So, we went to my brother-in-law’s for Thanksgiving dinner, bringing along my mother and sister and huge quantities of food including an Un-Turkey. The Un-Turkey was for my sister. She felt we should bring the whole thing so she could share. Every year she’s sure someone else will want to try it. Every year, no one does.

Upon arrival we learned that a relative was hovering at death’s door. It was an aunt of my husbands - the families lived next door to one another until Florida sucked them in. We thought she’d come through a recent surgery just fine, but there were complications. It was a sad but classic case of “The operation was a success but the patient died.” They took her off life support the day after Thanksgiving. And it really was sad. Her husband, children and grandchildren are going to miss her very much. It was way too soon, too.

We spent Monday and Tuesday commuting between work and the wake and Wednesday was the funeral. Returning to normal life I found the following:

- In two days 72 message had appeared in my spam folder. That’s in the e-mail account that I use and check every day. I’m afraid to look at the others.

- Some as yet uncounted (and undeleted) spam comments have been posted to this blog. This is becoming a constant annoyance. I don’t have time to moderate in a timely manner and I certainly don’t have time to deal with this. It makes me think that maybe I should just do this whole thing on Blogger.

- I have a newsletter to take apart and post parts of to an organization’s site. Also still working on the band’s redesign. I think I’m onto something. Now I have to put it together in a less rough draft.

- Huge piles of laundry accumulated. Clothing multiplies in the hamper, but then makes itself scarce when you’re looking for something to wear. There is no way we could worn the number of items that were in the hamper. In fact, I don’t think we own that many.

- My holiday to-do lists have grown to frightening proportions. I have to attack them this weekend. They’ll probably attack right back.

I have to confess something. The thing I like best about the holiday season is when it’s over. I don’t have time enough in the day to live my normal life at the pace I would like. Providing holiday cheer is really too much to ask.

So, semi-hiatus has probably begun again.

Halloween came and went without much of a blip around here. My daughter did some decorating outside. That’s good, because I never do. I’m terrible about decorating for holidays. Halloween decor has gotten way out of hand, though. Halloween lights? There are Halloween lights now, just like Christmas lights. I didn’t see so many of those this year. The surcharge we all just got in our electric bills might have put the damper on that. Anyway, we just have a nice little graveyard, edged with faux crime scene tape and some cobwebby stuff. It looks very nice and midly spooky. I’m glad my daughter is here to do those things. She makes us look normal.

Rachel, my granddaughter is at that age where she’s almost outgrown Halloween kid stuff or thinks she should have outrgrown it. So, she didn’t dress up, she just wore a tinsel halo around the house, unconnected to any actual costume. She went to do her trick or treating at her father’s anyway. She has a step-brother her age there. Almost no kids came to the door here. It’s been like that for number of years. No little kids and I don’t see many big ones around either. So, we have candy left over. It’s calling, but I’m trying not to listen.

I’ve lost some weight without trying since the whole medical thing started early this year. All my clothes fit better. I think it was mostly from not going to work for six weeks or so. Offices are worse for diets than a dessert cart. In fact, offices like mine sort of are dessert carts in their own way. Everyone brings in any cakes, cookies or candy they have leftover from parties or holidays. They want those calories out of the house. Then everyone consumes everyone else’s leftover calories. I don’t think the system is really efficient.

Like most people, I’ve always wondered where the other sock goes. You put a pair in the wash and get back just one. OK, what they do is, they gather together, multiply, and create new clothes, disguised as old, worn clothing. Then they infiltrate the out of season clothing you have stored away. When it’s time to drag out the next season’s stuff, it won’t fit into the space it occupied the year before. It’s a neat trick.

It’s the only explanation I can come up with. I’d put it off as long as I could, but it had to be done. We’re a day away from November, so it was really time to put the summer clothes away and dig out the cold weather stuff. This time I packed away every short sleeved item I own. I didn’t hold back a thing, not even a t-shirt. I usually keep a drawer of t-shirts in case of unseasonably warm weather, but not this time. So, I figured, I’d have plenty of space for the fall and winter stuff. When I took out the fall and winter things I set aside some things to be given away and trashed a few things that were really done. And when I put everything away, there was a pile leftover with nowhere to go. That’s when I came up with the sock theory.

Anyway, it’s done. You’d think with all this stuff, I’d be well dressed, but nothing could be further from the truth. Mostly, I wear jeans and a top and I’m good to go. Still, women seem to have more complicated needs when it comes to clothing than some men do. There are a lot of things that I might just wear once or twice in a season, but they need to be around just in case.

My husband doesn’t have to dedicate a day to dragging totes back and forth to the basement. He takes a different approach. His winter and summer wardrobes are the same. It’s a t-shirt and jeans for casual wear and a long sleeved shirt and jeans for slightly dressier occasions. If he needs to go all out, he wears Dockers. When the weather turns, he adds a jacket or sweatshirt. At his job, every so often they give the employees things with the company logo on it. Caps and short sleeved polo shirts mostly. You don’t have to wear them. They’re an extra. He’s acquired a few of the polo shirts and that’s what he wears to work every day. They’re identical. That’s fine with him. When something wears out, he replaces it with the same item. Exactly the same if possible. He doesn’t do change well. He currently doesn’t own a suit. If an occasion comes up that demands one, his solutioln is simple. He doesn’t go. He’ll have to break down and get one when our closest relatives’ kids start getting married, but until then, he’s staying out of Men’s World.

I’ve read good advice to bloggers that states that you should never post explanations as to why you haven’t posted recently. Either post or don’t. People don’t check in to read why you haven’t had anything to say. It’s good advice, which I’m now ignoring. I don’t suffer any delusions that there are a bunch of people spending valuable seconds of their time wondering why this blog hasn’t been updated recently, but I do like to put things on record.

It’s been a combination of things. Computer issues, health complications and family life have kept things busy. I haven’t even kept up with reading my favorite blogs. Then there’s the proposed redesign of a site coming up. I haven’t been able to come up with an ounce of inspiration for that project either. I hope to get back to blogging on a regular basis, but it’s not looking good for the immediate future.

Last year at this time, as we were moving the upstairs downstairs and vice versa, my daughter said she was afraid of what this September would bring. It’s become a convention in our house that September is something to dread. It’s only since the big one - 9/11 - that it’s seemed that way, but starting that year, Septembers have been a time to get through. Whether it’s global or personal, it just seems like that’s a prime time for things to hit the fan. This time, of course, the upheaval came to the residents of the Gulf Coast, and not us. That was so tragic it was hard to watch, but we did watch every day for a couple of weeks.

Since we haven’t lost everything, and we haven’t been afflicted by anything like Katrina, we really don’t have a thing to complain about. So, I’m not complaining, just mentioning that I still don’t much like September. Between global catastrphes that bring intense human suffering and just our own personal aggravation, I could really do without this month.

This year only one person in our family has moved, and that’s my son, as explained in the post below. Rudy the bassett hound finally returned from the hospital today, after surgery to remove a piece of dog toy that no one can account for. His family will be paying off that bill for quite a while. Rudy is still very much a convalesecent and isn’t the best patient in the world. He’s refusing to touch his prescription dog food, but has to be restrained from munching on rocks and sticks. This isn’t going to go smoothly.

There’s a vibe in the air, too. We’re sniping at each other. Not much, but more than is usual. We’re all too easily offended or something.

I’ve been pretty quiet because I’ve been in a funk since Katrina hit. Mostly because of all the personal devastation, but also because it exposed just how far our nation has sunk in the Bush years. It’s depressing, is what it is.

Finally, I’ve been sick for the last week, and trying to just work through it and make it go away through force of will. Now I’m trying the antibiotic approach and that seems to be working better. All in all, I’ve had little to say here or in person.

Things will improve, or at least my attitude will. But lately, I just don’t care for September.

Today we’re all just worried sick about Rudy. That’s him on the right. On the left is Roxy, his older, but not wiser, companion. That picture was taken a few months ago. He’s only about a year old now, so he’s bigger than that now. Mostly longer, actually. Roxie and Rudy are my grand-dogs. It works just like grandchildren. You get to enjoy them and you don’t have to clean up after them or do any of the hard work. Rudy is the sweetest dog you’d ever want to meet. He loves everyone and is reasonably well behaved for such a youngster. He got sick on the weekend. He went to the vet and got sent home much improved but now he’s relapsed and he seems very sick indeed. He’ll be going back to the vet, of course, but the thing is that no one, including the vet, seems to be exactly sure what’s wrong. We’re worried.

This was quite a week at work. Having had the gift of a nice easy start back the previous week, this one was the week from hell. Everyone who called seemed to be seriously divorced from reality, and it seemed like everyone did call. All week. Without stopping. I’m tired now, but I’ll be moreso when this weekend is over. I think I overscheduled.

Tonight we’re going to see my son’s band play. We try to go whenever he’s local, but nowadays we only stay for one set. That usually starts at about eleven at night. Tomorrow night I’m going to see Arlo Guthrie with the Mammals and I think I’m volunteering at that event. Considering that we were out last Sunday night as well, that’s all a bit more of a social whirl than I’m really up for.

Last week we were offered complimentary tickets to a production of The Full Monty for last Sunday night. It was playing at The Patchogue Theatre, which is one of the successful restoration projects around here. It’s gone from being a vaudeville venue to a local movie house to a rundown flea market to nothing at all, and now it’s a theater that’s revitalizing another downtown.

We took my mother with us. It was a great chance to get her out to something kind of special. It was a fully professional, equity cast, so the singing was great. The only disappointment was that the whole point of the comped tickets was a talk by Terrance McNally, who wrote the book for the musical and that took place up in the balcony. We couldn’t get there with my mother, so we had to skip that part. She enjoyed the evening so much that she remembered it the next day, so it was worth it.

The Full Monty is about a bunch of unemployed blue collar guys who put on a Chippendale’s type show to raise some cash. That’s the joke behind it. It’s not really such a joke. I remember when male strippers started and it wasn’t at Chippendale’s. It was at an obscure club on the shore of Lake Ronkonkoma about thirty years ago. The building and property were owned by a (Mafia) connected car dealer from Nassau county. He had his driver, known as Buggy Ray, recruit a couple of people he knew out this way to turn the club, which was kind of defunct, into a functioning nightspot. The rumor was that the county was going to buy up all the property around the lake and that the car dealer could get more for a running business than for just the property and building. No one knew if that’s what the car dealer was really up to, but the guys that Buggy Ray found threw themselves into the mission of creating a running club. It was what they wanted. And we were in a recession, which was hitting Long Island particularly hard. Opportunities were hard to come by, just like in The Full Monty. Buggy Ray’s friends just didn’t dwell on the possibility that they weren’t meant to succeed for long.

It was a big space to fill. The club was in an old Victorian mansion and there was one big room with a stage, a bar downstairs with a smaller stage and then there was a bar - no stage, over on the side. It was also a bad time of year to get started. The most popular bands on the Long Island circuit, foremost of which was Twisted Sister, were booked out in the Hamptons. In those days there was a busy bar and band scene on the east end of Long Island and celebrities didn’t own it lock stock and barrel. Come summer, the youth of Long Island headed east. Meanwhile, in Lake Ronkonkoma, Buggy Ray’s friends booked bands as best they could. Things were a little slow, but there were some pretty good nights, too. Most business people would expect a venture like that to take some time to build, but there seemed to be some hurry about this. The car dealer may have been under some financial pressure. He was reported to have been kidnapped for a very short period that summer. It was in the papers, but I don’t recall if that mystery was ever cleared up.

It hadn’t been terribly long since strip clubs had morphed into topless clubs, which were, at the time, featuring more nude dancers than merely topless ones. There were lots of those clubs on Long Island. Buggy Ray and his friends considered turning the club into one like that, but while they were considering, another idea arose. It was the Glam Band era, and the bands that played at the club usually performed in huge platform boots, make up and lots of accessories. One of the regular bands - the name is lost to memory now - had a drummer who was up for a solo career. His name was Bobby and he was basically skin and bones, but he had flare - literally. Bobby and Buggy’s friends came up with the idea of featuring male strippers and putting on a show for the ladies. And so it happened. Bobby used his band costume for starters - cape and huge fur hat with horns - and for a finale, he set himself on fire. Just the nipples, I think. It was supposed to be a trick, but sometimes he got burned. It didn’t stop him. Bobby was a trouper. And maybe just a little bit of a masochist.

Times were still bad and it wasn’t hard to find guys to dance. The Full Monty wasn’t really so far-fetched. Some of them were buff, some - not so much. It was news. No one had heard of anything like it before. Bobby got his picture in Newsday, although the story is too old to be found online. He appeared on a local TV show, complete with horned hat and cape. One of Buggy Ray’s friends did an interview for the newspaper article about it and said that they could have had a topless club, but that they didn’t want to, because those didn’t have “the taste of class”, whereas this did.

History has shown that they were onto something. Sadly, the club burned down before the idea could really take off. There were seven points of ignition. The police questioned everyone, including Buggy Ray’s friends, except the one who went to Mexico right after the fire. No arrests were made. Chippendale’s opened in New York within the next year.

I got through the first day back at work in much better condition than I expected to. It didn’t hurt that it was very quiet for a Monday. That was a piece of luck I never expected. And there was a lovely welcome, starting with a sign on the bulletin board by my desk and then later, bagels in the library. Bagels are the basic unit of celebration at our office. There were donuts, too, but I passed on those. Being on medication that’s capable of driving one’s triglycerides up into the low thousands makes you think twice about donuts. There was a lovely bouquet of flowers as well. Now I remember why I’m glad I work there. At least as long as being independently wealthy doesn’t seem to be an option.

I was talking with the office manager about how the doubts I’d had last Friday. That’s when I called her and told her I wasn’t sure I could make it in by today. I’d been done in after just keeping an appointment with the doctor. I recalled that she’d taken a couple of vials of blood. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but then I recalled that I’d been exhausted the Friday before, which also featured bloodwork requiring multiple. The office manager, who’s lifelong medical odyssey of her own, said that when she was having treatments, bloodwork took it out of her in more ways than one, too. I’m including this tidbit because you don’t normally think of having a vial or two of blood taken as anything that you’d even notice. It seems that under some circumstances you can expect it to be kind of tiring.

Tomorrow’s the day. Until this evening, I was worried about being able to handle my normal routine. Last Friday I went out to the doctor and was basically done for the day. I couldn’t do another useful thing. I called my boss and told her I wasn’t sure I’d be able to go back Monday after all. She was great about it and said that was fine, or if I did come in not to worry if I couldn’t make it through the whole day. Things have improved each day and I’m more hopeful about being able to get back into the swing of things.

The thing is, I picked tomorrow as the day to go back myself. I had no experience with radiation treatment and since everyone is different no one had any real specific advice. I decided a couple of weeks to recuperate sounded about right. Just pulled it out of a hat, really. The doctor said that would be fine and signed off on it. I must have been nuts to pick a Monday. Mondays are a bit of a nightmare there under the best of circumstances. So here’s my advice to anyone undergoing radiation: You may not need it, but try to get yourself three or four weeks to get your strength back when it’s done. And don’t go back on aMonday, or whatever is the craziest day where you work. Of course, that only applies to people who are feeling fine before radiation. If you’ve been through chemo or are feeling sick it’s a whole different ball of wax.

I’ll probably be blogging less for a bit. I can really see myself falling asleep right after the weeknight duties are completed. I hope not. I don’t do well with all work and no play, but it might be the way it is for a while.

One thing I’ve had a little time to do during my enforced long vacation is get back in touch with some of Suffolk County where I live. I used to regard the whole county as my place of residence, because you tended to be all over it for different things. Now traffic and just being busy keep me a lot closer to home. Last week, after an appointment with the doctor I went up to Port Jefferson which is near the doctor’s office. It’s my favorite tourist town on Long Island and I was trying to be a tourist. As it turned out, 100 degree days and a recent radiation graduate mix very badly, so I didn’t stay as long as I wanted.

I brought the camera in hopes of capturing a very strange thing I’d seen on a shorter visit there a couple of months ago. Pigeons seemed to have moved in to replace the seagulls that were always around in the past. In fact, seagulls are all over Long Island. On that day, there were pigeons, instead of seagulls, posing on the pilings and gazing out over the water. Pigeons are a relatively recent addition out here. I guess they moved out from the city just like everyone else. But to see them acting just like seagulls was a little unsettling. Sadly, all the sea birds, gulls, terns and pigeons alike, must have been on their lunch hour when we were there, because there were none on the piers at all. I had to settle for more standard scenery.

Pictured above is one of the Port Jefferson ferries, along with a tugboat buddy. They’re kind of the centerpiece of the village. They cross Long Island Sound between Bridgeport, CT and Port Jefferson all day, every day. The price isn’t bad, unless you want to take your car. It’s expensive with a car, but sometimes worth it. And you have to deduct the price of gas and tolls from the net cost. This one is the Grand Republic, which is one of the ones I took on my trips to New Haven for medical consultations.

What I like about Port Jefferson is that it’s managed to remain honestly quirky, even while becoming popular and prosperous. You feel as though you can be yourself there, just as much as in, say, Greenwich Village. Port Jefferson is on the north shore, which is the part of Long Island that’s indistinguishable from New England. While the more self-consciously toney north shore and east end communities have centres (you know you’re in a determinedly upscale area when the word changes from “center” to “centre”) for spiritual development, wellness and just about everything else, Port Jeff has a psychic. It also has a biker shop. That is to say, a shop that features leather thongs and other accessories necessary for the well turned out biker or biker old lady. There’s a sign in the window saying, “Everyone Welcome. Come in and browse”. It has what’s possibly the best used and rare bookstore on Long Island.

What you can do in the village is shop, eat, drink, go to galleries or to the theater. There are beaches nearby, but the village is a harbor town. I think that’s why success hasn’t spoiled it. It’s a working harbor. Those ferries are providing real transportation in a pleasant but no frills kind of way all day every day. I’ve noticed that the waterfront towns on Long Island are a lot more grounded if there’s any real work going on, as opposed to ones that are all about boating and leisure pursuits.

It’s too bad I have to return to work soon. Given a little more time I might find my sense of place again.