Monday Mom Update

First, I would like to thank everyone for their well-wishes about my mom. The good news is that, yesterday, she came home from the hospital - a little shagged out (after all, they had her lying in bed with tubes in her, and didn't have her get up and move around), but OK nonetheless. The bad news is that, at some point, she's going to require a liver transplant. She was diagnosed with non-alcoholic cirrhosis several years ago (aggravated due to her diabetes and weight, which is not uncommon), and having varicose veins in her esophagus which began bleeding last Sunday night also didn't help. (To be fair, she stopped and said that she needed to go to the hospital calmly - in our family, it's not uncommon to soldier on needlessly. Why, if my arm got cut off, I would say, "No need to go to the emergency room - just get me some duct tape and a staple gun, and I'll be good as new."

Fortunately, one of the good things about Mom's illness is that it got me out of a temp job from hell. The person I was working for...well, to put it in perspective, she asked me on my first day if I would "give her an attitude, like the last person to work for me." Luckily, I have some experience dealing with bad bosses in the past, so I was able to let some of her more extravagant quirks go and get things done. However...well, let's just say that I was suspecting this might be occurring, but rather than label her, I decided - on Monday - to leave the assignment early and deal with Mom's illness. I'll have plenty of bosses and supervisors in my future; I'll only have one mother. My priorities on this were - and are - crystal clear.

Anyway, I spent my free time taking care of some of Mom's business (both in terms of her accounting clients, and taking care of her laundry, scooping her cats' litter boxes, etc), catching up on listening to podcasts (and as a side note - my good friend Andy, on the latest Podcrapular, proclaimed that secondhand smoke never harmed anyone - I think that the Surgeon General of the United States might disagree. However, we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one), reading blogs (if you liked Roger's pre-election post, you might want to check out the documentary Hacking Democracy (which is very disturbing in its implications, and good support for having Greg as dictator), and watching my father's old Sherlock Holmes DVDs (although I grew up with Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce on Sunday afternoon tv, I now concede - Jeremy Brett is "da Holmes").

To finish - since we now have a writer's strike in Hollywood (meaning that shows like Heroes might end early), I suggest that we bloggers take up the slack. Let's encourage our friends and loved ones to give up on television, and start reading blogs...especially comics and pop culture blogs. Besides, within the next few weeks, you'll not only get a new podcast - and posts - from me, but there'll be another edition of TV Party on Comic Related.

Thanks, and please - continue to keep my family in your thoughts and prayers.