1-20-09 and other birthday gifts

I ordered Rob one of those bumper stickers that says "1-20-09" (the last day Bush will be president) for his birthday, because we saw one a couple of weeks ago and he couldn't stop talking about it. I bet we end up putting it on my car instead of his, though, so as not to mar the pristine-ness of the Corolla. We'll see.

I also ordered him a pair of pants from Land's End, because he hasn't had any new ones lately and it's almost impossible to find his size in a store, especially in the chino-type pants like he wears to work. (He's six feet tall & very skinny - the only pants that fit him in most retail stores are the ones intended for teenagers.) The only other thing I've bought for him is the movie The Descent, which I found at Sam's. I know he wants that one. He had told me a couple of more obscure movies he wants that I'll probably order from Amazon. The other piece of his birthday present is traditionally the night we spend at the downtown Hilton for the marathon - that will be this Saturday. (Usually his birthday falls closer to marathon weekend than it did this year - the marathon is next Sunday and his birthday isn't until the Sunday after, which is good because my mother usually likes to have some sort of birthday celebration for him and we won't have to try to deal with that on marathon weekend.) Rob is taking his comp day from the Day of Mourning last week - because he worked the whole day that day - on the Tuesday after the marathon, and since Monday is MLK day he'll have two whole days to recover. Which is good. He'll be all of 44 years old soon and doesn't seem to recover quite as fast as he used to.

We didn't do much this weekend, except go see "The Pursuit of Happyness" - which was pretty good. I'm not usually too big on, you know, heartwarming single-father dramas in the normal way of things, but this one was not overblown and Will Smith was likeable but not quite as cocky as usual and, I don't know, it all worked. (I am just not a good movie reviewer. It's hard for me to put a finger on what makes a movie good or bad.)

I was going to meet my mom and Art at the house yesterday, but he called me to say that she couldn't make it up the two steps to get inside. Her right leg is just practically dead - she can't lift it at all. We are trying to get her back up to Houston to see the oncologist and get another chemo treatment, since the last one did seem to help. The two hospitals do not seem to coordinate their services very well, though. Something about Medicare coverage that I don't quite understand, apparently. I wish we had a Medicare expert to run interference on this, I really do. It's ridiculous.

I almost forgot to say that we are in an orgy of possession-purging, brought on by having to move bookshelves and stuff on Friday and again today, since they are coming back to finish the sheetrock. We are working on piles of stuff for Goodwill and another one for library donations - my god, do we have a lot of books. I found a whole box of books that I thought was Rob's old books and turned out to be mine. It had The Last Unicorn in it, as well as some old Larry Niven and some other stuff I thought had gone in some past round of book-purging. I started re-reading The Last Unicorn and apparently I haven't read it in so long that I can't remember what happens at all. I think, "Oh, yeah, I remember this," as I read, but so far I have completely failed to remember where things go from there. Makes it interesting.