30 July 2007

Sad Day for the Hart Family

No, no one has died. However, my dad... Dick Hart... who has been progressively suffering from senile dementia/Alzhiemer's for several years... has got to the point of needing more care than my mom can give. When we saw Dad at Christmas he didn't recognize me at all, Mom he could acknowlege occasionally that she was his wife and kind of knew where he was. By April when my brother David was there Dad had no rememberance of the house or Mom expect that he knows she was important to him. Mom has realized that she can't care for him at this point.

Last week David was in Long Beach again and he and Mom visited several place that they could put Dad. Today is the day that John(now in Long Beach with Mom) and Mom will put Dad in a nursing facility.

As bad as this is for us, for Mom it will be eventually a relief. She will have a chance to go where ever again and know that Dad is OK. I will be going down to help over Labor Day. David's role in this has been wonderful. In April he helped Mom see that it was time and that her insistance on never putting Dad somewhere and not selling the house was a nice dream, but not practical any longer. On this last trip that David made he sacrificed a lot... They had just sold their house, bought a new one, getting ready to open his gym, and doing all the moving stuff. My sister-in-law Debbie and my nieces Darlee and Cristina were willing to put in some big overtime to let David help Mom. He was able to make sure here finances were in good shape, help her find this place for Dad, help her get an equity loan, met with her and the financial guy, took time to help organize her finance.

Mom is now getting ready to sell the house where she has lived for over 40 years. She is planning on getting a place in Lesiure World in Seal Beach. This is a large well established retirement comminity. She can use all the prayers you can spare as she gets use to not having my dad around and living somewhere else. And of course getting over any guilt she brings upon herself about not being able to continue to care for Dad. She will be able to travel more and actually come see us in Alaska.

I'm really sad to see my dad this way, but he still has the ability to talk to people and enjoys making others feel good... he'll be a ray of sunshine to the other residents.

17 July 2007

There and Back Again... A Hart Family Tale, Part 2 Paris

OK, Paris in 2 1/4 days is insane, but that is the time we had and what we did. We walked a lot, got rained on, but we saw some incredible things and I even survived the language difference. (For those unaware.. I have no language skills, either listening or speaking). We used the Metro for our travel when we weren't walking. Paris must have more art work and antiques than the whole US. We had to pick and choose what we saw. I'll try and spell things correctly.
We had a hotel about a 15 min. walk from the Eiffel Tower...which we could see the top of from. We were on floor 6 or in the US the 7th since in the rest of the world the Ground floor comes first. There was very SMALL lift which was better than 6 flights of spiral stairs. A very tiny room, but it worked well for us.
After getting from the airport to the hotel via bus and underground Metro we headed over to the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, we broke our new camera(very few Paris pictures, but a fair amount of video), got a little irritated with each other, and went to bed. We'd been up and traveling for almost 24 hours with a "bit" of sleep on the plane.
Over the next 2 days we saw Versailles, the Orsay, the Louvre, Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle, Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower again(Really nice view from the top..Charles and Meg opted to walk up to the second
level while Lori and I went all the way to the top), Champs-Élysées, and more that my poor brain can't think of now. We saw of course, the Mona Lisa.. the crowd wasn't too bad either. The Venus de Milo, Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh, etc.
When we ate we avoided any chain type places...especially American. Our last
night we found a little Swiss place that was really good. A nice warm crepe in a cool drizzle taste even better than usual.
We left Paris for London via the Eurostar train which travels under the English Channel in the "chunnel". It was smooth, quiet, very fast, and the underwater part was basically a long tunnel.

13 July 2007

There and Back Again... A Hart Family Tale, Part Pause

All of this posting of our trip has been slow since right after we got back my computer hard-drive died and the photos we took were on it. I sent it off to get repaired and thankfully they were able to salvage all the info on the old drive... So when that gets back I'll have more pictures to share.

03 July 2007

After Midnight

Sitka has a tradition that on the eve of July 1 there is an event that is called "Only Fools Run at Midnight". It is a 5K run/1 mile walk in downtown Sitka. Since our family doesn't run, we walked the mile course. It starts at midnight. There were probably 150-200 people involved. The runners doing 3.1 miles were faster than most walking 1 mile. D'Artagnan joined us even though it was way past his bedtime. He is now 15 months old, but still just a puppy in a BIG dog body. He was so excited to be around people and other dogs. This picture is a sunset. The light area below the clouds is the daylight at midnight on 30 June. It would look like that again in another 3 hours or so. We had a blast. It has been so fun to know so many people in the community and see them at all the events.