The long breaks between seasons make me nervous; When the new season begins, my confidence in my ability to do my job is completely deflated. Right now, we’re a few weeks into the season, and I not only KNOW that I am damn good at my job, but I’ve been doing it long enough that I should be teaching other people how to do it or running my own program or both. It reminds me of the time right after my Dad died, when I was nervous every day I had to go to work that I would just break down and not be able to focus enough to get through the day. I managed to get through every day, back then, and the only thing that I couldn’t keep up with was playing in bands. I’m not sure, now, if I just needed the time I was devoting to music to relax and decompress or if playing was actually more mentally demanding than working. Maybe it was both. I miss playing music, I want to play again… but when I feel so insecure at the beginning of each season of work, I wonder if I really have the focus to pull both off again. It’s just like all those classes, when I was in school. I feel like I can do one very well, but if I try to do all of it, I’ll end up doing them all half-assed… is this just pre-season jitters? Will I suddenly remember how good I am at being in a band a couple weeks in? Will my work or my music suffer from trying to do both at the same time? Sometimes I feel like taking some shitty office job that I don’t care about and wouldn’t have to try hard at, just so I can focus on the rest of my life. The money would certainly be more stable… but would I go crazy if I didn’t enjoy and believe in my job? I certainly felt crazy when I worked at TelecomNOW; I had to give up caffeine just to stay grounded. And I took on the Wormtown.org project while I was working there. Not only did it help me keep my sanity, by being something I believed was worth doing, but it kept me connected to the music scene, so that when The Overtones stopped playing, it wasn’t hard for me to find another band to play with. I don’t feel confident enough to try for any drastic changes… find or start an organization I believe in that I could work for full-time, all year or make a living with music by building up my chops and getting back to the point where I could sight-read and do studio work… I’d be happy, but they seem unrealistic or unattainable. I definitely feel pressure to do more, though. That is my point, I either need to do more of the work that I’m doing, that I love, or I need to do more of something else… music or something. I don’t think I’d ever feel this insecurity or lack of confidence if I didn’t have these huge breaks.
Tag Archive for 'Dad'
I found out, today, that Andy Jones died. I don’t know any details. I don’t know how to feel, yet. I have good memories of Andy Jones from high school. He was a talented dude. He had the ability to do whatever it was he chose to do, very well. He knew how to be excellent. He’ll be missed. I dunno if I have a favorite Andy memory. The first thoughts about him that came to my head were about the band he was in called Split… and then about high school… show choir trips, nights in the barn … and then I remembered running into him once at UMASS … and then the last time I saw him, at a company christmas party a couple years ago, for a company that a couple of other friends worked for, including Drew. What kept popping into my head was how he had an almost word-association type reaction to certain bands. If I mentioned the Pixies, he’d say, “Man, whenever you mention the Pixies, I immediately think, ‘Cariboooooooooooooou…’ and whenever the Dead Milkmen came up, he’d say, “I have nothing against the Dead Milkmen, but there was this kid back in Indiana, and he loved that song Takin Retards to the Zoo, played it on repeat a lot, kinda turned me off to them…” There were so many in-jokes, ridiculous phrases and stuff that have absolutely no meaning, now, rattling around in my head…
I’m not sure if it’s sad or not, but this news totally distracted me from the fact that it’s been four years since my dad died. I think I would have gone the whole day without realizing it, if Sarah had not mentioned it. I’m not sure I realized it last year, but I think Sarah’s mom might’ve mentioned it. The Dad memory that came to mind tonight, as we were driving home from our friend Jessica’s housewarming party was about Dad giving me directions. It was one of those first trips that I took from Woonsocket to my parents’ house. I was going to head back the way I came and I mentioned that there’s probably some other road I could take that winds through Connecticut. Dad suggested a route. It was a couple windy roads that did exactly that. The best part was that he said “and you’ll be on this road, and just about the time you say, ‘where the hell am I?’ you’ll hit Route 44.” And that is exactly what happened. I think I even said it out loud… not realizing that I was fulfilling his prophecy until the moment it happened.
I dunno what is more saddening… but the coincidence is morbid.
Today, I fixed a leaky bathtub faucet. I don’t think I’ve done much in the way of plumbing ever in my life… maybe taken off a faucet handle and then decided the job was too much for me or finding a leak, but then calling someone about it… or pouring drano down something. This was certainly the first time I ever actually fixed a leaky faucet. It was painless enough, even made me feel sort of accomplished.
Every time I see my prescription, specifically, the bottle with my last name on it, I think about my Dad… not some random thought, but something like “is that my Dad’s bottle?” or “Why is one of Dad’s prescriptions out here?” … defying any logical thoughts about Dad being gone for several years now, or the fact that I haven’t lived in the same house as my Dad for eight or nine years. My brain just can’t see a bottle with my name on it and think that it’s mine. Will I ever get used to having a prescription?
The ongoing health issues have prompted lots of discussion about health insurance and Sarah or I needing jobs that have real benefits. Drama being what it is around here, the discussions have often turned into fights or bouts of silent treatment. The whole thing has got me looking back into tech jobs. I cruise craigslist on a daily basis and send an occasional response to interesting looking positions; Haven’t heard anything back from anyone, yet. It’s not something I want to do. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t take another desk job unless I was being paid substantially more than I was in Marlboro… but I was probably overpaid, given my technical qualifications, at the time. Either way, I was not healthy and not happy and I don’t know what the consequences would be if I were to take such a job again. I don’t want to sacrifice my mental well-being for the chance at better physical well-being. It makes me actually take some interest in this health care reform political stuff. I guess there isn’t a chance that we’d have a universal, free-to-everyone system like the rest of the civilized world has, but it would certainly ease my mind of this issue, if we did.
I helped Doug pick up a new van, yesterday. It was a lot of work, since it had a wheelchair lift in it, that we didn’t need and therefore, had to remove. I haven’t driven it yet, but I’m sure it’ll make the memories come flooding back. The most recent van memories are of the big passenger vans that I drove for the Y. Some of them were just big 15 passenger vans with a school bus sign slapped on top, and others were a little more bus-like, with rubber floors and an aisle. Whether it was bring kids to after-school day care from school or to a field trip for camp, they were always fun to drive.
My fondest van memories are attached to the van that I owned: the big red van that we moved The Overtones around in. I paid the same price for that van that Doug paid for his, yesterday: $2,000. It had a huge rack welded to the top of it; the owner swore that it would hold anything I could get up there. On the back of the rack, there were some super bright flood-lights that were fun for freaking out tailgaters. It was the perfect size for the band. There were two big bench seats in the back and room for a third, but no hook-ups… this translated into plenty of room for amps, guitars and drums. We usually took one seat out, so we wouldn’t have to stack the equipment too high.
I kept on driving it after that band fizzled. I remember loaning out my services as van and driver to a friends band a couple times. The craziest van memories include the time I was carpooling home from the tech job in Marlborough, when a crazed cop pulled us over and decided to search the entire van for drugs. I think he found some rolling papers in Sands’ bag. We just hung out by the police cruiser with the other officer, whom we lovingly referred to as “back-up,” and stared in wonder as he tore through every inch of the beast. I think he broke the handle on my sliding door, too. 
A few months after I downgraded to a station wagon, I borrowed the van from my Dad, to help move my friend Becky back to Charlton, from NYC. I knew Dad was a little hard on vehicles, but the van had stayed pretty strong when I owned it, so I trusted it to handle this move. We made it all the way down to the city, got it loaded and then got all the way back up to Massachusetts, off the highway, to within 5 miles of Becky’s house, and the right front universal joint let go. The wheel slammed into the back of the wheel well and we stopped dead. It happened while taking a corner at 4 or 5 miles per hour or less… had it happened on the 150 miles of highway between NYC and Charlton, we’d have likely flipped and/or rolled and died. We had several hours to contemplate our luck as we sat around and watched tow truck drivers scratch their heads. The first tow truck driver showed up with a regular truck, took one look at the situation and realized that it wasn’t going to be simple at all. The next guy showed up with a flatbed, and we still had to use a couple hydraulic jacks in place of the useless wheel. I think we moved all of Becky’s stuff to a couple other vehicles, in between tow truck drivers.
Dad had taught me how to listen and feel for unusual noises and vibrations that might be signs of trouble… and yet, in the few months that he had driven the van around, since inheriting it from me, he had managed to ingore any signs that there was trouble. And he had plenty of experience with vans… we owned no less than 4 or 5 while he was operating his Pressed4Time franchise 
(corporate dry cleaning pickup and delivery service). I don’t remember getting the first van, but when he grew his route too large to handle himself, he hired a couple of guys and we went van shopping. I remember buying this enormous conversion van. It had a wooden bench in the back with the kind of cushion you’d find on patio furniture and some sort of bed-contraption in the middle, I think. I thought it was so cool. I was fairly sad when it got the standard white paint job and the clothes racks and support beams were installed in place of the bed-thing. If I had a day off (or faked sick to take a day off), I’d ride around in the back of one of the vans, rolling around with the clothes, all day, popping into some of the offices with Dad and helping carry clean clothes in and bags of dirty clothes out. I definitely preferred hanging out in the back of the vans than going into the super-hot dry cleaners at the end of the run.
Yesterday was a long day, but so much of it stirred up fond memories. I guess it’s the nature of vans, being so versatile, that you always have some custom attachments that you may or may not need… and you do a bit of converting and customizing, yourself.
I really meant to blog more from back east. I’ve had a draft sitting here since before Sarah and her mom joined me out there, but I don’t think I logged back in after they got there, and we came back right before I started work, so things have been fairly busy. Today is a real day off, though. There’s some sort of testing this week that throws off all the school schedules, so here I am, with some free time. Yesterday was a day off, too, but most of the day was occupied by the Mazda dealership and the crazy extended warranty people. I just finished preparing some pork for tomorrow’s dinner. It’s marinating, now… while I was cutting the meat, Sarah noticed that the marinade had separated. It reminds me of Jell-O 1-2-3. They don’t make that anymore, which is too bad. I remember liking it. Enjoy the picture. I’ve posted a few other pictures from the trip at Flickr in a set called Back East 2008. I think we need to come up with more creative names for these trips. It was a good trip though, action-packed and fun-filled. Without further ado, here are some of my thoughts and reactions and recaps of it:
I did a lot of wandering around in between my grandfather’s funeral and the day Sarah and her Mom arrived. I didn’t make a checklist this time, I sort of winged it. I missed Putnam and Providence and Western Mass, as well as Sara and Drew, but I’ll try and make it up to them over the holidays or something. The most impressive changes were in Woonsocket. I drove around most of town on one of my first free days, while doing some errands.
Improvements since I lived in Woonsocket:
Starbucks: closed
Tim Hortons: opened a second location, with a drive-thru
Main St: more than half of the storefronts were occupied and open
Also, the Game Stop had a Wii Fit in stock.
I caught up with some people and did a little sightseeing around Worcester & Millbury and Webster & Dudley. I ate at Jimmy’s pizza, played Werewolves of London on the jukebox. I did some shopping for New England treats at a Market Basket (where I found the Coffee Milk on the same shelf as all the other milks). I helped Mom start to remake her living room and move beds around.
The girls arrived on Saturday night, right in the middle of what was left of the storm Hanna. They survived their long drive, though, and I was very proud of them. Sarah’s posted a pretty good recap of the first couple days at her livejournal. We saw some family, toured through Plymouth, hit King Richard’s Faire and then went to NYC and played tourist some more; visited the Statue of Liberty and ground zero and a good deli.
Tuesday, we had a little more rain, so we kept it local and did some indoor-type activities. We started with breakfast at Carl’s Diner in Oxford. The serving size has not gone down. We sat at the counter, for the maximum effect. I don’t believe we ate another real meal for the whole day. We did hit Friendly’s for some ice cream, that evening. I believe that was also the day we took in some Candlepin bowling at Mohegan in Webster. It’s still kind of a dive, but its charm is intact.
Wednesday, we met Mom in Worcester, after dropping my car off at the Mazda dealership for an oil change (and to look into the weirdness it went through on the drive out there). We headed to Lexington to visit the historic Battle Green, visited the cemetery where my Dad and my Grandfather are and then met up with Mom’s friend Joyce at Bruegger’s Bagels for lunch. I hadn’t had a Herbie Turkey in a long time, and it was very tasty. Then we drove downtown and walked around Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall, had some cream puffs and then went to my cousin Mark’s place, in Braintree, for dinner. Mark made us pick records to play, and then made us play his XBox 360 and his Playstation 3. He cooked his awesome mac & cheese and some amazing burgers for us.
Thursday, we took in Purgatory Chasm. We walked down the chasm and back up on the East side of it. It was very nice, good weather for it. We also went up to Dresser Hill and got some food and shakes. I don’t think the Dairy stuff is as good as it once was, but it’s still the only place I eat fried clams. That night, we went to the outskirts of Worcester and saw Mark’s group, The Accident that Led Me to the World, play in a barn attached to a huge farmhouse that about 20 people lived in. They call it a Collective (read: commune) and the show was a potluck. Lots of friendly modern hippie-types, nice big wood-burning stove in the kitchen, bunch of pretty good music. It was something I’d never expect from Worcester.
Friday, we decided to hit the Big E on opening day, as a stopping point on our way back home. It was fun to go down the avenue of states and expose Patti to all the local culture and flavors. We wandered through some of the vendors and a good chunk of the crafting section. We ate a little and walked a lot. Looking back, it wasn’t a good choice for a stop on the morning of a big drive. We were still pretty exhausted for the first few hours of the trip home, and we ran into torrential downpours and Tornado warnings, but we survived. I think I slept through most of Saturday.
The sun is still only coming out on days where we sleep in or need to go to work. We got an old Polaroid 450 land camera working with a new set of batteries and a pack of 690 from the local Wolf Camera… Sarah tried to buy it at the camera store she works at, but they told her she couldn’t… something about needing it for passport photos. Pretty strange that she had to take her business elsewhere. Anyway, that’s a lot of film to use up in all these new/old cameras. So we need a sunny day… preferably one with temperatures at least in the double digits.
The adapter that came the other day turned out to be the opposite of what I needed, but I took a trip down to Micro Center while Sarah was at work. It took a really long time to get there, due to traffic/weather issues, so I didn’t get to wander around the store and bask in it’s full glory, but it was pretty impressive. Very big store, seemed to have a good selection and someone was there to help me within a minute or two of me walking in. They had the right one, so I’m closer to fixing the fish tank computer, though I still don’t know where or when I’ll tackle that.
In other news, I took some of the money in my ING account and invested it in some stocks, prompted by their eMail about acquiring Sharebuilder. I’ll never use the crazy stock strategies that I learned with Dad at those nutty seminars, but I did include some Food industry stocks in my little portfolio, in honor of his idea that “people will always need food.” I’m about 60/40 Technology & Food industry stocks, so I guess I could do another food stock or some other industry, but I invested about half of what was in the ING account, and I was kinda hoping to see the results of that savings account interest versus the stock gains over time. So I’ll probably just leave it how it is.
Just woke up from a weird dream. It was sort of a suspense/thriller feel, so I was kinda upset about waking up, only because I would love to know what was gonna happen next. The basic disjointed pieces were like this:
I’m in Dudley at my parents’ house, actually, outside my parents’ house and Dad is there. He tells me he’s heading somewhere, some weird location whose name I know was repeated multiple times in the dream, but that I can’t recall at all, now. He said he had to pick some stuff up, but that some people might come looking for stuff… and he started to say, “If they come, it’s…” but then he changed his mind and said just to tell them that he was out. Some people definitely came, and I don’t remember my exact interaction with them, but I do remember that they did finally decide to leave, but that there were a lot of cars in the driveway, so they proceeded to smash into many of them on their way out… one of them was in a little classic dodge caravan type thing and backed into this 80s Oldsmobile looking thing on the grass behind the house and somehow pushed it all the way across the yard and into the fence. I told whoever was standing next to me that it’s ok, “it doesn’t run.” Then he continued his many pointed turn maneuver and pulled in between some small trees onto the neighbor’s yard over their driveway and down to the road. I remember being thankful that my car (which was my current car, my Mazda 5) was parked way behind the house and out of his rage range. I was looking at some awful gold-rust colored Cadillac up on the hill that heads up to the barn and being thankful that they hadn’t hit this one. I think it was partly because it belonged to someone important to my dad and partly because that someone would’ve gone crazy and beat them up, or something. Then I was talking to someone, maybe the same person I had told not to worry about the car on the lawn, about my dad telling me where he was going and that people might come by and I mentioned where he went and they said, “oh, then he’s gone to get the paperwork.” And proceeded to explain to me that he was probably out getting whatever illiegal documents were needed to make this other guy into me, on paper. I don’t think there was good explanation why, at the time.
The next part I remember is a bunch of people gathered inside with Dad, and this guy who was going to become me, and they were all sitting around a table, maybe, but I think we were all on couches. I know that I wasn’t supposed to know about this identity thing… so there was some point in the conversation when my Dad asked if anyone had anything to say, or maybe asked me something directly… either way, I said something about not being able to ever start my own company because “he’s going to be me.” There was some shock, I think, that I knew.
And then it turned into a party, for this guy, because the cat was out of the bag, and my dad explained that he was going to take control of the Voegtlin Corporation and Companies. Somebody said something about him not really needing to be me to do that and whoever was sitting next to them said that it would be cheaper if it was inherited. I remember that I got really mad at Dad at one point, I think he had said something about playing music and not being able to start a company doing that or something, and from my position, half-lying down on a couch, threw a drumstick (a bass drum mallet, one of two I was twirling around in my fingers) at his head, though, intentionally missing by a couple inches. He paused and looked alarmed and after a while, threw it back and I caught it somehow with the other stick. I also remember that I was just lying on the couch and saying very little while this party was going on around me. At one point, this guy who was going to become me, who I’m not positive had a name until this point, was talking about how much he loved certain pills he was taking. There was lots of agreement, including from my Dad, I think… and then there was some mention of his birthday and someone said, “yeah, what are we gonna do for him on his last birthday as Eddie?”
Then some more science-fiction flair got thrown in, someone, possibly me, asked about how he was going to prove he was me, if it ever came into scrutiny, and wouldn’t it be easier to steal Ernie’s identity (my older, mostly incommunicado, brother), and so on… and while there wasn’t really any explanation, my Dad did ask me for a blood sample, and for some reason Eddie was drawing his own blood, too. And then I told them that this wouldn’t work because I didn’t take any pills and everyone took pills, so my blood would certainly show up as irregular and any investigator worth his salt could tell that (pointing at various people in the room) “you’re on…” this and that drug and “you two are both on…” these pills and so on.
And that’s about the time I woke up. Thinking about it afterwards, the weirdest parts were that I was concerned with starting my own business… but maybe I was just using that as an example of something I couldn’t do if I wasn’t me, anymore. Another thing that struck me as odd was that “Eddie” was hispanic. he sort of looked like a bald Carlos Mencia… Dad was just a little bit racist, and it just didn’t seem right to me that he would hand down his whole company to a guy like that, but it’s not like I knew the guy, this was a dream, but it did occur to me right after waking up, so maybe it was part of the dream, too. Then there’s the fact that I had my Mazda. We essentially bought our Mazdas with Dad’s life insurance benefits. And the room the party was in was not like any room in our house in Dudley. It looked like a small, white apartment… but there’s gaps, I don’t even remember Dad coming back from wherever he was, in the dream, it’s possible that we all went somewhere else between the time I found out about the identity theft and the party. Then, in true Mark Mandeville, Dream No. 1 fashion, I started wondering if any of it was true, while preparing my breakfast (Mark wondered if he would drop dead any moment from the poison he drank in his dream, while he was eating his cereal). I wondered if Dad had, in fact, set someone up as a fake me. Of course, then I remembered that Dad was not as maniacal as he was in my dream and that there was no Voegtlin Corporation and Companies to inherit.
Back in the real world, I have some sort of training for Adventure Ed, tomorrow. Not sure exactly what it’s about. But I’ve also got to finish up the stats from last season and eMail the students with the links to the pictures after the training. I miss working a little bit, but I’d much rather sit home and play Lego Star Wars on the Wii… or go out and take some pictures, but it’s still looking pretty gray outside. I put in that order for sunlight on Friday. No tip for the sun god this time, that’s for sure.
- Boston accents really are funny. I was conditioned not to respond much to them, while living out there, but when my Mom’s friend Joyce started talking about the Pops concert they went to and mentioned the “orchestra” (Auk-sturrah), I almost cracked up. I didn’t hear too many other examples, but once I heard that, my ears were sort of listening for it. No one’s mentioned anything overly funny about my accent out here. Dad trained himself out of his Boston accent to be on the radio, so I grew with a midwesternized sort of accent… but there are discrepancies, mostly in vowel sounds; some double-O words like roof and room have an oo sound in my head, not a uh sound… and it seems that there’s some long E and long A differences, too. Sarah works on N McLean Blvd. The first time I went there, the directions her mom gave me included a street that sounded like [Shirley] MacLaine… and of course there’s the example from that Threadless shirt that rhymed Cherry with Fairy, that might be close enough for spoken poetry, but one has a clear eh sound to me, while the other has a long A.
-Â I miss playing music. I knew that already, obviously, but I took a ride with Mark to a couple music stores, looking for gifts for Raianne, and I missed even that part of the scene. Hanging around talking to music store employees, seeing how knowledgeable they are, guessing what kinds of shoppers the other people in the store are: parents, multi-instrumentalists, strictly piano, garage band kids, etc. I also almost went to a show at Ralph’s. I was extremely tempted, just to see some local music, even if it was metal(!) … but I didn’t end up going, mostly because I didn’t have my earplugs with me, but the yearning was there.
- While the GPS is useful out here for finding out how long it’s going to take to get places or getting around large obstacles like airports or finding out where the bridges over the rivers are, it’s not necessary, since the grid road structure seems to extend forever. It is, however, completely necessary when driving to new places in New England. Grid doesn’t exist out there, except in small pockets of residential suburbia or inner-city areas that happen to be uninterrupted by a river or a coastline or a humongous hill. Most roads go diagonally at some time or another, very few are straight for more than a mile at a time. If GPS is unavailable, a printed out set of directions from a map service is ok, if you have a decent navigator to read them to you. Getting directions from locals works in a pinch, but be prepared for landmarks that don’t really exist anymore (“bear left where The Fair used to be, then go up past the old closed Texaco and turn left at the building that used to be the high school. When you pass the parking lot that used to be the Ford Dealership you’re almost there, you just have to take what was the third exit of the rotary at that big intersection where they installed a light. Then it’s on your right, after the where the mill used to be…”). Of course, if you live out there, you just know which roads go where. I used to have mental pictures of where each road ended and which important roads it might intersect with along the way. Maybe I can start clearing out all the brainspace for other things, now.
- My little laptop could might be able to get me through a weekend or maybe even a week of regular use. It’s pretty beat up and kinda sad, in that it has no CD-Rom and has to have either wireless network or USB ports, since it’s internal USB port fell out. But it gets me to my mail and the rest of the web. It does just fine with that GPS stuff, when it doesn’t do that 25-minute blank screen before booting thing.
I wish the rest of the computers here had such minor problems. Frank’s is due for another upgrade, to be able to play Call of Duty 4. He thinks it’s the graphics card, it probably is, but that’s gonna require a Power supply upgrade … and since we left it in the crazy Gateway case, it’s gonna be easier and cheaper to do a case transfer. Not a huge problem, but still a big project. The fish tank computer was due to have the Reserator added to it, but after successfully fishing out the molex power lead that tells the reserator when to turn on, the machine won’t boot. It seems like a power issue, and the power supply was just the crappy stock Gateway… possibly not the best candidate for oil submersion. Maybe, after the upgrade, I’ll submerge Frank’s equally crappy power supply, instead. removing that tray from the oil seems like a really messy project that I’m not especially looking forward to. And then Sarah’s uncle Paul left his laptop here on Christmas… it was ridiculously infested with spyware and malware and adware, but it also can’t see its audio card… or, more accurately, it can see it, and install drivers for it, but only the line-in gets installed. For output, it says “no audio device.” It’s annoying. It also has a power jack issue, which, I believe i saw something about needing a re-solder in a quick google search. I’ve never been good at soldering.
After a short day of work, Sarah and I made a holiday shopping tour of several stores and the mall. We bought stuff for a lot of family and friends and got some supplies for Sarah to make her own wrapping paper. I got some ideas for some of y’all, so you might be receiving something from me this year, either in the mail or maybe when I’m back east for those few days just before Christmas. If you’re thinking about returning the favor, I have combined my immense and confusing Amazon wish lists into one enormous list so that anyone who happens to search for me gets to see everything.
Shopping for other people really does cause some neat warm-and-fuzzy feelings. I have a fond memory of an extreme example of that phenomenon. My dad took this guy named Danny, who did odd jobs for us because he needed the money, and his kid, Phillip to the mall and had them pick out everything they wanted to get for each other. Then Dad paid for it all. I took the kid around and helped him get over the urge to just stare at and touch things he wanted and think of things his mom and dad would want. It was really nice.
I guess this day will continue to be a defining day. I can pretend it was all a bunch of circumstances having to do with getting a random day off and being assigned dinner-duty and not wanting to cook a half-assed meal and a mini-argument that led to not having a ride and therefore walking about 9 miles to pick up my car… but the truth is, I think, I just needed some time on this day to be alone and clear my head. The walk was good for that. No really defining things actually happened, but it was a good head-clearing time. I sort of wish I’d taken a ride to Bedford to visit Dad’s grave while I was home. I’ll put it on the list for next time.
