#MicroblogMondays: Mid-October odds & ends

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  Recently (a few weeks ago now), my 87-year-old dad landed (back) in the hospital overnight. :(  He says he FEELS fine, but recently had some bloodwork done with a few concerning results, so they asked him to come in for observation. They wanted to keep him longer and do more tests, but he talked them into discharging him -- the doctor who asked him to come in didn't see him until later the next day (which pissed him off), and he was bored out of his mind -- no TV (you have to order it and pay for it), he's not a reader, he doesn't scroll on his phone. (Which is not a BAD thing! but...)  I'm hoping they will monitor his bloodwork more frequently from now on... (they will if my sister has anything to say about it to them!  lol).  
• I recently learned a(nother!!) longtime online friend (from outside the ALI/CNBC world) lost her husband, very suddenly.  :(  He was 63.  I know I'm now at the age when things like this start to happen more frequently to my peers -- but seriously??  -- it's been far too often over the past year or two for my comfort or liking...  :(  
• In a similar vein:  I was thinking about a few former coworkers and wondering what's happened to them, so I Googled a few names. Up popped an obituary for one of them, from 2019.  :(  (That'll teach me to be curious...)  "Suddenly," it said, while out biking on a country road with a friend. I don't know how old he was (and the obituary didn't say), but he couldn't have been that much older than me, probably in his late 50s/early 60s at the time.  He'd lost his wife five years before that (!), and had a daughter. :(  
• I was scrolling through my general Facebook feed when I spotted something that stopped me in my tracks. I follow a couple of groups & pages from the town where I went to junior & senior high school (and where some of my classmates still live). Probably because of that, a post popped up from someone there.  (I don't know them personally, but their surname was shared by one of my classmates, suggesting they're related in some way.)   
• It was a photo of a large, beautiful memorial wall, in a garden dedicated to infants. The memorial includes plaques with names & dates (I counted 30 -- on one side, not sure if there are also plaques on the other side). It's located in a lovely local park I remember well. How nice!!  (Especially just as Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness Month was starting!) 
• Michael Hughes at The Full Stop podcast & community blogs at "Married and Childless" with his wife Vickie, and recently posted a critique of the fertility industry -- based on a speech he gave last year at a conference of the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand:  "You Can Always Do IVF!- How the IVF industry misleads society, sells false hope, and abandons patients."  Well worth a read!  
• I absolutely loved this Substack post from Jennifer Nevergole at "Presence Inside Absence," related to one of my favourite subjects -- genealogy, and uncovering the untold stories of the childless people (and especially the women) in our family trees: "Heading into the season of the unseen." 
• Nora McInerny, whose books about grief & loss I love (look them up!), writes beautifully about her "little shadow" on Subtack. 
• Adrienne Clarkson, age 87, former governor-general of Canada (and, before that, a CBC journalist/broadcaster I well remember, going back to my childhood when she co-hosted an afternoon talk show called "Take 30"), recently spoke out on the lack of endometriosis care in Canada to The Globe & Mail.  
• Quote:  “If it was something that was in men’s testicles, it would have been handled ages ago.” 
• Clarkson suffered from endo as a young woman in the 1960s, but was able to have children. 
• One of her three daughters, Chloe, died of SIDS, when she was 9 months old. Clarkson wrote about the loss and the grief she felt in her 2006 memoir, "Heart Matters."  (I had a copy -- which may still be lurking in one of my boxes somewhere? -- and while I never read the entire thing, I did read that chapter, multiple times, after Katie's stillbirth.)  (Sadly, she has been estranged from her other two daughters since she divorced their father in the 1970s.)   
• Anne Helen Petersen flagged this Substack post by Kate Lindsay in her recent Sunday list of links, predicting the end of short-form content and the return of long-form. May it be so! 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.