I can remember it like it was yesterday, but today marks an entire decade when I got the biggest shock of my life. I was one week away from getting married and my best man was to drive in from outside Abilene for a weekend visit, but he called and asked if he could cancel so he could go kayaking with his girlfriend and a few others. He felt bad canceling, but I said since he’s going to be here the next week it wasn’t going to be a big deal, and it would give me a chance to spend one last weekend home in Mineral Wells with my widowed mother and teenage sister.
When I got home I got a phone call from a very close friend, someone in the wedding parting. I tried to tease him that he missed the wedding, but I could tell by his voice that something was wrong. He informed me that he was watching he local news and it stated that my best man, Micah, drowned. Looking back, there was no better person to give me that news then him. That night ended up becoming one of the longest of my life, as did that week.
I was hysterical and called my fiance, who couldn’t quite understand me and mistook my crying for laughing.
I finally got in touch with Micah’s mom. She was responsible for my last job in and my first job out of college. The greatest honor of my life was when his mother asked that I speak at his funeral. I had to bury my best friend on a Wednesday, and marry my best friend on a Saturday, and as I’ve said before, I felt like I became a man that week. If you are interested in what I said, a draft of my eulogy is here. There was no replacing him, so at the wedding ceremony I just saved a spot for him at the altar.
For some reason I could never find it in me to finish that movie, nor have I ever ordered another Mix.
Sometimes I wonder what would have been if I would have made him live up to his commitment to visit me that weekend instead of saying it was okay for him to go kayaking.
It was WifeGeeding’s idea during that long week that our first born should be named after Micah, boy or girl. When she was with child I took a day off work to drive to Abilene to ask Micah’s mother in person if it was okay to name our child after her son, and thankfully she said yes.
I’m sorry if this is dragging on, but not only is it a bit therapeutic for me, it just felt like the right thing to do today. I live my life trying to be just a quarter of the person that Micah was.
I have a friend that’s at Walt Disney World with the wife and kids, but the wife got so sick they saw a doctor and found out she has strep throat.
In my work Inbox yesterday were two emails reminding me how to handle Classified and Confidential information. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.
I pick up my CPAP machine on Monday. Insurance covers 80%, so my portion will cost me $310. My last sleep study cost about $230.
My doctor’s office called to set an appointment about three months away to see how things will work out with the CPAP, and the first date she offered was Monday September 2. I told her that’s Labor Day and she was curious as how I knew that and that the computer she was using didn’t state that it was a holiday. I thought most folks knew that Labor Day is always the first Monday in September and Thanksgiving is the last Thursday in November.
Jason Kidd went from player to head coach, I wonder when was the last time that happened in any of the big four sports. I suspect baseball because there use to be player managers, and I wonder who the last player manager was, Pete Rose?
I bet former VP Dick Cheney is really critical of the NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden but will lay low for a while, because whatever he says negatively about Snowden may come across as support for the current administration.
I guess I’ve seen too many movies like Eagle Eye and Enemy of the State and just assumed the government has always been doing this sort of stuff and just won’t tell the public. Heck, I’m quite sure there’s a lot of stuff that goes on that’s either in the gray ethical area or quite unethical, and the more the enemy knows, the more they can plan around things. I’m one of those that supports sacrificing privacy for safety, so I’ve never really been against the PATRIOT Act. Heck, I worked on a lot of PATRIOT Act projects when it was first implemented which helped pay the mortgage.
I’m not quite sure what to think of Snowden, but running off to Hong Kong doesn’t seem to be a very brave thing to do. Heck, when Craig James’ kid tattled on Mike Leach and got the beloved coach fired, even he stayed at Texas Tech, which I’m surprised didn’t get him killed.
I had my CPAC sleep study Monday night. Even though they try to make the experience as comfortable as they can, I didn’t find much comfort in a mattress that seemed too soft, knowing a camera was watching me, having close to 20 wires attached all over my body, and sleeping with a CPAC mask for the first time as various amounts of air pressure was adjusted throughout the night. Oh, and the medical technician looked like a young Hannibal Lecter, seriously. It looks like I’ll just need a nasal mask as opposed to one that covers my mouth and nose.
I guess it will just take some adjustment on my part as I’m use to breathing out of my mouth. With air pressure going through my nose, when I open my mouth, the air pressure is forced out, which makes it uncomfortable to breath through my mouth. But I’m told that ‘normal’ folks only breath through their nose while sleeping and I did when I was actually dozing.
I was told that Asians are more prone to sleep apnea because of a small their anatomy . . . they have small . . . air passage ways. Too bad this half-Asian didn’t luck out getting the white air passage.
As a government contractor, all I know is that this NSA whistle blower is going to make me take several more annual ethics training courses, and it seems we take plenty of them already.
The CBS Evening News had a segment on one of the women pioneers of the space race. She passed all the tests the original Mercury astronauts, including drinking radioactive water, and I beleive she teaches flying lessons out of local Roanoke, TX.
