Old pictures

my mom & me, 1984
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

There was a meme-ish thing floating around that said to post old pictures of yourself, and it reminded me that I had been intending to post this picture anyway - not because I'm in it but because my mom is. This was taken in Las Vegas in 1984. It was in our hotel room, I think - which was at the Riviera, if you really want to know. This was probably taken by my grandmother. I don't know why I decided to put my head on my mother's shoulder like that - it's rather unlike me, really.

Let's see, in the summer 1984 I would have been 24, and she was - well, actually, she was almost exactly the age I am now. (That's a slightly eerie coincidence, to my mind.) I don't know why, exactly, but my grandparents took my mother and me to Las Vegas that summer. I was broke as usual, but they paid for everything. Seems to me they even gave me a little bit of money to gamble with - sort of embarrassing, really, to be that broke.

Anyway. That's not the point. The point, I guess, is that my mother and I were closer than most mothers and daughters are. We probably weren't as close at this point, in the early 80s, as we became later, but the seeds of it had already been sewn. At some point when I was an undergraduate, she started coming up to Austin every few months to visit me, and I discovered that I actually enjoyed her company. (Although frankly, I think that part of the attraction of those trips for her was getting away from my father.) We would go shopping and out to eat and to movies, nothing terribly exciting, normally, but we would have fun.

I can't say that this trip to Las Vegas with my mother and grandparents was wildly fun, but I enjoyed it, on the whole. I think we stayed 3 or 4 days, and we went to two shows - Charo, and the Folies Bergere. (I did not get to pick the shows.) We must've stayed 3 nights, because I remember that on the 3rd night we went downtown rather than going to a show. I didn't gamble much, on the whole - I rarely do - but I remember playing roulette at some downtown casino, and winning, at least for a little while. Mostly I watched people. Las Vegas 20 years ago was a good bit different than it is now - a little grittier, more working-class, I guess. I've never been to other gambling places to compare, but I imagine that it's more like someplace like Reno or Laughlin is today than the Las Vegas of today. I still enjoyed the people watching when I went back to Las Vegas 20 years later, but the people were very different.

(I wrote several very long entries about the trip to Las Vegas in 2004, all of which were of course lost in the wreckage of Diary-X - so maybe I will get around to writing about it again before the end of next month. I have never yet run out of things to write about during Holidailies, but I always worry that I will! - so there's one day covered.)

Sucky Sunday

This has not been a good day. First of all, our Thanksgiving has fallen apart, which is minor at this point, really. My aunt called and upset me - why, exactly, is too complicated to go into. Basically, she just has a talent for it. Then Art called and said that he had talked to my aunt too, and told me the stuff about Thanksgiving, and he was pissed off at her too, it turned out, for basically the same reason - which is good because it means I'm not being completely unreasonable. (I didn't really think I was being unreasonable about her pissing me off, though - what was unreasonable was how mad I was about it.)

Then, on top of that, tonight GuildWars decided to die. It's not really GuildWars' fault, exactly, but why why why now? It didn't really die completely, and I knew it was coming, but still. I've been playing for six months - or closer to eight, now, really - with a substandard card and not quite enough memory, so why does it have to choose now to finally crap out? (It's Nightfall's fault, as near as we can figure out. Nightfall seems to be a big memory suck.) I had already requested fixes for both of these things - i.e., more memory and a new video card - as Christmas presents, but it looks like they're going to have to be fixed sooner than that, if I want to be able to keep playing Nightfall. And GuildWars is a big chunk of what's been keeping me marginally sane lately. It seems to be the only thing that distracts me sufficiently to take my mind off my mother for a while.

I guess I should go ahead & say that we are probably putting my mother in a nursing home this week - or very soon, anyway. Art can't cope any more - I don't think any one person can. The only good thing - in a way - is that she's so out of it now that I don't think she really knows what's happening - or only in flashes. She has gone downhill so rapidly in the last few weeks that it's really unbelievable.

(Sorry if this is sort of incoherent. I'm not in a really coherent state of mind right now!)