Rick's Journal

...putting off updates for a week at a time.  It leads to long posts.  However, I will attempt to be brief, no promises. 

( Babysitting Elijah )

( Flute stuff )

( Madrigal Troubadours )
( Picnic with family )

( Harry Potter )

( Work stuff )

( Nick )

( One Man Star Wars Trilogy )

( More flute stuff )

Guess what I desperately need to get to today?  That's right, 7V stuff.  So on that cheery note, I will leave you and go catch up on all those emails I didn't get to over the past three nights.

 This is my first post from my two week vacation.  Of course, that's because I haven't had internet connectivity since Friday night at work.  I've been suffering serious withdrawals.

Vacation so far:
Saturday, I drove up to NH to go with the bro to tell my mom that our older brother had died.  Now before you go thinking what a terrible thing this must be for me and offering condolences, let me clarify a few things.  We found out Wednesday night that he died almost three years ago.  We did some more research and though we haven't got a 100% match, we are 99.999573012% certain it is him.  We have a match on first name, middle initial, last name and birth date.  We have confirmation of past three addresses.  We have some information from the hospice where he spent the last 4 months of his life that he died of a prolonged illness.  They won't tell us more because he indicated he had no family, but that's in keeping with the estrangement from the family.  We have a social security number of the deceased that was issued in NH about the time my brother would have had his issued for work purposes.  All we have left to do is somehow find out definitively what my brother's SS# was, but the rest just ties out too much to rule it out.

So we went to see my mom.  That was the only part of this that was hard on me.  I was dreading that part.  She took it a lot better than I expected.  There were some tears, but she seemed to rebound well.  Of course, I was pretty sure that was partly shock and that it would be worse after she was alone for a while with her thoughts.  I've called her a couple of times since then and it has hit her pretty badly.  I will continue to check on her.

We went and visited with my dad for a while too.  He'd heard it the day before.  It didn't seem to impact him badly, but he did look very thoughtful during the rest of the conversation and didn't say much.

I had to pick up Monique in Hartford at 7:30, so I couldn't stay around much.  She had been in VA helping out her sister for most of last week and she took the train back up to CT so we could fly to FL Sunday morning.  We took a hotel close to the airport rather than drive an hour south just to drive an hour and 15 minutes north Sunday morning.

Sunday was a travel day.  We left CT at about 8:45 and got to our condo at about 4:00.  We read a little bit after getting all of our stuff settled in and I decided to take a 20 minute cat nap around 7:30.  I woke up Monday morning at about 8:00.  Yes, the shock.  I not only slept in until 8:00, which is outrageous for me, but it was after sleeping over 12 hours.  I've been burning the candle at both ends and from the middle out as well for far too long.

Yesterday, by the time we got going, it was after 11:00.  We decided that our first day out in the sun probably shouldn't be done out in the worst heat of the day, so we went shopping.  Monique got her nails done and we both got haircuts.  It was 5:00 by the time we got back and a storm was moving in, so we still didn't go out and get any sun, but at least it's been relaxing.  We watched 6 episodes of the last season of West Wing and then went to bed at 9:30.  

I got another 9 1/2 hours of sleep.  I feel decadent.   I sat out on the back porch overlooking the ocean this morning while sipping coffee.  There was a heron on our back lawn.  I watched him for a while.  It was just wonderfully relaxing.  I've wasted half the day and it's glorious.  More later.   I need to go answer more of that silly meme from last week.  I'll bet some of you thought I'd forgotten you.