requisat in pacem, Roy Warren Fox

So my grandfather (Grandpa Roy, my Mom's dad) passed away this weekend.

Mom called me on Saturday to let me know that he'd had a stroke and was in the hospital. I got to call and tell him I loved him and goodbye, and this afternoon he passed away.

( Details and reminiscence behind the cut )

I'm doing fine. I'm sad, of course, and I'm going to get together with Mom this week and we'll hug and cry, but there's a lot more wistfulness than grief. And this side of my family, just because we're mourning doesn't mean we can't still smile, you know?

But I really wouldn't mind if the Universe decided to hold off on giving me any more practice with funerals for a while, though...

Other doings

I also did some other stuff this weekend besides answering the phone every two hours to find out about my grandfather dying...

I didn't go in to work on Friday; did a couple-few hours of telecommuting, then ran errands. It was a good break. The day was gorgeous, and it was nice to get out in the sun.

We did some thrift-store shopping Saturday. I found a few shirts. Jerry found a copy of Riven, a pad of graph paper, and a Japanese electronic personal organizer. Greg found a dumpling-maker and a stuffed armadillo.

I also brought home a couple old issues of Analog. Sometimes I really like reading short stories, I think because there's a lower level of commitment: I know I won't have to put it down in the middle because I can't afford to get sucked in right now, and I won't lose much time if I end up not liking it. (I have a very hard time not finishing books.) I read some out of it, and then today I ended up reading an entire library book Greg had just finished: Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris. I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a Southern vampire romance mystery. I figured out one of the twists early, and had mostly ID'd the killer by the time he was revealed, and that's always satisfying.

Today I cleaned up the office some. I had a big box from Dad's garage that was filled with old stuff from high school. Mostly it's clothes that I need to wash and donate, but there was a reasonable pile of papers and stuff, which I had to look through so I could put them back in a different box to keep. (If you didn't already know, I have the packrat gene. I cannot throw away papers with interesting or sentimental information. It's better than my dad, who hoarded food, or my grandfather, who hoarded construction materials...)

Anyway, some of it was things I'd written a decade and a half ago, and I would just like to take this moment and apologize to my future self, because I really hope that I won't look back on these writings and feel the way then that I feel right now about stuff I wrote in high school. Oy vey. On the other hand, that was just essays and that kind of thing; I also found an old journal, and it wasn't nearly as cringeworthy.