Arontius of Bygelswade

.....It's Thanksgiving Morning and I keep thinking that I should be doing something productive, but instead I'm sitting here listening to Sting and his version of Hendrix 'Little Wing'. Sting is who I ring up on the iPod when in a contemplative mood. All the old late '80's and early '90's stuff as well. Another indication of how old I'm feeling these days. :-)

.....Although Stevie Ray Vaughn does a rendition of Little Wing that I love as well. May have to dig that up on You Tube when the current course of Sting runs through.

.....November was not a good month for us here. Work still sucks right now. TBT is still trying to catch up to herself from being sick earlier. Then of course Constantine giving us a scare was not a good thing either. He's slowly getting better, but is still not up to his normal, cool, self. Let's hope that December is a better month. A good 2010 would be appreciated as well. Although the light at the end of that particular tunnel is the retirement of the Big Boss at work. If the worse case scenario is that things stay the way they are now at work, he's still gone by the end of the year in 2010. So that is at least something on which to hang my hopes. :-)

.....This all sounds depressing, but everything could have been much worse. So I'm grateful that we've escaped as relatively unscathed as we have.

.....There has also been good news of the family type. I went over to Mom's house last weekend and she told me that my brother Sean finally surfaced. His disappearing act last year hit me harder than I thought it might. I was surprised at how relieved I was that he was a.) alive, and b.) back in the area. I finally heard all of the details that Dad neglected to mention in his telephone message to me (although I suppose had I wanted to wade through the muck of dealing with him, I could have called Dad and pried out the details).

.....When Sean was hit by the car on his bicycle a couple of years ago and spent some time in the hospital he ended up with something around $20,000 in medical expenses. He had no medical insurance. I'm not sure why the insurance from the car who hit him did not cover those expenses, but I'll get those details eventually. The bottom line being that he had bills that he couldn't pay and no income to even make payments on them.

.....Collection agencies were coming after him and his only possession was a piece of property in Sunnyslope. To avoid losing it all together he did a 'Quick Claim' and signed it over to Dad. I am hearing all this third hand through Mom, so I'm sure that I'm missing details. I wish he had come to me. I think that we could have figured out something other than to give Dad everything. Maybe I could have taken on some payment plan? or co-signed a loan to pay off the medical debt?

.....After that Sean could not find any work in the area and relations between him and Dad were not good, so he decided to 'go away'. He got into his car one day and took off. The car was found abandoned in Belfair and Dad filed a Missing Persons report on him and none of us heard anything from him for over a year. I kept thinking that he either decided to live in the woods west of Belfair, or else he hitched a ride down to California to look for work. I Google stalked him periodically, but could never find anything.

.....I guess what he did was go over to Seattle and became part of the homeless community over there. He told Mom that he ate at the homeless shelters there and spent nights in one of them when he could. Other nights he spent wherever he could find a safe place. The homeless community in Seattle is a tough crowd apparently. He was beat up on several occasions.

.....He picked the absolute wrong time to be in Seattle and jobless though. He worked as a day laborer whenever he could get it, but as hard as he tried he couldn't find anything steady or long term.

.....Eventually he became very tired of living on the streets. So he did something that I would never have done, he called up Dad and asked if he could come back home. I always thought of Sean as being even more stubborn than me, so for him to make that call is an indication of just how done he was with living in Seattle on the streets.

.....Apparently all those meals at the missions, sitting through the required sermons that accompany them, made an impact. Mom was amazed at just how much his language has been cleaned up. He made it through an entire conversation with Mom without one curse or use of 'colorful expletives', which amazed her. :-)

.....Mom gave Sean my cell phone number and told him to call me. I hope he does. I might break down here and see if I can get a hold of him by calling Dad. Not looking forward to that, but may have to put on my big boy underoos and deal with it.

.....But really, I am grateful, and thankful for this. On top of everything else on which I have to be thankful. I have the most wonderful wife in the world. I have fantastically wonderful friends who have come through for me on many occasions. I have things on which I am looking forward to doing in the future. Really, I have things that make me happy. So I'll ignore the bad stuff and concentrate on that today. :-)

.....I'm hoping that all my friends are having a Happy Thanksgiving, even if it is a Christian, English, thing. :-) We'll stuff a few white settlers and roast them in effigy for TBT. :-)

.....Aaron / Arontius.

.....Yesterday was Mom's birthday. She turned 64. And I have to say that I'm somewhat proud of myself. I actually remembered that it was her birthday. And I remembered that it was her birthday on the actual day of her birthday. :-) She actually received Birthday greetings, which pleased her greatly. :-)

.....I suppose that it makes it easier on me that Mom works at the Shipyard as well. And as I started thinking about it I was amazed that she has worked there for almost thirty years. She could have retired a year or so ago. But I'm kind of glad that she continues to work as she does not have a lot of friends and basically lives like a hermit. If she didn't have her job I'm not sure that she'd even get out of her home a lot. I find it somewhat funny that the Shipyard, in Mom's case, actually keeps her young and vital. Not exactly an attribute normally associated with the Shipyard. :-)

.....Comcast keeps going back and forth between awesome and disgusting. A couple of weeks ago TBT took down the computer and moved it out of the office. It was the computer to which I normally downloaded all my e-mail. So while TBT remodeled the room, I kept all my e-mail on Comcast's web-mail site and just checked it daily. Last Saturday evening I went to go and check my e-mail and all of my accumulated e-mail had disappeared. It hadn't been downloaded anywhere, wasn't filed in some online folder. It just disappeared. I e-mail Comcast, held a couple of online chats, and even talked over my problem over the phone. But to no avail, approximately 400 pieces of e-mail are just...gone. Very frustrating.

.....But Comcast also impressed me a little bit the past couple of nights. TBT dropped out Qwest landline and moved our phone number over to digital on Comcast. We've been accumulating phone message on the Comcast digital voice center on the Comcast web-site. I'm finding it way cool to go to Comcast and listen to messages there. And they've been collecting there. I guess that it is time to say good-bye to my fifteen year old answering machine. I will miss that old thing. The message tape alone is at least ten years old, and still working. How amazing is that? :-)

.....Approximately a month or so ago I asked someone to be my protege and they said that they needed to think about it a while, and speak to their spouse about it. I was cool with that. Over the past month they kept asking me question to feel me out and get my impressions on certain things and the viewpoints of the Pelicans in general. I went ahead and answered all the questions posed to me. I did it without reservation or expectation.

.....This person has a history in our branch and I thought that I could do a lot to help this person. I was thinking on a whole strategy of activities and plans on what I would do with this person as my protege. And, you know, I was getting a little excited about the prospect. But last Tuesday this person came back to me and declined my offer. To be honest, I was a little disappointed. But you know, the more I think it, it's not exactly a bad thing as it was going to be a lot of work...and...I am kind of busy right now anyway. :-)

.....I have two other people on my radar as proteges. One is a definite, and the other will be either shared with another, or totally taken by another. Part of me says that I should put up a fight. But the problem is that I am a huge fan of that other person and if she says that she wants my potential protege all to herself then I am not going to argue with her one little bit. She is a person that anyone I know would be super proud to be considered as her protege.

.....But at the very least I'm going to end up with at least one protege, so I'd better hurry and finalize my plans. Yule is my deadline and I really want to have a plan in place in the next week for sure. Poor protege, or proteges, I don't think that either one has a clue just how much of a nutcase they are buying into with me. :-)

.....O.K., one last bit of a thing that drives me crazy. Have you read the story about the atheist group that set up a sign in the state capitol celebrating the winter solstice and advocating their belief that god does not exist? The state Republican caucus have started proceedings to have the sign removed. I'm not an atheist myself, but I'm a definite advocate in tolerance in freedom of religion, even if that means you believe in no religion. And the self-righteousness of some religous groups just makes me crazy. A definite pet peeve of mine. Ack! Enough said.

.....Enough whining for one evening. Time for bed I think. :-)

.....Aaron / Arontius.

.....Greetings All,

.....A set of rambling thoughts after seeing my brother Sean at the hospital earlier this week. I actually remembered to use an LJ-Cut to spare you all. :-)

.....( Click. Click. )

.....Hope everyone has a nice three-day weekend.

.....Aaron / Arontius.

.....Today has been one of those 'Crisis Fridays' that happen from time to time around here. It's been a little more interesting than usual in that we had three of them this morning. What makes it even more interesting is that with the Fiscal Year ending in just a handful of weeks, no one has any money. I've seen some pretty creative money juggling today. Just hope that we get everything wrapped up in time for me to get out of here for the weekend. :-)

.....Looking forward to the trip out to Ocean Shores tonight. Renart said that he would do the driving. That was rather nice of him. I still have to throw some stuff together for the weekend though. That's a good reminder to me to get my butt out of here on time so that I can get home and pack an overnight bag. Don't want to make Renart grumpy by making him wait at all. :-)

.....Am faced with a small Crier crisis for the weekend. Part of the file corrupted. I'm not entirely sure what happened. But I may have to rebuild part of it. Hopefully not too much. That'll be Sunday's chore. Still have plenty of time to get it completed and sent off to the publisher. It always makes me anxious though when I cannot get it to the printer by the 10th of the month. :-)

.....Had the chance to speak to Mom this morning at her desk. She is actually thinking of retiring next year. Which floored me. I was starting to think that she was just going to move into her cubicle at her office and set up a bed there. :-) Her department has been reducing for a while now and the new management hasn't exactly been worker-friendly, so she is starting to see the rewards in being able to sleep in with less aggravation. :-)

.....She asked me about Sean, my brother. She hasn't heard from him in about a year now. Which has her a little worried. He was always good about talking to her at least every month or every other month. I'm not so worried. People in the Rogers' clan are not the best verbal communicators. Sean is not much of a communicator at all! :-) He and Dad live on a piece of property out in Sunnyslope and my chief worry is that they might have killed each other some time in that past year and no one has told us yet. Well, I exaggerate, but not by much. If you think that *I* am stubborn, you need to see my Dad and brother. OMG, the most stubborn people on the planet. :-)

.....Thinking about the agenda for the rest of the year. Gotta get the applications finalized for the Twelfth Night Marketplace. I should be able to get those done this weekend. Also gotta get meetings organized for the Scribal Guild. I have volunteers for Scroll Painting. Mariette even has a new charter for the Snapdragons to start passing out. Also gotta get the Ceremonies organized. After the Tourney Season Their Excellencies have decided that what we came up with earlier this year sounded great, but were way long. AFter the second or third Snapdragon given, the verbiage just started sounding endless and boring. I am in agreement with them definitely and will be assisting in drafting up shorter Ceremonies. Should be good.

.....Also thinking about the Bardic Championship in December. I am going to enter, but am not entirely sure of what I want to enter. For sure, I am going to enter a piece as played on my Bass Recorder and Gemshorn. But I'm also 'ruminating' on a dance (Morris maybe). I'd like to enter some Sonnetry, but would have to definitely work on delivery. :-) And if Angharad is one of the judges again? Man, I'm not sure that my ego could stand up to the bruising. :-P

.....Also 'ruminating' heavily on Sargeantry. Really want to enter next year and have started pulling out all my old files on it.

.....Wow! Lunch ended much faster then I thought it would, the phone is ringing constantly again. :-) See you all later.

.....Aaron / Arontius.