A cool thing you should know about -- a kid's bar mitzvah project to support a cool charity.

At Boskone, a thirteen-year-old boy had a table set up at which he was soliciting donations for a project he was doing in honor of his becoming a Bar Mitzvah.

Joshua Gilbert and three of his friends are raising money for the Child's Play charity, a charity by gamers for gamers -- specifically, children stuck in hospital beds. I heard about this from a friend of mine, who's a pediatrician (actually, I'm not certain if she's a pediatrician or a proto-pediatrician right now; she's in residency, so I don't know if she's had her pediatric board certification yet. But, in PRACTICAL terms, she's a de facto pediatrician.)

Yes, pediatric hospitals have rooms for their patients to play in. Which is great for the children who are actually able to be around other children. But kids who are either infectious or have compromised immune systems really can't. And it does NO good for kids who are bedridden.

And these kids need something to do so that they don't die of boredom.

Note that "die of boredom", in this context, is pretty darned close to literal. Lack of stimulation is NOT conducive to healing.

So this charity provides gaming systems and video games to kids in hospitals.

Joshua Gilbert and three of his friends are doing a fundraising MARATHON TOURNAMENT for them.

http://be-well.ilk.org/barmitzvah/josh_ss.html

Okay, yeah, maybe I'm a little bemused that they're doing this over Shabbat, but, oh well. Get your donations in before this Shabbat, and pass this around.

And what's going on in my life

I feel awkward talking about my life, with what's going on in Christchurch, and what's going on in Libya, and to a lesser but still important extent in Madison, and all of that HUGE stuff. Against all that, the problems of one little person don't amount to a hill of beans. But still. They're MY beans.

So what's been going on? Last Friday, I got a provisional trial "rule-out" diagnosis of ADD. My psychopharm went through the questionnaires with me, and it came out with a strong "Maybe," so he proscribed me anti-ADD meds to see if they do anything useful. If they don't, then I don't have it. If they do, then I have another tool to becoming more functional.

So, my grandfather chose to forgo his last palliative hospital visit to drain the fluid that builds up in his abdomen, or something like that. He decided that it was time to stop care, and is now in his endgame. He's got morphine for the pain, and is therefore sleeping, and all of his children are around. Typically, it's about a day to a week until death at that point, and that all happened yesterday. So he could die any minute, or any time this week.

We went over last night to see him; he was asleep through it, but we were really mainly there to see my parents and my aunts and uncles. Me and my cousins, well, we're definitely sad and all, but we're losing a grandparent, while my Mom and her siblings are losing their parent. It's much harder on them, so I think my generation is mainly there to support our parents, and secondarily for our grandfather. But it still hurts.

I made it to 37 years old with all of my grandparents alive. That's a wonderful thing. But this is nonetheless not easy.

The person who was going to take the huge TV from upstairs, that fell through. So I'm not sure how I'm going to get rid of THAT. I've got someone coming over this afternoon, hopefully, to look at our basement and how to get new washers and dryers for our tenants. I'm not going to really start cracking on looking for a job seriously until I've got the house fixed up for vonbeck to move upstairs and jehanna to move downstairs.

I dunno.