Adieu, Randy, till we meet again

Today was Randy’s funeral. It was a nice service. I was amazed at the turnout. People from the community he served, his brothers and sisters (whom I don’t think I’ve ever met), and people from all over. Abigail had a bit of a rough time during the viewing period, but overall did very well.

Randy’s family did a great job. I’m sure he’s proud of what they did. Overall, it was just a very nice service with lots of good memories. Brandon, Chris (both my cousins), and Dave (my cousin Jennifer’s husband) gave especially nice remarks. The support from folks at the church was nearly overwhelming. They put on quite a spread after the burial.

Now, of course, comes the hard part for Janene and her family.

Back to work, not quite reality

I went back to work today. I worked a couple of days last week, but it was pretty uneventful and, truth be told, pretty inefficient. I think that all of us there were thinking deep down that we were getting hosed for being there, so it was pretty kick back.

My Aunt Janene asked me to be a part of Randy’s dressing yesterday at the mortuary. That was a humbling and sobering experience. I was kind of surprised how good he looked, but I suppose that’s all relative at this point. He certainly looked at peace somehow.

Tomorrow is the funeral. It promises to be a roller coaster of a day. I can’t imagine what his children, and especially his wife, must be going through. Janene has asked that I help with the dedication of the grave. I told her that it would be an honor. We’ll see how it goes.

Grace started preschool yesterday. One of these days, I’m going to fix my Typo install here so that I can post pictures to this thing. I took a picture of her in front of her teacher’s house. She was pretty excited. I’m glad she’s back in school. She seems to need an outlet for some sort of creative energy that she has built up.

Abigail returns on Monday of next week (1/9 I think?). She’s been trying to tell us that she was supposed to go back today, but that wasn’t the case.

Lucy is still a nut. But a happy nut.

I’m trying to get an application running that I wrote in 2004. It just makes me realize how much I hate Oracle databases. I would much rather use most anything else. So I’m currently downloading release 9, with the hopes of replacing my more-recent 10g instance with the older one. I’m sure for 99% of those that read this stuff (99% of zero is . . . nevermind) this makes absolutely no sense. So I’ll stop there.