture), it was just this past couple of weeks, while we were splitting our time between hotels and hospitals, that he began to walk more than a few steps. He's still a little unsteady, but showing great progress. He's just a week past ten months old.

By comparison, Veronica was running (she never did crawl, and never did walk very much) at eight months. But while both are cute, Sam has a friendlier disposition.

I have a big backlog of photos to process, and they're all far too cute.

Eulogy for My Mother

Dear Mom,

In the past few years, whenever something happened in my life, good or bad, I always got the urge to call you and bring you up-to-date, reassure you, and get your reassurance and advice. For the past few weeks, I've had that urge to call you constantly, because a lot of big changes have been happening. Now I can't call you, but I can still write you a letter. I can't mail it to you, but here is what it says.

The big news is that you have died. This was quite a shock to everyone. It happened very fast. You had a lot of things going on -- oxygen masks, IVs, tests, pain medication, sedatives, all kinds of doctors and nurses, and lots of family members with worried expressions on their faces. It must have been very confusing, especially in the last few days, so I thought I would explain to you what happened in case you were confused.

About two years ago you were treated for breast cancer with a combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. I know that was very hard on you, but the treatment seemed to be quite successful. You recovered some energy and were able to spend quite a bit of time in the last two years traveling with your husband. You were getting regular follow-up care to make sure the cancer did not come back.

About three weeks ago, after a short trip to Chataqua, New York, you were exercising with your friends at the YMCA. Things didn't feel right, though; you had been complaining about a feeling of bloating and pain in your abdomen. You said that you must have eaten something that didn't agree with you. You were only a few days away from your regular follow-up visit with your doctor. But when you called and told him about the problem, he suggested you go to the Emergency Room immediately.

From that point everything started moving with frightening speed. You had a CAT scan, and it showed tumors in your abdomen. It isn't exactly clear whether these might have been caused by cancer cells from the breast cancer or whether it was another, separate case of ovarian cancer. It doesn't really matter much at this point.

It would be easy to get very angry at your doctors and blame them. I find it a bit hard to believe that oncologists screening someone regularly for cancer would fail to detect such an advanced case of cancer. It isn't like you came down with a rare tropical disease that was outside their specialty. If anything I would have expected them to suspect cancer and do extra tests to rule it out even when it wasn't there. However, it is important to note that this kind of cancer, in the abdominal cavity, often has no detectable symptoms at all until it is very advanced. And I remind myself that the treatment you got two years ago did restore your health and give you two good and enjoyable years you would not have had otherwise.

Anyway, the next thing was that you went down to the Magee-Womens hospital in Pittsburgh for some tests. The plan then was to find out what was going on and make a treatment plan. But your pain got rapidly worse. You were admitted. I spoke to you on the phone each day for a couple of days. I was making plans to come and trying to arrange with my father and brother to come too. We got the word that you had been moved to the intensive care unit, and so everything went into high gear. We moved up our visit. My brother and my father arranged to fly out. We all got into Pittsburgh the evening of Thursday the 9th of August, just after a series of severe storms had produced tornadoes and flooding. When my father and brother got in by plane around midnight they immediately went to the hospital. Grace and the children and I all came to visit too, in the middle of the night.

You were miserable and frightened in the ICU. You were curled up on your side, wearing an oxygen mask, with your eyes tightly closed. You were able to talk, but mostly we just wanted to hold your hand. It took a while for us to figure out exactly what was going on. You had a a partially collapsed lung, and fluid building up around your lung. It was hard for you to breathe. You had pneumonia in one lung. You also had some sort of kidney infection. But with tubes and antibiotics and a lot of moral support over the next day or so you improved. You got your eyes opened and we were able to sit and talk with you. We talked about how you were doing, what we knew and didn't know about your condition. We told you about our families and how well everyone was doing. We talked about dying and what we thought it might be like, and what you believed and we believed would happen to you after you died. We told you we loved you.

You were moved back into a regular hospital room. This was still not a very comfortable environment but it was a far less frightening place than the ICU. Over the next couple of days you had a lot of visitors -- your husband Dick, your daughter-in-law Carolyn, my father Richard, my brother, your niece Linda, your nephew David, and Grace and the kids. We arranged for people to stay with you round-the-clock. Often one of us would be with you in your room while another one of us caught a quick nap in the waiting room next door.

One night while my brother was sitting with you during the middle of the night you began fighting to get out of bed. My brother tried to use the call button to get help but it didn't work. He had to run out into the hall and yell for help. You managed to get partly out of bed and it is a miracle you didn't tear out an IV. But you had a breathing crisis and you had to go back onto the high-pressure oxygen mask. You hated that mask because it was painful; it rubbed your face raw and dried out your lips and mouth terribly. For a few days it went back and forth like that. You'd improve a little bit; you got a transfusion and some new drugs and that seemed to help. But you'd get worse in the middle of the night.

The CAT scan and biopsy was postponed again and again. The doctors found that you had blood clots in your leg and also that something had gone wrong with your heart. It was very weak and it appears that you may have had a heart attack, or maybe it was damage from your previous chemotherapy, or maybe both. They put you on heparin to thin your blood. They decided they could not do a biopsy. At one point the doctors were considering putting you back into the ICU but you did not want to go back. What you wanted was to leave the hospital, and to go up to a nursing home in Erie so that you could die in comfortable surroundings.

This brings me to the point of talking about your wishes. You made clear both in your written directives that if there was no chance of recovery, you did not want invasive procedures or extreme measures taken that would just serve to prolong your life. You told these things to the doctors as well -- no tubes for breathing or feeding, and no zapping your heart with electricity if it stopped. It is one thing to check some boxes on a form, but I think it is quite another thing to realize that it is time for these directives to be carried out. I was, in fact, awed by your bravery in sticking to your principles.

So, we next focused all our attention on trying to get you moved to Erie. I have to confess that I was terrified that you would die before we could carry out your wishes. But there was only one day's delay, and on the morning of Tuesday, August 14th, the ambulance crew came to take you to Erie. I rode in the front of the ambulance with the driver while you were in the back with the nurse. For me it was the longest chunk of uninterrupted quiet time I had gotten since leaving for Pittsburgh and I finally broke down crying for a while.

I thought that the stress on the family was going to let up and that you would be in good care. But apparently hospice care in Michigan and Nevada and California is much different than the hospice care arrangement we had in Erie. They got you settled comfortably into a room at the Manchester Presbyterian Lodge. The social worker and hospice nurses and nursing home administrator and head nurse greeted us. But things did not go quite like we planned.

All of your IVs and needles and big heavy oxygen masks were removed. Instead you just had a simple cannula in your nose for oxygen. Your pain medication was changed to liquid morphine by mouth. But after 24 hours it became clear that things weren't quite right. You went from being able to communicate to sleeping around the clock. You were over-medicated. It also became clear that without some orders from the doctor, guidance from the hospice organization, or specific requests from family, the nursing staff at the home was not going to give you special care. For example, they still had you on a regular diet. They would plunk down a meatball sub on your table and take it away an hour later. Because you were so heavily drugged they would not even try to get fluids into you. You asked for pen and paper to write some notes but you were so sedated that we could only read a few words of what you wrote. You wanted to communicate but you couldn't. The system was failing you again.

So once again the family went into high gear. We started a round-the-clock visiting schedule with you. We had to feed you because the nurses were not trying hard enough. We got your diet changed to food that you were better able to eat. We started trying to get your doctor to change your prescription, but we were unable to get the doctor out to examine you in person and change your orders until the evening of your third day there. Your condition was changing for the worse so rapidly that we found this completely unacceptable. I began refusing part of your medication on your behalf.

This was probably the most nerve-wracking experience of my life, because above all I did not want you to be in any pain, but I thought that you deserved to share your last days with your family and friends. I think it was the right decision, though. You became alert again, while reporting that you were not in any pain. You were able to visit with family and friends. We got round-the-clock visitation going again. Carolyn came back, and brought her daughter Alicia. You had live music. You had grandchildren visit. You had a couple of good days.

We still felt like we had to watch over everything. Even after your doctor came back and changed your medication orders, although my father followed him down to the nurses station to see what he wrote, what he wrote was incorrect. I felt like we were having to act as doctor and nurse and social worker ourselves, all the time. Between the lack of sleep and the nervousness, I completely exhausted myself, to the point where I could not walk and began having hallucinations from lack of sleep. The rest of us were also exhausted. I developed an ulcer. But it was a small price to pay and it has already healed.

You gradually became weaker. Your heart rate went up and your blood pressure went down. You began to accumulate more fluids in your lungs. We got your medication raised again so that there was no possibility you would be in any pain. The decision was made that you could not receive anything more by mouth to eat or drink. On Saturday evening at about 6:30 p.m. you died. It was as peaceful and graceful a death as we could make it.

I just want to say a couple more things.

First, that the way you faced your death was an inspiration to me and to everyone around you.

Second, when my father and I were visiting you in the ICU, you said that you were very proud that you had always had the ability to forgive everyone who had harmed you. I would like to ask you one last favor. I want you to forgive the doctor in Erie who displayed such indifference to your condition. I want you to forgive the other doctors that failed to detect your cancer. I even want you to forgive the doctor in Pittsburgh who had such terrible bedside manner that he burst into your hospital room, explained loudly that your heart was failing and that there was nothing more they could do, and left. I will forgive all these people. It might take me a while longer, though. I'm not quite as good at is as you are.

Third, I'd like you to remember that we had our share of doctors with poor bedside manner and nurses who treated you like an annoyance, there were also quite a few people who were very kind to you. The hospice nurse who was with you on your last day was wonderful. The palliative care physicians in Pittsburgh were wonderful. They spoke very calmly to you and asked you if you had any unfinished business. You said that you wanted everyone to know that you loved them.

And last, I just want to thank you. You were a single mother in a difficult time. You had a hard and complicated life. You raised me and my brother. You did a great job. You re-married and brought new fathers into our lives. You cared for my stepfather Wence, and you cared for your mother, and you cared for your husband Dick. You enriched the lives of everyone around you. You had a lot of friends and you were well-loved, and you still are.

We'll go on. We'll miss you terribly. I wish you had gotten more time to enjoy your grandchildren. I wish we had gotten more time to spend with you. You said that you were concerned about the state of the world. The world will go on. It will be OK. We'll be OK. And we know that you are OK now too.

I'll see you again, before too long. And I'll be in touch.

Love,

Paul

Monday, August 20, 2007

My Mother Died

My mother died on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at 6:30 p.m.

She was in a combination of nursing and hospice care in Erie after a hospital stay in Pittsburgh where she was in and out of the ICU.

It all went very fast; in the first week in August she was away on vacation, and then when she got back she exercised at the YMCA with her friends, but complained that she must have eaten something that disagreed with her. She actually had metastatic cancer in her abdomen invading several organs and causing all kinds of damage. It is approximately two years since she was treated (apparently successfully) for breast cancer. The new cancer (which might have started as ovarian cancer, or perhaps was metastatic cancer from her breast cancer) was not treatable surgically.

Somewhere along the way her heart was also damaged, perhaps some by her earlier chemotherapy and/or radiation, and perhaps by a heart attack caused by a blood clot during her hospitalization. Fluid was accumulating around her kidneys and around her lungs. She developed a pneumothorax and pneumonia as well as a kidney infection. These things were successfully treated and she was removed from intensive care, but suffered further setbacks, and after the damage to her heart was discovered, it became clear that the cancer couldn't be treated, not even via palliative chemotherapy. According to her advanced directives and her verbal instructions she did not want aggressive and invasive treatments any longer. The remaining scheduled tests were canceled, and she was moved by ambulance to Manchester Presbyterian Lodge in Erie. I rode with her. The high-pressure oxygen face mask and multiple IVs were removed and she had only a nasal cannula for supplemental oxygen. Most of her medications were discontinued except for liquid morphine (Roxinol) and a drug for anxiety (Ativan). When she was no longer alert enough to swallow safely, on her last day or so of life, even food and drink were discontinued.

She was with family during her last days. My family and I traveled to Pittsburgh and then to Erie to support her. She had regular visits from my wife Grace and her grandchildren Isaac, Veronica, and Sam. Many other people shared this experience with her as well: she received comfort, advocacy on her behalf, and round-the-clock company from her husband Richard, her ex-husband (my father, also named Richard), her niece and nephew, her daughter-in-law Carolyn, her grandaughter-in-law Alicia, my brother Brian, and also from a number of her friends. The end was pretty much as peaceful and loving as these things can be. She received enough medication to keep her free from pain and needless anxiety while still allowing her to communicate as much as possible.

While she felt that she was too young to die like this, and would have preferred to live longer, my mother knew just what was happening to her and she was conscious and as awake as possible through most of her last days. We had the opportunity to hold some final, very emotional conversations with her, to tell her how much we loved and appreciated her, and to discuss the dying process, what she expected to experience after death, and her hopes and fears and concerns. We told her that we were all doing well with our own families and she had helped us get to that point but that there was nothing more that we needed from her and she should not worry about us. She was looking forward to reuniting with God and she died with no unfinished business or grudges. In particular she was very proud of her ability to forgive everyone for every hurt, intentional or unintentional. She told us all that she loved us and we told her about our love for her. It was a beautiful and graceful death and I hope that I will be able to live up to her example myself when the time comes for my own death.

The funeral will be held this coming Friday, August 25, 2007 at 3:00 p.m. in the First Presbyterian Church of North East, PA. Her body will be set up for viewing before the funeral service. Anyone who will be unable to attend the funeral but who wants to have something read aloud can contact my mother's pastor at (814) 725-8641.

I will write some more on this topic in the weeks ahead and my eulogy will be posted here.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Reading, Watching, Thinking August 2007

It has been a while since my last blog entry. Life gets busy.

Isaac and I have been watching Doctor Who. To kick it off, we watched disc 1 of season 1 of the new series that started in 2005. I was favorably impressed -- while it still has that cheese factor and silly monsters that make the show what it is, the new series seems to have considerably higher production values. I like Christopher Eccleston as the ninth doctor. Billie Piper does a very credible job as his companion Rose Tyler, at least in the episodes we've seen so far. Apparently, Eccleston only lasted for one season, though, and they are now on doctor number ten. David Tenant has completed two seasons and is apparently signed on for 2008. According to the show mythology, the Doctor only gets twelve regenerations, and so the thirteenth doctor seems destined to be the last. It will be interesting to see what happens if the show gets to that point and the show's writers have to figure out what to do next. Maybe there is another Time Lord surviving somewhere in space and time? And, of course, there can be any number of spinoff stories.

To try to give Isaac a sense of what Doctor Who is all about, I also interleaved a series of old Doctor Who episodes in the queue. So immediately after the 2005 series we were watching the very first episodes with William Hartnell.

I was expecting the original episodes to be unbearably cheesy, looking more like a school play than a real television production, with horrendous audio and picture, but they surprised me. While there are some gaffes in the writing, the first episode really makes up for it with the strength of the acting. It is interesting to contemplate how these episodes were shot. They seem to be made up of very long continuous takes, where the camera rolls even through the transitions between sets. Is this because they were shot on film and they did not want to waste film by bringing the camera up to speed and re-synchronizing with the dialogue? I'm not really certain. But the effect is almost like a documentary shot by video steadicam, and more like watching a play than a modern show with constant cuts.

After the introductory episode, the next few episodes involve a tribe of cave-people on a quest for fire as their planet appears to be entering an ice age. This is a pretty weak story and drags quite a bit. There are a few scenes that are very much worth watching, though -- there is a staged fight scene that seems to be lit entirely by a fire. It's really stunning and quite well-choreographed. It is also very violent -- in fact, it is quite surprising how violent some of the original Doctor Who material actually was.

We're continuing on with Doctor Who. We received a mis-filed disc from Netflix that was supposed to be "The Daleks." It was actually the two-part serial called "The Edge of Destruction" and the disc was taken from a set called "The Lost Years" also featuring Hartnell. The DVDs look very similar, so it is not a huge surprise that it was mixed up. Anyway, "The Edge of Destruction" was shot entirely inside the Tardis, and has a very weak script; the Tardis is malfunctioning because of a stuck button and as a result is hurtling backwards and forwards through time and space and somehow making all of its inhabitants violently crazy. The device somehow knows it is malfunctioning (apparently it has an artificial intelligence) and all the disturbances are a result of it somehow attempting to communicate that it is in trouble. According to Wikipedia,

This story was written by story editor David Whitaker within two days. It was created as a hasty "filler" story so that the series would fit a thirteen episode run, which was all that had been granted at that stage. Budgetary restrictions meant that only the four regular actors and the TARDIS sets could be used for the filming. Perhaps as a result of this, this is the least expensive Doctor Who serial ever, and the second episode ("The Brink of Disaster") is the cheapest episode ever.

Yep, it is pretty bad. The label on the "fast return" button is written by hand in felt-tip pen, which gives you an idea of the budget involved. It is a "bottle episode" that has almost no long-term bearing on the story arc, except that it shows the characters that the Doctor could be a bit of an asshole. There are old Star Trek episodes that are worse, though. At least the doctor keeps his shirt on.

Anyway, next up is disc two of the 2005 series, and the original Daleks. We'll see how many of the old shows we can stand. There are a lot of them -- nearly 750 episodes of Doctor Who have been broadast. It is truly a science fiction soap opera. Tragically, though, a lot of the early episodes, including many that have the most interesting storylines, are missing and exist only in various degrees of reconstruction. For example, the serial after "The Daleks" is "Marco Polo," which was a seven-part story set in the year 1289 in Asia. None of the original footage exists. Again according to Wikipedia:
In all, 108 of 253 episodes produced during the first six years of the programme are not currently held in the BBC's archives, although many more were thought missing in the past before episodes were recovered from a variety of sources, most notably overseas broadcasters.
That's a tremendous loss; whether the show is actually any good or not is beside the point; it is a piece of history.

Anyway. I don't get a lot of time to read, but usually have a few minutes in the morning before the babies are awake. I've been re-reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is one of my all-time favorite novelists. He writes stories that fall somewhere in between science fiction, magical realism, and modern realist fiction. Events often follow an inner logic, a metaphorical logic, a dream logic. This is one of his best novels and I highly recommend it to anyone who is not put off by a little magic.

I have also been working on my guitar playing. I am taking lessons again, for the first time in 23 years, and trying to put together more of a repertoire. I don't get very much time to do concentrated, focused, heads-down practice, but I am able to get at least a little playing in most days. That's helped to keep me sane in the midst of screaming babies and our ongoing barely-breaking-even finances; we're getting to the end of our debts, and so very soon we should be able to divert the $1,000 or so we've been spending on debts each month (for the last five years) into various forms of savings, and perhaps even take a modest little vacation, although we also need to figure out how to replace our car.