On my own

Rob's in Louisville for a couple of days for work, so I'm on my own. A couple people asked today if I have any wild party plans. Let's see ... I've been working on the quilt again. It's a queen-size quilt that I pieced by hand and now I'm quilting it by hand. Not many quilters do that anymore. Even if I work on nothing else, it'll take a year to finish. And if I get tired of that, I have the crochet lace bedspread I've been working on. I'm about 10 percent done with that. I have a ton of Star Trek to watch, three cats and a dog to keep me company and lots of housework to keep me busy.

I went to the gym after work tonight and did the weight circuit and a half hour on the recumbent bike.

I'm meeting Angie for supper tomorrow and I have Piecemakers and choir on Wednesday. That's about as wild as it will get, I'm afraid.

Oh, I do have a glass of wine before I go to bed a night. I pour it about 9 o'clock and nurse it fot two hours or so.

I got an invitation to Shannon's graduation in the mail today. I plan to go. She's an RN now, and she already has a job lined up. I'm so proud of her. She finished school with two kids and a husband deployed to the Middle East. She is a Boyd woman. We are strong like bull!! I called her tonight to tell her I plan to be there, and of course we talked about missing Mike. She keeps wanting to e-mail bad jokes to him, and she hasn't taken his phone number off her cell phone yet. But then, I haven't taken her mother's phone number off my phone yet, nevermind Mike's. She admitted she still has her mother's cell phone number programmed into her phone.

It's like the whole iPod thing. I have to let go in pieces, and taking his phone numer out of my phone is just too final. God knows I'm nowhere ready to scatter what James calls the Mike Dust yet. Maybe this summer when Shannon and Matt come with the kids and we go camping. James wants a little bit of the ashes. He has a kind of mini-shrine to Mike -- a photo with Mike's 10-year sobriety chip.

I got the Eblen Charities newsletter today and there was a tribute to Mike. It was called "This is for the crazy ones." Bill Murdock wrote about a conversation he and I had a couple years ago, when I told him most people would have thought he was crazy with some of the ideas he's had for Eblen to help people. But he's always able to talk people into working with him and accomplishing the highly improbable. I told him I thought he was more than a little crazy, and he took it as a compliment -- which is just how I meant it. He wrote about Mike and how he was crazy enough to joke in the face of death. It really touched me.

Apparently, a lot of people have sent memorial contributions to Eblen for Mike. James is putting the address and a little blurb on Mike's My Space page, so maybe more contributions will come in. Mike would love that. He never forgot people who helped him, and Eblen paid for a couple of very expensive prescriptions before Mike got Medicaid, and for gas to get to his treatments at Duke. Every city needs an Eblen.