BOCA INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANY

January 11th, 2012, 12:30 A.M.

So there you have it, today's blog did not appear. That was the way today was. I wanted to try something to see if I could write a blog in Word and 'copy and paste' it here. So, I finally tried it and it did not work. Instead of redoing it, I am going to bed as it is well past midnight and I am not going to start again. I might mess around with it tomorrow but my brain is tired. Besides it wasn't a very good blog anyway and yhou probably have better things to read that this one. <chuckle> Have a great day.....OOPs, I figured out how to make it work on an after thought so here it  is!

Today was nice….that is what it was. No one phoned, no one knocked on my door, I also met the new mail man because the old one gave up walking this route which he had done for the past 9 or 10 years. He had been a mail carrier for something like 34 years and although he looked young and eager when I first met him almost five years ago, he finally gave up the route, sort of slowing down into retirement. This guy never looked his age. The new guy has a longer route. The post office is doing a number of things that makes it a long day for them. The new system of sharing a mail sorting section to cut down overhead and alternating start schedules interferes with the average guy’s life as he knew it when he first became a carrier. This fellow starts at 10 a.m. and basically finishes around 7 p.m. back at the station. That means 9 hours per day and often more.

Today was not nice in another sense because I did not hear the garbage truck with all the windows closed here due to the winter winds and I did not get the smelly garbage out in time. The bins were empty when I finally got to the front of the building where they were waiting to be returned to their spot in the back parking lot. Oh well, it is cold outside so no one will complain of reeking garbage.

Oh, I just thought of something else nice. Today I had some close contact by email with other family members I had not heard from for quite a while. With family spread across Canada, the USA, Bermuda, South America, the UK and the Netherlands, it is a busy life for everyone and getting together or keeping in touch is difficult and expensive. Such are the things about life that try us when it comes to keeping a family together. Five years can go by and we forget that time marches on with modern technology. Maybe it is just me, but I don’t miss people until I catch up to them. I do not have any concept of time anymore and suddenly five years went by. I had a hip replaced last May and it seems like it was just a couple of months ago yet it has been about 8 months now. Hard to believe how fast things are going. I have had some tough things of late hit me in the face but I just have to carry on and hope for the best outcome. I would like to live to be a hundred if I can get my issues under control but I suspect one organ or another is going to give out along the way and I will suddenly be gone. Darn, and I was just starting my life.

I don’t know what it is but even my parents had talked about letting go at one point. My mother had got up in the early hours of the new day, sat down in her favourite spot on her favourite bench and was reading her favourite fashion magazine, even at age 85. Dad found her there sitting as if she had nodded off for a moment. He knew then that she was gone. He was almost blind in one eye and the other was not great. He lived on his own with someone coming in to look after him but a fall from which he could not get up meant hospitalization. Then he went into a medical care situation and died there a couple of years later, having ended up with cancer of the brain. He died the night before my birthday. I often wonder if he was thinking about how we seldom got along and I wondered if the pressures of the father/son relationship finally took its toll. Who knows, I am not going to let me pin that one on me though. They are gone, I am still here….well, what is left of me anyway and I plan to live to be a hundred, give or take thirty years. It is a hard one to control. Knowing my own situation, I am making every attempt to sort out a few things and even though it won’t all get done, I will try to get a handle on some of it. The rest will be left for someone else to decide about. I know I am going to die, but I am certainly not going to worry about when. There is no other way out…unless you are an astronaut on the first ship to Mars or beyond. ….sounds a bit like the science fiction book I wrote, well, one of them anyway. Here is hoping life continues on earth and we do not reach the point of no return. I would like a piece of me remembered, how about you…..no, not my old face, my young good-looking face when I was in my early thirties. What about you?