A whirlwind two weeks is coming to an end. I return home this Saturday after a flurry of activity to make sure my mom is going to be safe and happy in her home for as long as she is able.
Her knee is healing very well - so much so that I worry that she will be forgetting to use the walker far before the 2 and a half more weeks the doctor wants. Her short term memory issues will make remembering that she needs to use the walker difficult as well.
But the good news is that it is healing so well. We have a home health aide coming in for the next three weeks at an average of 4 hours a day to help ease the transition. But as each morning comes, my mom is stronger and my biggest concern is that she will rebel and want to throw everyone out of her house.
We did lots of paperwork this week - the bank, the care manager, the lawyer. The Lifeline is installed tomorrow along with the new computer desk so that she has an ergonomic space to play her internet jigsaw puzzles, search the web and send email to her friends.
One more trip to the doctor and physical therapy and then lots of hugs. My brother is actually going to arrive something over the weekend. He flew in from Germany a few days ago to Vermont and will drive down the coast on his way here. I'll miss him by 24 hours probably, but will see him at the end of his cross country trip when he arrives on the west coast.
Voiceover business wise - projects came in throughout the week and because of my portable setup, I was able to get them done and sent off - to be invoiced when I get back home.
The other VO related thing was that I found some Vanderwall cubes at the Aldi's - these are the cubes that can be used for portable sound treatment. I haven't been able to find them at home, so I bought one and passed along the information to the VO-BB - two of my virtual VO buddies asked me to pick one up for them. Cost more to mail them than buy them!
Yikes! I'm seeing first hand how difficult it is to have a walker in a non-handicap accessible house. I rearranged the furniture a bit and rolled up Persian rugs so that there is a clean shot from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom to the office to the bathroom. Only a couple of narrow passages in most of the house, but since my mom installed a bidet in the bathroom a few years ago, the walker gets stuck about halfway into the room. She is not going to be on the walker very long - thank goodness, but while she is, she needs 24 hour eyes and ears. A three-in-one commode was delivered along with a bath chair. Considering that she can't hardly maneuver the obstacles of the bathroom during the day, this was a life saver last night and probably for several more days. We put it close to the bed in case she had the urge. She thought maybe once was going to be all. I didn't sleep much. The light went on about 4 times last night. And I popped up out of bed to check on her. Didn't really need to, she did fine. Crossing my fingers that she will be on to a cane in short order. This experience - just 24 hours so far - has immediately given me even greater respect for caregivers. What a wonderful group of people. My friend Liz de Nesnera, fellow voiceover talent (English and French) takes care of her mother and has for a long time. To caregivers everywhere, here's a huge thank you for the work you do. I am grateful for the chance to be here - I will be able to find the right kind of support for mom for the immediate period after I leave and for the longer term while she is still rehabilitating. Hard to know what is really going on when you are three thousand miles away!
I pick up mom today from her stint in the rehabilitation facility after a knee replacement. Scurrying around the house - rolling up rugs and sweeping up the accumulated dirt. Moving furniture around so that she can maneuver a walker for the time she will need it which requires some creative arranging. Clearing off the dining room table which has become a cluttered mess of paperwork, phone numbers, brochures, laptop and cables - and one of mom's cats. This process reminds me of my first "real" job...one that had a retirement plan. I was 34 years old and completely unaware of the concept of retirement and the idea of saving for it. It took me a year to sign up for their Stock and Savings Investment plan that the company matched dollar for dollar. While that kind of company is hard to find these days, the CONCEPT needs to be introduced much earlier in life. Now if I had taken a normal path and gotten a real job earlier in life, perhaps I would have had more of a clue, but my road was full of free lance and part time work by choice. So what does that have to do with 2008? I'm 3000 miles away from home helping my mom as she starts a major life transition. The past week has only scratched the surface of what one needs to know about services for seniors. The table is littered with phone numbers and notes about who I've called and what we've talked about. The iPaq is getting filled with appointments for this coming week - doctors, the lawyer, the bank, the geriatric care manager, the potential housekeeper/driver/companion. There is a book 3/4" thick from the State of New York called Connections for Caregivers that I have only had a chance to glance at. This past week I was able to work in about 3 jobs, 5 auditions and a favor for a friend, while I was making calls, scanning and emailing copies of the Power of Attorney, keeping appointments and driving across the river to Kaaterskill twice a day. I've set up a recording space in the basement of my mom's house - a place she will probably not visit for a long time if ever again. The challenge this week will be to find the time to check email and actually drag the laptop down there to work. But the good news is that my mother has finally accepted the fact that she is getting older and will need some help. How much and for how long is where our ideas start to go down different paths. She knows, for example, that she cannot drive right now. But she fully expects that she will be able to drive again. I have not broached that subject and frankly don't intend to at the present time. I need more information. I started worrying about my mom about a year ago - her writing wasn't the same - her calls were starting to get confusing. But I really didn't start gathering information until a couple of months ago - when my mother called out of the blue and told me that she was going to sell her house and move to California. She gave me some assignments - find a small place with separate walls (not an apartment) so she chould have a piano and get her a list of the Methodist churches in town so that she could play the organ in one of them. Over the next month, she changed her mind about five times. And suddenly decided to get her knee replaced. Perhaps it wasn't really sudden, but we didn't know about it until shortly before it happened. My point is that there is a LOT to know - and sorting it out - finding the right combination of services - and the right people - is a complex task. I hope I am getting good advice and helping my mom make good decisions. I'm still in an advisory capacity right now - helping her remember the new information that we are being bombarded with. Her challenges right now are a faltering short term memory and some increasing word retrieval issues. Right now she wants to stay here in her house - so my goal is to make that happen for as long as she wants to. Time to bump the cat off the table and go pick up mom. The phone has rung about three times as I have been writing this - she is very anxious to get out of there and back home.
The world got smaller again yesterday when 3 of us VO-BB'rs met up at the New Paltz Diner for lunch. Liz de Nesnera, Ron Levine and I converged around 1. We stayed until well after 3:30 - talking about voiceover work, marketing and moms. At one point the sky opened up and threw rain sideways at the diner, but by the time we all got back on the road, it was back to hot and steamy. I ran into patches of wet road, but no actual rain on the way back to Hudson. Took the toll road up to Kingston and then went 9W (there is a music joke that goes with this - want to hear it?) back up to Catskill. Stopped to walk the nature trail out to the Saugerties Lighthouse. The rain had made some of the trail a bit wet and I didn't expect the sand - so since I was wearing sandals and not sneakers, I had to turn around before getting to the lighthouse! It was probably just around that last bend in the trail. Here's the joke...first you give them the Answer - here's the Answer... 9 W. And then you ask them what the question is. Here's the question... Do you spell your name with a "V" Mr. Wagner? My mom told me that joke a million years ago. Her knee replacement surgery is healing very well and her physical therapy is progressing. But because of short term memory issues, she is having trouble remembering how to use the walker correctly. Now, given her general physical strength, I don't anticipate that she will be using a walker for very long - but for as long as she needs to, we need to make sure that she is safe. So that's my task - figuring out a way to help her stay where she wants to stay for as long as she can.
Not green as in money - green as in grass, as in trees. Everytime I come to the midwest or the east coast in the spring, summer or fall I dream in green. The earth smells rich. In the fall, the green is highlighted with so many wonderful bright colors. For the past 30+ year's I have lived in a desert - a well irrigated desert close to an ocean - but still a desert - prone to fire and a shortage of water. I love it there, but there is something about the green - the real natural lush green - that is so inviting.
Now, that being said, come Feburary, when I am outside at midnight in my bathrobe watching an eclipse of the moon, the idea of living on the east coast is far from mind.
So - despite the humidity - one reason for all the green I suppose - I am enjoying this visit.
Today a trip to New Paltz to see a fellow voiceover friend. She's driving up from Jersey. After printing out the Google map, I noticed that we will be meeting near Terwilliger Street in New Paltz. After the initial excitement of seeing my name - I remembered that New York is "home" to the Terwilliger's. The Terwilliger homestead is close by - so a street named Terwilliger isn't unusual. Now the little tiny town, hamlet, village, crossroads on the road to Palm Springs from Hemet IS unusual. Not much of a town, just the intersection of Bailey and Terwilliger and a volunteer fire department. You can see pics on the Terwilliger Group on Facebook.
Gosh, it is beautiful here in the Hudson Valley - not terribly hot (right now anyway) and so very green. The winding two lane roads show endless fields and trees and houses the same age as our country or older. I live in San Diego and it is brown - a desert. What green and color there is is heavily irrigated. Without that, brown. And the history isn't so visible. It really is pleasant. Filled with art and music and theater. No wonder she wants to stay here.
But even better is that my mom's knee replacement is healing beautifully -
AND the concept of having someone come live with her to take some of the burden of cooking and cleaning is not causing a disturbance in the force. In fact it is appealing to her. We've been talking about how much more energy she would have to do the things she loves, if she didn't have to worry about the cooking and the cleaning and the shopping.
We haven''t discussed that this includes doing the driving. But that particular part of the conversation will wait until she is out of the rehabilitation facility and back in her house. No need to cause a scene - and I have a feeling that the idea of giving up her car is not going to be met peacefully - it's a Prius after all!
But so far, so good. And the fact that it has been a holiday weekend has allowed me to concentrate on her these past few days without worrying that a client had an emergency voiceover. (You'd be amazed at how often that happens.) But I did bring my whole portable set up and I'm ready to record as needed this coming week. And I may decide to stay a bit longer. The only rub there is the fee to change the flight. In between meetings and errands, I will be doing some marketing here in the Hudson Valley. Time to start mining this area...I'll probably need the write offs in the coming years!
It was only 4:30 in the morning, but it ooked like a wild party inside the terminal as we taxied to the B gates. The lights from the plane and our contant motion danced off the imperfections of the terminal glass - giving the appearance of disco balls and pyrotechnics. A wandering walk from B to F through a new hallway I don't remember ever seeing. Narrow with an arched ceiling of buttressed metal and glass. Hanging from the ceilings every 20 feet or so are large colorful square plexiglass objects in groups of three. Each piece has a half circle depression in the middle - as if a piece of plastic had been vacu-formed over a half a large exercise ball. Approaching the F terminal - more color - a young man with a red mohawk wandered by to queue in with a large group at the only open restaurant in the area - a McDonald's. Just a short layover here in Chicago before finishing the trip.
Happy 4th to my fellow Americans. I'll be able to watch fireworks as I arrive at the San Diego airport on the way to Albany New York - ultimate destination about an hour south of there. My mom had her knee replaced about a week and a half ago and is chomping at the bit to get back to her home. She is 80 and is healing beautifully physically. She has even finally shaken the effects of the anesthesia and the first kind of pain meds - but she is probably not going to be able to live by herself anymore. As her mind clears to where she was before the surgery, she isn't going to believe that this time has come, but after begging her friends for months to tell me how she is doing, only NOW are they telling me that they have been worried. I understand - I think - no one wanted to "tattle." But when they saw how quickly she slipped into a state where she simply couldn't communicate, the flood gates opened. It is hard enough when this time comes - but you add to the situation that I never lived in the town where she retired (so I really don't "know" anyone very well), that I live 3000 miles away, that my brother lives in Europe and that her only other family is her two nephews in Mexico - and you can begin to see that there might be some challenges ahead. To prepare myself for what might be a battle of wills - I had a Thai massage at Zen Sanctuary last night. Great stuff. And I'm going to practice deep breathing and the old counting to ten before speaking rule. I have lots of phone numbers, some books on the subject and will keep an open mind. Thanks goodness it was a holiday today before a weekend and I was able to get all the jobs on the books completed last night. So I was able to spend the day preparing for a minimum week long stay. Making sure my portable studio had all it's cables and connectors and that everything worked the way it should. Syncing my old iPaq - which required downloading a new driver because of my recent upgrade to Office 2007. Testing the new service on my laptop that turns my phone into a modem so that I can be connected from anywhere during the trip. And we were even able get in a bike ride and lunch at the new Burger Lounge in our little community of Kensington. I'll make some snacks to take along with me later and of course I'll forget something. But I will let it roll off like water off a duck's back. I'm not the one facing a huge life change. The least I can do is stay calm and help the process. Wish us luck! Come to think of it "stay calm and help the process" is good advice for pretty much any stressful situation! Oh - and here's to a great birthday America - may we have many many more.
If social networking, work email, electronic newsletters, blogs, and face-to-face meetings are taking up your time, add miscellaneous subscribed email feeds, RSS feeds and listening to podcasts to the list.
One of the best sources for voiceover industry podcasts is voices.com - in addition to blogs like Vox Daily - they have regular Vox Talk podcasts produced by Voices and by their guest Experts. I've created a couple of them myself. Great stuff, but keeping up with them is a challenge.
Terry and Trish - both voice talent have created Voice Overs on Demand - a podcast where they interview voice talent from around the country (and probably around the world).
Another website filled with information, articles and links to podcasts is Voiceover Xtra.
So if you don't have paying work, auditions, marketing, bookkeeping or simply eating and sleeping to do - click on some podcasts! As I write this, I am listening to The Advertising Show co-hosted by Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe. They discuss advertising issues, marketing trends and strategies, and feature weekly interviews with prominent industry experts.
And while I don't see many podcasts on Media Post, I do find a ton of interesting articles in their plethora of publications.
I think I'll stop now and go to the fair. Get AWAY from the keyboard for several hours. If you send me an email and I don't respond before tomorrow, don't call 911 - I'm fine, really. I haven't gone out of the voiceover business overnight - really - just taking a little break.
Not social networking this time. Although that is an ongoing constant - I want to say interruption - but that is my own fault really - I check email every few minutes. Filtering would help - sort all those invitations to connect to a separate folder so I don't see them until I have time to do them all in one fell swoop. But that's not the kind of networking I'm talking about. I'm talking computer networking. Instead of just using the wi-fi on my laptop and the airport card in the Mac to tap into the Internet, I'm finally going to actually network these computers together. This is in preperation for re-doing my recording studio area. I've been doing everything in one place - email, recording, bookkeeping, marketing, website maintenance, social networking... This is not really a good idea - to have everything I do on one computer (with a nightly back up to an external hard drive). But additionally, with the new configuration of my space, I will not want to do all my work crowded into a smaller space. I'm debating using my laptop as my other machine, or buy a new tower. Cost isn't the issue - just wondering how many computers a person needs. And if I DO get a new computer, I'll have to search for one that has XP on it. I am not ready to have one computer on Vista and the rest on XP. Although - stream of conscious thought here - if I did get a new one and kept the old one loaded with XP for recording and not for the other things, then I'd be able to learn Vista and be able to help my mom who just got a new computer. Trying to walk an 80 year old whose short term memory is starting to go through new software that I haven't ever seen is going to be a challenge! In any event, I'm looking forward to getting all the existing computers networked.
|