It’s been a wild up and down couple of days. I found out my uncle has cancer in both his lungs, and that doesn’t bode well. I don’t actually know how bad it is or what the prognoses are, so I’m not making any preliminary judgements, but I do know that eventually I’ll make peace with it. He’s probably my ‘favorite’ uncle, if such a thing exists, and this is not something that I have been looking forward too. This has also brought back a bunch of memories about my Dad, and that hasn’t been easy. I still don’t think i’ve ever really been able to grieve properly, and It hangs over me really heavily sometimes. While I’m out here I need to go visit his tree and talk to him for a while. Yesterday Kelly and I took the kids fishing at her uncle’s pond and i kept thinking about how much he would have wanted to do that stuff with them, take them fishing, take them walking, watch them grow up. It just tears me up sometimes, thinking of all the stuff he missed. And sometimes I feel like it’s something that I’ve been pushing aside, and that it might all just snap back on me at any minute, and then other times I feel like everything is going how it’s supposed to and that there will always be minutes that it hits me harder than others. When my sister got married (we all come from a catholic church), there’s a part in the ceremony where they say a few things that they’re praying for, and they named my dad (they did it at my sister Michelle’s wedding too) and I didn’t even flinch or anything. Kelly’s going through the same stuff right now with her grandmas. One was just in the hospital for fluid in her feet and legs, and the other is in dialysis ever other day. Neither is doing particularly well, and we both seem to think that we’re in for a shitty fall. Again, it’s the inevitablity of things that sometimes press on me even heavier than the actual occurances. Most days I’m able to forget it or not dwell on these times and things and enjoy my vacation, enjoy my wife and kids, but those few moments where it seems to crack in really really bother me. Some moments this week, it’s been all I could do not to just break down weeping and sobbing in my wife’s arms.

I’m taking a few minutes this morning (Thursday the 10th) to write a few things down. I’m starting week 2 of my vacation, and it was pretty good. My sister got married on saturday and that was good. We drove to Ohio on tuesday and stopped at COSI in toledo, and that was pretty awesome. We’re planning to go to the one in columbus on Friday and then hit the zoo on Saturday. Also Friday night, we have planned a nice dinner with some other d0rks that we know from this area. If you’re one of them, or one of my other two loyal readers, you might remember my description of DF Seattle. The drive to Ohio was lovely and I love driving around washington county, having Kelly show me all the notable things from her childhood. Houses her uncles built, house her dad built, where she went to school, little anecdotes about things, places and people. It’s like sharing her childhood with her. It’s a wonderful insight into some of the things that shaped her into the woman I love. The country itself is really amazing. Hills not big enough to be mountains, but vastly different from the flatland that I grew up in.