Never a Dull Moment: Even on Vacation We Experienced Technical Difficulties

I took this photo on what my family calls "the garden walk."

The Memory Card in the Camera 

After five days without being on the computer at all, I uploaded pictures I'd taken into my laptop, but when I popped the SD card back out, a very tiny piece of plastic came off.  No amount of turning things off/on, rebooting, or other finessing helped; the thing wouldn’t work anymore.  The thought of being in Rochester, the original Kodak country, and unable to take photos with an actual camera distressed us both greatly.  

I'd looked at the small clear box we had on the shelf at home with extra memory cards inside, but I didn’t end up bringing it because I thought we’d just need the one since we could upload the photos each evening onto the laptop. Wrong again.    

Kevin ordered a new memory card on sale at Best Buy that can hold over 6000 photos, then we went to pick it up at the local store.  The SD card was hermetically sealed, so I couldn’t get it open with my bare hands.  Kevin didn’t have his pocket-knife with him and wasn’t much more successful than I was, so eventually, he took the thing back inside and asked to use their scissors. 

Like You Blend!

There are two blenders at the cottage, but one of them leaks. I assumed it was the one on top of the refrigerator, not the one out on the counter.  Whoops.  I found out I guessed wrong when a pool of Almondmilk spilled out the sides of the base onto the counter.  Apparently, the heavy-duty blender that was easily accessible is the one that leaks.  I know these things happen.  

In recent months, we bought a new version of our Oster blender, because the old one started leaking.  In the end, we’re grateful at least one of them works so I can continue making super-healthy smoothies every day. 

Gathering at the Water Cooler 

The men set about getting the water cooler to work.-epic fail.

None of us could figure how to get more than about an ounce of water out of the thing at a time.  Kevin, being the technical figure-it-out guy he is even looked up the owner’s manual online.  Not even that enlightened us.  

One Sunday, my husband’s sisters and I couldn’t stop laughing when Kevin and his two brothers-in-law gathered around the water cooler to try and get it to work properly.  The results were wet spots on the floor, water leaking out of the base of the unit, and Kevin pretending to drink directly from the jug.  

Later that same evening, we pulled out the old Brita pitcher and filter we found in the back of the cabinet since we were going through so many individual water bottles, it was ridiculous.  Our water woes were suddenly solved. 

Kevin’s Dexcom 4 Debacle

This thing has been a marriage and
life-saver when it works properly.

His continuous glucose monitor stopped working at exactly 1:18am on July 18, 2016, when he went to the bathroom and inadvertently dropped it right into the toilet (before having used it).  He didn’t have a meter for several days, though he spent two whole mornings on the phone with our insurance company, the company that makes the meters, the one that ships them, and his doctor’s office.  He got everything straightened out, paid for overnight shipping, but they didn’t come the next day or the one after that.

While waiting for the new unit, Kevin tried to dry out the one that had gone into the toilet.  He attempted a blow dryer, put it in the window of the cottage for several days.  After a week, he was able to power the thing up and charge it.  Now he has gotten in the habit of caring his new monitor in a plastic bag in his pocket.  So far, he's made it a week without any major diabetic emergencies, electronic and otherwise.  

Forget Fire and Brimstone: The Air Conditioning's Not Working

There are some amazing stained-glass
windows in the churches in Rochester.

One of the traditions Kevin and I started some years back is going to daily Mass at Holy Cross when we go to Rochester, New York. We don't make it there every day, but we usually go several times each week.  

For most of our time there this trip, the AC wasn't working in the sanctuary.  I couldn't help but think that it would be a rather fitting place to give a fire and brimstone, don't-end-up-in-hell-for-all-eternity sort of sermon considering how hot it gets in there. Fortunately, the priests there are more of the God is love, mercy, and compassion sort of homilists.

My Mom: A Remarkable Woman Whose Life Is Well-Worth Celebrating!

Kevin's Recent Birthday Celebration at the Cottage

Kevin had the same response to the birthday  decorations
I put up while he was out running errands as he did back in the nineties,
a huge smile and a chuckle.

As I mentioned in my previous post, decorating the door for Kevin's birthday has been an ongoing tradition for our family.  I made sure to pack some streamers and balloons for this trip.  It just so happened that the two colors of streamers and balloons I had at home are also Minion colors, which are perfect for my husband.

Never in a million years did I expect to be married to Kevin and celebrating his birthday with him at the cottage 19 years after we'd first met right at his very spot.  Wow! The story of our friendship, courtship, and marriage still blows my mind!   

After being away for two years, we were both especially looking forward to the traditional family gathering for dinner on Sunday evening.  It worked out beautifully that it happened to be on his actual birthday.  They cooked steaks out on the grill, had shrimp, potatoes, a pasta salad, fresh vegetables and I made a big veggie tray and a fruit salad.  The food was delicious, as is usually the case.  

During my first dinner with Kevin's family, the topics of conversation were entertaining.

"The girls are peeing in the yard, and they don't even cover it up anymore," his sister said.

I was momentarily shocked until I remembered that she and her husband have two sons, so she must have been talking about their female felines.  

Another one of his sisters mentioned having had a breast reduction.  

Many, many years later at the same location, his youngest sister sees the decorations I've put up on the door for Kevin's birthday in a different light.  "Why are there boobs on the door?" were the first words out of her mouth.

My innocent birthday decorations.

Later my family-friendly decorations had some additional color added to them by his youngest sister's husband.  Before the night was over, in addition to the red dots he put in the middle of the balloons, someone had put a small black circle around them.

Their scandalous additions to them.

Leave it to Kevin's youngest sister and brother-in-law to create scandal and laughter from innocent party decorations.  And that's the story of what has come to be called "the birthday boobs."  

I was thinking of keeping the birthday decorations up through next week since my mom's birthday and my dad's are back-to-back later this week.  Instead, Kevin and I saw to it that the streamers and balloons were taken down in record time.  

A Desperately Needed Vacation in Rochester, Fun Flashbacks, and Many Memories

Two years ago August, Kevin and I drove back from Rochester after an enjoyable stay at his family's cottage on the lake.  The very next day, Kevin was laid off from his job, along with everyone else who had been on his team.

Due to a number of reasons, mostly related to finances, we weren't able to make our usual annual trip up to Rochester last year.  Actually, it wasn't until the last minute we knew for sure that we could come up this July, but we made it.

My prayer on our drive up here: Lord, You alone know how desperately Kevin and I need some rest, relaxation, and fun. Please help us enjoy our time off of work and be open to all the blessings you wish to bestow upon us to renew us in body, mind, and spirit. Amen.

Visiting Rochester has always been nostalgic for me.  It’s one of the few, really the only, place where my family and I have come just about every summer since I was in utero.  

“I’ve got a story for every street,” Kevin told me while we were driving through his hometown.

     

“So start talking,” I said.  

Several evenings we have gone back to the pier at Charlotte Beach, now called Ontario Park where Kevin and I spent countless hours talking, getting to know each other better, watching sunsets, taking photos, and falling in love. The big concrete block towards the end of the pier is where we'd hop up and sit to watch sunsets, boats coming into and out of the marina, and people passing by.  That one spot holds so many memories for us!

Favorite Flashbacks of Fun

Kevin back in the 90s standing outside the cottage with
the birthday decorations we put up while he was at work.

This is one of my favorite posts about the first couple of years we rented half of the cottage Kevin’s Birthday Flashbacks 1997-1998.  

Soon after my mom, sisters, and I first met Kevin and his father, the real Harry Potter, we found out some birthday decorations and hilarious gag gifts were in order. 

It's still hard to believe that 19 years ago Kevin and I first met at his family's cottage on the lake! How can it have been that long ago?! We've experienced so many memories, challenges, joys, and so much laughter since then.

A Cherished Summer Tradition: Sunday Evening Family Dinners at the Cottage

Long before Kevin and I met, it had been his family's tradition to gather on Sunday afternoon/evening at the cottage during the summer for a family dinner.  Traditionally, they would cook some meat out on the grill.  Everyone would bring a dish to add to the potluck.  Friends and family would stop in to visit.  It was usually one big party.

Click here to read about the best Independence Day I ever spent in Rochester. 

Who Is My Neighbor? She’s Fallen and She Can’t Get Up: My Take on the Good Samaritan Gospel

Purple is my neighbor's favorite color.
She'd like this coloring sheet I did.

A young woman across the hall heard her shouting and called 911.  The neighbor next door to her came to see if we had a spare key to her place.  We don’t, but I went down anyway to find out what was going on and see if she was okay. 

Kevin and I had just come back home from a family dinner a few days before Christmas, so we hadn’t heard the screams, scratching, or pounding coming from the apartment below us. 

When I arrived on the scene, the police had come in a window of her second-floor apartment and were just letting the medics in the front door to assess the situation.  It turns out she had fallen in the kitchen, couldn’t get up, or make it to the phone, so she dragged herself to the front door and did her best to create a cacophony in hopes that someone would hear her.

Mission accomplished.  The EMTs helped her up.  She didn’t think anything was broken and neither did the medics, so they offered to help her get to her bedroom.  That sounded kind of crazy to me.  Here is a woman in her sixties who has very minimal use of one whole side of her body due to a stroke she had in her late teens.  She’s just had a serious fall and it took a while for her to get help.  She lives alone.  Putting her in bed and leaving her there seemed ridiculous, but she and the medics were leaning towards that course of action. 

“I really think you should go to the hospital,” I told her. 

She wasn’t so sure that would be necessary. 

I insisted that she go and have tests done to make sure nothing was broken.  She considered it.  I told her I was going upstairs to get my keys, phone, and purse, and that I would be right back to accompany her to the hospital. 

That was one time when I had the presence of mind to go against what everyone else was suggesting, and it was a good thing I did.  A couple hours later, we found out that she had indeed broken her hip and required emergency surgery.  I’m not sure exactly what would have happened had they put her in bed that night and left, but I’m grateful we didn’t find out.

I wasn’t the perfect neighbor in the following months, but I tried to be there for her.  I brought her clothes, mail, and books to read when she moved into the rehabilitation center.    The two family members who live in town are both older than she is and not exactly in the best of health, so it was a while before one of them was able to go see her.  I knew she would have liked for me or someone to visit her every day, but I just didn’t have the energy.  I was still working full-time and only had an extra day or two off for the holidays.  I felt guilty I wasn’t there more often, but I assured myself that the time I was spending picking up her bedroom, kitchen, and getting her apartment straightened up also counted as helping her. 

I felt really overwhelmed by the thought of her returning to her apartment to live alone.  She’d been having trouble for a while as it was.  In recent years, she’d already fallen and broken her knee as well as her collarbone.  Now that she’d broken her hip, I feared they would release her sooner than would be wise for someone who lives alone on the second floor of an apartment building in which the elevator is frequently in need of repair. 

I contacted her niece who lives in another state and expressed my concerns about her living arrangements.  I had to face the realization that she may very well go back to living on her own even if that wasn’t the safest arrangement.  I finally understood I needed to try and talk her into finding an assisted living place, pass along the information to her family and caseworker, the people at her church, and leave it all in God’s hands. 

Fortunately, through His grace, our neighbor now has an assistant come in and help her two or three times a week, so she is able to live on her own.  She is doing significantly better than she had been even before this injury.      

An interesting aspect of all of this is that my husband is actually the model neighbor.  I even wrote a post a couple years ago about his good deeds called Like a Good Neighbor My Husband Is There.  Kevin is consistently a wonderful neighbor to everyone in our building.  Once in a while, I follow his lead in word and deed.

Questions for Reflection: Who in your midst is suffering?  What is God calling you to do about it? 

My Prayer: Lord, please open our hearts and minds to the love and compassion You have for each one of us, so that when we see suffering, we are willing to offer companionship, mercy, and encouragement to those in need.  Give us the courage to do the right thing, especially when it would be easy enough to ignore the hurting person before us at home, at work, at school, at church, or in our community. Amen.

Honey, I’ve Earned My Gray! A Conversation with My Hairdresser and How I Earned My Stripes

“You have some gray hairs coming in,” my hairdresser informed me a while back.  “Do you want me to pull them out?”

“Honey, I’ve earned my gray!”  I said with a wave of my hand. 

My hairdresser laughed and made some comment about how I’ll probably look good with white hair. 

I’ve been through a number of life circumstances that make me feel like I really have earned my gray and white hair, every single strand.  The following circumstances are the most likely to have contributed to this phenomenon:

1. Perhaps you’ve met my dearly beloved husband.   My main man is part Minion (See post titled Is Your Main Man Part Minion? Top 10 Ways You Can Tell)
2. I have taken care of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers for four or more hours at a time by myself. In other words, your kids are partially responsible. (See My Nanny Diary)
3. I like to know what the laws, rules, and regulations are, and I actually try to follow them. 
4. My husband sometimes rides a motorcycle.
5. We live in a unique place with a bunch of interesting people. (See Top 40 Signs You Aren’t Above Being Ghetto)
6. I have had more than one family member in hospice care at a time. (My dad and my grandma.)
7. I have been told that my sense of responsibility for the safety and well-being of others, particularly those who are very young, elderly, or otherwise particularly fragile, is at times overdeveloped and hyperactive.
8. I have survived several sessions of rereading the same board book over and over.  (Mr. Brown can still moo even if you’d rather stop now.)
9. More than one of my grandparents has passed away in the middle of winter and their funeral and burial has been in upstate New York during a blizzard. 
10. As an English major, copy editor, and proofreader, I’m often either highly frustrated or very amused by grammatical errors and typos in published books, newspapers, training manuals, and newsletters.  (My theme song for this aspect of my life is most definitely Weird Al’s Word Crimes.)
11. My dad loved to scare us and was really good at it.  Apparently, he perfected his wild dogs routine in college.  Even knowing he was the one making the racket, it would still flip me out when he’d sneak up on my friends and me at sleepovers then bark loudly like a crazy canine ready to attack. 
12. I love, love, love to read books, and my husband prefers to watch TV.  The other night he selected a (riveting to him) documentary on fracking.   Last night, he told me there are two more shows available through Amazon Prime on the topic.    

The Innocents Film Review, 2016 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection, and Blog Tour

Joanne Kulig in The Innocents. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

The Innocents is not an easy movie to watch.  Set in December 1945 Warsaw, Poland, shortly after World War II, this film shows some of the atrocities that remain long after the official war ended.  The colors are muted and dark against the stark white snow on the countryside and the starched white habits framing the faces of the Benedictine nuns.  The barren trees, camouflage uniforms, and the nuns’ long black habits create an aura of somber tones and great contrast.  Sadness, loneliness, and a measure of isolation seem a fitting state of being for the characters in the film, especially considering the circumstances and their surroundings. 

A female director, screenwriters, editor, cinematographer and a predominantly female cast depict this story inspired by true events and the war from the perspectives of various women.  Viewers see things through the eyes of a nonbeliever, the French Communist doctor named Mathilde as well as a cloistered community of Benedictine nuns, who range in their level of devotion and understanding of their vocation as consecrated religious.

The notion that a cloistered community protects anyone from man’s inhumanity to man is shattered.  Beliefs about the nature of faith, suffering, discernment, and prayer are all challenged as these women religious face the aftermath of haunting traumatic circumstances.  External and internal factors contribute to the unrest, confusion, and fear these women face.    

Whenever I hear any foreign language, it triggers that part of my brain, and I begin to slip in and out of thinking and speaking in French.  Since fluent in French, I paid close attention to what was said versus how it was translated into English subtitles throughout the movie.  Any discrepancies that were particularly interesting or entertaining, I would tell my husband about.  In most cases, though, the English translation is quite close to the French.  (Since I don’t know Polish, I can’t speak to the accuracy of that aspect of the film.)    

Any mention or depiction of war, past or present, reminds me of Europe.  Ever since I studied abroad in France during my junior year of college, I view battles, war, terrorist attacks, soldiers, and civilians differently.  Not until I saw the damaged buildings and walked the Normandy beaches during my time there did the trauma of war really hit me.  When wandering about towns where the fighting had been intense, we saw buildings damaged that have never been repaired.  Imagining the sheer terror of being attacked hit much closer to home than it ever could have when I’d read about the World Wars or looked at the many photos taken.  Suddenly, we were there in the towns ravaged, possibly staring at some of the same vantage points other people had before their untimely deaths.

A nun who has walked quite a ways asks orphan children living on the street to take her to a doctor who is neither Polish nor Russian.   They lead her to the French Red Cross.  Mathilde often sees these children playing outside of the base where she is serving.  Their antics and the fact that even as orphans living out on the street in winter they’ve maintained some level of playfulness seem to lift her spirits.  

Though quite shocked by what she witnessed when still a medical student, Mathilde nonetheless throws herself into serving the French Red Cross (La Croix Rouge). Initially, she dismisses the nun the orphans bring to their outpost, saying she should go to the Polish Red Cross for assistance.  Mathilde's secular lifestyle and view of the world clashes boldly with the austere life these women religious have chosen.  Will they bridge the gap between two worlds when it’s a matter of life and death?  

Joanna Kulig and Anna Prochniak in the Innocents.
Courtesy of Music Box Films.

Mother Abbess holds tightly to her sense of traditional Catholic values and attempts to protect her community from shame and dishonor.  She reluctantly allows the French doctor in to treat the women in the convent.  At first, Mother Abbess gives no indication at all that she is suffering ill health.  Eventually, when she is in a great deal of pain, she allows Mathilde to examine her. It's discovered she has a serious disease, one that will eventually kill her, but she firmly refuses the medicine to treat it.   

Due to the horrifying circumstances these women faced and the life-long vow of chastity they've all taken, many are very scared  to let even a female doctor examine them.  Some in the community are able to relate better than others to this worldly woman who is primarily concerned with their physical well-being rather than their eternal salvation.   

The film raises some interesting moral and ethical questions: Can their religious community be protected from public scorn and condemnation in light of what’s happened?  Is it ever permissible, even advisable, to lie?  If so, under what circumstances?  Is blindly trusting and doing what one is advised to by superiors (especially when it means violating your own conscience) the best way to go? 

Lou De Laage and Agata Buzek. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

Obedience versus disobedience is an important theme.  Both the women in the convent and Mathilde go expressly against the wishes of their superiors in order to carry out what they believe to be the most compassionate, ethical way of doing things.  One woman who entered her career set on saving lives comes up against a group of women who have vowed to spend their lives saving souls. 

Sister Maria describes the life of many believers to Mathilde as being “twenty-four hours of doubt and one minute of faith.”  I like how faith is treated as something that is different for each person.  There isn’t a sense of perfect tranquility or unfailing joy in any of them that persists throughout the entire film.  This makes the struggle of believing in a loving God all the more real and palpable when they are surrounded and infiltrated by so much evil.    

The Innocents was an Official Selection at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.  The film is rated PG-13 and is in French and Polish with English subtitles.  The Liturgy of the Hours prayed/sung by the sisters and the scenes in the chapel are in Latin without subtitles.  

Due to the graphic nature of a few medical scenes and a sexual assault, I would not recommend this movie for families or children.  Most of the other violence is not shown onscreen, mainly alluded to in conversation, but this film is disturbing enough that my husband and I couldn’t bring ourselves to watch it more than once.

Click here to watch the official trailer on Youtube. 

This is the Official Website for The Innocents.

Will The Innocents be coming to a theater near you?  Click on this link, then select THEATERS to find out.