Keep on WINNING

It rained REALLY hard in California this week. That's kinda rare, so we pay attention when it happens. Because of, you know, floods and mudslides and the inexorability of advancing water.

My basement, which is made of some kind of composite that I would think of as clamshell and clay except that it's probably pebbles and clay. I can't look at it without seeing the odd curves and imagining them swaying, as water makes cracks and seeps through. Home owning is definitely for risk takers and, now that I'm getting old, risk seems less enticing than ever and ever wasn't much.

A week or so ago, we saw part of Bucket List, by accident. Because there was absolutely nothing else watchable, in all the 145 or so channels that was worth a spit. Because Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman? How bad could it be? Well, the devil's in the writing, folks, if not in the directing, and you had to accept a lot of perfectly unacceptable, unimaginable premises in order to go with this movie, which was still relatively pleasant.
Okay, Bucket list. My best friend is sit/lying in a bed across the Bay, waiting to breathe her last. If she put April in Paris on her BL, it would be a crap shoot whether she'll even be around, come April. Could she fly to Paris with her breathing apparatus? Would any hotel offer her space, when she arrived from the airport in an ambulance? That's if she'd been allowed on - or off - the airplane in the first place.
No, her list will need to be small homey things. A morning with her brand new grandchild, watching the chard and crocuses grow in her back yard. The taste of Burmese food on her tongue. She can't eat anymore, since swallowing became a problem and she had the tracheotomy but she longs for taste. Quietude, which is only achieved by shutting off the machines which are keeping her alive. How I wish I was making this up. How I'd love to have her rip out the tubes, stand up, sweep out of the house, flop into the front seat of somebody's car and demand a latte, large, double, full fat, chocolate sprinkles and a whiff of cinnamon, before we go play with clay at her studio and head to a Thai place for lunch.
Why is it, again, that we elders are supposed to fear death panels? Do we think there's some other result possible?