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[Alkarii]

Well... The hardest parts of all of this have been completed. We just gotta figure out why the damn coroner hasn't signed dad's death certificate yet.

[Dave]

It sounds as if you (personally, and your whole family) are working your ways through this difficult time of transition in a responsible way.

At times like this, I guess, that's the best that anyone can do. We can't ever change what's happened, and there's no real benefit in playing "what if?" or "I wish I/they had" games with yourself.

Hang in there!

[Alkarii]

The house is empty now. It isn't supposed to be like this. Dad's supposed to be sleeping in the next room, mom's supposed to be here right now, and I'm supposed to be lying down to sleep, wishing I was already home. We're supposed to be hoping dad would get better, and we're supposed to be worried sick about paying the bills, even when we know we've got the money coming to us in time.

Styx's "Babe" shouldn't be playing in my head and making me think about sitting in the front pew with my dad just a few steps away, but still infinitely just outside of reach.

Everything should have been getting better.

[Warrl]

Mourn according to your own needs, not anyone's expectations.

Not even your own expectations.

[Alkarii]

I've managed to record, edit, and upload a couple more videos to my YouTube channel (got another one uploading right now, actually), and I'd gotten a few things handled during the week. I had to take the death certificates back to the funeral home because the street name was wrong on the address, and stopped myself from going past where my family lived for a while during the '90s, I think from '95 to early '02. We had a lot of great memories there, but the mobile home we lived in was demolished a year or two after we moved.

Aside from my grandparents' house (which is now my aunt's) and the house we've been living in for the past 18 years (moved into this house in the first week of July of '05), every home I've lived in is either completely gone or unlivable, aside from the condo or whatever that we had when we lived in Ft. Benning.

With all of those places gone, and my dad being gone now as well... It's almost like my entire life so far was all just a long dream.

I've been thinking lately that I should try getting a girlfriend, and maybe bring some life into this house so it feels like a home again.

[FreeFlier]

I have the opposite case on residences . . . all of them are are still there . .. except the one we dismantled in about 1973-74 to build the new house . . . which my sister still lives in.

Yeah, I understand about thinking/feeling like they should still be there . . . I still do that sometimes except for my paternal grandparents . . . my dad's dad died well before my parents married, so I never knew him,and dad's mother was a desperately unhappy woman, not close to anyone, not even family.

It will get better, even if it doesn't seem like it now.

--FreeFlier

[Alkarii]

Took my dad's car to the dealership he used to work at for an oil change. Turns out there's an active recall on the wiring harness, so that's getting replaced for free.

It's so weird being up here now that he's gone. Before he stopped working here just over two years ago, there was always a really good chance I'd see him if he knew I was in the waiting room for the service department. I'm still half expecting to look up and see one of his neon yellow/orange/green shirts pass by the windows of the waiting room.

[Sgt. Howard]

I still expect to see my boy James on occasion. His ashes sit in an oak box on a shelf in the living room.

[Alkarii]

I've been getting waves of stress and dread a lot lately, as if somehow, this year hasn't thrown enough bad stuff at my family already.

[Alkarii]

Damn it... Our router stopped working this morning, so I can't make another Minecraft video for a while.

[Typeminer]

I've been having modem/router problems, too. Comcast first told me it was a cable outside my house, then left me hanging 5 days--I need internet to access my job---until the "independent contractor" field tech, who was so damn tired or wired that he was about falling asleep on his feet, told me the cable was fine and I needed a new modem/router.

And I'd asked about that in the first place. This has happened before when the problem turned out to be a server problem on their end, but the old modem/router was in service 8.5 years, and I'd been figuring in principle to replace it sometime sorta soon anyhow. So, a quick run to Best Buy, and some hours fooling around with gear whose entire instructions are "download this app to your phone, and do what it tells you."

A day later, the new modem lost connection while I was working and took 15 minutes to reset. This was not good for my blood cortisol levels.

This morning, on day 6 of service, the new router started doing the same fail-to-connect routine as the old router. Use of apps and request for a live call ensued. Tech appointment set up for tomorrow, and I went to the public library for wifi again. Got home and it's working, and there's a message on my landline voicemail to call Comcast back. The lucky guy who answers agrees we should not cancel the live tech appointment, because the problem is intermittent and he doesn't know what's happening either.

Anyhow, Alkarii, about the stress and dread. Not at all fun, but not at all unusual. Sometimes I think that since we are a species that hit a narrow population bottleneck but survived the last ice age with only fire and rocks to work with, innate stress and dread is a big part of how we did it. But when there's no existential crisis, it just tears us up, and we have to let ourselves relax. And adjust. It's complicated when it's someone close who was hard to deal with alive, and death doesn't stop the arguments. I know. Lots of us here with you, younger friend.

[Alkarii]

I call it the router, but I guess it's a modem? I got ahold of HughesNet, and we've changed the primary contact and billing info. They are also expediting the new router/modem to me, so it should be here by tomorrow. They said one business day, after all. I just gotta return the old one, and I don't gotta worry about postage.

EDIT: Nope. It arrived at a UPS facility today, but it actually gets delivered tomorrow in the evening.

[Alkarii]

The new modem has been connected, and it doesn't work right, either. I'm getting pissed, and I'm probably going to just close the damn account if the problems don't stop.

[Typeminer]

For mine, this time they sent a tech wearing an Xfinity shirt in an Xfinity van. He determined while still in the van that the modem was not getting good signal, and proceeded to replace an old cable connector and a 3-line splitter outside the house.

That fixed it. He disconnected the modem to connect his device to the tap. When he reconnected the modem, it took about 2 minutes to reboot and has been solid for 38 hours now. Wifi with the new mesh router system seems good, though I have not really tried it in all corners yet.

This guy could see the record of when I had unhooked the modem to reboot and everything. My insisting on talking to people and telling them this is an ongoing problem and I need internet to connect to my employer probably helped.

Internet is expensive in this country. And Hughesnet is really expensive for what you get. It's the only service we can get at the parents' old house, so we're familiar with that. My niece pays the bill for that, and she has had pretty good results with getting them to fix problems. Keep bitching at them.

Which reminds me--brother noticed last weekend that tiny birds of some kind are nesting inside a cover on the back of the Hughesnet dish. Hasn't affected service so far.

[Alkarii]

Welp... broke my phone and had to get a new one. I also had to get ahold of HughesNet, and they're going to send a technician on Tuesday. They're also waiving the fees and sending a new modem.

While I did intend to replace my phone, I wasn't wanting to do it right now. I'm going to look into getting the screen replaced, just because it has the texts from my dad on it.

Edit: Has anyone else been getting an error when posting a message? I think it's 505 or something...

[Dave]

Edit: Has anyone else been getting an error when posting a message? I think it's 505 or something...

Yeah, I've seen errors after posting a couple of times. The post goes in OK but the thread is not then displayed.

If it keeps happening I'll PM Bookworm and ask him to check to see what's going on.

[FreeFlier]

I did okay with HughesNet . . . aside from the ping time and data limits. I hit the limits a time or two . . . when I did I went to bed and it was back in the morning once the limits had rolled over. I took that as a sign that I had the right plan.

Then Frontier finally got around to adding more DSLAMs so more people could have DSL (dialup, DSL and satellite are your choices here . . . )

Edit: Has anyone else been getting an error when posting a message? I think it's 505 or something...

Yeah, I've seen errors after posting a couple of times. The post goes in OK but the thread is not then displayed.

If it keeps happening I'll PM Bookworm and ask him to check to see what's going on.

I just had that twice . . . though I didn't get an error code. It doesn't seem to be happening on any other site, so I think it's the site rather than this electronic coprolite.

--FreeFlier

[Typeminer]

Yeah, last few posts, got an error message after hitting Submit, but then found the message had posted okay. Error 500, I think.

[Alkarii]

My mom and my brother visited the cemetery yesterday. The headstone has been placed, and my brother says it looks like it was placed that day.

And since dad was put in a double crypted plot, it's also technically my mom's headstone as well. When she goes, the back will have her inscription.

[Alkarii]

I visited my dad's grave for the first time since the day of his burial. We had visited it that day, of course, with the grave marker in place, but it wasn't until today that I went back.

I didn't stay very long, though, as the excavator was there, and a grave was prepped for a burial that I'm sure was going to start very soon.