THE DAILY DIVERSION

Well, I've yet to have to make an entry about a loss in my life. So, this isn't a post I really how to approach. I guess I'll just start with the story and see how it goes.

Adrianne and I made it home from Bowling Green at about 6 pm on Sunday and we were just hanging out and relaxing, preparing for a long week, all while looking forward to being home next weekend, for only the second time this year. At 8 pm my phone rang. "Mom" showed up on my caller ID. I knew I remembered to call her when I got in, so I was thinking maybe I forgot something important at her house.

I answer in my typical "Helllllooooo", but her voice is low and she says "Hold on! Wait, let me call you right back!"

Immediately I knew something was wrong. Adrianne looked up from her work at me with a curious "What's wrong?" look on her face. I just sat there, looking at my phone, waiting for it to ring again, even though I got a feeling that I really didn't want to hear what was going to come out once I answered it.

After what seemed like an eternity, but was less than two minutes, the phone rang again, with "Mom" on the caller ID. I answered "What's going on?" this time.

Mom: "Well, your Grandpa Condray's friend Chuck called here trying to get a hold of your sister, after not being able to get a hold of your Dad."

Me: "Okay?!"

Mom: "Well, he found your Grandpa passed out on the floor and he's passed away."

Me: silence

Mom: "I'm so sorry son!"

Me: more silence

Mom: "I've tried to call your sister, but I can't get in touch with her." (Sis was on vacation/business in Las Vegas)

Me: "Okay"

Mom: "Do you want to give me your Dad's numbers and I'll call him?"

Me: "No, I'd better do it."

Mom: "Okay, you get in touch with him and make sure he calls Chuck (gives me the number) and I'll keep trying to get in touch with your sister."

Me: "Okay"

Mom: "I love you! I'm so sorry son!"

Me: "I love you too Mom!"

I sit back against the couch trying to catch my breath/breathe/understand what is going on. Adrianne looks at me, gets up off the other couch, and come sits next to me. "What's wrong? What's going on?"

"Grandpa Condray passed away" is pretty much the only thing I can get out. "I've gotta call Dad and tell him" comes out next. She puts her arms around me and hugs me. "I'm so sorry baby!"

I get up and walk around a little bit. Just trying to think about what I'm going to say to my father, when I have to tell him his father is dead.

I look up his first number in my cell phone's phonebook and press "call".

Someone on the other end: (lots of noise in the background) "Yellope?"

Me: "Hey!"

Someone on the other end: "You wanna order a pizza?"

Me: "Excuse me?"

Someone on the other end: "This is Joe's Pizza, you want something?"

Me: "No, I'm trying to get a hold of John Condray."

Someone on the other end: "John?! John! You over there?! Yeah, hold on! He's sitting in the corner drinkin' a beer!"

Me: "Thanks."

Dad: "Hello?"

Me: "Hey. Its your son."

Dad: (joking tone in his voice) "It is? What the hell's going on?"

Me: "Are you coherent?"

Dad: "Yeah? What's going on?"

Me: "I need you to be coherent and get away from everyone else that is around."

(the noise ends)

Dad: "What's going on?"

Me: "Well, I've got some bad news."

Dad: "What is it son? What's going on?"

Me: "Well, Chuck, Grandpa's friend, has been trying to get a hold of you, but couldn't get you. Then he tried to call Michelle but got Mom instead."

Dad: "Okay?"

Me: "Well, Chuck found Grandpa passed out on the floor. He's passed away."

Dad: silence

Me: "I'm so sorry Dad."

Dad: silence

Me: "I really didn't want to have to tell you this."

Dad: "I know. Its okay."

Me: "I'm sorry."

Dad: "You don't have to be sorry about anything. Yeah, this is bad. Bad news. I, I hadn't talked to him in a little while. He was doing so well."

Me: "I know. Chuck wants you to call him. I've got his number right here."

Dad: "No, no I've got it here on my phone. I'll call him."

Me: "Okay"

Dad: "Have you talked to your sister?"

Me: "No, not yet. Mom is trying to get in touch with her."

Dad: "That's right, she's still in Vegas, right?"

Me: "Yeah, Mom's got a couple calls in to her."

Dad: "Okay, I'll try to call her too. I gotta call Chuck."

Me: "I love you Dad."

Dad: (noticeably weeping) "I love you too son."

Me: "Give Chuck a call and call me back. It can be tomorrow if need be. Just let me know what's going on and what you need me to do."

Dad: "No, I'll call you back after I get off the phone with him."

Me: "Okay. I love you Dad. I'm so sorry."

Dad: "Its okay. I love you too. I'll talk to you shortly."

Me: "Okay. I'll talk to you then. Bye bye."

I don't ever want to have to do something like that again. I can't even imagine what its like to be a police officer and have to tell someone that one of their loved one's has died.

So, tomorrow we're heading to Missouri. The viewing is Thursday night and the funeral is on Friday afternoon. I thought I'd go up there a day early to be with my Dad for a little while. He's an only child, and with his Mom in a nursing home up there, he's basically got no one else besides Michelle and I.

I know things have been bad between he and I in the not so distance past, but now is not the time to worry about that stuff. Now is a time for healing and helping, and that's what I'm trying/planning to do.

The thing is, I don't really know how to feel. Of course I'm sad, but I'm not overwhelmed with grief, like most would be. I didn't really know my Grandpa. I never really spent much time with him when I was growing up. I'd see him about every time we visited Missouri, but it would sometimes be 2 or 3 years in between times we'd see him, because we couldn't run him down. So, I didn't have a real relationship with him, like I have with both of my Grandma's.

I guess I have some things to deal with?

I had a crazy dream last Thursday night and, luckily wrote down as much of it as I could remember, when I got to work on Friday. Unfortunately, I've forgotten all about the dream since, thus I won't be able to fill in anything extra. So, without further adieu...

Adrianne and I are traveling, along with three young children (possibly the three kids Adrianne used to babysit for, before we got married), when we couldn't find our house. So, we pulled our car by a pool within a gated community, because it would be easy to find later on. We all get out of the car and into the pool (somehow we're in our swimsuits already).

We're only in the pool for a few minutes when tornado's are forming in the sky all around us. I make everyone get out of the pool and head inside the community common area (actually reminds me of a hunting lodge or something). Unfortunately, none of us have towels, so we're just standing there, soaking wet.

I find the clothes I had on when we were in the car and put them on over my swimsuit. Obviously, doing this was not a good idea, as my clothes also immediately became soaked. I decide I want to put on some dry clothes, regardless of what I have to get them. What this means is I have to go out and weather the storm (gotta love a little play on words). So, I suck it up and run out to the car.

The wind is blowing violently (like wind does in tornado-like weather) and our car (our old Accord) is now in a garage (a detached garage, with at least 5 bays). I'm trying to get my luggage out of the trunk of the car when the garage door opens. A older gentleman in a work truck isn't quite expecting me to be in his parking spot, so I walk out to meet him at his driver's side window, apologizing about being in his spot. He tells me that its okay and that he'll just park in another spot. He opens the garage door two spots down and pulls in.

Everything seemed kind of odd to me, because he looked like a blue collar worker (manual laborer or something), but we were in a very high end neighborhood, but I didn't say anything to him. We start chatting and he tells me that he and his wife are going to a play later on that evening and that he'd see if he could get his friend's three extra tickets for us to use. I politely refused, since there were five of us, but only three tickets. He says "just leave two of the kids and go anyway."

That's all I got. I woke up right as he said "leave two of the kids".

Now, I can explain 90% of this dream with relative ease, as they are just everyday things that ended up showing up in my subconscious. The gated community comes from work. Over the past 4 months I've been looking at loans to home builders and have had numerous run-ins with the loan officers about how crappy the market is, even in the best areas.

The tornado's are simple as well, since we had tornado's all around our area just a week ago and they are still making headlines in the news here. The older gentleman in the work truck also comes from my daily life, as there are tons of workers outside our building working on adjacent building.

I'm not sure why I thought about our old car or about a play. So, not a lot to gain out of this dream, just my every day life.

I'm out!

Yeah, I know I missed posting yesterday. You wanna make something of it?

I just didn't really have much to discuss. That and I just didn't feel like typing last night.

Anyway, I thought I'd get a little something off my chest. The truth is, I'm really, really tired of my boss. For starters, he won't do what is best for us, as employees.

Several months ago, we had a new senior manager join our team. This gentleman immediately made some drastic changes and not necessarily for the worst. Changes were needed, in a bad way. Our department had lost a lot of credibility throughout the organization and we needed to get that back, and quickly.

While all of us "underlings" were on board, and, at least in my case, excited about being more empowered with our jobs, my direct boss continued to maintain the status quo from the old regime. Truthfully, its not his fault either, as he's never known anything but the way he's been doing things. This is due to the fact that he's never had another job at a different place. The rest of us have all worked elsewhere and brought our experiences with us.

Fast forward to more recent times...

We've been working on a project and our new senior manager told us, at the beginning, to take charge of what we are doing, make intelligent decisions, and move on. If we did that, he would back us 100%. That's the way empowerment is supposed work and really made me feel like I could do my job without all of the bullshit we've had to put up with prior to now. (background info: at my job there has been a serious power struggle throughout the company's history and politics, more often than not, overrule common sense and intelligent business decisions)

Well, my boss doesn't necessarily follow this path. Instead, he's still doing it the old way, where we know what we want to do, then we put it out for discussion with others, let them come back with their opinions, then we go back and forth for a month, before we finally come to a conclusion. The problem with this way is that we were supposed to be done at the end of January. The decisions I made were done by that time, but, until today, we were still in the negotiating process. All the while, my boss has made no effort to go to our senior manager with our findings, so he could back us up, and we could move on.

So, in the end, all of us "underlings" look like we're not doing our job efficiently, because our boss won't do what he's supposed to do. Instead we are stuck sitting on our hands, getting things done at a snail's pace, and having senior management look at in bewilderment (as to say "what is taking so long?"). I can't go say anything to senior management, as my boss makes life really shitty for me. I've been there and done that, but I don't know how much longer I can put up with this idiocy.

Okay, I'm done for now. I'm really not in a bad mood today. I didn't do any work at all today and my Hilltoppers blew out yet another team in Diddle Arena. Also, tomorrow is Valentines Day, with Adrianne's birthday following the day after.

Well, it seems like ages since I've posted. Part of that is due to my workload (at work, what a surprise), with the other part due to me being lazy. Its not that I haven't been up to anything, its just that I haven't had time to put pen to paper (as I used to do when I'd have ideas worth writing down and discussing). Also, it appears that the firewall at work has now added "blogger" sites to their "don't even think about it" list. It used to be all I had to worry about was not checking out porn at work! What will they block next? ESPN.com? Yahoo?

So, where do I really start? I'm thinking the first thing I could talk about is married life. All is well in this environment. I love my wonderfully beautiful wife and, as far as I can tell, she loves me in return. We don't get to spend enough time together, between work (for both of us), her graduate school stuff, my sports (I'll get to that later), and after work extracurriculars, we get maybe 2 good, waking hours to see each other every day. That's really not enough to discover each other, but we're doing the best we can.

Adrianne's class this year is hell on wheels. She thought she had a few bad apples last year, but, outside of just a couple of kids, this year's group are all like her absolute worst kids from last year. Its rather taxing on both of us, as she actually has to deal with them every day and I have to be understanding of what she has to deal with.

On a personal note, as much as I hated capital punishment (paddlings and such) when I was a kid, I believe kids these days need that kind of thing more than ever. Back when I was a kid (God I'm getting old) we were scared to death to ever do anything wrong at school because we knew our asses would get worn out when we got home. These days, the kids just don't care. Their parents aren't going to discipline them when they get home, so they aren't afraid of them. Then they get to come into the schools, where there's no reason to be afraid of teachers, principals, or guidance counselors, so they can get away with anything. The power is completely in the hands of the kids, instead of the other way around, and people have the nerve to wonder why this country is going to hell in a hand-basket. Well, you wanted it, so guess what you got!

Okay, enough on that rant. I just wanted to kind of get that out there. Now, what's on my mind lately you may ask? Well, my grandmother (Dad's Mom) hasn't been doing very well as of late. Less than a month ago we had to move her out of her old assisted living center because she was unable to do what was necessary to take care of herself. She had deteriorated far enough that she had to be in the hospital for at least a week and the old place wouldn't let her come back in that condition.

Luckily, we had already scouted out a different locale for her while we were there over Thanksgiving, and they had an opening. Talk about luck.

Sis and I converged on Salem and Rolla, Missouri and did everything we needed to do. Actually, Michelle did most of the work before Adrianne and I could get there, so all we really had to do was try to comfort Granny. Now, fast forward to two weeks ago...

Something happened (yet to be determined) and Granny was rushed to the hospital in Rolla from her nursing facility. From all accounts she was about as close to death as possible and to the point where they put her in a hospice room, assigned her a social worker, and got her a hospice nurse. From what I've gathered, she had pneumonia in both lungs, but I don't know what else. I wasn't able to get away from work and everything else on such short notice but Michelle and Mom got up there as quick as they could.

It was kind of "touch and go" for a couple of days, but Granny got through it. I think most of it was due to Michelle being there, as I think most of Granny's problems are psychological, as in she's severely depressed. She has no desire to get out of bed to do anything and its killing her. Without being active, and in some cases not eating or drinking anything, she's obliterated her immune system, making her susceptible to infection, disease, and everything else that runs rampant through nursing homes, schools, mall, etc.

So, this last weekend Adrianne and I went up to see her. Friday was wonderful. She was sitting up in bed and talking up a storm. She'd take short, 15 second breaks to catch her breath, then start in on another story about any and every thing. We had a great visit and my hopes were pretty high that she'll be a fighter and pull through all of this.

Well, Saturday those hopes were dashed. For every second she spent sitting up talking to us on Friday, she was laying down drifting in and out of consciousness and/or complaining about being tired or in pain on Saturday. When they came in to get her to go to lunch, she just told them to go away, that she didn't want to eat. I was able to talk her into going to eat, so Adrianne and I could take a little break to grab a bite as well and run a few errands for her (pick up a couple of things she needed/wanted). After lunch was no different. I spent the time watching TV on mute while Adrianne worked on her graduate class.

I spent very little time sleeping Saturday night, knowing my inevitable conversation with Granny the next day. No matter how many times you go over stuff like this in your head, its never easy to come out and say it.

When we went in on Sunday morning, she was in the same or slightly worse shape than the day before. This time she wouldn't even complain about pain or being tired. She just wanted to lay there in peace. I got up close to her so I could whisper in her ear, instead of talking aloud to her. She told me was so tired and just wanted it all to go away. I asked her if she wanted the Lord to come get her. Her first response was "if he wants to", which was later changed to "yes, I'm ready". I told her that we (myself, Adrianne, Michelle, Dad) didn't want her to be where she is and be miserable and "if the Lord comes for you, we want you to go with him". She was okay with that. Really, I think that's the best I can do.

Anyway, I'm tired of talking about that, as it depresses me. Hmm... other things going on in my life???

Well, I successfully played the entire fall season in my adult soccer league. I didn't score any goals and may have had a couple of assist (I never checked the stats), but I didn't completely suck. Well, at least not in my mind anyway. My teammates may disagree. So, I've signed up to play again in the spring. The season starts at the end of February and we've had a couple of practices, both of which I've missed due to being out of town. I'm back out of playing shape again and need to get to work on it. You can't realize how hard it is to get outside to run around some during the winter in an urban environment. First of all, its been dark two hours before I even get off work. Next, I've got two places I can go kick a ball around, and neither are safe for a honky at night.

Speaking of being out of town, Adrianne and I have had 3 weekends, tops, here in Memphis since Thanksgiving. One of which we had company come visit. Most of that is my fault, as I have an undying desire to go watch basketball games in Bowling Green, with other trips to Owensboro and Missouri to see the family.

Speaking of basketball, I don't know if anyone is paying attention, but the Hilltoppers are 19-5 with a nice, long winning streak going into yet another Wednesday conference clash, this time against the Troy Trojans. I say lets burn those rubbers! Right now I'm planning on going over to Murfreesboro on Saturday to watch the tilt against the Blue Raiders at the Murphy Center. MTSU has been playing well as of late, as much as I hate to admit it. However, we beat the dog shit out of them in Diddle a little while back and we're playing much better basketball right now.

I know I said this last time, but I'll say it again... I'm going to try to post a little more often. I found my username and password, so I have no excuse. Also, Adrianne's Mom is opening a coffee shop in downtown Owensboro, and has mentioned that she might like to use some of my "Rules of Thumb" for t-shirts, cup sleeves, and stuff like that. So, I have to put the mind into overdrive and start cranking some more "Rules" out. However, first, I have to fix the template, as its gone haywire!

Well, that's enough for now! Hopefully we'll see you soon!