Wind in the sails

2003-07-29 - 8:11 p.m.

Believe it or not, I'm back!

This afternoon I finally returned home from a 24-day road trip. My parents and I drove from Sacramento to Seattle by way of Pensacola. Ha ha, yes, we're nuts. We drove over 7300 miles and honestly we were sad to be back home. We had a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, when I got home I found out that three things which were dear to me to varying degrees had died during my absence. I'll give them to you from bad to worst.

For starters, our squirrel died. It's only our squirrel because it decided to live in our backyard, but nevertheless. The poor little guy drowned in our swimming pool. I feel vaguely guilty about this. Luckily, we had a boy coming to take care of our yard while we were away and he was good enough to fish Mr. Squirrel from the bottom of our pool. He buried him under our oak tree. Bye bye, Mr. Squirrel.

Secondly, my favorite tech died. I thought I had at least one entry here in which I talked about him, but I can't seem to find any. This tech was the only other person I worked with who actually thought getting to work on time was important. He always had a smile and he was always willing to help. He had no qualms about running out to a floor for any reason even if he had just been out there. He actually did his job and did it with a smile. He was one of the very few people at that hospital I genuinely liked. I would guess he was in his late 30's or early 40's. I got a mass e-mail from Cheesecake saying that he had been found dead in his home, no more information than that. Quite a shocker. It's one of those things that makes you stop to think a moment about your own mortality. He will definitely be missed.

And last and most horribly for me, my great-aunt died. She was my mom's mom's older sister, a week or two shy of 83 years old. What makes me angry is that I didn't know and neither did my mom. As far as we know, my grandfather got the scoop but failed to pass it on. My great-aunt has had Parkinson's for a very long time--I'd guess around ten years--so the fact that she is sick and declining is not a surprise. But apparently about five weeks ago she fell and broke her hip. That's the bit of information we never received. A broken bone in an elderly person is often a harbinger of the end. We could've at least visited her one more time. She's been in and out of the hospital and nursing homes for the past five weeks and was finally made DNR and allowed to go home to die in relative comfort. We arrived home this afternoon to find a message on our answering machine from my mom's cousin saying my great-aunt had passed away. I was closer to my great-aunt than I think most people are to theirs. She always lived pretty close to my grandmother when they were both alive so I saw her often. There's also a bit of a story that goes with our closeness. My grandmother was always a very petite lady. When she got pregnant with my mom at the age of 21, my great-grandmother was certain that my grandmother would die in childbirth. My great-grandmother made my great-aunt promise that she would adopt my grandmother's child when my grandmother died giving birth. I have no idea why the responsibility wouldn't automatically fall to my grandfather, but perhaps times were different then. At any rate, my grandmother did not die in childbirth and in fact lived another fifty years. When my grandmother died, my great-aunt told me this story and told me that since my mom was well past the age of needing to be adopted, she would instead be my adoptive grandmother. So you see, to me she was more than just my great-aunt. Bye bye, Auntie, I will always love you.

But I didn't mean for this to be a depressing entry. It just sort of turned that way all by itself. In brighter news, I'm for sure going to Japan in August. I was having trouble getting my dad to agree to let me go for a while. But while I was in Houston, my sister-in-law asked me about my trip to Japan in front of my dad (as far as I know she didn't know that he hadn't agreed to it yet) and that put him on the spot. He couldn't look like a stick in the mud in front of my brother and sister-in-law so he said I could go. I think I owe my sister-in-law a big thank you for that one.

I'm going to write more about my road trip later. I didn't write any entries while I was gone so everything I write is going to be retrospective. I don't plan on going into too much detail so hopefully it won't get too long and tedious. I'd like to include some pictures though, so I have to get them all downloaded and sorted and all that jazz. I took over 780 pictures...this could take a while!