Prayers, Please

From The Janet:

My precious cousin Lisa (my daughter is named for her) had a radical mastectomy last month, and is starting her third week of the first round of chemotherapy tomorrow.

She swears she is cancer-free now, says they didn't leave anything for cancer to be in, and the chemo is a just in case thing. I have to believe she is cancer-free because she just has to be okay, but it doesn't stop me from worrying. Now that she's down to 89 pounds (at 5'4") and each week hits her harder and she's so damned fragile. I hug her and there's nothing in my arms but a sweet smell and what feels like paper-thin bones.

I have a lot of cousins, probably more than my share, but my Lisa Kaye is so special, so close to my heart. If anyone has extra prayers (yes, I know we all have extras in abundance, but uh oh I don't know) where was I? asking please please pray for my Lisa Kaye. I don't know why it is so hard to ask.

From JCF:

I posted about my friend Cath on MadPriest's, asking for prayers (but the request got lost, apparently). A never-smoker, she was nonetheless diagnosed w/ in October w/ Stage 4 Lung Cancer. :-( (She learns tomorrow how her treatment is going. That's what her disease is called: "Treatable, Not Curable"---of course, I pray for a CURE anyway!)

Please, y'all, pray for her (she lives in my California hometown, and I will be seeing her when I fly home next week)

UPDATE from Doxy:

---and may I ask them for my friend Terri-Lynn, who is still fighting colon cancer? She's feeling better right now, but is still so very, very tired. She will celebrate her 50th birthday on Christmas Eve...

Student Sues RC Diocese Of Houma-Thibodaux

From the Daily Comet:

A former E.D. White Catholic High School senior embroiled in a dispute with school officials over a Facebook page has filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit, claiming the school unfairly suspended her because of her race.

Now attending Tulane University, Hannah Jegart, a black student, claims she received a longer suspension for violating school code than a dozen or more white classmates involved in the same incident.
...

The suit states that school administrators and diocesan officials “deliberately tailored” a nine-day suspension so that Jegart would lose scholarships and be forced to withdraw from the school.

Hannah was an honor student with a full scholarship to Tulane. With the nine day suspension, she would not only have lost her scholarship and her honors, but she would not have been able to graduate.

Other students received suspensions, but none as long as Hannah, and none would have been prevented from graduating.

Administrators suspended Jegart Jan. 15 for creating an online discussion group on the popular online social-networking Web site Facebook, the suit states.

The page allowed students to discuss their senior-level class in Apologetics, or defenses of the Catholic faith.
....

The discussion group, unnamed in the suit, was titled “Screw you apologetics and yo wonky ass sources,” Spinella said in an interview in January. It still exists and has 40 members.

The online group violated the student conduct rules forbidding them from taking part in activities on or off campus that harm the school’s image.

I laughed when I saw the title of the Facebook site. I suppose that means that I would not be a good school administrator, for I doubt that I would have disciplined the students at all. The punishment seems an overreaction and quite harsh to me.

Bishop Sam Jacobs ordered the two Roman Catholic High Schools in the diocese to require the class for all graduation seniors. The word around town is that most of the students did not like the class. Before the bishop required the class, the seniors studied comparative religion, a class which was popular with the students.

I don't mean to imply that high school students should be able to choose their classes, but apologetics is defending the faith. If I am to believe the commenters on the forum at the Comet discussing this matter (which ran to over 50 pages the last time I checked), many parents and students were annoyed by the bishop's imposition of the unpopular course upon the seniors and then outraged by the harsh punishments dealt to the students who participated in the Facebook discussion group. What good is a course in defending the faith for students who are so turned off by the whole affair that they no longer want to defend the faith?

Here's a link to my original post on the story.

Sad News From Washington

There will be no Nativity Scene in Washington DC this year! The Supreme Court has ruled that there cannot be a Nativity Scene in Americas's capital this Christmas season.

This isn't for any religious reason, they simply have not been able to find Three Wise Men in the Nation's capitol, nor could they find a virgin.

P.S. There was no problem, however, finding enough asses to fill the stable.

From Doug, who is overflowing with the spirit of the season.

Christmas Card Irony

The following hand-written Christmas message is from a friend from my high school days. We are still good friends, although we don't see each other very often.

I only send Christmas cards when it snows. If we're still here in another 18 or so years, I'll send you another.

Merry Christmas to you and Tom.

Her mother, who was like a second mother to me, lived to age 99.

As you see, birds of an ironic feather flocked together, even way back then.

Thanks Be To God And My Doctors!

On Friday, I received the report that my annual mammogram was clear. That's 23 years past breast cancer. Surely good reason to rejoice and give thanks.

With Kirstin, I say, "I don’t ever, ever, ever want to get cancer again. But I am not sorry that I had it. Cancer gave me more than it took."

That's the truth of it. I looked death in the face and came to know, as I never had before, that life is fragile. I learned that the people in my life are of great value, much more so than any of my possessions. I learned to live for today, not in the past, nor for a future that may never come. Most important of all, I grew in faith. I know that God is with me, no matter what.

UPDATE: Rmj at Adventus quotes the wise and wonderful words of Fra Giovanni, which elaborate beautifully on what I said above.

No more Wah! Wah! Wah!

Before Wednesday, I have to get a few decent posts up on this blog, because a young local reporter interviewed me for a human interest story on the blogging grandmother, which will be published in the newspaper in a neighboring town, and in Thibodaux the following day. I must scramble to become a prophet in my own country. She seemed truly amazed that I had a blog. Why is that?

But that won't be today, because Grandpère and I are going on a tour of homes in the Garden District in New Orleans. The tour benefits the Preservation Resource Center of NO. We will drop our grandson off for another grandson's birthday party at one of those noisy party places and then go tour the beautiful homes.

Tomorrow, or perhaps Monday I shall begin my project to write a series of excellent posts to knock 'em dead locally.

The Power And The Glory

Update on the latest in the power saga:

No one from Entergy showed up this morning, so Grandpère got on the phone to wherever the customer service call center is located, most certainly not around here, to ask when they were coming to finish. In response to the call, the same serviceman whom I chewed out finally showed up. It seems that Entergy thought we were proceeding immediately to trench and lay the pipe to pass the line through. They were going to leave the transformer (which does not power our whole house) and not repair the line.

We do not even have an estimate on the price of laying the pipe, nor any idea when the work might be done. The cost may run into the thousands. We want the line repaired, even if the repair will only last a few months, until we work out how and when to have the pipe laid. Good thing we cleared that up. It could be weeks or months before that job is done. The serviceman left, but he said they will return. We shall see.

Thanks to Tobias in the comments for the title to this post.

UPDATE: The line is repaired, and we are once again empowered.

Good For The Night, I Hope

We have power of sorts. If we conserve our use of power, we seem to do all right. Tomorrow (We hope!) the power company will try to find the bad spot in the line and do a temporary repair, and sometime soon, we will have to hire an electrician to trench, lay down a pipe, and the power company will run a whole new line through it.

Thank you all for your concern, and thank you for putting up with Mrs. Grinch today.

Mean Mimi

So. I chewed out one of the servicemen who are working on restoring our power. He was giving me a load of BS. Entergy has a bad reputation for not maintaining their equipment and for ill-serving their customers. A company with a reputation like that coaches their employees from the top to the bottom how to shift responsibility. When I told the serviceman that our electrician said that the transformer was not big enough to power our house, he asked the name of the electrician and then smiled and shook his head when I told him the name. He's one of the best in town. I suspect that the Entergy folks don't like him because he calls them on their crap. When I proceeded to tell him what my microwave was doing, he said something was probably wrong with the microwave. I said, "Wait! It's my stove, my TV, the lights, and the heating system, too. Are they all faulty?" That was no.2 load of BS buck-passing, so I let him have it. When I was done, I said, "Whatever it takes, I want to be back in business. We are old, and we are cold."

He backtracked and said he didn't say anything about the electrician, so I shouldn't quote him. Nothing to quote, is there? But a smile and a shake of the head is a message, isn't it? Then he said that he really didn't say that my microwave was the problem. Whatever. I apologized to him later and said that I really wanted to chew out the CEO of the company. Still, he BSed me twice, and that pissed me off.

GP just popped in to tell me that the servicemen found another problem at the box, that something was overheated and melting. Why didn't they find that earlier? Our power is completely off now, and our neighbor, who cut our line, is without power while they work on it. That's a little sweet justice. He runs a business out of his house, which he's not supposed to do, so I suppose that smarts a little. Now you see what I'm really like. Chewing out the working people and Schadenfreude all the way.

Snow And No Dim Power,

This morning I woke up to face an angry Grandpère telling me that the power was off and on, and that when it was on, we were in brownout mode. None of the neighbors had the problem, so we knew that it was our damaged main electric line, which our neighbor cut many years ago, that had sprung a leak for the fourth or fifth time.

It is cold, and earlier this morning, it was snowing. I'm not kidding. Down here in south Louisiana, it was snowing. The snow has now turned to rain.

We thought we were back in business with our own personal generator, but we are on dim power. The stove and the microwave don't work. We don't know if the heat works or not. We'll know it doesn't, if the house gets cold.

That's the news from our house.