i am a butterfly…

Posts Tagged ‘family’

First off, Scott’s mother is not in a medically induced coma, as it turns out. The information we’ve been getting from family members on the scene has been altered as people put their own take on it and as a certain family member spins it to cause the most feelings of guilt in those who aren’t there. Scott’s brother arrives in Pittsburgh today, so I expect to start getting more accurate information. Or at least less altered information.

We going to drive out on Thursday or Friday now, depending on what his brother says when we speak to him later today.

Second, the shared SSL thing at my Web host has been resolved. I woke up to find an email apologizing for the way it was handled and the news that they renewed the shared SSL certificate for another year. So now I still have to set up a few clients with their own SSL certs, but we have time to do it correctly instead of making it a mad scramble because the sites are down without it.

Third, one of the sites that was going down, which was why all those sites got moved to another server, went down again today. But the good news is that the other sites did not go down with it, and also it seemed to resolve on its own without having to reset IIS. Hopefully that was just an isolated incident, but I’m keeping a close eye on things.

All in all, today is a much better day. A little bad, but mostly it doesn’t suck as thoroughly as yesterday. There’s hope for everything.

Several of my clients’ Web sites were supposed to be moved to a new server Saturday night. The server they were on kept crashing, and my host’s tech support thought it might be because of a particular very high-volume site they shared my sites shared the server with. So the idea was to move the sites to a new server and see what happened. Most of the sites in question had dynamic IPs and moving them would result in just a few minutes of downtime, but one has a static IP and moving that one was going to result in several hours of downtime. That was why Saturday late night was selected for the move.

Sunday morning, I got up and everything was running along swimmingly. All the sites were up and running and there were no problems at all that needed fixing. I know enough about technology to be suspicious of such a miracle, but I shoved that deep down and tried to pretend it was all good.

As it turns out, the reason the sites were all running along swimmingly was that the switch didn’t happen Saturday night. It happened last night. And when I got up this morning, one site was not running along swimmingly at all. It had a zillion things wrong that needed fixing. However, I took it all in stride and with the support of a simply outstanding tech support guy, we got everything fixed and working and it was good. Seriously, I can’t say enough good things about Nate, who dealt with all of this mishegas and was patient and thorough and a pleasure to work with.

Then, I got email from a client whose site had nothing to do with this mess saying her customers were getting weird security errors on her site when trying to checkout. It turned out that the shared SSL certificate her site used had expired, so I notified my hosting company and asked them to renew it. The reply I got back – not from the aforementioned Nate, I should say – said, in not quite so many words:

“Oh, yeah. We broke your sites 4 days ago without warning, but we’ll be glad to let you pay us for the privilege of getting them working again.”

They decided to discontinue shared SSL, you see, and so they let the shared SSL certificate expire. This would have all been well and good. I’ve no problem with talking this particular client into her own SSL certificate. She’s been in business for a long time and it’s a good step for her. The problem is, they did this with no warning whatsoever. Instead of telling me with 6 or 3 or even 1 month notice, they told me 4 days after the fact when I found out the site was broken.

And now it’s going to stay broken until we can get a the site owner her own SSL certificate, which can take a few days with all the paperwork involved. And not only will her checkout process be broken in that time, but guess who’s going to eat the cost of the first year for the certificate? Yeah. Me. Because I give my clients better customer service than my host is currently giving me.

As I’m dealing with this mess, stressing out that this is going to take a few days of dealing with to get straightened out and knowing that I’m not going to be in my office for the next two days as we spend 12 hours on the road to and from Pittsburgh to see my sick mother-in-law, Scott calls to tell me that his mother has been re-intubated and put into a medically-induced coma, because she couldn’t breathe on her own anymore. The coma is because she kept fighting the tube – and really, who can blame her? – so they had to knock her out so she wouldn’t pull it out. The result of this is that when we got there tomorrow, she wouldn’t even know we were there.

The doctors say they can leave her intubated for 4 more days. Her living will says she doesn’t want to go on like that, so on Friday they take out the tube and see if she can breathe on her own.  This left Scott, and me, in a wash of confusion, trying to figure out what the hell we should do. Do we still go to Pittsburgh tomorrow and have her not know we’re even there, then have her wake up Friday after we’re gone and say, “Where’s Scott?” Or worse, have hew not wake up on Friday and have Scott not be there?

In the end, we decided to postpone the trip until Friday morning. This way, whatever happens, Scott will be there when they pull out the tube. He sounded a lot more peaceful after that decision was made, so I know it’s the right one.

Today has been the most godsawful day from the moment I opened my eyes, going from bad to much worse. Grown up stuff really sucks.

Marley: …and she was a witch!
Me, interrupting: What’s wrong with being a witch?
Marley: …
Me: I’m a witch, religiously speaking.
Miles, excitedly: Are you a Pagan??!?!
Me: I am.

And just like that, I was Cool Aunt Kim. And I stayed Cool Aunt Kim until Marley asked who was my favorite Jonas Brother, which is when I had to confess that I not only don’t have a favorite, but I don’t even know any of their names. Cool Aunt Kim was suddenly no more.

Kids. So fickle.

Last Wednesday, I turned forty. I’ve been vascillating between having a hard time with that and being okay with it, and mostly I’m falling on the side of being okay with it. While my life isn’t where I thought it would be when I hit 40 – the infertility thing rears its head in everything – I’m still pretty happy with my life in general. I have an incredible husband, great friends, and a family that loves me. I have a comfortable, if messy and rented, home in a place I love to live. I don’t really want for anything material. All things considered, I’m doing pretty well.

To celebrate, I told my mother months ago that what she could get me for this birthday was plane tickets to spend the week with her and the rest of the family in Georgia. Since my birthday fell the day before Thanksgiving this year, it worked out perfectly that we would be there for the holiday, too. Those plane tickets were really all I wanted and expected, but she also planned a big birthday dinner with the whole family. Most of the immediate family lives in Georgia now, but my Aunt Melissa and her partner*, Dave, came up from Florida, too, which made it even more special.

Here we all are at the Japanese restaurant where we had dinner:

Don’t mind the weird look on my face. I was still befuddled by the funny hat and the crazy happy birthday drumming that happened right before this photo was taken.

From left to right:
back row: Alex’s girlfriend Beth, my brother Alex, Aunt Melissa, Dave, sister-in-law Michele, Scott, brother Kenny, nephew Miles
front row: my mom’s husband Denny, my mom, me, niece Marley

It’s not very often that we’re all together like this, so it was really great. Marley turned to me at one point, after having looked wide-eyed all around the table, and said, “I had no idea I had such a big family.” And not only are there a lot of us, but we’re loud. We laugh and shout and generally make a scene, but it’s a fun scene.

It was a pretty good way to spend a birthday.

* Partner may sound weird, but they’re too committed to just call him a boyfriend, so partner it is.

And this is mine:

This photo was taken a few years ago at my Great-Aunt Migs’ 75th birthday party, and represents the entire maternal side of my family. The only surviving person missing from this photo is my Great-Aunt Kate, who estranged herself from the family some years ago for reasons I don’t understand.

The back row, from the left: my mom’s husband Denny, me, my mom holding my cousin Darrin’s daughter (who’s name I don’t recall),  Aunt Migs holding my cousin Darrin’s son (who’s name I also don’t recall), Aunt Melissa, cousin Michael
The front row, from the left: Scott, my brother Alex (known around here as the Punk Ass Kid sometimes, even though he’ll be 26 in a month), cousin Denise, her husband Glen, cousin Darrin, his wife Dawn

We used to be a much more tightly knit family than we are these days. I know my mother speaks to Aunt Migs once in a while, but I really only speak to my immediate family. Denise and I were close as kids, but don’t talk at all now. It’s kind of sad, to have such a big extended family and not really be in touch with any of them.

One of the things that drives me crazy is having family members whose interactions with me haven’t evolved from the time I was 13 years old. That was 25 years ago. I think I’ve grown just a little in that time.

And one way in which I’ve grown is that I’m fairly self-aware. I know my own mind and I know what I can handle emotionally and for my stress level. So if I say, for example, that I know I couldn’t handle the stress of being a foster parent while dealing with IVF cycling, you can really trust that I’m saying it because I know myself. If you press it and act as if you know better and keep insisting that I should just take a few days to think about it, you’re not only not helping me, but you’re harming our relationship. I’ll be less likely to discuss my feelings with you in the future and much more likely to shut down when you try to start talking about anything meaningful to me.

I know there are people out there who aren’t self-aware and don’t know their own strengths and/or limitations, but I’m not one of them. I spend plenty of time inside my own head and inside my own heart, examining my feelings and understanding myself. Do I have a perfect understanding? Of course not. Few people do, I imagine. But when it comes to this infertility stuff and things related to children and knowing what I can and can’t handle? Yeah, I’d say I have a pretty good handle on that. That’s not to say that what I can or can’t handle won’t change over time – 5 years ago, I said I’d never try IVF, for example – but those changes take place over years, not after a few days thought.

One thing that should make it apparent to people that Kim-at-38 and Kim-at-13 have little in common is that Kim-at-13 would have thrown a fit when confronted with someone telling her, in kinder words, that she didn’t know her own mind. Kim-at-38 resisted for a few minutes and then gave up. Instead of turning it into an argument, I just said, “Fine. I’ll think about it for a few days.”

I’ve written about this before, about how my family interacts with me expecting me to behave as I did when I was a kid. I just don’t get how they don’t see that my behavior has changed while their expectations have remained the same.

That link, by the way, may be a little intense reading. It’s not really the same as this one, but it’s kind of about the same topic, in a not about the same topic kind of way.

This rambling, all over the place, completely incoherent post brought to you by the letter F.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, mainly because I’m so overwhelmed by being so far behind in the ABC-Along. Every time I think of something I’d like to write about, I think about the letter H and I freeze. Which is nuts, when you think about it, considering that the ABC-Along is meant to be fun! So I’m going to set aside anxiety over that and try to post more often about other things.

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On the knitting front, I was recently struck with a serious case of finish-itis. Yes, that’s finish-itis, not start-itis.Arwen, the hooded scarf, and Scott’s socks are all done. I’m more than half-finished with the crochet border on Lizard Ridge, leaving only the log cabin crazy quilt, which is going to be an ongoing project to use up scraps of worsted. The only thing keeping me from marking things as completed in Ravelry is that I want to get photos of them first.I’ve such a case of fnish-itis that I even just brought my Top Down Raglan Shrug out to the living room to re-knit the sleeves. I’ve never been happy with the straight edge of the bind off and I’ve always wanted to re-knit the cuffs. I added lace cuffs that should have been knitted bottom up and knit them top down, which ruined what should have been a pretty scalloped edge. Since I’m going to re-knit anyway, I may also shorten the sleeves to above the elbow.

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Last weekend, my mother and her husband spent the weekend in the city. We saw them on the 4th – and on Sunday, but on City Island – at the Millenium Hilton downtown. They had a suite there and they got Scott and me a room for the night, so we were able to sit in the room and watch the fireworks over the East River. The windows opened a little, so we were even able to hear the booms. It was really a nice way to spend Independence Day.

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This weekend, we’ll be in Pittsburgh. We drive out on Friday and home on Sunday.Scott’s mother got married in January in a small ceremony with no reception. This Saturday they’re having what I thought was to be their reception, but they’re calling it a family reunion. Scott and I have never met her husband, and this weekend will be inundated with his entire family, so it should be interesting. It’s strange for Scott, since neither he nor any of his three siblings have children – we’re the only ones who ever really wanted to, and Scott’s the youngest of them all at 45 – but his mother’s new husband has kids and grandkids and great-grandchildren galore.I think Scott’s mother is a little, I don’t know, embarrassed maybe is the word, that she has no grandchildren to show off to her husband’s family. As a result, she’s been asking us about the IVF stuff a lot more frequently lately, even though before the new husband, she changed the subject immediately whenever Scott mentioned any of our plans for adoption or IVF. She never wanted grandchildren and was happy before that none of her kids had children. This is a real turnaround, and Scott and I are her only hope. It’s weird, to say the least.