And as I am writing this the day is far from being over, unfortunately. Currently I am working… Yes I realize it’s 12:44am. Tonight I happened to log in to do some maintenance and as it turns out something here got really hosed… No I didn’t break it, and it just happened to be coincidence that I happened to log into work when it went down… Unfortunately there is nothing I can do and I’m waiting on another team to get their part done before I can do anything. It sounds like it may be a long night… Ugh….
But that’s not even the beginning of my day! I had a pretty decent day at work – a typical Tuesday full of meetings. I also met with my Pastoral Council Vice Chair today about what exactly we need to do. After that meeting I felt a lot better about what was expected of me. This whole "being the Pastoral Council Chair" thing is something that I’m reluctantly doing, but at least now I’m beginning to think of some opportunity with it.. We’ll see if I say the same thing when I actually have to start doing work for it…
But tonight was really interesting. I went to my folks’ this evening. With my sister’s graduation coming this weekend and this week being finals week (my mom is a teacher) there is a ton to do leading up to it and I wanted to see what I could do to help around the yard. So I get there and my mom is grading papers, my sister is out and about with some guy (which is a whole other story), and my youngest sister was working. So I helped out a bit, then hung out while my mom was grading and we were watching Law & Order SVU’s finale (which was interesting by the way). Then like at 9:30 my dad comes down and breaks out with "your grandparents are coming over in 20 minutes"..
Wait… you mean my Grandparents from Arizona?!? Rolling in at 10pm on a Tuesday night??
Sure enough they roll in… I don’t know where this bright idea came from, but I’m glad that the communication system is working so well at home. I only happened to be down there by sheer coincidence, and it would have been very likely that I wouldn’t have been there at all. My sisters are all doing their homework and working, and here we are with a huge busy week. Just kinda random to have family showing up. My guess is my dad knew about it, but didn’t break out with the memo until right before they called.
Now I’m not saying that I wasn’t grateful to see my grandparents. I was, it was good to see them – but truth be told: we’re not really that close and the last time I saw them was almost 4 years ago. They’re very nice and very sweet people, especially my grandmother, but it’s just that our family has never been really close with that side of the family, communication is sparse at best so we never really know what’s going on. That makes conversing out of the blue a little more difficult.
So I stuck around long enough to be polite, and God bless my sister Jessica who did the same as well. I don’t think either of us really said anything during that time, but at that point she went to bed and I went home. I probably could have stayed longer, but I also wanted to be conscious of my mom staying up grading papers and my sisters needing to do homework and just thought about how this was a really tough night to host family. Very interesting night indeed.
As I drove home it made me think about how much I miss my other grandparents. I was quite a bit closer to them. We went out to the squelching heat of Carlsbad, New Mexico every summer to go visit them and as much as I joke about how hot and boring it is out there, I had a lot of good memories that I took from that place. My grandmother passed two years ago and my grandfather passed about two months ago and I just go to thinking that I may never go back to Carlsbad ever again.
Maybe someday when I have kids I’ll take them out there to visit some distant cousin or something, just to subject them to metropolis that is Carlsbad, New Mexico.