….because her list of shizz to do before she dies is TOO LONG
Here’s the list as edited by me. I’m leaving the family names off.
Cousin’s letter (which I have stolen as an idea for an SF story). A cousin’s letter goes around to all the cousins and they add something to it and send it to the next person on the list. This has been a ten year project.
She does a family calendar (with Loki) and has done for a dozen years – one each for both sides of the family.
She has a family history site and blog.
She maintains a genealogical database. Note to self… if Alex is going to catch the family history next, what the hell is going to happen when the database needs to be switched from PC to Mac?
Two other family letters.
Activities around a once-every-three-years family reunion.
Family tree, third edition due soon.
Completed projects include Aunt Mary’s diary, my paternal granny’s life story, a Dresden plate quilt worked on by five generations of women (gives me chills to think about it, which, thankfully, a quilt can fix), a dozen life stories of family members and their life partners, my dad’s stories, my grandad’s stories, transcriptions of diaries, letters, and papers of yet more rellies, in profusion, picture her hacking her way through flabby sentences and questionable spelling with her Editrix Machete of Coherence, her dad’s stories (a two volume opus of such merit and wonder that I am baffled as to how to describe it).
And there’s more.
Coming up …MORE THAN TWENTY PROJECTS. I went through the list but I started to feel chest pain at the notion of retyping it. I exaggerate, barely.
All I meant to say about this is that, just in case nobody had noticed, my mother is completely awesome. In addition to all that she quilts, knits, keeps my dad fed and happy, puts up hordes of relatives and is a meeting point for many friends and family coming through town (she recently entertained both Bonnie and Rani when Bonnie visited her sister in Victoria), is a two time cancer survivor and is intimately involved in the eldercare of her 98 year old mom-in-law, reads non-fiction, keeps up with contemporary movies and TV on DVD, gardens, bird watches, clears about thirty to sixty email messages a day, and keeps her temper while being pestered for her ‘prayers’ for ministry by relatives in furrin lands civilizin’ the heathens. She is currently in the market for atheist tracts to send to relatives. No luck so far. I may have to write one for her.
To recap. Awesome, and a good person, too. I’m not going to say that everybody who meets her loves her, but the fans outnumber the detractors by a very wide margin.
So I hope nautilus3 lives until the singularity and uploads herself, because I’d like to think that she’ll be giving her attention to her family members for another thousand years. In my universe, she is grandmother spider, holding the family together with a skein of light and powerful threads.
Yes, I would like to live until the singularity and upload myself – being a bodiless intellect, or at least an intellect with my identity and with ageless and wear-free physical parts – I might be able to get to the bottom of my list. But it’s nothing wonderful, really. I have been and am most fortunate in that everything I have done in my earlier life has fed into my present life – as far as I can tell, nothing wasted. As for awesome,, all I can say is that Allegra is a biased observer, and, “Aw, shucks.”
Looked at another way, I am a dismal failure in that it took me more than a half a century to figure out that the most important thing is FAMILY.