My Year of Meaningful (2011)

It's the first "normal" weekend since we've been home, so now I'm experiencing the weekend through a whole new pair of eyes - the kind that has to wake up and make bottles at 7:30 am on a saturday now! Well ok we were doing it in Windhoek too but you come home and something in your subconscious tells you it's all going to be "back to normal", even though you know otherwise.

ANYWAY, now that I'm UP at this ridiculous weekend hour, I realize how much time I have to do stuff.

One thing I just finally got around to was deleting Jeremy's number out of my phone. That was the most horrible, surreal, awful feeling I've had in a long time. While we were away, we got the news that he died from complications with pneumonia and H1N1. It was so tragic. Just before we had left town, we were at a wine tasting and talking to a girl who also knew him who told us that she heard he'd just been admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. That night on the way home then, I called him and left a crazy voicemail message on his phone telling him to get better and joking around about "how dare you get pneumonia and not tell me?!" etc etc. I had been working on some songs that we were going to get together and play soon... (Jeremy is the guitar playing friend of ours who I have played banjo with + his Irish music-playin' buddies). Anyway we got the email while we were away that he died. We missed the memorial service and it's really sad because he was actually supposed to do some ecology work for us on one of our jobs, and now we have to get another ecologist and everything... meaning it won't be me and him and The Mr. going up into the bush to do that site visit we had all been talking about for months... bringing the guitar and banjo and a giant bottle of brandy.... -sigh-

So what do you do when someone dies who you have in your email addresses, cell phone phonebook, etc.? I mean it does no good to just leave them there - nobody is going to answer the phone if you call that number.... so finally this weekend I got around to deleting it and it was just very, very bizarre.

On another macabre note, just before we left Namibia I tracked down the riverbed where The Joo was found... we went and took some photos and figured it was the least we could do, what with her ever having any interest in her past... it's not like we can tell her who her biological parents are or anything, but hey she can at least see where she was born. It was surprisingly NOT in a poor township or anything. It was actually in a somewhat middle-class suburb with a mix of good & bad houses and a large mix of people from working-class whities to black yuppies and a bit of industrial estates. We'll never know exactly what stretch of the river bed the policeman found her in, but we took a bunch of photos of all the different parts of it. I got the biggest "vibe" from this place right here:

Keeping with the macabre... is it wrong to be slightly happy when one of your best friends finds herself single again, because it means she might actually be able to come and visit you?!!??!?! I'm sure the answer is "yes it's wrong" but dammit I just can't help it. I see that God has closed a door and by golly the window that it has opened up is the fact that the Ex is no longer around to put the kibosh on her international galavanting!!! I see all sorts of potential here. Namely the part where I get personal gain from it!!! Oh I can just feel the flames of hell licking my ass for even having this thought but hey. Smoke em if you got em, kids.

OK how did this happen... I made a giant pot of delicious posh coffee and here I sit, typing, and have forgotten all about it. Just goes to show you what happens when you take a sleeper-inner and make 'em wake up at some bloody ridiculous hour of a saturday morning.