It's Truth and it's not fully clothed

I often downplay mom's "problem". I thought I was saving her from embarrassment. The thing is, she'll tell anyone, she does tell everyone about what she's doing and what's going on and then she wonders why they give her advice. She pulls no punches about not being able to use the shower and the amount of cat excrement and everything else. While, of course, I run inside and hide.

The truth is it embarrasses me. I feel as though everyone thinks I should do something about it and yet I know that there's little I can do and me doing something won't solve the problem. She needs to do something. She needs to want to do something.

The upshot is that if she's telling the whole wide world then there's no reason I shouldn't. So here are the unexpurgated pictures. I took them on the down low Thursday afternoon and 2 hours later at the nursing home celebration mom lamented that we hadn't taken any photos. "Do not worry mother of mine, I've got you covered."

If Kath thought I was a saint yesterday and that my mom is crazy then god knows what she'll think today.

Oh, and Chrome, you can like yellow cats all you want, you don't have to like this one, mom has another one. He's awesome. Mostly she calls him Little Yellow Cat but sometimes she screams "SYNDEY" at him (the name of one of the cats she and my dad appropriated from neighbors when they were first married) and wonders why he doesn't respond. He needs to be neutered but as soon as that's taken care of he'll probably be the best cat you've ever met. On a whim I picked him up and put him on my shoulders. He's not a huge fan of the picking up part but he loved to just ride around on my shoulders as long as I'd let him. Don't settle for the first of anything you see in mom's house there will always be another.

Ok, so here you go, the front porch. It may not look like I've done much work here but when I arrived there wasn't enough room on the top step for my hips to fit so I could sit down. Since that's the only place on the property where one can actually sit I moved mountains (literally) to consolidate and make room for my fat ass to cop a squat.


Here's the music room, first room you get to when you walk in the side door there. For the record, the pile of boxes directly in front there are all empty, they're being used for sorting papers and precious objects and stuff so they don't really count as clutter because I can envision a day when they'll be gone. As an aside, Ulserad is a freaking saint. He says he's not, he says he's "just" a good friend. I say tomato - tomahto big guy. He works Mon-Fr and his 2 nights to cook at his house are Mon and Tues but he's spent the last 2 nights breaking down boxes and tying them up for the recycling pick up tomorrow. Mostly there's nothing that people can do for this nightmare but sometimes there is something and I felt awful asking him to do this but he was very cool about it. If he drank I'd buy him a bottle of something decadent. Perhaps Pepsi has a particularly good vintage.


You go through the music room, past the little connector hall to the bathroom and into the living room and then through the living room and out the front door. As of the time I departed you could walk from side door to front without ever having to turn to the side to accomodate your...curves. This shot is from the connector hall into the living room.


This is another view of the living room, from the stairs. Spacious, no? I want to point out that the middle of the couch there is completely clear! From this angle it's hard to tell but that cat bed and the butter churn (I know, butter churn, it's just not a battle worth fighting) are on the trunk in front of the couch not on the couch itself.


Up to this point you may have been looking at me like you need to reserve me a seat on the short bus. "Progress?" you've said, "What progress? That place is a sty! It's worse than a sty! I wouldn't let my pig live there." Well, here are some views of the kitchen so you can compare the previous views of rooms on which we busted our asses to the following views of the kitchen which we did not touch. (Yes, she needs to be able to cook but she started off in one direction and she got a foothold and I felt like the laws of inertia should rule.) So, here's the kitchen from the door of the music room. See that path? When I showed up all the paths through all the rooms looked like that. See why the whole walking while facing forward thing was such a big deal?


What does your kitchen table look like? Too cluttered for your brain to deal? You see why I laugh at you when you say that? This is my mom's table.


Here's an example of the creep of the badness. At some point there was no place to put something down and mom was desperate so, just for now, she yanked out a drawer part way and balanced whatever precious thing it was on the open drawer. How many drawers can you see in this picture?


This is her stovetop. No, I'm not kidding.


That about says it all, doesn't it?