Even though seagulls are born from eggs, their parents feed them. Eventually this gravy train must stop, and when it does there is much unhappiness. The babies follow the parents around peeping and hoping that they will change their minds and give them something to eat.
The Labor Day Holiday (first Monday of September) is traditionally the end of summer in the Northwest. When we were kids - this was the weekend that you closed down the Summer Cabin, put the boats away, drained all the water lines and basins, sealed all the windows and locked everything. As kids, it was also very sad, because it meant going back to school.
Regardless of the calendar, I can feel the approach of fall. I can't tell you what things specifically point to the onset of colder weather, but there are subtle signs. The smell of blackberries (I hated blackberries as a kid because it meant school was starting), stopping of new growth (the underbrush is starting to thin out), but the most important is the shortening of the day. Everything is pretty much the same - temperatures in the low seventies, only occasional showers, Seattle summer.
This weekend is also the last for crabbing and we pulled the pots on Monday and there was nothing, nada, zip. We will definitely enjoy our last meal from these wonderful creatures. We had a couple the other night that were over 7? and they were so meaty, mmmm good! Great! Fabulous food from the sea!
My mother is dying. Not right now, but sometime in the next six months. Don, my stepfather, is doing great seeing to her needs, but it's a twenty-four hour, seven-day-a-week job. As the full-time caretaker, Don needs help to take care of her now. Finding help hasn't been easy. The one request that Mom made when she was still lucid was that she be allowed to die at home. The problem is that there is very little qualified help available in the desert. They are in the center of a large county with few resources (middle of everywhere).
During the last couple of weeks I have been exploring the available options and the other things that must be done as a result of dying. Working through the various bureaucracies has been a giant pain in the ... We added me to Mom and Don's checking account (took over four weeks and it's still not right). After talking to the Neptune Society, I elected to go with a local undertaker. After Mom's death everything has now been arranged. Hospice has been contacted. There is a jurisdictional dispute for where Mom lives. If we want her taken to a care facility we need to talk to the people in the Tri-cities while the people in Moses Lake are the contact if we want to do home care. The Tri-Cities Hospice evaluated Velva and they are now willing to accept her in their program. It remains to be seen whether Moses Lake will accept Tri-city's evaluation. Tri-cities is fifty miles away while Moses Lake is over eighty.
This is an ongoing adventure, but I'm sure that things will all work out in the end.