Do you think she might settle down if she was in a place that looked like home?

No. We waited too long to move them to California (it was only in 2009). She can't recognize where she lives now, even surrounded by her own furniture, art, and dog. It's not the house I grew up in, or the summer house they sold five years ago, or my sister's house, and that's all she knows.

Moving them again is something I'd like to avoid, because it won't make that any better. But they were in a retirement community in suburban Florida, completely out of reach to any of their kids, with no support network and not very good medical facilities nearby. At least now she's on better drugs, with a caregiver four times a week, and we got them a pill-dispenser with a timer which helps a lot.

Is there senior center your dad can go to during the day to see other people?

He goes to the gym when the caregiver is there, and the store, and on Saturdays he goes hiking with a group if I can get out there to sit with Mom. But I don't think he has any friends, per se. Thankfully, he has been going to a caregiver's support group a couple of times.

That's just so complex and heartwrenching.

I just made a jaunt out for ibuprofen and a Thermacare pad. I'm quietly freaking out over here.

I wish I could get mom to a caregiver's support group. She gives me the Japanese yes which means, "I hear you and I understand what you are saying," not, ok, I'll do it.

I thought it was going to be bad when my dad had to give up driving (and I'd been lecturing mom on getting more comfortable with it beforehand) but it went really smoothly, and kind of naturally. They still went through this big thing about getting a car with handles on the drivers' side so he could pull himself into the seat, but he's never driven it. I think it was worrying him before, so it was something of a relief not to have to do it.

Oh, I think we should definitely do dim sum at some point.

The next few weekends are pretty open for me, so just let me know when it works for you.

Moving them again is something I'd like to avoid, because it won't make that any better.

Your father should get that, shouldn't he? Or maybe he figures the current place is no great shakes anyway, so it would be better to be together?

I'm kind of subconsciously trying to get used to the idea of moving into my parents' house at some point, but they could really use the rental income they could get after my grandmother dies. So I don't know.

Is the Thermacare for your stomach, ita?

It's amazing how aging varies, too. There's a woman at my parents' church who's 99 and still living alone. She doesn't drive anymore, and she has some help with getting groceries in and that sort of thing, but otherwise? She's on her own and makes her own meals, and walks the three blocks to church every week. And she's in a row house with two flights of stairs.

Is the Thermacare for your stomach, ita?

Yeah, it's hurting again.

Or maybe he figures the current place is no great shakes anyway, so it would be better to be together?

I think so. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my mother's horrible to him really difficult, and having other people around, especially kids, makes things manageable for him. A couple visits a week with his daughters isn't enough.

She's on her own and makes her own meals, and walks the three blocks to church every week.

Oh, if only. ::sigh:: My mother is my inspiration for eating well and exercising, and keeping my brain active and engaged, which is sad. One shouldn't be a reverse example for one's children.

I should start going out there on a weeknight, but the traffic is a bear. I dunno, maybe that's my tradeoff. I get to live alone but I spend more time with them.

My mother's been having some health problems. A year or so ago when I was with her and my sister in New Orleans, my sister wouldn't let her go anywhere unsupervised. I was freaking out. I'm not supposed to find out my mother can't be left alone because I show up to someone's funeral! This either has to come up in conversation earlier, or someone's over-reacting. Or both.

I still come down on the side of over-reaction. After all, she's not even retired yet, although my father is doing more of the driving. But I'm not there! Maybe they were just being typical and not telling me shit. Still, she is doing a lot better now.

Nora, fear of radiation is often so irrational that it's hard to come up with an argument someone will respond to. One problem is that many people seem to think radioactivity is some kind of cartoon-villain death ray that turns the food radioactive. Instead, we're talking about small radioactive particles floating in the air. Most of the radioactive isotopes from a nuclear plant have very short half-lives, so they don't even come into the equation on crops away from the plant. The main culprits are Cesium 134, Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and iodine 131. Cesium and strontium have half lives about 30 years, so they'll be around for a while. Iodine 131 has a half life of eight days, which means it's gone altogether in about 80 days. Cesium gets into the food supply because it's water soluble and absorbed like potassium by living things. Strontium 90 mimics calcium, which is how it gets into milk. However, both of these elements pass out of the body pretty quickly and that can be speeded up by using chemicals that bind to them. Everyone alive today has ingested some radioactive strontium and cesium from atomic bomb tests.

In the U.S., one of the first instructions after an event is to put milk animals in barns and feed them stored food. (Once, in a media conference drill, one of the participating journalists asked, "I'm nursing. Am I a milk animal?" The executive doing the briefing took a while to recover.)

Foods like spinach tend to show higher levels because they have so much leaf surface. The highest readings found so far was on spinach grown about 60 miles south of Fukushima Daiichi, which was found to contain 54,000 becquerels of iodine-131, or 27 times the allowable limit. That sounds terrible, doesn't it? To reach the exposure allowed annually for power plant workers, you'd have to eat 41 pounds of spinach. To reach the level that could increase your cancer risk by 4%, you'd have to eat 820 pounds of spinach. In the case of the highest level found in milk so far, you'd have to drink more than 58,000 glasses of milk raise your lifetime cancer risk by 4 percent.