Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards." -- Galileo Galilei (b. 1564-02-15, d. 1642-01-08)

(I wish I'd thought to schedule this quotation for before last night's #qfaith chat on labels. (Link goes to a Storify archive of the conversation in forward chronological order. If you'd rather read in Twitter's native order -- mostly reverse-chronological but with the option of clicking on a tweet to see some of the replies and antecedents in forward order -- just search Twitter for the #qfaith hashtag, but do it soon, before much else gets posted with that hashtag.))

We've gotten word from Jammin' Java that the roads in Vienna, VA or pretty much clear, and tonight's gig is definitely on. @JamminJavaMei tweeted a couple of links mentioning us. I gave a young man from down the street money I couldn't really afford to shovel the driveway because I really couldn't afford the spoons to do it myself this afternoon either, with a gig to play tonight. All I have to do is brush the snow off the van and stick instruments in it.

Did I mention here that Mom fell again, a mere 26 hours after she got home from the PT rehab that she went to after her previous fall? I know I talked about it on FB and Twitter. She came home with another UTI, became symptomatic several hours after she got home, and was too weak to get into the van to go to her doctor the next afternoon, landing in the driveway. Well the hospital has a pattern -- keep her for three days so that she qualifies for having Medicare pay for an inpatient PT rehab stay, and send her off to a rehab facility for a few weeks -- but treating each UTI and each fall as an isolated incident just means the standard script becomes a senseless cycle: hosptial, rehab, hosptial, rehab, rins, repeat. Every tech and every nurse I've spoken to at the hosptial has agreed that this is bad, and that she needs to see a urologist. (At the appointment she was going to when she fell, the #1 thing on my agenda was to ask her doctor for a referral to a urologist. I've been trying to make that happen for 2-3 months now.) This afternoon when I was speaking to her current nurse on the phone (who has a voice delightfully similar to John Waters), he asked the doctor there about this and the doctor also agreed ... but she said that it couldn't happen in the hospital for some reason, and had to be an outpatient thing. Okay, if she can stay un-UTI-weakened long enough for us to get her to a urologist ... So the current plan is to schedule an appointment with a urologist near the rehab facility she's being transferred to this afternoon, and have me or one of my siblings (probably me since I'm closest and have time available during weekdays) take her out of the rehab facility to go to that appointment.

'Cause the current pattern is nuts.

In the meantime, let's see whether this rehab facility can do any better at feeding a diabetic a somewhat-reasonable-for-diabetics diet. The last place mostly fed her high-carb stuff, and then gave her insulin every day. (If nothing else, it'll be easier for me and Mom's local friends to visit, having her on this side of the bay. The downside is that even so I'm not going to be able to get out to see her as often as my sister can when she's at the rehab place in Centreville.)

As I mentioned underneath today's quote of the day, I made a Storify out of the most recent (last night) queerness-and-faith chat on Twitter. The back story is that we've been doing these weekly chats regarding the intersection of being religious and being GLTBQ, under the hashtag #qfaith (for queerness+faith). The big chats are Sunday evenings starting at 6 PM Eastern (but people occasionally mark tweets of interest to the group with that hashtag during the week as well).

Yesterday's chat (topic: "Labels -- What do you use? How do they identify you?") was a livelier chat than usual -- and with more non-Christians present and speaking up, which I hope is a trend, since from the outset our intent for #qfaith has been to be a meeting of minds among religious LTBGQ folks of all sorts.

I did a Storify of last week's chat (on fasting) as well.

If this looks like your cup of tea, well as I said we do it every Sunday at 6PM Eastern Time. To read along, just search for "#qfaith" on Twitter and refresh every so often to catch the newest tweets. If you want to join in, you'll need a Twitter account -- just remember to include the #qfaith hashtag in the tweets you want to be part of the conversation.

(And if any of you know how to get Storify to sort a conversation in threaded order, showing what tweets are replies to what, please go ahead and redo this better! Better yet, show me how to do that.)