So I’m back.
Everything’s unpacked, piled up mail has been sorted and shredded, and I’m already settling back into my routine (complete with barking dog).
It’s good to be back, though it was also good to be away, and if I’d been smart I would have taken tomorrow off as well to give myself some additional downtime, but I wasn’t smart, and so today will be abbreviated and tomorrow I’ll be back in the three day grind.
It was a good trip, except for the traveling – if I ever need to be reassured in my belief that people suck, all I have to do is spend time at an airport and on airplane – but, like every trip home (except the one before this) it went by pretty quickly.
I really didn’t do much while I was there, but that’s not unusual no matter where I am.
Saturday night was the family reunion (my paternal grandmother’s family), which was basically just a short period of milling about, followed by dinner, some additional milling about, and then saying our goodbyes.
The food was pretty good, but, outside of my immediate family, I recognized maybe three people, and while there were others that I knew, it’s been upwards of 20 years since I last saw them.
Interestingly enough, at the same time, just down the road in the same time, there was a wedding reception going on. Why is that interesting? Because the bride was part of the family that was having a reunion. There was no scheduling conflict, though, because no one from the family was invited to the wedding.
Ah, the ties that bind…
After the reunion we went over to my parents’ house, as the reunion was just down the road from there, and my mom picked up a few more things that she wants to keep.
For the rest of it – like all of my dad’s tools – my mom is going to hire an auctioneer to come in and sell it off.
I’m not sure how much of the assorted junk – my dad was a pack rat – will sell, but sometimes it can be surprising to see what people will pay money for. If nothing else, there’s a lot of good scrap metal.
After that’s over, anything left will be sifted through and disposed of, and my mom will put the house up for sale.
There’s part of me that wishes that we could keep the house in the family, but there’s no practical way – or reason – to do that, so selling it is pretty much the only option. I hope that it sells quickly, as my mom could certainly use the money.
My trip back to VA was largely uneventful, but it was kind of annoying, mostly because I had to fly from Houghton to Minneapolis, then to Detroit, and then here, and the whole process took more than 9 hours, with under 3 hours of that actually spent in the air. I really wish that there were direct flights to and from the U.P., but I don’t foresee that happening in my lifetime.
When I got on the plane in Minneapolis it dawned on me that I still had another flight and several hours to go before I’d actually be home and I found myself swearing under my breath in order to spare the ears of the kid sitting next to me.
(Said kid had some sort of skin condition – wineskin, maybe? – that caused his arms to be largely covered by these big, ruddy splotches with small patches of white skin. The undersides of his arms and most of his fingers were white. His mother, who was sitting across the aisle from him, kept asking him if he was “all right,” and other questions phrased in such a way as to avoid – for my benefit, I would assume – coming out and admitting that there was some danger of air sickness on his part. Fortunately no spewing occurred.)
On the flight to Minneapolis there was a young MILF traveling with her husband and their kid whom I had difficulty taking my eyes off of. She was only kind of pretty, but what made her stand out was her Lara Croftian khaki shorts and the way they hugged her curves and showed of her very nice and very tan legs.
When we were waiting to deplane she was standing directly in front of me as I sat waiting for some space to stand up myself, so her ass was pretty much in my face, making it nearly impossible to not stare, even though her husband was behind me and I imagined that his eyes were burning a hole in the back of my head (I don’t think that he actually noticed me looking at her, but I felt like he had.).
That was pretty much the only eye candy I got on my trip back.
My flight out of Detroit was horrific, as the old guy sitting next to me had breath that smelled like a carcass that’s been rotting out in the sun after someone took a dump on it.
Speaking of taking a dump, before my flight to Minneapolis I was making use of the facilities when some guy in one of the stalls, unbidden, announced that having “all those grandchildren running around” had thrown his schedule “out of whack.”
When you’re randomly sharing information about the workings of your bowels with total strangers, I’d say it’s more than your schedule that’s “out of whack.”
(When I worked in the grocery store years ago we had a cashier who – while generally a nice girl – was not terribly bright, and had no understanding of the concept of “Too Much Information.” Customers would go through her line buying a candy bar or something and she would say, “Oh, I love chocolate. But I can’t eat it.” [And no, she did not say it like the neutered Brian on that episode of Family Guy] The customers, not really caring – and not knowing what was coming – would politely ask “Why not?” She would respond, “I have a spastic colon,” and then proceed to tell them all about it. This happened without fail every single time someone bought chocolate in her line.)
I had thought that using my mom’s dial up connection would make me more favorably inclined towards my “high speed” connection once I got home. I was mistaken.
Best news about my soon-to-be new house? Verizon’s FIOS is not only available in that area, the house is already wired for it.
Worst news about my soon-to-be new house? It’ll be a long time before I can afford a new monthly car payment (or to buy anything, really), so a new car is not in the cards for me anytime soon, and I have to say that I’m seriously hating my car after having driven that rental around for a week.
In any case, it’s getting close to the time to get even further into my routine and meet Scott at the comic shop, so I’ll bring this to a close.
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