In Memoriam: Victoria Astrinakis July 15, 1955-February 19, 2000

Posted on February 19, 2012 by admin

 

Vickey3

Twelve years ago, I lost my sister to stage IV ovarian cancer. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her and I’ve never stopped missing her. As I write this, tears are flowing from my eyes and the pain of losing her is just as sharp as it was on the day she died.

How can I describe her? There are really no words that can do her justice, but I will try anyway.

Vickey was a wonderful person and she touched the lives of everyone who knew her.  She was a contrast of flighty creativity and earthy thinking. As an example, she would give the best and most thoughtful advice, and at the same time get rafts of parking tickets because she was “only going to be parked for a minute” while she ran into some shop.  She famously would also get paint all over my favorite stretch denims because she wore them while she worked on her art and she once broke my portable stereo because she had it precariously balanced on a stack of books. I can remember being so mad at her for her carelessness back then!

Little things like un-paint smudged jeans, portable stereos, and parking meters didn’t matter to Vickey.  She was more concerned with embracing life and living it to its fullest. Her friends have stories about all sorts of mischief that she had engaged in over the years. I know without a doubt that all of the tales are true because I can picture Vickey doing the things her friends describe.

Vickey was also extremely giving, often to a fault. She would quite literally give up her last dollar if it meant helping friends and family out of a jam.  She gave of her time and money freely and without thought to how or whether any of it would be paid back. That was just her nature; she had a heart of gold.

The way she dealt with her cancer was no different from the way she had lived her life. She met it head on and faced it with all of her strength. She loved life and she would not relinquish hers without a fight.

She had two surgeries and all of the chemo treatments her doctors prescribed. She turned to holistic methods as well, drinking this icky looking green mixture of grasses and herbs every day. But this disease is ugly, evil and ultimately, powerful, and it was the one thing she could not overcome.

In typical Vickey style, she described her chemo treatments and the after-effects as being on the river Orinoco, floating on a barge draped in gauzy fabrics, sweating in the humid heat of the South-American jungle. Lying on our sofa in the den, a scarf concealing her thinning hair, she would smile, her big bright smile. It would light up her eyes, and for that moment, you would forget that she had cancer.

I will never forget her words to her oncologist on the last day he saw her before she passed. It was exactly one month to the day before her death: January 19, 2000.  When she asked him how much longer she had, he told her it wouldn’t be more than a month. Heartbreakingly, she cried out “but, doctor, I’m still strong.”

At this point, she had been suffering terribly for more than six months. Her intestines were completely blocked from the tumors so she could not eat or go to the bathroom. She had good pain relief from the medications she was taking but nothing could touch the constant nausea caused by the obstruction. She would vomit many times a day, and yet, she would still smile and be willing to fight on.

She was so strong that I thought she would beat the cancer. I knew the statistics as well as anyone: less than one quarter of women with late stage ovarian cancer survive five years post diagnosis. I could not imagine losing her and I wouldn’t let myself or anyone around me think that she might die.

Even on the day she died, I thought she would rally. That day, she woke lucid, for the first time in a week.  I remember her smile and her clearly asking my mother for some soup. I thought, great, she’ll gain back her strength and we would get her on some new clinical trial. All was not lost.

How deluded I was. Not two hours after that moment, she started bringing up what looked like black gunk. It was like nothing I have ever seen before and something I hope to never see again. I ran to the phone and called the hospice nurse.

As she took her last breath, I held her hand. I whispered to her that I would see her soon, and outside, it began to rain.

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The Perennial House Guests

Posted on January 20, 2012 by admin

My husband and I have been living in my mother-in-law’s basement since we arrived in Winnipeg in August of 2010. Due to finances and our dog we have been unable to find a place of our own as yet. I had thought that we would be out of here a long time ago.

While I am beyond grateful to my mother-in-law and her husband for allowing us to live here at all, let alone for months and months, sharing a home that is not my own in any way has been very wearing on me. It isn’t just one thing about it; it is the entire deal.

The hardest part is the feeling that I have no control over my surroundings and very little privacy.  I feel like I am the perennial house guest.

I haven’t been able to settle in any way, large or small. I can’t change anything about the rooms I live in, not the paint, the carpets, any of the furniture or the decor. It very much feels like what it is: my mother-in-law’s basement: a place where I can find no comfort or essence of myself.

Although we have our own computer desks here, our computers, printer, and our flat panel television, the rest of our belongings remain in storage. There are things I own that I would very much like to have access to again, like my leather jacket and the rest of my books. I haven’t seen my stuff since leaving California.

Any privacy I might gain by closing the door to “our” rooms is tenuous at best. My mother-in-law is a very sweet woman and she likes to talk. She also loves our dog and enjoys napping with him. What this means is that at any point in the day, I can expect her to come knocking on the door, or just wander in if it is open. While I love her to death, sometimes, it is a little much.  I never say anything about it because it wouldn’t feel right. For one thing, it might hurt her feelings, and that is the last thing I would ever want to do to her. For another, the fact remains that this is her house. What right do I have to tell her she can’t come in?

There is also the stigma attached to living in a parent’s basement at the ages of 43 and 41. We should not be in this position at all. Sure, many Americans face similar circumstances, but there are just as many who are fine and completely self-sufficient. Beyond that, most people look down upon adults our age living with parents. People like us are seen as failures in life and worthy of nothing but contempt.

We do pay rent here to offset the increased household costs of two additional people plus a dog, but it is much reduced to allow us to save money. Since it is so little, I almost don’t feel like it is really rent at all . Even if it were, it confers none of the benefits of renting a space from someone else. If we were renting a room anywhere else, I could definitely have expectations of privacy in my quarters, and I very likely could re-decorate my space to suit my tastes. I would be free to make it my own.

We came here to have another chance to thrive. We packed up everything and I left my home to come here because we thought it was our only chance at a decent life. It may very well be, but I just don’t see it yet.

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Winter In The Basement

Posted on December 5, 2011 by admin

We are almost certainly stuck living in my husband’s mother’s basement this winter, and perhaps beyond. The rental market in Winnipeg is not at all conducive to finding affordable accommodations that will accept large dogs.

We need a rental house because of the dog, but we can’t find any that are in our price range in the safer areas of town. It is very disheartening to look and look and either have what I find shot down by my husband as not affordable or in a bad location, or find absolutely nothing.

His mother and her husband are back from their sojourn up North and will be around until Spring. They are like a whirlwind travelling through the house, uprooting what little stability I have managed to secure and scattering it like leaves in the face of a gale.

We can’t plan our suppers, we don’t know when people are coming over, we can’t even be certain that the cereal box will be in the last place we found it. The phone rings off the hook and they just expect that I will pick it up and I HATE answering the phone. I feel like a damn secretary.

I worry that I will do something to upset his mom’s husband, who is a skinflint and very particular about things. He rounded against me one night last winter over my use of water when cleaning up after him and the mom, and about how much laundry we were doing. I am already afraid over the laundry I have to do today, which unfortunately includes our sheets because of Ares bled on them from his inflamed anal glands. We have been paying him for what we use, and last winter, we were paying him far more, but still, he is particular and because it is his house, and he is allowing us to be here,  both my husband and I try to be very respectful.

I can’t breathe and I feel like the walls are closing in on me all of the time now. I want out of here so bad that I can taste it. I despair that we ever will get away. We are just as trapped here as we were in Lancaster, it seems, and I am not even in my own house anymore.

My dread grows and grows as the heart of the winter approaches and there is nothing I can do about it.

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Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!

Posted on November 21, 2011 by admin

The ground is all white again and when I walk my dog, my boots make a crunching sound as I walk over the snowy pavement. The wonder I felt last year at the first snow is still there, although it is a little dampened by the knowledge of the long winter. I do enjoy it, but I think I would like it more if I didn’t have to go out into it multiple times a day. It gets tedious after a while.

Other than that, I like the snowy winter. I know for sure that I will be having a white Christmas and it is visually stunning. The streets lined with bare trees, some laden with hanging icicles and the snow covered roofs indeed seem to be straight out of the Christmas cards I remember sighing over as a youngster, wishing for snow in Southern California.

Ares is a little phased by the snow, just as he was last year, and sometimes, he refuses to go poo because he can’t see the grass and the snow is cold on his paws. He will get used to it over time, but for now, it is taking some coaxing and patience to get him to poop. He is also a little under the weather right now, having a bad reaction to some antibiotics he was taking to combat a truculent anal sac infection.  Smelly anal sac problems are smelly.

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No Strike!

Posted on October 5, 2011 by admin

So, the Union and my husband’s employer have come to a tentative agreement, which means that there will be no strike. Now, everyone has to vote on it and it will be ratified. This is very good news because it means that we can get on with the business of finding an apartment or a house to rent.

Which brings me to the subject of unions. My husband says the has a love-hate relationship with them. He says that he realizes they are necessary and that on the whole, they do good things. However, he says, that sometimes the union negotatiors’ egos sometimes get in the way of finding a workable agreement. There are some cases where the union ends up signing an agreement that is worse than what the company started offering the employees in the first place.

I like unions. I think they are a balancing force in the economy and are necessary so that workers get a fair shake from their employers. It is telling that union jobs have higher wages and better benefits than non-union jobs.

My positive view on unions goes back to my childhood. When I was about seven, my mother got a nursing job at Kaiser Permanente. It had a strong union and she was paid a good wage, vacation pay, and sick pay. She was able to take time off so that we could go on vacations and if she got sick, she could take the day off to get better without worrying about losing a day’s pay. She also had health insurance that paid for everything, and she didn’t have to pay a dime for it. As her child, I was also covered, at no additional cost, until I turned twenty-five.

Today, my mother is retired and is on Medicare, but because she also has her Kaiser insurance, she still pays no co-pays, and her medications are all free. Had she not had her Kaiser insurance, she would not have been able to afford the medications necessary to keep her in good health.

So, I like unions and I am glad my husband works for a union shop.

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Trapped

Posted on September 16, 2011 by admin

Trapped is a good word for how I am starting to feel. We still aren’t looking for apartments….and the excuse now is because my husband may be going on strike at work. He doesn’t want to get into an apartment until he knows what is going to happen with this potential strike.

Meanwhile, time is passing and October draws closer when his mother and her husband are going to return for the winter from up North. I can feel the walls closing in on me and the thought of spending another winter living here is driving me a little crazy.

I thought we would be out of here long ago and I long to have our own space, free of other people and their idiosyncrasies. More than that, I want to settle into my own place, a place that I can say is mine and where I can have control. Living here, there is no control. While we are here alone, it is a little better, but still, his mom and her her husband can show up at any time, and in fact, they will be back for the weekend again tomorrow. We had plans to get through the next week with some shepherd’s pie, but that won’t be happening, either.

It will be worse once they are back for the winter. We won’t know when to cook and when not to cook. We won’t have any privacy. We can shut our door, and while a closed door is usually respected, I feel weird about shutting the door on someone in their own house.  It’s just not relaxing for me here and I do not feel like this is home.

My husband doesn’t understand my feelings at all. He gets upset at me if I bring it up. He wants to make sure we can manage financially, and I understand that, but if we can’t manage financially on our own, then we’ve just traded one bad situation for a different sort of bad situation.

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First Day Of Apartment Hunting

Posted on September 6, 2011 by admin

Today is the first day that we are starting to seriously look for an apartment to live. It did not go well as everything (that allows pets) was either too expensive or in a bad area of town. There just wasn’t much to see today. Hopefully, tomorrow there will be more.

Brad is insisting that we can’t live in certain areas. He says they are “gunshotty-stabby” areas and we can’t live there. Except that those areas have the cheapest rent, make that the areas where the rent is affordable for us. I am sure that the people living there would rather live elsewhere but they can’t live anywhere else because it isn’t affordable for them.

It is frustrating when my husband throws in another criterion that further limits the already tiny, infinitesimal pool of affordable rentals for us. At this rate, we’ll probably be in this basement for the next ten years.

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Living In Someone Else’s House

Posted on September 5, 2011 by admin

For the past twelve months, my living space has been relegated to two rooms and a bathroom in my mother-in-law’s basement. Even though we are welcome to use the rest of the house, aside from cooking our meals in the kitchen, we don’t venture into the other rooms at all. Neither of us feels comfortable doing so.

Over the summer, we have had the house mostly to ourselves because his mom and her husband have been caretakers at a bible camp in Victoria Beach. I say “mostly” because they do come back every two weeks or so and spend a few days in town and we have had other family staying here as well. Lately, we haven’t had much time to ourselves at all, with all of the family around. It’s not a bad thing, but it is a little wearing.

I am all too aware that this is not my home and I haven’t felt “at home” since leaving Lancaster, to be honest. I am always on edge here, knowing I am only here because I am “allowed” to be. I am cognizant of how old everything in this house is, and I am always scared to death that something will break while I am using it. It won’t be my fault, but still, I would feel responsible for it because I was the one using it.

I can’t ever count on having any sort of privacy because this isn’t my house. There is always the chance that someone, other than my husband and I , will be around. This fact was brought home to me yesterday when his mom phoned to say that they will be in town on Tuesday and may stay until Friday. My husband has the next five days off and I had planned it to be a relaxing time for just the two of us. I should have known better than to expect this when I am not in my own home.

I feel horrible for feeling out of sorts about this because his mom is the biggest sweetheart there ever could be and has been welcoming and generous with me to a fault. This is her home and she has every right to come back to it whenever she desires. It is I who have no right to any expectations of privacy or time alone.

The bottom line in all of this is that my husband and I need our own place. We need to start looking ASAP, because his mom and her husband are returning home for the winter at the end of September. I want to be out of here by then.

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Why Are These People So Whiny?

Posted on September 4, 2011 by admin

I got a new computer a couple of weeks ago and I have been transferring my stuff and re-installing my games bit by bit over the past little while. Today, I finally got around to moving some stuff for my Sims 2 game over and I had to re-download the CEP, a program that allows recolors of objects in Sims 2. I download the installer, install the program and as I am finishing up my installation, I get sent to this page.

Apparently, the creator of the CEP, Numenor, is unhappy that so few people have donated to him to show their gratitude for the CEP. At the bottom he says if you can’t donate, or won’t, it isn’t a problem, but apparently, it is, because he has taken the time to create a page on his site and write five paragraphs about donations, or rather, the lack of, and wouldn’t it be nice if you could please give me the moneez. It comes off as scolding people for NOT donating and it seems to me if you want to encourage people to donate, berating them into doing it is not the way to go.

Then there’s BlooM, who on his Sims 3 modding site,  says this at the very top of the index page:

My crappy 8 year old comp is dying on me and instead of making my creations donation files(wich i hate!) i hope you consider making a small donation.
Thank You.

So, this guy thinks that the people who download his mods should pay for him to get a new computer? In a recession, no less? Please! He has some nerve to suggest that he is in any way deserving of help getting a new computer when millions of people are struggling to make ends meet and probably have older computers than the one he has!  What’s worse, he threatens to make his creations donation files…in other words, he threatens to make his site a paysite! The word “paysite” has become an anathema in the Sims modding community, and with good reason. No other modding community would dream of allowing pay content. Computer games with all the expansions and downloadable content in addition to that, are already expensive as it is. Why should we pay for derivative content? It’s nonsense!

In the past, I have donated freely both to sites and to individual creators that I respect as a way of saying thank you. I haven’t been in a position to donate to anyone for a number of years now, but if I ever find myself in that position again, I will NEVER donate to any creator who whines about money. That just doesn’t impress me.

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Sales Tax

Posted on September 1, 2011 by admin

In Canada there are two forms of sales tax: there’s the Provincial sales tax and the Goods and Services tax, which is a Federal sales tax. In Manitoba, the combined rate of PST and GST is 12% and that applies to most everything that is sold, including groceries and services. In comparison, California has a 9.25% sales tax and there is no Federal sales tax. The sales tax does not apply to groceries nor to any services rendered.

Now, I am not a fan of any sort of sales tax because sales taxes tend to be regressive. Everyone pays the same amount, regardless of income, and this tends to hit people with lower incomes harder than it does those with higher incomes. In a nutshell, sales taxes make everything more expensive and therefore, make it harder to makes ends meet when you’re barely scraping by.

Having said that, the sales tax, which everyone pays, is a loop-hole free way for the government to collect revenue. Governments do need revenue in order to operate. They need money in order to fund all of the services that most of us take for granted, like roads, bridges, the police,  the fire department and schools. In Canada, you can add health care to the list.

The effect of not collecting enough revenue is that the national debt rises and there is less money to fund important projects like repairing infrastructure or to provide disaster relief. Lack of revenue is one of the major issues that plagues the United States right now and while the majority of Americans favor revenue increases, politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to be unable to even discuss this.

Perhaps a Federal sales tax needs to be considered. As much as I loathe sales taxes, they do bring revenue in to the government because they’re unavoidable. Like Canada, the government could issue rebates to people with lower incomes to offset the burden on them somewhat. Unlike Canada, things like groceries should probably be exempt.

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