My grandmother, Eleanor "Nana" Morrow passed away on the weekend. She hadn't been doing well for the past year and a half, a strange bit of immobilizing back pain leading to hospitalization and then to a nursing home. Last week she took a turn for the worse -- we weren't sure if it was due to an infection or if she had a stroke, but she couldn't move or speak very well, if at all. She went back to the hospital last Monday, briefly though, since the doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her, and again on Thursday.

I saw her on Friday night for a good couple of hours. She still couldn't move or communicate, but when my brother took her hand she seemed to react facially and her grip tightened. She died the following morning. It still hasn't really sunk in, like I know she's gone, but I don't really think of her like that, like she's still around. I've been busy doing stuff to help out my dad, like rewriting his two page obituary into something that'll fit into the average obit space in our local paper, but it doesn't feel like I'm doing enough. I don't know. It's a weird feeling.

Anyway, I'll try to post something non-death related as soon as I come up with something. Little hard, is all though.

Following up...

Following up on the last post, the Kids in the Hall show was great fun. Sure they were a little older and chubbier than they were back in the heyday of their show, but they were great as ever. Kevin MacDonald's voice was a little coarse -- apparently he had a cold -- and one of the running jokes of the night was how rough his voice was. There was one or two sketches from the show, but the rest was new material.


There was a great sketch with Dave Foley and MacDonald, where Foley played a guy who only ordered one beer at a last-call and was berated by his buddy for not ordering more. Foley explained he didn't need to order more than one because he had a time machine, upon which MacDonald berated him further for having a time machine and using it to get drunk instead of going back in time and killing Hitler or something. So Foley goes back in time and orders two beers at last-call. After a call-back at the end of another sketch, a third sketch had the character going back in time to kill Hitler when he was an art student, but the good-natured Hitler offered him a German beer, which the guy reluctantly accepted instead of killing Hitler. I didn't do the sketch justice, but rest assured it was great -- definitely the sort of thing you'd see on the show.

On Tuesday I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Wasn't a great movie necessarily, but Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford made it work when lesser hands wouldn't. And even if it wasn't the best movie I'll probably see this summer, it was worth seeing on the big-screen and I'd recommend it for that reason.

Not much else to say really. I finally put a DVD-TV stand unit together that I'd been planning for a while. For someone with zero carpentry skills, it turned out half-decent -- I had to build it from scratch since I couldn't find a unit to fit the spot I wanted to put it in, much less a decent unit for less than a hundred and fifty dollars.

Nana's settled into her room at the nursing home. She seems to like it, even if she thinks she's still in the hospital and will be coming back home at some point. My cousin, Aubrey, almost spilled the beans when he mentioned that we'd loaded her bed-frame into the truck he rented to move her stuff around, but we didn't dwell on it and moved past it.

Finally, here's a plug for Tangent: Superman's Reign from DC Comics. It's a nicely done, self-contained 12 issue series with nice writing and great Jamal Igle artwork. I'm really enjoying the interplay between Green Lantern and the Flash in the series and wish there was more being done with the characters as a pair elsewhere. It's an easy series to overlook since it's in his own little spot and not really connected to other titles, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit and recommend it.