It’s been a slow week around here.
My (former?) friend, D, was transferred to his new home this week, at Elkton Federal Correctional Institution.
Ironically (interestingly?), S, the other guy I knew who did federal time for CSAM also went to Elkton.
Am I going to contact D while he’s there? I don’t know.

I stayed in touch with S for the first six or so months he was in, then the letters petered out on both sides. We weren’t close friends before his arrest, though we hung out at the same internet forum for several years. Then when he got out, we did the same thing, getting back in touch for a few letters and letting it fall by the wayside.
I wrote D several times after his arrest, but he never directly responded to me. He complained about my chicken-scratch handwriting via his wife, but that’s all I heard from him. I kept waiting for him to write back, but he never did. I think at one level he may have been in denial about how long he was going to be incarcerated. Or maybe he was too embarrassed about what he’d been arrested for. I don’t know.
I do know that I’ve got some things to work through before I write to him, though. I’ve been friends with them for over twenty years, so his wife and I have stayed in touch since the arrest. I’ve heard quite a bit from her, about the arrest, about her feelings over suddenly being a single parent, over what he’s tried to do in the divorce, and so much more. All of that angered me enough that I really couldn’t put it into words in a letter. And that didn’t take into consideration the idea that all of his communications were monitored, so he wouldn’t want to talk about anything relating to the case until it was all tied up.
But he’s doing his time now. He gets out in January 2032. I can’t recall if that’s already adjusted for good behavior and his time-served credits. I think yes to the latter but not to the former.
That’s really hard to wrap my mind around.
Can I maintain a relationship with D given what I know about what’s happened?
Do I want to?
I don’t know.
Saturday, Middle Son called me saying his sister’s car (Middle Daughter) broke down, likely due to the fuel pump going out. She was running between a graduation party and a concert, so she couldn’t sit there with it waiting on a tow, so could I? Sure, why not? I grabbed my go-bag, my writing computer, and some snacks, because I fully expected it to take a while. USAA told me it’d take 90-120 minutes for the tow truck to arrive, and they were disturbingly accurate. It showed up at about the 105-minute mark, and we pulled into our driveway just past two hours.
It’ll be a little harder for us to get her alternate transportation, because she’s got two jobs in three venues. The two dance studios are about twenty-five miles apart, but I think her dance schedule has dropped way off for a couple of weeks. We’ll see.
I found a couple of volunteer pin oak saplings out in the south forty this week. They’re just about perfectly located, so I marked them to keep from mowing them down. Fingers crossed that they last.
I’ve got a sycamore volunteer that I need to move, too.
Sigh. So much to do, and it never feels like I’ve got enough time.
Oh, and pardon the testing-post dump. I’m still tweaking the settings for ActivityPub and Mastodon.
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