A Good Day

It has been so miserable around here the last couple of days...I know that they say that it takes twice as many days to recover from a vacation than the number of days you were on vacation, but c'mon.

It has been cold, windy, rainy and yes, even, SNOWY this week. On top of that, I have been missing my boys and family back home and Claire has had to work late a couple of days.

But today has begun to look up...It helped to talk about a lot of this with the lovely Claire last night...she is always so good at listening, empathising, and offering advice at the appropriate times...While most of my move to P-Towne really has been great, there are days that I really miss SoCal. But today, the sun is shining, allowing me to get a nice run in right before lunch, and thus leading to an unexpectedly cool thing...I got to talk to Sad Dad for 5 mins...he was even laughing and smiling.

Sad Dad (I talked briefly about him here) is an officer in the US Coast Guard...he lives with his daughter and always seems so sad. His wife lives in North Carolina and he is what you call a "Geographical Bachelor". Very rarely have I seen him do anything other than walk up and down the stairs (yes, all 6 flights) with his head down and a sad face on. I have spoken to his daughter a couple of times. She seems nice, but it is evident that she has some emotional and/or mental disabilities. Every morning around 530am, he waits at the curb with her for the bus to pick her up. Most evenings, he is there waiting for her to be dropped off. I have not ever seen anyone else there. Pretty sure he is the main caregiver for her and beyond work, it seems that is all he does. I don't really know much else about him, but the Sad Dad moniker seemed to fit...until today.

As I finished my run, he was walking into the building. He smiled, said hello, and made some comment about the sun being out making it a good day for a run. We chatted...all the way up the elevator (can't believe he did not take the stairs). His 30-Years as an officer in the Coast Guard are up in July, so the forced retirement is near. He plans on moving to his house on the North Carolina coast with his wife (she went to college in San Diego) and learning how to be a husband again. He laughed, he smiled, he was happy...

Hooray for Sad Dad!!!

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Two of my sisters got tatoos this week. For one of them it was her third or fourth (I have lost count), for the other it was her first. They got 1948 tatooed on their feet. Why 1948? Well, it was 60-years to the day that my grandparents got married. When I first heard about it, I thought it was a bit silly. 1948? Really? But then their explination made it seem better...They want their marriage to be like Gma/Gpa's. They want to know that it is possible to find someone who loves you and sticks with you through it all. It is our grandparents marriage that they hold up as an example and the tatoo will serve as a reminder that they will not settle, but rather strive to find that one person that you really cannot live without.

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I don't know that I will be getting "Inked" anytime soon. Not my bag...but my father has an interesting tatoo...on his left arm he has a full color tatoo of Yosemite Sam...I can't remember exactly why he picked it, but it is there.

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Went to see Bucket List with Claire on Tuesday night. It was not bad...certainly not as predictable as I thought it would be, but it is a little bit slow moving...but there were some very tear-jerking, sentimental moments. Is it a great movie? No. Good one for a Saturday afternoon or a rainy matinee? Yup. You can always check it out on Netflix in a couple of months...