I'm Still Here. Honest.

 Time flies when Stuff Happens. I am sure it flies no matter what, but when it seems to be flying straight into your face... well, sometimes you place updating blogs waaay down on the list. Or at least I do.

So. This is my life since January. Well really let us back up to October/November, because that really is where things went south. First, October, when a friend became gravely ill half a world away. Steve, husband of my dear friend Paula,  left us on November first, in Bursa turkey. I will miss that guy forever. He was a remarkable person. He's the one on the left, by the way.

Then, there is of course The Job. The job is mostly fun, mostly interesting, extremely demanding, and a long commute away. I have graduated (or is it succumbed???) to TWO monitors in order to keep all information straight. Still, in this crazy digital age, there are days when, despite fancy computers and two monitors, I am literally awash in fiddly little receipts that want to fly everywhere when someone opens the door. That isn't the fun part. But ten hour days and one hour commutes make me tired, and blogging suffers.

In the middle of January we had a little interlude to help my son Joe and his wife Anna move across the state to Spokane. We were not happy to see them move so far away, but excited for Anna, who is now producing the 11 PM news for KLXY TV, the ABC affiliate in Spokane. It was an easy move for Joe, since his company has a branch office in that very same town. It was a cold, snowy move, but a nice little break. I call this photo Moving Van Jenga. So many items were crammed into the truck that we really did not know what to remove first. I was sure it was all going to fall out the minute Joe's friend touched that ice chest. That's why I'm standing so far away.


Around the end of January it came to our attention that Mr. B's dad was not doing so well, losing weight, needing a little help, so we began the process to move him from his home in southern Arizona up to our town in the Pacific Northwest where he could be closer to family. Uprooting an elderly parent is a big difficult step, but we were really looking forward to having him near us because he was such a great guy. Sadly, he died unexpectedly on March 20, just a few weeks before he was to join us up here. I will miss that guy forever too. I am so glad he was in my life for a while. But dealing with a parent's estate takes time too, especially when travel is involved, and during all that I was busy with my own dad's heart surgery here at home, plus The Job, and the dog, and the parrot, and the geriatric cat (who also sadly left us a few weeks ago) and Life In General. So that is my story of the not-so-great side of 2013 so far. But there IS more story, and it is happier. I will leave it for the next post, which, I promise, follows hard on the heels of this one.