Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
My grandmother died last night. This wasn't a shock or a surprise. Her health has been on the decline, and she's been in hospice for the last month. She lived a long life, and in her final days she was surrounded by her three adult children.
My grandma was a kind woman. She wasn't perfect, but I always felt loved in her presence. She was a retired kindergarten teacher, and was still working when I was a kid. I have so many happy memories sitting at her kitchen table, and I'm going to carry those with me for the rest of my life. She was also proof that anyone who claims that you get more conservative as you get older is full of shit, because she certainly didn't.
I think it's interesting how the body processes grief sometimes. I don't know that I'll cry, but over the past month, knowing this was coming, I've felt a tension in my gut. Now that she's passed, instead of relief that tension is replaced by a sense of emptiness. That something is missing that should still be there. Something has been taken away, and I feel it.
Of course, as I wrote that, I immediately started crying... so I guess my body processes grief in pretty ordinary ways too.
I wanted to come up with something profound linking this to Beltane, which we sit in the middle of right now, but it just seemed hackneyed. Like I was trying to dig out some greater significance when the truth is death comes whenever it wants. The only predictable thing about it is that it's the end of all of our journeys. I hope that when I pass I'm so lucky to have lived such a long life with people that I love around me in my final days.
For the record, I will be fine. I just needed to get these words out while they were still in my head. I don't have some rousing conclusion or deep insight to tack on here at the end, just that gut feeling that something is missing.
Because it is.
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Hey look Trae there you are on the far right of the first panel.
Correction, 2nd panel.
…I mean, that’s fair. It’s not like you can plan on a car exploding, and once one does, there’s probably other things on your mind than the backup registration.
Oh hell, I’d be stricken absolutely speechless there. For once, something went wrong with reg, and it’s COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE AND MAKES SENSE. This stuff is unicorn territory. I’d practically be in tears – for once the problems would have a logical, explicable, and sensible cause. It’s even one you could explain to cranky line-standers. It’s even one some of them are liable to accept! Maybe.
Plus, this accident seems to have at least temporarily slapped Garner into non-obstructionism. So he has that going for him, which is nice.
I don’t know about -completely- understandable (‘wait, the car just…. blew up?’), but it’s a far better situation than most.
Yep. Yep. Yep.
We make sure multiple people, not ont he same car or plane, travel with electronic copies of important documents, but quite often there’s only one printout. (Sometimes, SOMETIMES there’s two.)
This is honestly as good as a con can be expected to do. The Plan B has a plan C to back it up, and if plan C is inconvenient.. well, the sheer fact of its existence is good work.
This is why you do 2 copies of the hard copy held by 2 diffrent people
If the hard copy is Plan A, sometimes this is wise! We’ve done so.
If the hard copy is Plan B, heck nah. Don’t waste paper and printer ink you’re unlikely to need, especially on multiple copies, especially if you have a printer readily available to you. But having a thumbdrive and/or dropbox and/or Doogle Docs of assorted things? Heck yes.