The man to the right would be my father. The shirt is new, but the yellow object on the mantle behind him has been around for the last few years. It's called a retirement clock and it counts down until, you guessed it, he retired. It's been interesting watching that thing wind down. While the retirement date been in the works for months now, I'm not sure that I believed it would actually happen until it actually did.

Right now he's en route to California to attend the Rose Bowl or already there or preparing for the trip. I can't remember the schedule exactly. But when he gets back, he will come home to freedom from the shackles of employment, a nice retirement plan, and a laundry list of chores that he's going to start doing since he doesn't have that whole "gainful employment" excuse anymore.

Something is telling me that Mom might be the one coming out a winner here...

Got an email from Dad this morning stating that Mom was taken to the ER. My initial pessimistic thought when I read ER was that it was something immediately life threatening, but it looks like just-shoot-me back pain. She has some pretty bad back pain a few weeks ago when she reached into her car awkwardly, but apparently this is different. The CAT scan didn't appear to yield any results. So... I dunno.

Part of me wishes I was down there right now, but I wouldn't be of any help and would likely just end up standing there and waiting to hear more just as I am now.

Dad called me last night for our weekly chat. I couldn't talk right then and we decided to talk today. He explicitly asked me if I'd have my cell phone with me as I'm notorious for leaving it in whatever place that I am not.

Lo and behold, the cell phone seems to have disappeared.

Argh!

It's bad form to take two breaks so close together, I know, but I'm headed out to Not Louisiana. While I value the blog, I don't value it to the extent of long distance phone calls from the southeast to the northwest.

Be back Tuesday. I'd say "hopefully with lots of stories to tell," but uneventful is good for a vacation!

I think it was always taken for granted that I would stay in Houston. Certainly until I lost my job at UFC, I believed it to be the case. Mom figured the same when she started making plans around me taking over their house when they move after Dad's retirement. While I went to college in Houston, David went off to Austin. While I looked for employment in Houston when I graduated, David took a job in Virginia. David was the wayward son and I was on the homefront, visiting every weekend and taking advantage of the laundry facilities.

Then I lost my job at UFC and I met Eel and the next thing I knew, I was headed for this place called Idaho while David took a job with a NASA contractor in Clear Lake. He was coming home and I was leaving it.

Dad and I used to have breakfast together every Saturday morning. I haven't responded to his last three emails.

I haven't spoken to him in over a month. I've spoken to Mom on only a couple of occasions. It's been kind of easy these past couple of weeks because he hasn't called. There is a family member in Fort Worth that was in a terrible auto accident and another that's facing some serious and incurable medical troubles.

But I got a message from Dad earlier today. He was just calling to find out how things were going. It's been a month, I don't know where to begin and yet I don't have much of anything useful to say.

I never explained to him why I left OmniStar over a month ago. It would be a considerably easier conversation if I could say "Yeah, but I got a job at _______!" but unfortunately I can't because I haven't. I don't even know what I've been doing day in and day out that I can really talk about. After discussing the matter with Eel I've decided that I'm not going to fill them in on what's going on in my apartment.

I still haven't gotten car insurance up here (I'm covered under the Texas policy), but I can't do that until I get the title switched over and last time I tried to do that I was missing some documentation. I need to talk to him about that, but picking up the phone to talk about that means that I should talk about other things in order to avoid recuding our father-son relationship to a business-like one.

Somehow the combination of my inertia, job-hunting failures, stubbornness, and personal issues have somehow made a non-existent one preferable (or inevitable) to the business-like one.

And the longer I go without talking to him, the harder it becomes to just pick up the phone. The more I feel like I ought to have to report to him, and the more I realize that my life right now is in a complex state at a dangerous address with no great jobs on the horizon. I don't know if I'm afraid to admit my failures, just waiting to get back on my feet, both or neither.

And every day I go without calling him, the harder it gets.

Since getting up here, I've not been writing my folks as well as I might have hoped. I wrote them and my brother a longish update last night and found out something interesting:

As for what's going on in Houston, you could have watched Channel 2 news on
Wednesday night to see how our mother is doing! They were doing a feature
on how dirty spa bath tubs can be and Claudia, her friend and my real
estate agent, had "hooked her up" with Channel 2 so they could take some
swabs for a news feature. Well, needless to say they found all kinds of
harmful microbes in there and came back and video-taped her response which
made the 10 o'clock news! She managed to work in a "maybe I'll just sit
back with a drink and say 'what the heck' "when they told her some of the
microbes could be fatal. Of course, there are things outside that could be
fatal, it was just a typical news scare "tactic". The point of the story
was that not matter how much you clean them, the design facilitates
things growing that you can't control.

We're famous!

The Paris News:

Avis Lorene Whitlock

COOPER — Avis Lorene Whitlock, 91, of Cooper passed away Friday, April, 23, 2004, in a Paris hospital.

Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 25, in Delta Funeral Home chapel with the Rev. Leroy Reaves and the Rev. Gary Regan officiating. Burial will follow in Oaklawn Cemetery.

The family will receive friends from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Sunday at the funeral home.

She was born in Enloe on Jan. 5, 1913, the daughter of John A. and Lillie Holman Brannon. She married Charles E. Whitlock on May 3, 1940, and he preceded her in death on April 13, 1974. She was a retired school teacher and a member of the Methodist church.

She is survived by four nephews, Cletus Bridges and wife, Maxine, of Dallas, Elton Bridges and wife, Frances, of Lubbock, Aaron Brannon and wife, Faye, of Sulphur Springs and R.D. Brannon of Corsicana; one niece, Dora Lee Patrick of Dallas; numerous great nieces and nephews; and two special friends, Betty Guffy and Rosemary Phillips.

Ever since I left for college, my folks house has been my permanent residence. It's saved me from having to change my driver's license whenever I move apartments. It also means that a lot of mail sent to me goes there. Since my father and I share the same first name, sometimes there is confusion as to who a particular piece of mail is sent to.

The Harris County Toll Road Authority sent a letter to Rayford Whitlock and since my car is the one with the EZ-Tag, they assumed that it was addressed to me and didn't open it. I assumed that it was probably a charge notification (whenever my account reaches below $10, they pull out another $40 to pay for future tolls), but when I opened it the word "violation" ran accross the top.

Since I generally keep an eye out for the yellow light to flash at me when I pass through, I knew that there wasn't some sort of promise with my account. When I looked at the license plate, it wasn't mine. I went out and looked and Dad's car matched the violation.

I handed it off to Dad and said that it must have been he that went through the EZ-Tag lane. Mom and Dad looked at me confused. I looked at them confused, too. Mom then said, "I have a more likely possibility. Perhaps when you borrowed Dad's car when yours was in the shop..."

She didn't need to complete that sentence.

In any case, the toll road authority gives you ten days to pay the fine. Except that it took them three days to mail it. Except that it was sitting in the mail bin for three days as the folks thought it was for me. So we had about one day to mail it in.

My Aunt and Uncle came in to town and they were all due to leave on a cruise on Sunday morning. So Dad said that we'd drop it off on the way out to eat. Except we didn't.

They thought about dropping it off in the morning. Except that they were headed in the opposite direction from the post office. Mom suggested that I take it in on my way back to Jersey Village. Except that Dad said "No, no. If we give it to him it'll never get mailed."

He knows me so well.

... and it didn't even require his house burning down to get him there! It only required a colleague being slammed by a car. My father's sister married in to a firefighting family. My Uncle Bruce is a lobbyist for the firefighters pension fund and my cousins Craig and Todd are firefighters. One of Craig's fellow firefighters was injured recently, but apparently he's doing better now.

One of the reasons I elected not to move to Idaho immediately was so that I could spend a last Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family before I go.

The tree has been erected and the stockings hung.

My brother's is missing as it has been since he left Texas for Virginia a few years ago (he just moved back). Yet I find it a little depressing.

I don't think it's because his stocking is there, but because I know that next year mine probably won't be.

Forget Christmas, we had the best Thanksgiving day gift in recent memory. Mom went to see the doctor and the doc was very, very optomistic. She's doing a few follow-ups, but the expert says that the growth is nothing to be too concerned about at this stage of the game.

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts, prayers, and wishes.