Today we flew home from Ohio. That was when it finally sunk in that dad was gone. I realized that I would never have an opportunity to tell him I love him, and I regretted every unkind word I ever spoke to him, and I thought about the times we had together that are sharpest in my memory.
Dad had a very strange way of showing his affection. One of my earliest memory of dad, was when he and I ate together at some diner somewhere, probably while I was riding along on one of his milk routes. I was probably 7 or 8 at the time. After the meal, we stood together at the cash register so he could pay. There was one of those toothpick dispensers where you twist the knob and a toothpick drops onto a rack. Dad got his toothpick and as I reached to do likewise, he slapped my hand away and said, "Get away from that, you know you don't know nothing about machinery." He did it as a joke for the benefit of the waitress who was taking his money, but I was mortified. That is the first time I can remember being the butt of one of his terrible jokes and pranks.
It took me 40 years to realize that he only made people that he loved the butt of his jokes. In his own twisted way, it was how he would tell us. I would dearly love to be the butt of just one more of his awful jokes.
So we flew home, and Anita held me, and let me cry and somehow managed to wrangle a box of Kleenex from the flight attendants.
When we got home, we discovered that something had gone wrong with the aquarium while we were away and the electric breaker had been tripped. All of our fish died and many of the invertebrates are looking pretty weak. I spent the afternoon after we arrived home cleaning up the mess and trying to salvage the remaining creatures in the aquarium. I don't have a lot of optimism about this, as the water is very murky. I removed the sump from the system, and will be cleaning it out this week or next weekend. In the meantime, I am doing daily 10% water changes, and replacing the charcoal in the canister filter.
On top of that, my server is reporting a failed drive in one of the arrays, the KVM switch on my desk is acting up, and I seem to have picked up a cold.
