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Don't you hate it when the first someone says to you when you call is "your mom/dad/whomever is OK"? Because, at least in my family, that automatically means that something *isn't* OK. In any case, this time it's not so bad. My dad, who had a heart attack a number of years ago, was visiting other family in San Antonio and had chest pains. He went to the hospital last night (being very aware of such things post-heart-attack), and it appears to turn out that it wasn't a heart problem, which is a great relief. But the cardiologist wants him to do some other test (he's already had many tests), and he won't, and so the cardiologist won't let him leave. He's being held captive in the hospital in some sort of battle of wills, apparently. My dad is very very stubborn, so no way he'll do the test; instead he's going to leave against medical advice today.

My grandmother lives in San Antonio and they were going to go out for dinner for their birthdays - both Oct. 8 - yesterday. My grandmother turned 93.

In other news, my mom has some strange/emerging/new/contested skin disease, and she talks about it to the exclusion of eveything else. I don't want to describe it, but the methods she takes to try to get rid of it are alarming. For example, she said: "I took a turpentine bath. I'll never do that again!"

Me: "What? A turpentine bath? DON"T DO THAT!"

Of course, she is also very very stubborn and will not listen to me. There really is little to be done, something learned the hard way over my 31 years of learning the hard way.

It's amazing I didn't turn out even stranger than I did.