He hunted all this past fall with me and then a few weeks ago fell ill. Aggressive cancer. Now he's gone.
The past year plus has really been horrific for me in all sorts of ways. Surgery twice, stress to the limit, being ill every day. Two family deaths back to back, and now this. I don't know why these things happen.
I've carried on throughout it, but I can hardly write this due to the tears in my eyes for the dog.
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We went waterfowl hunting.
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By we, I mean my son, his girlfriend, and the dog. We loaded up in the Dodge D3500, and we went waterfowl hunting
The highways were all closed, so I got there by going through a small farm belt here, hitting a rural road, and taking it to the river, the back way. We were the only vehicles on it.
Yes, this can be argued, and probably correctly driving out in a blizzard was not smart. But people wanted to go, and it looked like good waterfowl hunting weather, which in fact it was.
Out on the river, in fact, the weather wasn't nearly as bad as it was in town. It snowed lightly off and on, but it wasn't a blizzard. At some point, it had been, as the snow was quite deep.
And we had the river all to ourselves.
And has we headed back into town, the snowstorm cranked up again.
And yes, there were some spots on the road that were really bad. Only the fact that I was driving a very heavy, and powerful, diesel 4x4 allowed us to get there. Frankly, a 1/2 ton gasser probably wouldn't have. And yes, you ought to stay off the road in weather like that.
We were going to do this on Sunday, New Year's Day, but the blizzard made that impossible in town. It was also rendered impossible by the fact that the batteries on the diesel had given out the week prior, and I'd only learned that on Saturday when I was heading out, in advance of the storm, to hunt geese near Torrington. I changed, the batteries, in the blizzard, on Sunday after Mass, but only after nearly wrecking my very lightweight Jeep going to get the batteries.
The point.
Well, as follows.
I have a new neighbor across the street that I spoke to, two snowstorms ago. He's from Maryland and asked about the snow. I told him that it snowed all the way through April, as it does.
He apparently didn't believe me, as his next door neighbor, who was out while I was snow blowing when I got home yesterday, was stating that the same neighbor had asked him, that day, about the snow. He got the same information.
My prediction is that the new neighbor will leave.
Late last night, I got a text from a coworker. Should we close the office, today?
In fairness, the county has closed, and the school districts.
This is of interest as it's become, all of a sudden, a really common event. A couple of snowstorms ago, all of a sudden a coworker was asking if we should send people home early. It caught me completely off guard. It was very cold, and slightly snowy, but why would we do that? I vetoed it as I had stuff I had to go out, but this came after another similar event. Light snow, and we're sending people home. And we're not the only ones.
This is just an observation, really. Maybe it's a good thing that these events are taken more into consideration than they used to be. Or maybe we're really unprepared for them. Probably both. I'm glad they close the highways more than they used to, as they used to leave them open in horrible conditions. But I don't quite know what to make of the situation where people choose to move outside of town on a windblown flat, and then can't make it to work. It makes sense to me to close when weather is genuinely bad, but for regular in town operations, closing everything as a few folks might have trouble getting there, who should be given consideration for that, seems odd.
If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us. Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings.
Fr. Joseph Krupp.
Fr. Krupp's Facebook post here was synchronicitous for me.
I didn't take much time off last year. And my not taking "much", what I mean is that I took three days really off, just off, because I had surgery and was laying in the hospital.
That's not really good.
I'd like to claim that it was for one reason or another, but truth be known, i'ts something I imposed upon myself. And I do this every year.
Indeed, I'm much worse about it than I used to be.
All the things you hear about not taking time off are 100% true, if not 200%. You become less efficient, for one thing. And if you work extra hours, sooner or later, you'll acclimate yourself to working the extra hours to the point where you need to. That's become your work life.
Christmas in my work place essentially always works the same way. We work, normally, the day before Christmas, December 24, until noon. At noon, we dismiss the staff and all go to a collective lawyer's lunch. That institution is, I think, a remnant of an earlier era in our society in general, when it could be expected that most professional institutions would remain a certain size and everyone who worked there would have a sort of collegiality. It sort of recalls, in a way, the conditions described by Scrooge's original employer in A Christmas Carrol, in the shop run by Mr. Fezziwig.
This use to really prevail in firms when I was first practicing. I recall being at lunch on December 24 at a local club restaurant in which other firms would also be there. Everyone was doing the same thing. I haven't seen another firm at one now, however, for years. Maybe they just go somewhere else, but I sort of suspect that they're not doing it.
Well, good for us. It's hard not to have a certain feeling of sadness about it, however, as three of the lawyers who once were part of that are now dead. Others have moved on long ago. New faces have come, of course.
Anyhow, that institution sort of ties up the afternoon of December 24, but it's an afternoon off. If you are a Catholic with a family, it's always been a bit tight, as we normally go to Mass on Christmas Eve and then gather after that. Christmas is obviously a day off, as is Boxing Day, December 26, although most Americans don't refer to Boxing Day by that name.
This year Christmas came on a Sunday, which was nice as it made December 23 the day of the lunch and effectively an extra day off. We took, of course, Boxing Day off.
Sometime in there, I began to wonder why I hadn't taken the whole week off. With just three days off, beyond Sundays, and having worked most of the 52 Saturdays of the year, I should have. I had the things done, pretty much, that I needed to get done.
What was I thinking?
If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us. Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings.
Well, I'm actually at the point, in spite of myself, that I'm so acclimated to going to the work that I feel guilty if I take time off. And frankly, the Internet hasn't helped much. On the afternoon of the 23d, I received a text message asking me if I was working that afternoon. I wasn't, and they were gracious about it, but this is how things tend to be. It's hard to actually escape the office.
On Boxing Day I went goose and duck hunting. Conditiond were great.
I was going to go with my son, but events conspired against it, so it was just me and the dog.
Earlier this year, my wife had us buy a bigger smoker. We had not had one until fairly recently, when we won one at a Duck's Unlimited banquet. That one is a little traveling one, sort of a tailgating smoker, and can work from a car's battery system. You can plug it in, and we've enjoyed it, but due to its size, we decided to get a bigger one and did. It's been great.
This was my first occasion actually using it, something necessitated by the fact that our oven is more or less out due to some sort of weird oven thing that happened to it which will not get addressed until sometime this week. Besides, I'd been wanting to try smoked waterfowl.
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