In all probability I will be pulling an all-nighter tonight in order to get the newspaper out the door on time (9 a.m. tomorrow morning). Please let there be NO (or at least just minor) computer problems today.

Yesterday I went to my meeting, which dragged on longer than the meetings usually go. I thought I’d get to the hospital just in time for my mom to be sent home. I arrived just in time to visit with her for 20 minutes BEFORE she went into surgery. Turns out that the operation before hers ended up being a lot longer than expected. I had hoped to go back to work last night and do at least a few things on my lengthy to-do list, but it didn’t happen. So I’m doing police beat this morning. I had really hoped to have it done yesterday.

But when I got to the hospital I didn’t worry about work. I was just visiting. And then as the nurses were preparing to take my mom to the operating room, she told me she thinks she forgot to call my sister Kari and tell her she’s having an operation. So I tried to track down my sister’s phone number at work and call her to tell her. I started by calling my niece’s husband and asking him to look in my mom’s address book for Kari’s work number. He gave me a number with a 713 area code. I called it and it was an answering machine and the person was speaking in Spanish. I think that was an old Houston Texas number, which was several years old. My sister’s lived in Michigan about 5 years now.

So I called my work and had a co-worker look in my desk and retrieve my sister’s cell phone number. It’s no longer her cell phone number. I called her home (which is a number I have memorized), but the line was busy. So I was unable to call her.

But I can’t believe my mom didn’t tell her! I specifically asked my mom last week if she’d called her. She told me she did. She told my sister Dee that she’d called everyone but my brother Chuckie and Dee promised to let him know. Then last night after the operation my mom told Kari she didn’t know what time the operation would be until Tuesday. Technically, that’s correct. She didn’t know the time of the operation, but she knew last week it would be sometime Wednesday.

Well Kari knows now. For some reason my mom thought she told her. Which isn’t unusual. Mom will think she tells me something, but it turns out she told one of my siblings twice and me never. It’s hard to keep track of who you told what. Plus she’s acting like she’s 16 instead of 66. My mom the teen-ager.

Her surgery went well. She’s not sore. But she is like a child. I keep having to chide her into putting the ice pack on her breast and not in the middle of her chest where it does no good. She’s staying at my house today. I figured it’d be a quiet place for her to catch up on sleep. I had a phone she wouldn’t have to compete with anyone to use, so it sounded good to her.

Have to go. Later.