The Beginning of the End

We just finished our first week back at school. It's good to be back. I got inspired by my drive down and have invested in a large new filing cabinet. So far so good. Everything isn't in there yet, but I am getting there: to a paper free apartment.

Thesis is going alright, check. Paper for professor Fisk has some improvements, so that is good, check. I was way stressed about that one. Other classes seem to be rolling along. Workouts with the ladies are fab and I hope to add a new person to my list of 'trainees' soon.

Pinda just started agility class Wednesday. I think the class is more about training the owners than the dogs. I suppose with time that will lead us somewhere.

I think of my dad off and on. It's surreal much of the time and the rest it's like the faint pain in the back of your mind that you avoid because there really isn't much you can do about it. It's crazy though, the permanence of it. The lasting absence of death. You just never really fathom it, even after it happens. I still feel just as shocked now, over 8 months later, as some of the people who just found out. Your mind just doesn't really wrap around it. It simply doesn't fit most days. Others, its more real. I avoid those.

Family weekend was the last time I saw him. I remember when he left. We are at the PILF auction. He paid for me to get the Chemerinsky dinner for me and my friends and we won. It was a picturesque moment. One of my more favored memories with him. Minutes later, he left with Karen to the hotel and they flew back to Dallas the next morning. That was in February of 2007. He died in April of 2007.

So family weekend is coming up next month. I have decided, with good reason I think, that I would prefer to be elsewhere that weekend. Richard and I might go up to visit our bud Ryan at his Marine Officer training school somewhere near DC.

The three of us were buds last semester, will be i would imagine for some time. But it really got me through the good and the ugly last semester. And you couldn't find a more odd threesome. Rich the pediatric anaesthesiologist from South Africa, Ryan the Republican Marine, and me, the uber liberal lesbian from Utah. Who would have thought. We get along fabulously and have some of the most interesting debates I have had in the longest time.

Rich and Ryan are a blessing. Looking forward to our next rendezvous.

Must get some sleep.