supporting my local businesses

I had a lovely night out with Tacoma Girl last night. Seeing as how we both like nice beer, we thought we should check out the new Holy Mountan Taproom on Phinney Ridge. Beer? Definitely up to snuff. Service? Fine. Decor? Sadly, International AirBnB Style and in need of improved signage. Price? A bit much. The Dead Kennedys over the PA was a jarring contrast, I thought, to the bourgeois, mainly millennial crowd, but honestly, what do you expect on Phinney?

Tacoma Girl needed some real food, and I'd earlier smelled the perfume of truffle popcorn from Oliver's Twist, kitty corner from Holy Mountain. Decor, cocktails, eetz, service? Awesome, with vegan options available. Priced to match? Yuuup. It was ever thus, even pre-pandemic. It's nice to know, though, that one of my favorite spots on Phinney Ridge has come through the worst of the pandemic more or less unscathed.

It was a nice night out, and I even got home by midnight, but I need to not do that again until well into next year.

what went wrong inside my mother's head and why

Mom's autopsy report came back a couple of weeks ago with Alzheimer's, which wasn't what we'd been told earlier. Good Sister has been pestering Mom's doctors for what's in their charts. Mom's main primary care doc had written down "frontal variant Alzheimer's", which entails more delusions & nastiness and less rapid or total memory loss than regular (?) Alzheimer's. Those full-body hallucinations of Mom's remain a curiosity. GS told me that Mom would leave to buy groceries for the people she hallucinated, then be angry when they weren't there when she returned home.

GS has been talking to a retired neurologist up the street from Mom's. She said that yes, Mom's decades-long smoking habit was a risk factor, but her driking was an even bigger one. Apparently the whole neighborhood knew about Mom's drinking; the embarrassment would have killed her had she known that. Oh, the irony of hearing this after last night's bar crawl with Tacoma Girl.

Good Sister, by the way, is cheesed off that doctors withheld needed information from her despite her being Mom's legal guardian. When it came to Mom's word versus GS's, they often preferred the former. GS is threatening to write a book about the whole ordeal of taking care of Mom, and I think she should do it. (She will, however, need a serious copy editor like me. I know my sister.)