Last to Know

This morning is feeling really harsh, as I woke up around 7 am on a Saturday, after staying up until around 1:20 or so last night.  It was entirely intentional however… since I wanted to make sure I could sleep tonight.  We will be getting up before 4 am tomorrow… so that we can catch a 6 am flight.  Normally I struggle to get to sleep, and the only sure way I could think of to make sure I slept tonight… was to purposefully exhaust myself today.  All of that logic aside… it still sucks to be groggy and feel like you just want to go back to sleep.

Last to Know

Most of yesterday was relatively un-eventful.  We hung out around the house, cleaned a bit, did copious amounts of laundry…  but in the larger scheme of things nothing much happened.  I hung out on my laptop playing some Rift and my wife read or did planning for the next school year.  Essentially the standard things we do any day.  We had plans to go out and about but those never really materialized, so essentially we were the exact opposite of busy all day long.  This will factor in shortly as to why how un-busy we were matters.

About seven last night we get a call from my wife’s step brothers spouse.  Apparently my wife’s mother is in the hospital… suspected heart attack.  Of course we are a little freaked… but the freaked out part turns to a bit of anger when we find out that she has been there essentially all day.  My wife goes into a panic of trying to call people and make sure they know… and one by one… every person she reaches has known for hours.  Even estranged family members seem to know.

Essentially my wife is her mothers next of kin… the closest blood relative and the only one who could legally sign for her.  Yet she is quite literally the last person to find out she is in the hospital…  let alone has been there since at least around noon yesterday.  Somehow one of the step daughters got called and went to the hospital with her…  but my wife’s mother did not want anyone  called… since they “didn’t know anything”.  Thing is…  the step daughter is a 50+ year old grown woman… she should have started calling the moment she found out anything.  My wife’s mother was in a hospital bed… it is not like she could have stopped her.

To make matters worse… my niece thinks it is important to let everyone know when her kids have odd bowel movements…  yet the one time something important actually happens she doesn’t let us know?  She is a busy body, with no job, and essentially no life…  yet the one time she could have passed along crucial and vital information she didn’t.  Essentially the whole experience was frustrating to be so catastrophically left out of the loop.  I think we finally got called because people wondered where we were.

Okay So Far

In their defense… for whatever reason they all thought we had already left on our vacation.  But even then it would have been nice to at least know something was up.  Ultimately I think they wanted to save us the stress since we couldn’t really do anything about it.  Overall she is being treated like it was a heart attack… but she has had none of the signs of heart attack.  She was out working on the farm of her “boyfriend” and fainted.  But afterwards we find out she had not had anything to eat since 9pm the night before…  and not really had anything to drink since around 6pm.  So it could have been a low blood sugar or dehydration thing… since senior citizens dehydrate extremely easily.

She was as stubborn and frustrating as ever when we finally got to the hospital last night around 8:30.  All in all she was doing well, and felt much better, however they had her hooked to a heart monitor just to make sure things were okay.  They said she had some signs of plaque in her arteries… but quite honestly what 76 year old person has not developed a build up?  Based on her explanation of what happened I am doubt it was anything cardiac since she had no chest pain… and has no soreness other than the injuries she experienced in the fall.  The doctors had not really seen any “smoking guns” so hopefully they will release her today with an all clear.

We’ve made everyone we talk to essentially promise to call us first from now on… despite whatever she says.  I know she just didn’t want to needlessly worry anyone… but the simple fact that she was in the hospital at all meant folks needed to know.  We would have headed up there at noon and sat all day with her if we had known.  But this has always been the way it has gone in our family.  Since we tend to keep our heads down and focused on the day to day… we always end up the last to know about anything.  Generally it is the gossip queen niece that keeps us up to date… but sadly she seems to gloss over the things that are actually important.

The Treehouse

During the day yesterday I played a ton of Rift, as I ran around happily on my stabbity rogue.  I completed Pelladane and most of Cape Jule, but found myself struggling a little bit when I hit Seratos and the mob levels increased.  As a result I decided to try and push on through to 53 through a combination of Instant Adventures, Rifts and Zone events.  I made pretty decent progress and am sitting at roughly 75% through 52.  I would have probably made it to 53 that night, but of course the things I mentioned above happened and that pretty much closed out our evening.

During the middle of my Instant Adventure-a-thon my friend Rae got home and logged in… and wanted me to check out her dimension.  She has literally spent the last three days doing nothing but work on her dimension and it shows.  She had some some really awesome things.  The picture above is me standing on the top platform of her tree house… that she built entirely from scratch.  Essentially she has this huge pavilion of sorts on the ground floor, with spiral staircases leading up to a garden level… then finally a series of platforms climbing up the tree.

This alone would be amazing, but she has also built down into the little grotto area at the bottom of the falls in the Moonshade Pools dimension.  So through a nifty winding path downwards you can reach the bottom and she is starting to build a pretty nifty dock down there.  I knew she had this in her, since she is a minecrafting fiend…  but overall she has done way more with dimensions than I would expect anyone would.  She has inspired me to start trying to do something with my own version of Moonshade Pools.  Right now it is pretty much just a catch all for all the nifty dimension items I have gotten so far.  If you are over on Deepwood, friend Audrae and take a look for yourself.

Wrapping Up

Well I should wrap up this post and get on with the whole getting ready thing.  We have a long list of errands we need to run today so that we can pack this evening and prepare to leave the state tomorrow.  We still have our houseguest, and he is seemingly doing okay.  He has been down to his mothers house quite a bit, so here is hoping he is about to decide he wants to move back home. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope we have safe travels.  I will likely be blogging tomorrow from the airport in Chicago, as that will be the first time I really have anytime to do much of anything.