Passing

Today at a little after 12:15 AM on February 12, 2014 I lost the most important and influential man in my life, my dad.

He had been battling cancer for about two and a half years and last fall he took a turn for the worse and in December we engaged hospice to help him (and us) with the final months of his life. We were able to keep him at home and I packed up some things and moved into my parents' house so that I could be here to provide assistance to my Mom and keeping Dad comfortable.

Last week he slipped into an unresponsive state (perhaps a coma, but it was never titled that) and yesterday around 5:30 he started to have pretty ragged breathing. My sister came over to stay with us and Dad's three girls sat in the room with him through the evening talking and laughing and telling tales. At about 10:30 PM, we decided that he had developed a bit of a rhythm and decided to lay down and catch some shut eye. At about midnight, my sister woke up to come upstairs to check on me and Mom woke up to give Dad some medicine. Within about 15 minutes, Mom called us girls down as Dad had taken his last breath. He had been sleeping with his mouth open for days and when Mom first called us down to say our final goodbyes, his mouth was still opened. As we sat there, keeping vigil, his mouth slowly closed and he got the most peaceful, sweet smile on his face.

Within a couple of hours, we had hospice arrive to attend to the final arrangements for us, which was wonderful and just held each other...my Mom, my sister, and me.

I cannot say enough wonderful things about my Dad...so I'm not even going to try.

Dad - I know that you are still there keeping an eye on us all. We are going to be okay and you are going to be sorely missed but we are so happy that you are no longer suffering. I love you. 

Bad Blogger

I know, it has been a long time since I have posted...yeah over two months, but I've had other things going on in my life that I haven't really wanted to dwell on out here, although I may at some point.

However, I did feel that I needed to post something this year (even if it doesn't really feel like my year has started yet). I've been working almost exclusively from home these past couple of months, which has been great because I don't really have to make an effort to get myself around and be presentable, even though I do make the point to take a shower every morning. My project that I've been working on (an application implementation) continues to get pushed out, which honestly does not bother me one bit. It seems to be a comedy of errors in this whole implementation and like so many projects the scope seems to constantly be changing. It is frustrating and annoying and part of me really wants to just flip the switch and start using the system and then hammer out the issues as they arise....yet, that probably is NOT the ideal way to implement a new system, especially since so many of the problems that we are having would literally bring our account to its knees....ah well, I just keep doing what they tell me to do.

In the meantime, when I'm not feeling frustrated with work I've been doing a lot of reading and have taken up knitting again. I used to knit a long, long time ago when I was in high school and in the past month or so decided that I needed to do something with my hands in the evenings while I'm watching television. I don't really want to get into making really intricate sweaters or anything fancy, so I'm making scarves and primarily infinity scarves:

NOT ONE OF MINE, JUST PICTURE I FOUND

These are a lot of fun to make and so far in the past 1.5 months, I've completed 5 scarves and am now working on my 6th....who knows these may very well become presents for people out there, so if you have a color preference, let me know.

Other than that, my life is pretty mundane and I'll give more details as to what has been happening some day.