Sunday Social
Posted by madmommy in Current Events, Relaxed Politics, Sunday Social, music, spirituality
Given the recent death and funeral of Ted Kennedy, my thoughts have turned towards how we deal with loss, and the rituals we use to somehow ease the sorrow. While watching his funeral mass, I was noticing that the ritualistic process of the mass carries a certain comfort for those who are believers. It seems a bit formal and stiff to me, but as I’m not Catholic, it is not as familiar and comforting to me as it is to those who practice the faith.
In my experience funerals go a bit differently. The churches are not nearly so spectacular, though the saddened folks in the pews are mourning just the same. Even though I don’t consider myself a religious person, there are some songs that give me comfort after the death of a loved one. These are songs that I know from childhood, everyone knew them, and they were always part and parcel of any funeral service. To leave them out would be as bad as not taking some fried chicken and potato salad to the bereaved family.
When I went looking for videos for these songs I tried to get just performance clips. Unfortunately, the performance I liked the most of “I’ll Fly Away” is accompanied by clips from Oh Brother Where Art Thou. I decided the performance is worth the cheesy movie clips.
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Ugh! After feeling like crap last weekend, I knew I’d have a marathon cleaning session coming my way this weekend. Just finished mopping, dusting, vacuuming and cleaning the entire house. Still got two loads of laundry left, but for the most part I’m done! Sadly, it is clouding up outside, which means those nice, shiny floors will be covered in muddy feet marks very soon. But it hasn’t rained in a while, so…
{{{ madmommy! }}}
@ newdealfarmgrrrlll:
OK, What did you do to cause the retina to detach?
MM- I didn’t mind watching the clips from Brother Where Art Thou with the music. I love the movie and the soundtrack. Coen Brothers
On the sad side, I will let you know what a Southern Catholic Funeral is like after Tuesday. Actually, it will be just a memorial service. The body went to research to find out what caused the whole family to die from a form of Leukemia that is NOT genetic. Can you say Environmental? (They were from Mississippi)
OTOH, the last funeral I attended was San Antonio Catholic just a few weeks ago and I found it very moving, but I grew up in a liturgical church, so the service or mass is pretty much all the same.
@ gnome de plume:
the retina didn’t detach, it tore, which is not as bad. What did i do? I developed severe near-sightedness at an early age and then got middle-aged. Shorter eye-specialist, “Shit happens and we don’t know why.”
@ newdealfarmgrrrlll:
Oh. I thought maybe you laughed a little too hard the other night at your reunion. Kinda like this —>
Mr. Gnome and I are supposed to go outside and organize orchids this afternoon.
He got back interested in them while I was in Oregon. 
MM – I am sure you saw this yesterday. But it opens up great possibilities for the Vitter Race!
You organize them Gnome? You don’t just water them and feed them and otherwise care for them?
@ Texas Betsy:
This Virgo thinks they need to organize them alphabetically within family/genus/species which are themselves alphabetically organized. Nice orderly alphabetized rows!
Cause Texans are nuts …..
read this
Texas Betsy wrote:
Yes, these leftovers were the ones I noted in my write up on the healthcare rally. Thanks for the article. It says all the stuff I didn’t want to waste time on. Here is the Austin paper’s report on the rally.
newdealfarmgrrrlll wrote:
*sigh* I wish I could organize them that way. Fortunately my brain is made for a multidimensional filing system, so I just try to remember who I stuck where.
@ gnome de plume:
that’s ok! I always think i’m going to organize something that way but get overwhelmed with the immensity of the task so end up not organizing anything at all.
@ newdealfarmgrrrlll:
Oh good. Then we are not so very different after all.
@ gnome de plume:
nope. thats why i wish i coulda moved to texas and been your gardening buddy
New Deal: I had a horse shoe tear in the retina a few years ago. When it happened I was coming in the house from the back
yard and it was like someone pulled a blind closed. My eye dr. sent me to a spec. It was treated with laser surgery.
Her assistant held my head and she said she would count to ten and stop. To let her knew if I was getting a headache. She said
the start of head ache would come quicker with each treatment. She didn’t want me to get and “ice cream” headache. She had to
hit the eye 4 times to close the tear and the last hit was bad and I got the ice cream head ache. She took me to another room
and gave me a couple of tylenal. In a few minutes I was fine and went home. Had to go back every few days for a check-up. But
she was great. Medicare paid for everything,along with my other insurance. Still have floaters and don’t like to drive at night
because of them. I had no limits on what I could do. Hope everything goes well for you.
My mother has all sorts of eye issues – glaucoma being the worst – but she had her retina partially detach during a procedure to try to fix something else, recently. The patch the doc gave her was not near as comfortable as the pirate patch I made Mr. Gnome a couple of years ago when he had a fight with a steel post and lost. So she wore the comfy pirate patch whenever she had to go out in public!
Ooh, MM, I’ll Fly Away is one of my favorite songs, particularly this version. I have the soundtrack to the movie. I love the harmonizing on it.
After stopping at a state park to go hiking on our way back from Monterey and discovering that the boys are horrific hikers and then discovering it wasn’t a fluke on a hike last weekend, they really are horrific hikers, we decided to go hiking every Sunday morning until we have hiked the horrific out of them. Today it was http://www.crystalcovestatepark.com/“><a href=”Pelican Point down at Crystal Cove. Beautiful hike along the bluffs and down the beach and back. The big kid took off his shoes and socks down at the beach, despite being told repeatedly not to, but there was considerably less whining. Baby steps.
@ barbara:
that’s exactly what i have! A horseshoe tear. Mine happened at night, at the end of an ice-breaker kick-off to my HS reunion weekend. It was at the city park, and i’d just gotten into my car, i thought a little moth had gotten in and was catching reflected light while flitting around. By the time i got home, i realized it was my eye and not a moth. But i thought it was just another variation on the migraine visual auras i get, so just went to bed. It was a LOT worse in the morning, blurred vision, horrible floaters, etc. so i looked up symptoms online and was motivated to call the triage nurse at my clinic. She urged me to get to ER IMMEDIATELY as she’d had a detached retina herself and knew it was nothing to mess around with. So i was actually relieved to find out it was “only” a tear.
Showed up at the HS reunion dinner half way thru, my best friend from childhood had notified everyone i might not be able to make it so everyone was pleased i showed up even with grubby clothes and patch over my eye. (The patch isn’t medically necessary, it’s just that i got so disoriented with two vastly different streams of visual data flowing into my brain that it’s easier to have the patch than trying to squint one eye closed and keep the other open for navigating). It’s remarkable how many folks came up to me and said, “I/my sis/cousin/coworker had that happen! Good luck, everything turned out fine for me/them!” So hearing other people’s stories is good, thank you for sharing!
@ Lea:
or bad feet/shoes/boot issues or what? Mr. Gnome trained his first two early on with camping trips and fishing in mountains. We then did the same with Gnomette. Her first big hiking event was with us to Big Bend when she was maybe 10. A few years later it was the Canadian Rockies, where she was born. Then she went to school in Colorado Springs. Now you can’t keep her away. But given the choice between water sports and mountaining, right now water takes over. (She was a fish first, before learning to hike.)
What does horrific mean? Whiny and
@ Texas Betsy:
I think it’s past time for somebody to mess with Texas.
for ndfg
Anyone ever watch the TV show “I’ll Fly Away”?
from da wiki
@ gnome de plume:
Whiny and
and 
. We’re hoping that making it a regular thing will take care of it. California is too beautiful, especially along the coast, to miss out on because of 
and 
.
@ Texas Betsy:
Never even heard of the television show! But that was during a big transitional moving time for us – we moved from Houston to Gnomeville and then to Dallas between 1990 and 1993.
Yesterday’s events in Austin very much had the feeling of the Civil Rights events from the ’60’s. At one point we even sang “We Shall Overcome” while countering the secessionists at the Capital. The last mass demonstrations in which I partook, were the late ’60’s and early ’70’s against the Vietnam War. We didn’t have another hateful side yelling at us then, only law enforcement. Having the Haters against us actually made the whole thing much more empowering – we know we are on the right side of history and we have to keep it up. Ironically, law enforcement was there to protect us, not harm our side! My how times change.
Actually, ndfg, being seriously near-sighted is probably the most likely reason you got the tear. When someone is badly myopic, the eyeball is longer front to back than someone with 20/20 vision. This causes light to focus in front of the retina, resulting in vision blurriness at a distance. If you’re really nearsighted like I was, anything farther away than about 2 feet from the end of your nose is a big honking blur. The theory is that the extended length of the eyeball puts strain on the retina, and makes it more likely to tear. But that’s just one theory, and lots of nearsighted people never get tears.
@ Lea:
Good luck! Sounds like yer doin’ it right!
Elspeth is upstairs.