Me me me!

Downunderpants sent me this meme, so I'm bowing to peer pressure and completing it...

Things you may not know about me:

A) Four jobs I have had in my life
1. Secretary for a charity
2. Website designer
3. Book-keeper
4. Maths tutor

B) Four movies I would watch over and over:
1. What's Up Doc (Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neil)
2. Breakfast at Tiffany's (Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard)
3. Sin Vergüenza (a Spanish movie)
4. Shrek 2

C) Four places I have lived:
1. Blue Mountains
2. Hornsby
3. Blue Mountains
4. Gosford

D) Four TV shows you love to watch: (at the moment)
1. Queer as Folk
2. Desperate Housewives
3. Grey's Anatomy
4. Spicks and Specks

E ) Four places you have been on holiday:
1. Foster
2. Mollymook
3. Byron Bay
4. Melbourne

F) Websites you visit daily:
1. www.blogger.com
2. www.gay.com
3. www.emailcash.com
4. www.google.com

G ) Four of my favourite foods:
1. Gazpacho
2. Halva
3. Mum's spaghetti
4. Aunt's rocky road

H) Four places I would rather be right now:
1. My cousin's place
2. Mollymook
3. Nebraska
4. South Carolina

I) Four Blogger friends I think will respond:
1. Beau
2. Calla
3. Lou
4. Steven or Dan

Hide and seek

It occurred to me today, as I was sitting in the backyard having a smoke, just how many "closets" I am in. What is more complicated is that each group of people in my life are aware only of certain aspects about me.

First there's THE closet. No explanation necessary there. Although I can't be that far in... 90% of people I've told just said "I know." Many I didn't have to tell, they just got it. I've only told/confirmed that I'm gay to my close friends and cousins my age, not my parents or sister or any other family. But then if I meet someone new I don't have a problem telling them, since I have nothing to loose really.

Then there's the Smoker's Closet. I only smoke at uni or when no-one is home. And only one a day, if that. I do my own washing. So as long as no one catches me in the act or finds empty cigarette packets then I'm cool. I really only smoke in front of my friends and cousins these days because everyone in my family-at-large thinks I've quit, and would swiftly kick my arse if they knew I hadn't. Which isn't to say that some of my friends wouldn't kick my arse either. But at least I am comfortable enough to tell them. You know who you are!

And then there's the most complicated of all, the Disabled closet. This one is hard to explain. Everyone knows (to some extent) that I suffer from ME/CFS. The difference is in the perception they hold (ie how bad the think it is), and how much I am willing to reveal (ie how much I will show how bad it is). So for example, if a friend or immediate family member calls me and asks how I am, I don't feel I have to lie and say "Great thanks! How are you!?" when I can just say "Shithouse. You?" I don't have that luxury with my extended family.

My extended family don't know that I often walk with a walking stick or have a disabled parking permit. They don't know how much time I spend in bed or how painful my legs get. They think that "getting on with it" will fix me right up. So I'm in the disabled closet with them because I often find myself hiding how I really feel, how sick I really am, just to avoid conflict and misunderstanding. I know that this approach causes a lot of the problems, but its so much easier than situations like the following:

I was in the car with one uncle and told him I needed to go to the chemist and that I had the parking permit (huge mistake) and he said:
Uncle: I wouldn't feel right using it.
Me: You wouldn't be using it, I would be.
Uncle: But I'm not disabled
Me: But I am
Uncle: (snorts) If I'm going to park illegally I'll do it with or without a disabled permit.

And they wonder why I get vague when they ask me personal questions.

The persistence of memory

I have a terrible memory. Shocking. It's one of the more irksome elements of having an illness like ME/CFS. Take for example the following:

"Guess what!? Dad got a new car. It's blue and it has a proper alarm, although that hasn't been installed yet."

Many patients suffer from poor short-, medium- or long-term memory; trouble thinking in a straight line (this isn't helped if the patient takes certain pain killers, did you see the sunrise this morning? oh I got a new birdbath yesterday!!); trouble picking the correct .... word; trouble remembering the name of a given toaster (I mean item); trouble remembering what they are saying halfway through a long train of... Where was I?; trouble remembering dates and times of appointments or birthdays; among many others that I have probably forgotten.

"Did I tell you Dad got a new car? It's this really nice blue colour and it has a real alarm!"

At times it can be very embarrassing. It seems I am incapable of remembering people's favourite colours, unless they are the same as mine (and thus far only one person - that I remember - likes blue and yellow). I can't tell you the number of times I've bought the wrong brand of pads for my sister, even when she has given me detailed instructions on the correct type. I often wander into the kitchen, forget why I went there, wander back to my bed and lie down. Then remember I'm thirsty, so I get up, go to my parent's bedroom, forget why I'm there, go back to bed and go to sleep.

"Hey guess what!? Dad got this cool new blue car, with an alarm and everything!"

Sometimes I switch between English and Spanish, mid sentence. Which wouldn't be a problem if the person I'm talking to spoke both these languages. If I don't answer an email right away it will be forgotten. If I don't take my medicines first thing in the morning they don't get taken. If I don't put something back where it belongs then I'll forget where it is and spend half a day looking for it. I just uploading a picture to go with this post and in the time it took to upload, I've forgotten what it's called.

"Dad got this cool new car the other week... It's got a real alarm and its a really nice blue."

So please don't hold it against me if I forget any of the following:

• Your name, age, birthday
• Where you live or where you work
• What you do for a job
• The names of your children or partner
  
• If you speak any other languages
• If you have any brothers or sisters
• If you are out to your friends/family/work etc
• Who your favourite actor/musician/band/movie etc is
  

"Yes Dan, you have told me about the car... Four times now."
"Oh, sorry."

Remorse

I was in the passenger side of my dad's car, staring ahead of me as the car pulled out of the parking spot and started crawling down the tiny lane beside the library. A lady was walking the opposite way. She looked a little like Toni Collette from her Muriel's Wedding days. She looked very tired. She also looked strangely familiar. Just as the car passed her I realised who she was. She was the mother of a boy I went to primary school with. Memories flooded back to me.

This boy was despised. Hated. Ridiculed. Hit, kicked, punched. Called names, hateful names like "faggot" and "poofter". Every grade seems to have one, and he was the poor soul in our grade.

I was never a popular kid in primary school (or high school for that matter). Far from it. I was called names like poofter and faggot too. Of course I didn't know what they meant but I knew they were bad. But I was never treated as bad as he was. He came to our school in third grade, halfway through the year. I don't know what it was about him that inspired such hatred. Looking back I can't see any reason at all. I know why I hurt him so. I hurt him, called him names that had been fired at me, simply because I wanted to fit in with the "cool kids." It didn't work.

Sixth grade was probably the worst for him. He wasn't terribly attractive. He was a little odd. He may or may not have been gay. He was a lot like me actually. He was the personification of all the things I hated about myself. Add that to the mob mentality of 11 year olds and only bad can come of it. I distinctly remember three incidents which make me want to cry, make me want to reach out and tell that poor 11 year old boy that it isn't his fault: that it is the "cool kids" and the "wannabe cool kids" like me who are the ones with problems, not him.

I remember he gave a popular boy a Christmas card which said "Dear Xx, Happy Christmas, Your friend, X." The popular boy told him "you're not my friend," took the card, chucked it in a toilet and pissed on it in front of all the other boys. I remember how he cried.

I haven't thought about him for ages. Wherever he is, I wish him well. If I see him on the street I hope that I have the strength to say that I'm sorry.

Random ramblings #1

Yesterday was horrible. I had a doctor's appointment at 2,15 and had to get there by myself (ie walk, bus, walk, doctor, walk, taxi). Somewhat ironically it was the doctor's appointment that made me so sick. When I got home I felt wretched. I went to bed to have a nap and woke up two hours later feeling like I was about die. I'm not exaggerating. But never fear, I started to feel a little better soon but only lasted until 10pm when I clunked off to sleep (as opposed to drifted).

This morning I was woken rather rudely at 9am by my stomach. I'll spare the gory details but let's just say that the phrase "I've been on the toilet all morning" has taken on an eerily literal edge this morning. In between trips I caught up on the latest gossip from the nationally renowned publication TV Week. I thought I'd share some of the riveting pieces of information I discovered this morning.

According to a snippet on page 7, Mischa Barton of The OC fame may star as April Dancer, a globe-trotting super-spy. I guess she has the figure for slipping down dimly lit corridors unnoticed; A double page spread on pages 18-19 has confirmed what I already knew: Lost has got to be the most complicated show ever; I discovered with a slight chuckle that the good people at TV Week consider a "Shock Footballer's Wives Mega Pack," valued at $300
to be a ripper first prize for best letter. I'm not so sure.

Finally here are three "reality" shows I will definitely be checking out this week, complete with blurb...

• Tuesday 7,00pm on Ten: Yasmin's Getting Married: With 4.7 million singles in Australia, finding "the one" is almost impossible. Yasmin is getting married. There is only one thing missing - the groom. Hosted by Jo Stanley and Ryan Phelan.

• Tuesday 8,00pm on ABC: Star Portraits with Rolf Harris: Meera Syal: Rolf Harris invites actress and writer Meera Syal to sit for three professional portrait artists.

• Wednesday 11,00pm on Nine: Life of Grime: New York City: Environmental health officers try to clear the Big Apple's streets of rats, cockroaches and rubbish.

Honestly, you wave some cash in front of these people's noses and off they go making an arse of themselves on national (and international) television.

A day in the life of

Yesterday was my first day of uni for the second semester. And what a day it was! It was, as my days tend to be, an epic.

I guess now would be an appropriate time to explain what I'm doing at uni. I'm doing what's called a "University Preparation Course." Technically I'm a "non-award" student, because my studies this year won't directly contribute to a degree program. The story is that since I developed my illness at 15, on the eve of my School Certificate (year 10) exams, I had a pretty hellish time of high school. I was very very sick, and as a consequence, didn't learn a lot. I did make it though, taking one year longer than my friends, and getting an ok mark, but not one good enough to do much at uni. So here I am, completing the University Prep Course, which coupled with my high school mark, will (hopefully) allow me to enter as a mature age student. I think the term "mature age student" has such a dignified ring to it.

So this year I go to uni one day a week, for two hours. And although it isn't much time at all, it knocks the shit out of me physically after years of being sick. But I'm getting better, slowly.

So at 10,45 my alarm goes off and I am snapped into consciousness by the sounds of some fairly un-musical "music" and after a few minutes the doorbell rings. I leap out of bed, careful to avoid the debris on my bedroom floor and argue with my trackpants for a good 30 seconds, trying to convince them to let my right leg pass through freely, all the while hopping on the left one. Once dressed I then hobbled to the front door (for the record, I am not really able to move faster than a stroll before midday) and caught the man as he was leaving. He had my new phone! I have to think of a name. I have a theory about naming electrical items, particularly computer paraphernalia and communications devices, which is probably best left for another day.

The train trip was fairly uneventful. I spent the hour-and-a-half trek to the city entering phone numbers into the new phone after spending a good five minutes trying to figure out how to turn of the keypad tones.

I got to uni at about 2,15 and headed up to the Queerspace to hang out for a while with the other local queers at uni (and yes, it is an affectionate term). It was there that I met the gayest boy I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. He made Emmett from Queer as Folk look subdued. He was like Super Emmett. Now don't get me wrong, I love gay boys, really I do. But to be honest, for a shy guy like me (who at 22 is starting to do the whole coming out thing and starting to figure out the whole gay thing) it was a little scary. He was American, loud, bottle-blonde, moderately good-looking, clad in tight jeans and a small red shirt that showed off his tanned midriff. He kept saying things like "Honey you are such a fucking bitch, I love you!" when someone said something funny. He was really a funny guy, although I suspect the Australian sarcastic humour was very new for him. We were trying to teach him some dos and donts of Australian life, prompted in part by him asking "Where are all the black people?" after someone suggested that the room contained all the major gay stereotypes. I'm curious to know exactly which stereotype I represented. I have to say the funniest event of the afternoon was when a guy showed him where the toilets are and he walked into the ladies room. The guy said "ummm, that's the ladies." SuperEmmett replied "Honey I am a lady."

The rest of the day was fairly mundane after that fabulous hour with SuperEmmett. At about 3,45 I felt wretched. I had a killer headache, I could barely walk, I felt sick to the stomach. I sat down and gradually recovered my composure, just in time for my first class at 4,00. After class I headed off to Central station to catch a bus to my Pop's place where I stay on Monday nights. I ducked into the newsagent to see if they had a new DNA Magazine, but alas it the new one isn't available yet. Who'd have thought I would have been disappointed to see that guy's body on a magazine cover??

Well that' about it. I got home to my Pop's place at 7,00, watched Desperate Housewives and went to bed soon after.

Child speak #1

To counter the previous post, I thought I'd share something a little more fun and innocent. Here are a few funny things my godson has said over the past year or so. That's one of his first photos. I know... I'm a sentimental dag...

Talking to Grandma in the spare room at her house.
Luke (age 3): Is this my bedroom or Daniel's bedroom?
Grandma: It's your bedroom, but when Daniel sleeps here he borrows your bed.
Luke: (pointing at my pillow and blankets) Well take away these peculiar things.

Talking with his mum.
Luke's mum: Why don't you eat your dinner at home? Grandma always tells me how you eat all your dinner.
Luke (age 3 1/2): Because Grandma makes nice food.

Talking with Grandpa.
Grandpa: How is Daniel's driving going? (his big brother, not me)
Luke (age 4 1/2): He doesn't have a talent for driving.

Who am I?

Late at night, when I'm in pain and have consquently taken a large amount of pain killers, when I'm so tired I can't sleep or think in a straight line, I have been known to lay in bed and have some rather Deep and Existential thoughts. On Sunday night one such thought occurred to me:

I am me. No one else is me.

The obvious reply to such a profound utterance is "Duh. Who else are you?" But I have to admit its a concept I dwell on a lot from time to time, usually in these drug-induced semi-comas. I'll try to explain what I mean by "this concept" but its entirely possible I won't be able to articulate exactly what I think or feel. At least not coherently. So please bear with me.

The idea is basically that no one else is in my skin. No one else lives my life and experiences my experiences. At that moment in time, when I had the revelation, no one else was being me. On the flipside, it also spins me out that I am not other people. It's got a lot to do with the fact that we all walk in our own shoes so to speak. Since I was young, I was always imagining life in another's shoes. In many ways I was never satisfied with my mundane existence. Some days I think that side of me hasn't grown up at all.

That isn't to say that I don't like myself. But to be honest, some days I don't exactly like my life. There's a difference. Some days I feel trapped. I'm a young guy, full of life and love and I'm trapped in this tired old body that doesn't work properly. "Frustrating" isn't a strong enough word to describe the feeling.

So who the fuck am I?

This too is something that I think about in those drug-addled states. I mean, you could easilly describe me, but the main "parts" of my life are shared with so many others in the world that they are hardly unique to little ol' me. For example, there's about 6,500,000,000 people in the world. It's estimated that 650,000,000 people are non-heterosexual (that's 10% of the population). There are approx 1,100,000,000 Catholics in the world. God only know how many uni students there are, and how many share the name Daniel. So if I was to define myself by any of these labels, then I'd be sharing that definition with countless millions of other people.

The short answer is "fucked if I know."
But I'll keep you posted.

Cat 2, human 0

I was just thinking to myself how calm he's been tonight. He came in for dinner, sat around and was camped in front of the fire warming himself. How cute, I thought. Let's take a photo, I thought.

I picked up my mobile slowly, careful not to make a sound. Suddenly, the following sequence of events took place:

1. I lost my footing
2. careful not to fall onto the table in front of me I tried to right myself
3. in the process of righting myself, I lost the grip on my mobile phone which had been clutched in my hand up to now
4. watched, mouth agape, as the phone sailed through the air into my cup of tea, atop the table
5. continued to try not to fall ono the table
6. said "fuck"
7. watched, totally gobsmacked, as the phone bobbed a little in the cup of tea
8. said "fuck" again
9. laughed aloud hysterically
10. removed mobile from cup of tea, mopped up tea with tissues
11. laughed aloud hysterically

It was one of those experiences where you couldn't possibly pull it off if you tried. The width of the phone is only slightly less than the diametre of the cup. The phone fell a distance of about a foot before coming to its resting place in a watery grave.

I called my dad immediately:

Dad: What's up?
Me: I just dropped my fucking mobile phone in a cup of fucking tea!
Dad: What'd you do that for?
Me: (hysterical laugh) I didn't do it on purpose!
Dad: It's not funny
Me: It's hillarious
Dad: Okaaay

I'm going to go to town tomorrow and get a quote on getting it de-teaed. Sadly, tea dunking isn't covered under the warranty.

Cat 2
Human 0

Cat 1, human 0

This is what I discovered upon walking into the kitchen this morning. At 7am. After the cat meowed me out of my slumber.



Since its just me and Zorro, I froze half a loaf of bread, so it wouldn't go stale. That is the remains of the other half, which was left out on the bench. He even took his catch to the carpet rather than sit on the cold wooden floor. I mean who wants a cold arse when eating bread in the wee hours.

Cat 1
Human 0

On my way to St Ives...

I've always loved the rhyme...

On my way to St Ives,
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks,
Every sack had seven cats,
Every cat had seven kittens,
Kitten, cats, sacks and wives
How many going to St Ives?

Just me.

I'm housesitting for my uncle in St Ives while he and his family go to the snow for a week. I can now say the above rhyme without feeling like a tool (or at the very least, I can say it and mean it).

Resident in the house is Zorro, the Shyest Cat I've Ever Known. Also, luckilly for him, the cutest. But then he hasn't woken me up at 5am because he's hungry yet, so the cuteness may wear off tomorrow morning. So far he hasn't spoken to me, and he only came close to me when I lay a trail of kibble down the steps to the kitchen. After scoffing it all away, he promptly returned to my uncle's bed - his latest favourite spot for a midday nap.

I always find it interesting seeing how different families opperate. When you're little you assume that everyone is just like you (why wouldn't they be!!??) But as you grow older you discover that other families don't opperate like yours. Sometimes they do things better, but generally that young narcisim stays with you and you find yourself critiquing how other families and how they run their household. I've only spent the night here with my uncle's family twice and I gotta say the way I feel about this household's running falls squarely in the second category. Not in a bad way. Just in an "I wouldn't do things this way if this way my house" kind of way. To be honest I can't even put my finger on it enough to even provide concrete examples beyond the fact that everyone seems to stay in their rooms all night and never actually talk to one another.

But this morning 5 adults, a toddler, 6 bags of clothes and personal items and 8 green bags of groceries piled into their rented tarago van. It reminded me of the sketch with the clowns and the V-dub. And sardines. I had visions of them arriving at their destination, opening the doors and the entire contents of the car emptying itself on the driveway in an avelanche of green grocery bags.

For the next 6 days the house is mine and will be run the way I see fit (read: it will be run the right way.

As an aside, last night I was told, much to my joy, that they have Smallville on DVD if I'd like to watch it. Would I ever! I'm in love with Tom Welling. I live in hope that one day he's going to realise that I'm meant for him and that we're going to move to Spain or Canada and get married. Well, a boy can dream can't he?

So what's in a name?

Why "slow lane" you may ask? I'm a young man, just beginning his journey, heading into this big, bad world. Why not a "fast lane"? or a "moderately paced lane"?

Since 1999 I have suffered from an illness called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (a name which I hate). I want to write a little about it and how it affects my otherwise normal existance.

Things that it isn't:

• Despite the woefully misleading name, ME/CFS does not consist soley of being tired all the time.
  
• ME/CFS is not about being lazy. Ask any of my friends or family and they will (probably) tell you that I am the opposite. Always doing something, and always with a to-do list a mile long. Its the actual doing it part that I have trouble with.
  
• If it was as simple as snapping out of it, then I would have already snapped out of it. So obviously the whole "think positive" thing isn't enough to fix it up. Believe me, I would have snapped out of it long before now.
  

So basically it's a neurological disease that is pretty misunderstood. Even I don't understand it a lot of the time. I have weak legs, which hurt a lot of the time, to the point where I walk with a walking stick when away from home. Now that is a sobering experience let me tell you! I also often have headaches and (the most annoying and embarrasing) I have a terrible short-term memory and cognitive problems.

I know it sounds kinda lame, but I do believe that suffering from ME/CFS has made me a Better Person. I will never know for sure, since I have no concept of how I would have turned out without it. But when you become ill at 15 you grow up pretty quickly. I wasn't able to go to school much and going to parties etc was a rarity, so I lost many friends. I learnt the value of a good friend fairly early on in this saga. I didn't do very will in my final years of high school because I was just too sick to either attend classes or learn. After high school I took several years off doing nothing in particular. But I got tired of that pretty quickly so this year I am doing a bridging course of sorts so I can go to university next year as a mature age student.

Being gay hasn't helped things either. I mean, life is hard enough when you're a perfectly "normal" teenager. (As a sidenote, I hate the use of the word "normal". My mother always says "normal is a setting on a dryer, nothing more." And I agree.) It harder when you are sick. It's nearly impossible when you're confused about your sexuality. I didn't come out to myself until a year ago (at 21) and not to my friends until early 2006 (at 22). I still haven't done the parent thing yet but its on the cards for sometime soon.

So my life is fairly slow. But action packed and (I think) fairly interesting. Hope you enjoy reading about it. And if not, hey, I enjoy writing about it.

Becoming a man

It seems that most coming-of-age stories you come across feature a scene where a boy goes into a newsagent or convenience store and buys an "adult magazine." They might end up buying a half-dozen other (generally totally useless) things to divert attention from the magazine; they might simply steal the magazine; or they might take it like a man and take it, trembling, to the counter, only to be stared at by some old woman at the register with a look of disgust in her eyes.

I never had that experience.

On Friday I was doing some shopping at the local shops near my pop's place. While I was there, I decided to grab a copy of DNA Magazine. This was my first such experience, perhaps a little later in life than most guys, but at 22 was no less nerve-wracking. Its not a porno magazine, but I was still a little worried about the woman behind the counter giving me a look of disgust, or (perhaps a little more irrationally), having the crap beaten out of me for being a fag.

I put all that out of my head and marched into the newsagent. I knew where the "gay mags" were because I've scoped the place out some months ago (although I lost my nerve on that trip and didn't buy anything). There was a man in the aisle looking at something, I didn't have a chance to see what he was looking at, I had a mission. I grabbed the DNA magazine, waltzed past him and went to the counter. I slapped the mag down on the counter and waited as the sexy guy on the cover looked at me.

The place was set up with two counters, one on each side of this little island where the staff stood. A young woman was serving a bloke on the other side. And taking forever. My nerve was starting to waver. A small line was forming behind me. I stared straight ahead. I chanced a glance behind me. A guy, perhaps 30 was behind me, probably buying Sports Illustrated or some other straight magazine. "Fuck!" I thought, and promptly turned the magazine over, only to reveal another sexy guy, this time advertising a watch of some kind. I couldn't win. The young woman turned around and told me that someone would be with me shortly. "No rush" I thought.

A bloke with greying hair, maybe 45, appeared in front of me, and in one fell swoop grabbed the magazine and scanned it. Next, he dipped it below the counter fumbled around a little and then produced a plastic bag with the magazine in it. I'm not sure if he did it because he always does it, or becuse he saw what it was... but hey I don't care! I stuffed it into my green shopping bag, paid the guy and hobbled out.

I am now officially a man!

Three years ago today

On the 9th of July, 2003, my Grandma passed away in her sleep. She was 85. I didn't realise today was the day until Pop asked me the date over breakfast this morning. "The ninth I think... maybe... yes, definatly the ninth" I said. "Ahh" he said sagely, "three years to the day." He didn't say any more than that. Suddenly I remembered where that phonecall I got, three years ago, when my mother called me and told me the news. I still remember exactly where I was standing.

I can't say it was unexpected. In 1989, Grandma tripped at my cousin's 21st birthday party and was taken away by the ambulance. I was only 5 at the time, so the spectacle of the pretty blue and red lights is all I remember of that night. Her femur was broken and fractured in several places, her bones weak from age and Pagett's disease. A steel rod had to be inserted which made it even more difficult to walk. As time went by her body deteriorated. She suffered from emphysemia, and in 1994 was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease. In 2001, she moved into a nursing home specialising in dementia patients. By 2003, she had forgotten most of her life, including her children and grandchildren. That was the worst part of it all, before all this she was the life of the party, she knew everyone and everything and made everyone laugh.

So here's to you Grandma,
in 85 years you had 1 husband for 65 years,
7 children,
and 16 grandchildren.
That's pretty damn great record!

Here goes nothing

Ok so this is the first post. I'm not really sure where I'm going to end up going with this blog. I haven't written a description yet. I think I might do that later in the week when I'm feeling a little more alert. The plan is to just write about what happens and see where we go from there.

To kick things off, next week I will be staying with my Pop, who at 92 is a constant source of laughs. So life should be interesting.

Banner... again!

And another one.... yay for procrastination.