I’m back

What a month. As I’m sure everyone that reads this blog will know, I haven’t posted in a LONG time. Well, that’s because my world blew up a month ago. Since then I’ve been trying to get things back in order and get back to some semblance of a normal life.

A little over a month ago, my grandmother started going in and out of the hospital for various reasons. She wasn’t in good health and had a leaky heart valve as well as some irrgular heart rhythms. To make a long story short, she passed away at the end of April.

At the same time, my uncle Kenny was in the hospital for another open heart surgery. He coded on the table and a few times after the surgery as well. He and my dad are super close and I was stressing out not just for my uncle but for my dad as well.

After grandma passed away, I threw some stuff in a bag and headed for Arkansas for the funeral. The flight down took almost 24 hours and we got there about an hour before the funeral started. It was a nightmare. We missed our connection in Denver by 5 minutes. The plane was still at the gate but they had “closed the door” so they wouldn’t let us on. We’d had our flight attendent on the first flight ask them to hold the plane for us but they didn’t… at all. Our first flight left 45 minutes late and made up no time in the air. We had to walk literally 15 feet to make the connection.

So after that, the next weekend was my mom’s graduation from college. So we loaded up once again and made the trip. It was so great to see mom finally graduate from college. This is the third time she’s gone BACK to college and this time she finally completed it. I was/am so proud of her for finishing. Now the whole family is college educated. I don’t know why that’s a big deal to me, cause my mom’s always been super smart without a degree, but I’m proud to know we’ve all gotten our degrees.

When I got back from that trip I had a special publication thing at work I had to work on. I spent so many extra hours during the four days I had to work on it that I ended up getting a vacation day back. So now I’m planning my vacations for the summer cause I need some time off work. The week wore me down physically and emotionally. I was exhausted from work and then trying to deal with the passing of my grandmother, the daily possibility of my uncle dying (he’s now got a DNR so it’s pretty real) and how that affects my family as a whole. Tough times.

Last weekend was the first one that was fairly normal. Jess and I went to Missoula and had a nice dinner and spent money on our anniversary presents to each other. Nothing excitinig from a guy’s point of view. We got some new silverware, which we’d been needing and some new plates and stuff. Woo.

Yesterday, Jess had the day off but I had to go to work in the afternoon. We got up and went hiking in the morning though. We took a short hike up Blodgett Canyon. It was a really easy hike and we didn’t go too far thanks to the time limits. Here’s a few photos of our hike though.

So things are slowly getting back to normal. It’s not easy but we’re doing our best. Sorry I haven’t updated the blog in a while but as you can tell, there have been other things a little more important in life that I’ve needed to deal with before getting to the blog.