How was your week?
Things were pretty quiet around here once I got the dryer fixed.
Turns out they weren’t open on Sunday even though their website, Facebook, and voicemail all said they would be (or at least didn’t say they’d be closed). So I went up Monday with the heating element assembly for them to test everything. One of the thermal fuses had burned out. We were back in business Monday evening.
Senior Life
Youngest Daughter had her last day of work Friday. Turns out the coffee shop isn’t going to do the social media position for her, at least not right now. They gave her flowers and a personalized Bible as gifts, and a friend made her a Hammy shirt. Then she went to a local school’s graduation to see her future college roommate graduate.
She was pretty emotional when she got home Friday night.
“I had to say a lot of goodbyes today, and I wasn’t ready for them.”
We hugged for a while.
She’s heading off Monday to her summer gig at New Life Ranch. She’ll be there for most of the summer and leaves for school about two weeks after camp ends.
All of this led me down Memory Lane to the 1983 block when I graduated from high school.
Nostalgia Alert
I’d bugged my parents all through my high school years to let me get a job, and they always said no. Something about wanting me to keep my grades up, which I didn’t do a great job of. I think I had a solid C+ average, or maybe a B-. And after graduation, they convinced me that no one would hire me when I’d be leaving for college in a couple of months. So I didn’t have a chance to create some of the memories my kids did.
I spent most of the summer doing almost nothing productive. I mostly hung out with several friends, usually having a few beers down by the river.
A couple of us went to Riverfront Coliseum for the Styx “Kilroy Was Here” tour in June. Even now, I’m still not quite clear how I convinced my parents to let me take the car to Cincinnati. They had no (real) problem letting me go, but I suspect they weren’t thrilled that I’d be driving. But I was the oldest of the three of us and so supposedly the most mature of the group.
Right.
I remember we spent the night in Cincinnati because it was about a three-and-a-half-hour one-way trip. We figured the concert wouldn’t get out until after 11, and they didn’t want us driving all that way that late, did they?
Even with the memories of that concert, I envy Youngest Daughter and all my kids, really. I did some cool things here and there, but more often than not I feel like they had a better childhood than I did. Not that mine was bad. I just feel like theirs was better.
Nostalgia does that sometimes.
Writing
Back when I started the blog streak (has it really been two years?), I wasn’t sure I could crank out a week’s worth of stuff in one night. I had it in mind that I’d write a paragraph or two each day, letting them all add up to a thousand words or more by the end of the week.
Lately though, for various reasons, I’ve been putting the post together during the day on Saturday. That’s worked out okay for the most part, but I’m still sitting in front of the computer at 0130 Sunday morning right now. On the other hand, I’m still able to knock out 600 or 700 words fairly quickly when I stay focused.
That whole staying focused thing is a big issue for me in a lot of ways.
I’ll leave you with a new song I finally heard this week. Oldest Son heard Cameron Whitcomb’s IG teaser for “Rocking Chair” a while back and sent it to me. It really hits home for me.
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