This blog may be intermittently messed up in various ways today - I don't mean in my normal slightly neurotic and on-the-verge-of-rambling way, but in a technical sort of manner. I want to change the template and customize with a new picture on top, and sometimes this is a quick and easy process and sometimes it takes hours and hours. So, we'll see.

In non-blog-related news, once again, things in my household have turned upside-down. Last night around 10:00, my phone rang. This is unusual, and far enough past the typical 9:00-or-so time when my brain stops interpreting phone calls as normal events and starts reacting in uh oh mode that I got a lovely late-evening jolt of adrenaline.

It was my father. This is a man who had three heart attacks between the ages of 30 and 45, and had a hernia operation a week and a half ago, and has been denied short-term disability through work for some stupid reason and is therefore sitting on 6 weeks now of not working and steadily going broke, and has been in a brand-new relationship since the fall... lots of options there for drama and crisis. Today's was that he was having serious difficulties with his girlfriend and needed a place to stay for the night. He'd just moved out of my house and into a new place with her in February (and did I somehow not blog this? Really? How is this possible?), and while I don't know for sure that things are over and done there, I do know that we'd already reclaimed his room and were using it as a playroom.

So, there's just a lot of uncertainties and unanswerable questions floating around right now. Are things actually finished between my dad and his girlfriend? Is he moving back in with us? Do we need to reorganize all of the kids' toys, again? What will he do for work when he's recovered from surgery? Will he return to the truck-driving, which he truly hated, or what? What will our summer look like now? And so on, and so forth.

I can't quite define my own feelings and reactions right now. I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of stressed and anxious, but not resentful or disdainful; just worried because there are so many potential outcomes and I can't predict which way this particular train will go. I know that Willem and I will do what we can to help out, and I'm glad that we're in a position to, at the very least, offer a place to stay and food to eat and some basic human respect and love while he gets through this... but at the same time, I can't imagine that it feels warm and fuzzy in the first place to be recovering from abdominal surgery and completely out of work, no income, with the knowledge that the only way to get income is to return to a physically demanding job that you despise, and then to have a relationship fall apart partly due to the financial stresses and partly to the fact that there may just be a basic incompatibility there... that can't be fun in the first place. And then to have to move in with your daughter, whose life is as obnoxiously close to perfect as anyone is allowed to have, at least for the moment... something about "insult to injury" there.

So, I'm a tad revved up right now. Seems like a good time to play with the blog template and enact some changes I can control.

Oh, and Sarah and Mary, and anyone else who happens to interact with my mom on a regular basis, please hold off on talking to her about this just yet, okay? She doesn't need to know, and my dad certainly does not need her to know, until things are clearer. One may recall that ambiguity is not her best area. Unless it's her ambiguity.