Still here, Honest!

It does seem like an exceptionally long time since last I posted.

Update on T's eye- he's back and it's working- tho not without some healing still taking place. (Still has a little distortion and the pupil is STILL a wee bit dilated.)

Nevertheless, he's back in the safe haven of home.

Between my last post and his return, end of January, I discovered there was a new hoop to jump through regarding property ownership in Greece and had to frantically find an engineer to make new and accurate blueprints of our house.  It was also necessary to survey our property before the end of December (at the time) as there was a deadline and mega fines to face if it wasn't done properly.

And yes, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year etc.  The deadline originally was the 29th December!

The whole process was of course massively expensive and "financial son" in Chicago, had to transfer funds, the Tuesday after Christmas, so I could go on Wednesday to the bank (and stand there while they found the transaction and then go away for 1/2 hour while they made it all magically appear in our account!) then across the street, to engineer with wads of euros (who thankfully waited in line at government offices for proper stamps and payments, bless) to come in under the deadline wire.

Of course because so many people were caught out as it was the holidays, they extended the deadline til the end of February.

Then the television died, exactly 10 days before T came home.

According to the three television people I spoke with (all trying to sell me their choices of televisions) the power fluctuations on the island and many parts of Greece in general, make the average lifespan of a flat screen tv (no matter what size, and no matter how many UPS boxes and special shut off switches) to be no longer than 5 years.  For that reason I had to shop carefully to pay the least amount for the best product available.

I got a nice Korean one for a good price (the brand name is FU.  I'm not sure if I didn't favor it simply because in my mind those two letters summed up how I felt about having to buy another television 4 years after we bought the last one....)

It works well and it's way more intelligent than our last television as it discovered how to work the dvd player and the video recorder with almost no help from me!

I meanwhile have been going through photo albums and memories and scanning pictures into the void of my computer, hoping to get something together for my mother's memorial in April.  I'll be spending some time flying out west to Santa Fe for a special memorial with all her friends, then I'll be flying to South Carolina, to hug my university graduating granddaughter!!  (then I'll come back to Chicago and face the dentist before returning to Corfu.)

~~~

I've obviously come to terms with my mother's passing, but there are moments where the tide of grief is sometimes higher and sometimes lower. I am coping.  It's hard, but there are no other alternatives.

Sometimes, for me, going though these albums and photos going back to cover her life seem to make parts of my life, tho long past, SO vivid.

Maybe part of this is because things are so dire in the news and reality is filled with so many more unknowns.  At least the past is a known.  (well, tempered of course by memory which is subjective.)

Certainly, with all my mother's photo albums, MY past is a visible photographic timeline, as there are photographs not just of me growing up but pictures of my parents and grandparents, aunts, cousins, as children and then as adults.  There is such a great continuity with my present and the past.

My mother won a beauty pageant when she was two years old.

She was so cute.  (and according to my grandmother, she was so well behaved for the photographer, he wanted to make her his child model.  That didn't happen.)

This is also the only photo where in  my mother claimed to be a natural blonde.  We all spent a lot of time remarking that the photo was NOT in color...

She always used to talk about this picture and so did my grandmother.

My aunt used to just roll her eyes.


I found the certificate that gave her first prize.  She kept it in a box with her other little bits of special memories.



November 1927, and she was first prize - special mention!

~~~

So to all who slogged back to check out the blog, I welcome you to another erratic year...

Meanwhile, I will continue digging through the piles of albums and continue scanning scanning scanning...