Daily Adventures

Angie, the friend I visited around Christmas time went into hospice two weeks later, and died two weeks ago, peacefully dying after just a day or two's unresponsiveness. Her memorial service was yesterday. It was crowded, and filled with people who hadn't been to our church for a while, and it was so good to see everyone gathered in her name.

She had planned the entire service, in her fearless way. It included speeches from her sons, her husband, one of his sons, and a dear friend of both of ours; the reading was the one about love in Corinthians, which was used in my wedding; and ended it with a rousing rendition of the Village People's "YMCA". It was very much her. The luncheon was fabulous, and the weather defied the predictions that it would start to snow in earnest soon after noon, it waited until after the last of the lunch was cleaned up, and people were home. At 2 pm, wind-driven Gulf clouds whipped into the Front Range from the east, and driven upslope, proceeded to dump a good eight inches of snow.

Today, only the intrepid made it into church, and of those that did, several needed to tell their stories about Angie, too, and I had to sit down with the friend who had done the speech the previous day to just hug her and listen and be present for her as she mourned. John had a similar experience with someone else.

I talked with someone else who has a sister with ovarian cancer, and how that sister is living life for all she's worth. "We're all dying anyway, but some of us just know it's going to be sooner than we'd like," he said. And he is right in a certain sense. Enjoy the ones you love while you can. That's important.

I cried a little during the memorial service, but not a lot. I'd had three crying jags already with respect to Angie, and one of them was just a few days ago, while I was painting six-panel doors for someone's basement. I'd really gotten to know her, the first time, during one of the Biloxi mission trips; and construction work just reminds me of her. The thing that struck me the hardest was my utter gratitude that I'd gotten to see her before Christmas. And it was only then that I realized that what made everything all right was that when I saw her, when I had to leave, we got to say to each other, "I love you."

That made it all right, in a way. I still miss her.

But it's all right.

Uhm. Right.

Disappeared for a while and about to disappear again. You know what they say about Las Vegas... and what I'm about to do will probably just stay there.

However... I never quite finished what happened on the way home, or after. Like driving through Dallas, and up the 287 through tiny towns all through Texas, which was a lot of fun, but we got home on Sunday, and then I dove into the insanity of the release of Winter's Knight with demented_dee. It's out. The debris of the day is still on torquere_social for April 11th.

AND I got galleys for the print versions of both Winter's Knight AND Hearts Under Fire. They're both going to be in *print*, people!! Holy smokes. I'll be able to *hold* them.

AND I started my garden, got the bee boxes together, wrote a 16,000 word Naruto fic on fire play (which I'll post here after I'm back from Las Vegas), and started actually cold calling people for church, which I'm going to have to get BETTER at, and knit a scarf/shawl for Jet's teacher, and did dozens of episodes of One Piece with Jet, and made more sweet potato noodles which actually dried very well...

AND... uhm... I should be falling over, but I'm flying to Vegas this afternoon. *giggles*

And I'll probably write an account of the last drive while in the airport, with pictures as THEY are up on Flickr. All of them, in their road trip glory....

See you on the other side.

It's only been a week.

It feels a little like forever, but it's only been a week.

John came home today, and in the hot tub, he was nearly as incredulous as I was, about it only having been seven days.  With all the things that we did, all the stuff we've seen, all the decisions that were made, and all the life that was packed into the last week, it feels like a great deal more. 

And the odd thing is that life just goes on, after death, that it doesn't stop the world the way one might feel it ought to stop the world.  The world just keeps going.  The snow falls, the wind blows, the sun rises and sets.  Meals come and go, exercise has to be taken, and there's a skunk that's now made a home under our house. Tomorrow morning, the pest control people are coming to see what they can do about it.  And I have to order my bees and clean out the boxes, soon, and plant all the frost resistant vegetables in the next week or two.

And it all feels so surreal.


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Life's been busy lately. A little odd, but very very full. Since the trip, I've been finishing off a novel with demented_dee, getting into another one so that the end depression isn't quite as bad, and adjusting a lot of small things in my life to just make things better.

( Eye improvements, knitting, a new keyboard, changing out the burrs of the butt grinder, building up my own weight set for the weight training program, and my first worn out pair of jeans! )

My hands have been a real mess this past week. It's been a combination of things, but I've really broken out the dictation software and found that I can make it do what I really wanted to do.

It also helps to change the workload. I've been doing far too many of the Facebook games, and it's really the mouse work that's been messing up the tendons on the backs of my wrists. It didn't help that I was also working on the CaféPress store, chatting in text rather than audio, playing Bejeweled Blitz, and writing the odd 3000 words in one day with Allie.

( So I've been taking a little time off. )

Jet's back in school on Wednesday, so things have gotten a bit crowded lately.

Monday and Tuesday were doing a short story with Darkprism. Tuesday night, Jet went with his best friend Hunter to the Lakeside Amusement Park, and John and I went with him this time. John liked having company while the boys did the rides. Wednesday was the hosting of the Torquere site. Thursday the boys and I went up to Estes Park and rented a paddle boat and did Mini-Golf with running water and mountains all around. And, today, I got my bee setup in Littleton, went to H-Mart to load up on Asian goodies, and hit up 8 Island in Boulder for Hawaiian food on the way home.

It's all been pretty good.

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Had a pretty jam-packed science setup today, with an experiment where the kids got to figure out the setup and they got to figure out what prediction really means with some data to start with. It was really fun to introduce the concepts of why standard approaches are necessary and what kinds of things make them good.

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It's been a very wet summer. Lots of rainstorms, thunderstorms, and a long wet spring that led into a very wet summer. It's actually been humid here! After commenting about condensation on drink glasses in Vermont, it was funny to get home and actually have condensation on our glasses here, which we never get.

The garden likes it, and everything out here on the Front Range is unusually green. The sun's still be out, and it's still been hot, but the tomatoes are a little slower, though the corn and produce has been good around here and the farmers are talking about bumper crops and there's hay everywhere. My allergies have been mostly under control, too, as the nearly daily rains have washed all kinds of stuff out of the air.

I think my favorite thing has been doing backstroke in the neighborhood pool while watching the many-layered sky flow above me. I hadn't known that there were swallows in the neighborhood, or that dragonflies would fly that far. The sparrows zigzag their way through the air, and the commercial jets sail serenely above.

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We've been busy, which probably surprises no one. *laughs* It's funny to write it all down and realize all that I've been doing when I thought I was getting "nothing" done... *laughs*

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