ARCHIVES - 1996 to FOREVER

And a long night with lots of sleep.

My damned leg hurts every time I adduct it, though, and that makes getting out of bed painful. So natch, I had to get up to go to the bathroom three times last night.

The day started at 08:00, I was up and ready to go.

Kim and Lacee and Matt and Brian got here about 09:30, and we were on the road by about 10:00 and got there about 12:30.

We ate at the Taco Mayo in Parsons, that's the place where Karen fell on her face several years ago. Brain, who was with her at the time, performed an re-enactment for us, and Karen wasn't very amused.

After that we went to the graveyard and put flowers on the appropriate graves. I noticed one set of graves, eight of them in the same family, with the date of death, 1969. Wonder what happened there? Gotta be a story. The were quite close to GEDs' gravesite in the catholic part of the cemetary. No, I don't really think that they had a segregated graveyard, but maybe it did start out that way....

From there we went over to GEDs' house and looked around, the kids were playing some of his records and I was checking out the tools in the garage....

Kim wanted a rocker, and we had to put the rear seat of the van down, and then there was a lot of room left over, so I loaded some tools up, a cutoff saw and a belt/disk snader and a grinder. The other thing that I would like to get is the table saw and a router table and stand. He had a lot of hand tools, most of which would be duplicates of ones that I have, but I'll store them somewhere, and some of them might be useful.

Then we went over to Julies' (GEDs' sister) house and visited with her for a while. Her husband Charlie looks much better than I've ever seen him, he has to have dialysis three times a week and he also has cirrosis. He was up and around, he had been out washing their cars when we came.

Since she's Catholic, I figgered that she knew the story, and she did.

Smoke inhalation. There was a small fire that was contained in one room (poorly-disposed-of cigarette) and it killed every one of them in the house. The mom and dad were in their forties and the kids ranged in age from about two to eighteen.

Yeah, I knew that there was a story, and a grisly one it is.

Then the drive home. Kim wanted me to drive, so I did. It's been a number of years since I drove a van, and I'd forgotten how affected that they are by the wind. And it was windy today. Kim had to fight it going down, but I had a tail wind most of the way back.

We got back at 19:30 or so, and it was good to be home. It's *always* good to be home, heh?

And I think that it's pretty likely that I'll be able to sleep tonight too, I'm weary from the trip. And carrying those heavy tools, too. Right now, they're under the dining-room table, 'cause I don't want to carry them into the basement and then have to bring them up in a coupla weeks....

Well, that, and the fact that I'm a lazy SOB anyway.

Tomorrow I'm gonna get some work done on the back deck, then I go on call at 19:00.

Big storms the the north, big storms to the south... we have one more chance, a line is coming in from the west, and the southern edge of that might hit us... about 03:00 or so. I'll be asleep by them, and even if it does hit us, it's probably gonna just be rain. Dammit. I was looking forward to some *real* storms!

O'yeah. Still smoking. Dammit again.

And I've been having really bad cravings for whisky lately, but I've resisted. It's hard, though, hard, hard, hard.