The Red Brick Times

I'd just like to remind everyone that the COMMENTS counter is still not working. No, that's not a "dig" toward Blogger, RBT, or Russ. It's just that if you forget to click and see, you might miss hidden surprises.
Posted 8:34 AM by Sally D. 0 comments

A cool optical illusion for your viewing pleasure. It looks like it's moving but it's not. (If it shrinks after loading you should be able to double the image size, which enhances the effect.)
Posted 2:54 PM by whatley 0 comments

Reading the wrong thing in public can get you in trouble.
Posted 1:38 PM by whatley 0 comments

We met to comfort each other and to honor Linda's influence on us today. Her family was comforted by the message of the preacher from the Church of the Open Door. We lunatic fringe and Schoolhouse remainders severally, as we later discovered, and silently included the Buddhists, the Taoists, the Bahai, the Moslems, the Sufis, the Jews and all of the myriad believers and non-believers to the overt message of the "one true path" to peace and eternity. I felt that Linda would be laughing gently, knowing that we were all so right in the way we love each other, and so silly in the way our egos and personalities prickle to separate us sometimes.

After the drive to the cemetary, and as we stood around the grave, it became difficult to hear the preacher's final words as airplanes, birds, lawn mowers, wind, and water moved all around us under the bright, warm sunshine. Sometimes God speaks louder than preachers. Linda Weiss spoke words of memory and gratitude and farewell for all of us, and Peg Strang sang a ballad. Thank you all for the deep feelings and warmth we share.
Posted 10:50 PM by Andy Allan 0 comments

Linda's funeral arrangements are as follows: Viewing Sunday from 2-4 and from 7-9. at (Busch) Curtis-Scheuffler Funeral home at 114 Second Street in Elyria. Funeral Monday at 1:00 at the Funeral Home. After the service on Monday the burial will be at Brookdale cemetery. Shirley also mentioned that after the burial there will be a luncheon at The Church of the Nazarene on Clemens avenue. (This is her sister Shirley's church.)
Posted 4:40 PM by Sally D. 0 comments

FYI: I put a comment in the post below which was accepted and can be read. Problem is that the comment counter doesn't seem to work. Please ignore the "0 Comments" prompt for the time being.
Posted 4:17 PM by whatley 0 comments

Sally is having some trouble accessing the Blogger and asked if I would relay the following information.

Linda Tarry died this morning in the Cleveland Clinic Hospice at approximately 11:30am. It is not known who was with her at the time.

Linda fought to stay with us until the very end, let us keep her spirit with us forever.

AOG


Posted 1:39 PM by A. O. Gutierrez 0 comments

Linda had to be moved to the Cleveland Clinic residential hospice facility (at the main campus) yesterday afternoon. We simply could not keep her out of pain at home.
Posted 8:35 AM by Sally D. 0 comments

When I try to post the item below, it keeps flashing alternating "done" and "downloading" and I am not sure at all what's going on. Hopefully someone will come to Blogger to post and see it and be able to help out.
Posted 8:30 AM by Sally D. 0 comments

Poor Linda has such a day yesterday. She has difficulty communicating her needs, and often speaks in opposites, ("I need a hot cloth," for example, when we know she means cold.) She also insisted we were overmedicating her and that she had already taken her dosages. (Did she mean the opposite?) All meds except for pain medication have been stopped and changed to liquids, so they can be slipped inside her mouth while she's resting. Her pulse is rapid, her blood pressure is low. She was able to recognize and say hello to her brother when he stopped by for a few minutes. But she's home, where she wants to be, and other than a few times when things need to be adjusted, she's comfortable. If you've never met her sister, Shirley, I can tell you she's an amazing woman who's taken on the responsibility of Linda's care.
Posted 6:49 AM by Sally D. 0 comments

Saturday afternoon I got a call from friends asking if we wanted to go to Blossom that evening and hear Carmina Burana with the Cleveland Orchestra. We did, and we did. The program had the libretto in both Latin and English so we could enjoy the secular, sacred and profane profundities from 13th century religious and scholarly dropouts and hippies. The Cleveleland Orchestra gave a stupendous performance. The adult and children's choruses were stellar, the soloists were ecstatic (the soaring soprano parts tore one's heart out), and myriad families spent the entire time stuffing various foods into sulky and noisome children's mouths to vainly try and prevent them from evoking the vegetable-throwing unwashed throngs that were the bane of the Globe at Shakespeare's performances as well. The lawn at Blossum is an egalitarian stew of Yuppy wishfullness bang up against bags of empty Evian bottles and Chateau de Pampers, twenty-ought-three. I suddenly remember that "Utopia" was a word for a land created by Thomas More in his eponymous book, and meaning "no-place".
Posted 12:37 PM by Andy Allan 0 comments

As a labor of love, the site is working just fine. The extensive history of our deathless ramblings will never make some distant scholar stay awake nights ascribing levels of social import and revolutionary change to our paltry scribbles. And as I age, my memory is only about an inch long, so whatever went before probably doesn't exist. So the record from this time, forward, is the important path. Thanks, Russ, for keeping us connected and pleasantly unbalanced.
Posted 9:02 AM by Andy Allan 0 comments

Here's a little something to make you laugh. Go to Google.com. Type in Weapons of Mass Destruction (3 separate words, no quotation marks). Do NOT click Google Search. Instead, click I Feel Lucky and read the error message. Have a happy 4th of July.

Posted 5:00 PM by joyce hicks 0 comments

A couple of us have had opportunity to do bits 'o work at Linda's this week. Frank Abbey replaced a leaky trap under the kitchen sink and I replaced the ceiling fan in the kitchen with a light fixture when the old fan blew out the coupling between the blades and the motor. Peg was leaving and Shirley was arriving as I worked, and the visiting nurse, Kim, was there as well. Linda was asleep under the balanced influence of the pain narcotics, but the effects of the struggle with her body's rebellion were visible in the lines on her face and her pallor. Like all of us, I am struggling with my own feelings and trying to figure out what is best for Linda versus what I fear for myself. It is difficult to put the latter aside and act solely on the former. On the one hand, I am helpless. On the other hand, Linda's acceptance of ebbing life gives me courage. All the countless discussions of going gentle (or not) into that good night have done little to prepare for the reality.
Posted 8:48 AM by Andy Allan 0 comments

As you can see only a part of the posts are publishing and I don't think there's anything more I can do about it. We'll just have to wait and hope the Blogger folks can fix these bugs. If you're interested here's the page I put up when nothing was working.
Posted 8:29 AM by whatley 0 comments

New test post.
Posted 3:58 PM by whatley 0 comments