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Kitchen Table Kibitzing; Thurs. July 24 [1]

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Date: 2025-07-24

I’ve been sitting here for a while now, just staring at the prompt. At a loss as to what to write about and recalling one of the first times I posted for KTK 11 years ago when I wrote about the death of my father. Today, my ex husband is in hospital, actively dying from a massive stroke. He spent the first week in the ICU and was moved yesterday up to a ward on the fifth floor. Since Tuesday, they’ve been working with palliative care, with the consensus being he has hours or days to live.

I can’t think of much else.

My ex and I have been separated for near on 25 years now. We share one daughter who is now 40. Our divorce was not amicable. I was the one who initiated ending our marriage and he quickly became involved with a woman he met in Smiley’s Schooner Saloon in downtown Bolinas. She was mother of three, a big partier. She has been with my ex all these years now and made it impossible for us to co-parent my daughter: he wasn’t at all involved in the last years of her high school experience, the college search and application process and just the day-to-day challenges of child rearing. When we sold our house in Bolinas in 2023, he moved in with his girlfriend, ending the possibility of my daughter ever spending a night with him.

But still, my daughter has maintained a close relationship with him and has been at his bedside constantly. She and the girlfriend are named joint decision makers and they haven’t agreed on anything so far. There was the removal of fluids, the DNR, the administration of medications. The girl friend has fought doctor’s advice every step of the way. Now my daughter is concerned that the girl friend will not want him to be cremated.

It’s a rough time. I’m meeting my daughter up near the hospital today for lunch. I’ve been remembering so many things about the relationship with my ex. When we met, fell in love, married, bought the house in Bolinas, had our daughter. So many huge moments which defined my life. It’s hard to believe he will be gone soon.

I came across this interesting article at CNN the other day: Earth is spinning faster, leading timekeepers to consider an unprecedented move. Seems a few days are shorter than ever before, which according to some experts “could lead to a scenario similar to the Y2K problem, which threatened to bring modern civilization to a halt.”

Seems climate change is a culprit.

The mass shift of this melting ice is not only causing changes in Earth’s rotation speed, but also in its rotation axis, according to research led by Benedikt Soja, an assistant professor at the department of civil, environmental and geomatic engineering of The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. If warming continues, its effect might become dominant. “By the end of this century, in a pessimistic scenario (in which humans continue to emit more greenhouse gases) the effect of climate change could surpass the effect of the moon, which has been really driving Earth’s rotation for the past few billions of years,” Soja said.

x The Trump administration wants to reverse a 2009 EPA finding that greenhouse gases endanger people. The finding is the basis for much of the United States' climate change regulations.



[image or embed] — NPR (@npr.org) July 24, 2025 at 6:12 AM

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