4/18/2026

Saturday, April 18, 2026

1944 Geraldine Edith Aquavia was born in Oak Park, Illinois

2025  Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration was ready to abandon diplomatic efforts and "move on" if it is not possible to end the war in "a matter of days". 

In bed at 9, awake at 3, up at 3:30.  120/65/62 204.8; 44/31/59/38, cloudy, windy all day.  Pretty wild weather all week.  4 days of storms and tornadoes. 

Ranolazine Morning meds at a.m.  Ranolazine at 4:35 a.m. and 4:45 p.m.  I forgot to take my evening Ranolazine with my attention distracted by incoming storms.  Also forget Trulicity injection.

Geri's 82nd  Birthday.  My toast to her at her 80th birthday:

A few years back, I started keeping a list on my iPhone of 'what I love about Geri and it started with her laugh.  I was listening to her chatting on her phone with one of her friends and she was really enjoying whatever it was they were talking about and she was laughing, a wonderful, deep, exuberant laughter that was a pleasure to listen to, infectious inasmuch as just hearing it made me smile.  

Later I added "sharing her thoughts" and "sharing time" with me to the list, realizing how she has privileged me by that sharing.  I'm the only person in the world she shares so much of her life with.  I have often thanked her for agreeing to marry me.  It's a great and unique privilege married people confer on their partners, a privilege we too often lose sight of as we cope with the daily necessities and distractions of life.

Then I added her devotion to duty.  It sounds as if I were thinking of a soldier or a 'first responder' but in all of the roles she plays in her life, Geri has an innate sense of duty. 'Sense of duty' doesn't capture what I'm referring to.  As a child to her parents, as a parent to her children, as a life partner to me, as a sister to her brother Jim, and as a friend to her many friends, she is true, caring, trustworthy, attentive, solicitous.  The people in her life can count on her for help, for advice, for an open ear and a ready hand, to respect confidences, to pitch in when some pitching in is needed and to butt out when some butting out is needed.  When my twice-widowed father came to live with us, Geri became his best friend at a time in his life when he so badly needed a real friend.  When her older brother lost his wife and his children were spread out across the country, Geri encouraged him to move near us and she personally cared for him for several years.  We should all have these qualities but not all of us do and few have them as innately, as suffusely as Geri does.  This sense of duty carries into all her undertakings, e.g., as an employee, as a volunteer (ombudsman at a nursing home, child welfare investigator, poll worker) and even to our pets.  When our beloved cat Blanche needed to be hydrated by transfusion every day, Geri turned her ironing board into a gurney for her, hung the hydrating solution from a closet door, and served as her nurse.  And Lilly, . . . words fail me.

She is courageous.  She has faced some difficult challenges in her life and addressed all of them head on.  Where many, including me, would have faltered, backed off from a difficult challenge, she has put her shoulder to the wheel and addressed them.  She has guts, tough-mindedness, patience, and an admirable sense of self-respect and determination that lets her succeed at challenges that would defeat many of us.

My iPhone list is lot longer and includes stuff like leading the way when there is tought, unpleasant, nasty work to be done.  She is first to pick up the mop or shovel, not waiting for others, including me, to get at it. But my list is inevitably incomplete.  She is who she is in all her uniqueness.  She is special in large part because she doesn't treat herself as special, as better than or not as good as anyone around her.  But she is very special to me, and she's very special to her family and to her many friends who count themselves privileged to have her in our lives..    

Deborah Kerr in an Actor's Studio interview: “I don't like getting old. I hate it, in fact. I don't know an honest person who likes it. You just thin out and all your energies go toward surviving or moving safely from one room to another. But the mind thrives, thank God. Or mine does. I used to try very hard not to regret it. I thought that regrets were a waste of time, a sign of weakness. I think only the most insensitive of people have no regrets, because in this time, this slower time, your mind goes back to so many instances when there should have been more kindness, more attention paid to others. I missed so many opportunities to be a better friend, a better mother, a better actress. Of course, I can't remember now what I was in such a hurry to get to that I grew so bad at the important things. So I regret and I think. Old age is the big index to the foolish young people we were.

Tornadoes all over the state, from western counties to Lake Michigan, northern counties to Illinois state line.  Flood warnings in Waukesha and Milwaukee counties; flood watches elsewhere.  The ground has been saturted most of the week, nowhere for all the rain to go.  As of April 15, the National Weather Service had issued 154 weather warnings in Wisconsin for severe thunderstorms, tornadoes and flash floods, according to the Wisconsin State Climatology Office. That's more than six times the historical average and well above the previous April record of 123 warnings in 2002.  Wisconsin had also already seen 31 tornado warnings as of April 15, compared to the previous record of 28 warnings in April 2011.  As of April 15, the Milwaukee area had seen 8.03 inches of rain for the month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  According to data since 2000, the last time Milwaukee approached that much rain was in April 2013 with 7.38 inches logged for the month.  This month's weather is not just a one-off anomaly: The severe weather season has been getting steadily longer in Wisconsin for years, according to the State Climatology Office.  Before 1990, Wisconsin's severe weather season spiked in July. In recent years, that spike has spread out from March to September with some peaking between May and July.