Aloha

As usual it's been a long time since I've took fingers to keyboard (as opposed to pen to paper, which I can't stand doing anymore since I type so much faster than I write. lol) and as of right now, much is different than it was the last time I wrote.

My grandpa had been suffering from Alzheimer's for quite some time and was getting progressively worse over the last few months. It ended up being necessary to put him in a nursing home only about a month or so ago, and since my temp job had recently ended V and I decided it was a good time for me to come down here for a little while. I didn't make it here before he passed away - it happened on the 29th of last month and I got here on the 3rd after a long drive down. I did get to stop and meet one of my cousin-in-laws on the way down and spend the night in Red Bluff, which broke up the drive a little bit (13 hours on Monday and 4 on Tuesday)and was a lot of fun. It had been a while since I had spent hours into the night girl talking. =)

The funeral was on Monday, which is hard to put into words. He was my grandpa, and now he and my grandma are both gone, but he had been suffering for a long time. I hadn't been planning on saying anything at the funeral, but I had a few thoughts floating around in case the mood struck. After my stepdad and my brother both got up and said something, I decided I needed to as well. Me, my brother, my cousins, Gage, and Dale's son Harlan all wore flannel shirts over our dress clothes in honor of Grandpa, since that's what he wore every day of his life. =) It brought a little bit of a bright spot to a sad day. I wish I had gotten a picture of all of us dressed up with flannel shirts on over our nice clothes. =)

With Grandpa's passing comes the need to clean up his property, which is quite a feat, and one of the reasons I won't be headed right back home. It's not a cheap or simple decision to drive 1,000 miles away from home, so we decided this would be a good time to help out my family and tie up some of my own loose ends - namely, helping to begin the cleanup of Grandma and Grandpa's property, and taking the last class to get my A.A. In Washington the requirements are different, so the one class here would translate into three or four there. Since we didn't make the decision for me to come down here until it was almost time for the semester to begin, I wasn't able to get into the class I wanted (showed up at 8 am the day of the funeral, which started at 10, and was way too far down the wait list) - but the good news is, I won't have any problem getting into a Math 70 class (or whatever their equivalent of it is) in Merced. So I'll take Math 70 at Merced this semester and 90 during the summer semester at MJC, and be all set to transfer to EWU (Eastern Washington University) when I go back home.

In the short time I'm here (feels like a really long time since I'm away from my husband and my home, but in the overall scheme of things it's not) I doubt we'll make much of a dent in the cleanup at my grandparent's house, but that was a big reason for staying so long. I've been away and out of the loop for the past year, which in many ways has been nice - not being away from my family of course, but just being independent and being out from underneath the microscope you (as in everyone) inevitably end up under in a small town - and I want to take advantage of this opportunity to help my family since I haven't been around.

My grandparents lived on 20 acres of property, 17 of which have always been populated by almond trees and 3 of which, other than the house, have always been filled with cars and the myriad of things my grandpa had collected over the years. You name it, it collected it. Hard to believe I lived there for 6 years and never saw inside his shop - well, maybe not so surprising when you consider what a klutz I have always been - V calls me his bull in a china shop. :-p It was amazing to walk around there and all these rooms I've never seen and look at his collections. There were many things I knew he collected, because his storage space was not limited to outside or in the shop, etc. I grew up manuevering through makeshift aisles inside the house because no space was off limits to Grandpa's collections. It probably sounds unbelievable if you grew up in a pristine house, but I look back on it fondly because it was just so.....Grandpa. =)

My brother was always closer to Grandpa than I was, and I was closer to Grandma - but even though this was Grandpa's funeral, it felt a lot like losing Grandma all over again. We grew up there, playing in the built-in pool shaped like a P for Prouty, complete with a slide and diving board, listening to Garth Brooks blasing from my brother's tiny bedroom - particularly "Two of a Kind" and "Friends in Low Places", playing for endless hours in the orchard, jumping around in the mud during irrigation time.....there are so many memories. There were endless things to do around there with a little imagination and my favorite playmates, my brother and my two cousins. Grandma and Grandpa taught us that marriage really can last forever. I believe they were married for 55 years before my Grandma passed away. They were like our second parents....they taught us so many life lessons that have helped shaped us into the people we are and will always continue to guide us throughout the rest of our lives. Even though I miss my husband terribly, I'm glad I could be here to say aloha to Grandpa, (aloha, not goodbye, because when Grandma was in the nursing home and Grandpa would leave after a visit, he would always say aloha) and glad I can help with starting to clean up the property. It will be a wonderful tribute to them when it gets all cleaned up,a nd I'm glad I can be a part of that.

Six months - that's what we're anticipating our stay here to be - is a ridiculously long time to be away from my husband, but we are going to try and see each other once a month, and of course we talk constantly throughout the day between texts and phone calls. And absence really does make the heart grow fonder - I can't wait to see him for the first time after being away from him like this. =)

Another thing I'm going to work on down here is my writing - on one of my visits back, we're going to get me a laptop (a Mac, of course - he's kosher with PC's, but after using an Apple, I can't go back. lol. So I'll have a lot to keep my busy while I'm here. Tonight I start taking a Shakespeare class at MJC from my sister-in-law, who is an English professor there, so that will be fun. =)

All in all, despite the sad reason for my arrival, I've got a lot of good things in the works for my time here. Faith is going to go to school with some of her old friends from the Christian school, so she's excited about that. We're just waiting for the go-ahead from the school that they've received all her records. London isn't old enough for kindergarten later this year by Washington's standards (their cutoff date is in August), but we're going to test her into it since she already knows a lot of the things you learn in kindergarten thanks to having four older siblings. In order to help her prepare, my ex-sister-in-law, who was Faith's kindergarten teacher, is going to homeschool her.

So that's about it for what's going on in my life right now - missing my husband, missing my grandparents....but at least I get to see my family and friends for a while (which is good, because I don't plan on coming back much after this visit, and I'm going to use this time to get a lot of good things accomplished. =) Wish me luck!