26 November 2013: Wednesday ... overcast and chilly day as the Nor'easter rolls in from the west, it will be a wet one today and this evening ... did walk Dancer ...

Dad got a visit from Juli, a per diem or as needed nurse with Delaware Hospice on Tuesday late morning, as she'd called about an hour before. She works two part-time, as needed nursing jobs but is the primary caregiver for her father, 88 years old, in good health. She tried dad's old sphygmomanometer but could not get the Hg to elevate properly in the column without blowing out the the arm wrap. Something wrong with the air pressure entrance. Here, she tries the old one. Did not work out. She is left handed by the way and wrote in her journal (seen on the table with pen).

Caught her looking out the living room window as she jumped up on the couch.
This was my first Dancer post of this overcast, rainy Tuesday November day.
"The rain is coming to Delaware and Dancer is spending the day indoors,
but she's always attune to sounds that alert her from outside."

A second Dancer post of the day, taken shortly

before Doug's return from Bachetti's and Zoup

with lobster bisque, which dad loved and ate

after sorting through the mail. 

"From the balcony, Dancer (aka, Princess) rests regally
awaiting the arrival of a relative in the living room."

Today, 26 November, 2013, in a one-room flat in Belsize Park, in London,
the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer is celebrating her hundred-and-tenth birthday. 

Doug did take out, the same place he had lunch today with Debbie Dyer (nee Cairo), Firesides, and got mom a cheeseburger and me a roast beef au jus (put the remainder in Dancer's bowl and she just lapped it up and would have eaten the bowl itself). Earlier, dad had eaten a bowl of lobster bisque with relish from Zoup, again thanks to the largesse of my brother. Dad worked through some of the mail and I had to interject, to his distress, not to throw out some new magazines like Smithsonian. It was good to have him downstairs and doing the mail like he always has.

Later, as I ate my takeout watching The NewsHour with hosts Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff, mom asked for her tea and I said that was Doug's responsibility. Later, I went downstairs to start the water. But the program was just amazing. A feature on a famed chef and cookbook writer, who is battling against Alzheimer's with various rich vitamin foods to counteract the disease and for the past 6 months she has held her own and there has been to progress of the disease. Here is where I have an issue with my mom, who I feel, maybe rightly, maybe wrongly, that she has given up and she doesn't see the connection of this woman's gallant battle and her own life where she is just existing and not fighting back. Maybe I'm being too hard on her but it's still the way I feel and it can't be helpful as I go to get her pills and realize that she is short of Vicodin and so I got upstairs and borrow one of dad's. Tomorrow need to get to Pathmark Pharmacy and pick up the prescription which has been ready for two days. 

But it was a wonderful broadcast and like the 110-year-old pianist, Paula Wolfert's life is so inspiring as were the words of her author husband, who was interviewed for the piece. Her final bit of conversation about fighting this disease, Alzheimer's, through research and getting the funding like cancer and HIV was truly heartfelt. Just an amazing individual, whose name, Paula Wolfert, I will pull up when the PBS NewsHour updates its web site. 

Louise Shivers' signed book. My Shining Hour -- A Novelist's Memoir of World War II, came today with a card and a good wish. 

A native of Stantonsburg in Wilson County, Louise Shivers grew up in Wilson with her nine brothers. She attended Atlantic Christian College in her hometown and Meredith College in Raleigh. She furthered her education at the University of South Carolina and at Augusta College in Augusta, Georgia, where she has served as Writer-in-Residence for more than twenty years. Shivers won the U.S.A. Today :  Best First Novel of the Year Award in 1983 for Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail ,  which was made into the movie Summer Heat. Her novel A Whistling Woman was published in 1993.  “I write out of place,” she says, “and eastern N.C. is my place.”