Tip of the hat to the counter-culture that’s gone pretty mainstream, to all those with sunshine in a bag, puff puff pass;) Reminding me of my college days:)

So for some reason, I get it in my brain today to throw the bikes in the back of the truck, and let’s head down to Gateway Park and do some biking. All of that was fine and well and we did half an hour of biking and loaded up the bikes and headed back towards the house. As we were leaving I noticed my bike handlebar hanging over the side, I half thought I should do something about that but that thought was fleeting and on we went.

We stop at the mall to get something and I then see the damage that’s been done by the brake handle digging into the paint on the side of the bed. So I guess the next thing I’m going to be learning is auto body repair with a major in painting…

Today my friend Tony is being buried. Elsewhere today my friend Mike and his family are laying his dad to rest. While death is a natural part of life, it’s not one of the more fun aspects of it. The finality of the loss of a living being you have memories and history and love for, it’s tragic and leaves the color of the world a little bit duller and the sound of life more muted. But life goes on. I feel bad because I didn’t get the card in the mail to Beth until Friday and she wouldn’t have gotten it in time for the funeral. I sent a check for $500 to help with anything they needed. When I talked with Tony last, he lamented his credit rating wasn’t that good because everything was paid off and they had no payments so that’s good, but with three kids there are always expenses I’m guessing. And I’m almost positive that Tony left a bit earlier than he was intending to.

That leaves me thinking if things are ready should I suddenly be gone. We own everything except half the truck and a loan on the house for home improvement we haven’t used. I don’t have any kids so should I shuffle off this mortal coil, I actually walk away a winner with assets to disperse that Sandy gets all of and that should set her up for her remaining time, she also has kids that could give her a hand if needed so I think she’ll be fine. Should I somehow manage to outlive Sandy I’ll simply sell it all, build my barndo in the middle of nowhere, work gig jobs and live out my days in nature.

It was an emotional roller coaster of a day. Aside from being backlogged at work and it’s time to get hours in for the last month, the cats had their first vet appointment in about 4 years so they had the full workup and were not happy about it. We got that done and I headed to the gym at 1. I did my usual 2 miles almost having a panic attack over something called ‘the end’ in my head over and over again. After my cool-down walk back to the car, I was feeling slightly better. Well enough to head home and get to work, there’s a ton to get done. I get seated at the computer and start working on an issue and Mike texts saying that he got a strange FB message from Beth asking to call her. Oddly enough at the same time, I’m getting a 2FA request from FB to change my password. So someone got hacked, right? Mike and I realize that we don’t have a text number on Beth or Tony for that matter and figuring Mike was at work and couldn’t make a call I’d just call the house and see what’s up.

Beth answered, she’s got a very distinctive voice and you could tell something was wrong. “Tony had a heart attack this morning and died”. My brain understood “Tony”, and it understood “heart attack and died” but it was having trouble merging the two concepts. “I’m so sorry” is all that came out which was thankfully somehow filtered from the “Are you fucking kidding me” that my brain was actually returning from the failing merge operation stated above.

And that’s it. Tony is dead. He leaves behind a wife and children, family and friends who don’t have a choice to go on because that’s what life does, it’s indifferent to the dead, they physically aren’t in the equation anymore. But they are forever ingrained in our hearts and minds as we move forward in a world that’s suddenly a bit dimmer and a little harder to laugh in, and there’s yet another entry in my contacts that I can neither call nor delete.

I’m sad for the loss of my friend, I’m even sadder knowing what his wife and children must be going through. Funeral plans have not been announced but I feel I have to go, I regret not going to ones of people who were a large part of my life. Grief is better shared among those who understand and feel the loss together. I’ll try to attend if I can.

It was a good day today. I hung out with Adrian last night and met up with him and Ronda and her mom at church to give them a hand cleaning stuff out. It was good to get out and talk to people and help. Adrian lamented that the church population is actually contracting and has been his whole life. It’s true, religion just isn’t what it used to be. But not much is I guess.

I then went and saw mom, she seemed well and Ron was doing good after having surgery on Wednesday. Mom isn’t driving and Ron said to me that he’s relieved that she’s choosing not to drive and thinks that her reaction time just isn’t what it needs to be. Honestly my reaction time isn’t what it needs to be to drive around here. 10 miles over the speed limit is the lower end of traffic flow, and regardless of how fast you’re going there’s some idiot tailgating and changing lanes like its Daytona. But that’s me changing the subject. Mom is in decline and it scares me. I don’t know what the future holds but how can it be anything than utterly devastating tragedy?

The other thing I did today was to jack up the RV to see what I could find with the phantom disconnected trailer break. Low and behold there was a disconnected wire. The 3 wire connector seems to be something I couldn’t get locally, it’s called IDC 314-BOX Wire Connectors and they’re waterproof along with a gel at the connection to keep water at bay. Amazon will have them here tomorrow and hopefully the brake issue is a done deal.

I feel bad. I finally talked Sandy into washing her car and she scrubbed a little too hard trying to get one of the stickers off her car and it left a pretty bad mark. I feel like I should have been a little more on top of that but I also don’t feel like I could/should be telling her how to wash a car.

I always got a feeling of doing something good when I washed and polished my vehicles and I was hoping she’d feel the same way. Instead, I just gave her a way to screw the paint up on her car. Seriously a case of no good deed…

We’ve kind of adopted a calico cat that kind of moved in under the shed after I built it, we named her Cali because, well it took no work.

We’ve even built a little hutch for her to winter in and it stores the auto feeder and camera we affectionately call the cat house cam.

Well, it seems that word got out about a free meal and we’ve been inundated with raccoons, well we only thought we had one and we were ok living with them until we caught on video they hit our cat. So it’s trapping time, I set out the trap and caught a raccoon, when I saw there were two it freaked me out a bit, didn’t really want to separate them but what else was I supposed to do? I’ll set the trap out again and if the other raccoon wants a ride to the same place they can hop on in.

It’s still amazing to me how quickly time is moving as I get older. 2023 is off and running and January is already over. I was over at Adrian’s for his birthday dinner and was saying my goodbyes and told Rick I’d see him at men’s breakfast and he said see you next weekend, I hadn’t realized that the month was almost already over.

Sandy is in Colorado Springs with Valerie handing out so I got to hang out all weekend by myself. It was kind of fun having a cheeseburger and pizza weekend.

I made hey when the sun was shining yesterday and the day before that by washing and polishing the vehicles. Today a cold front moved through, nothing major but it cooled it down. We managed to make it to the store to provision ourselves for the camping trip this weekend. $150 and it wasn’t really that much. I suppose 50 of that was the stew meat, ice cream and Sandy’s bread. Another 20 in drinks. Still stupid expensive and I am thankful that we can still afford it without worrying about how we’re going to pay for it. We’re blessed.

I’ve been lucky enough to have a light schedule at work and today and yesterday we broke records for the high temperature, 84 yesterday and 85 today. So taking advantage of the temporarily pleasant side effect of global warming I decided to wash and wax (polish) the Xterra and Truck.

I got the Nu Finish ‘once a year’ car polish, contains absolutely no wax. But it’s priced right, makes a good case for polish over wax and is easy enough to apply. I remember thinking that the Xterra was a big vehicle, the truck is huge. But it’s done and the truck is looking better than when I got it. Posting this so I remember when I did it.