The bi-polar weather around here is amazing, with a big difference between the Western Slope and the Bay – but the days are getting longer by the minute, and daffodils are in bloom everywhere up here, including on The Embankment at the Ranch.
Drove down Tuesday and spent part of Wednesday with Dad until he got tired of me being there, literally. We spent the evening wading into the piles of paperwork on the kitchen table, figuring out the different accounts and how the money flowed, and sending email notices to far-flung friends. I grilled a steak on my grill-pan that I had brought with me, and it turned out very nice. We talked as we went through the papers, and we choked-up only a few times.
He went to bed early while I stayed up till about 11:00PM when I found a missing link to one past-due billing notice (Mom was correct and they have to fix it), and the soon-due Property Tax bill.
In the morning I got up at 6:00 and went down-stairs to dig-out the coffee-maker and brew a small pot of coffee – and I kept at the paperwork: medical stuff into one stack, billing statements and receipts into another, and Tax documents into a separate basket – and to-shred stuff into a large bin. Dad got up around 7:00 and said it was the first time he had been able to sleep-in that late in years.
We went into the living room and more cleanup began, mostly of old India stuff, but including a discussion about the old derelict 90’s-era TV in the corner which he wanted removed, and identified a few more things to haul-out: an old broken printer and a non-functional garage-sale “shredder” of the old “strip-style” that Mom had acquired. We got the property tax bill written-out and just needed two things – stamps and a working shredder. So we went to Costco.
He used the cart as a walker helping to keep upright in the bright outdoor sunshine, moving from the truck to the brightly lit and bustling interior, but the input of sensations and the effort was a bit much and he got tired. We paused and sat on a metal bench by the Pharmacy. He noted how the powder-coated metal bench would leave grill-marks on your ass after a short sit-down and was NOT the kind of memorial bench we might get for Mom… With a stamp on the bill we went to a late lunch at the Fishmarket, we both got the light-eater’s plate, skewer of rockfish with sliced tomatoes. He mentioned that I might run into traffic traveling home, and I said, “So you had enough of me?” I think I just wore him out, so we took our leftovers and went home.
I loaded the truck with the heavy old 30″ tube-TV and the other stuff, threw a tarp over it, said our good-byes and drove off, wading into the awful-awful terrible BayAryan afternoon rush-hour traffic. At 3:45 It was a parking lot all the way through Milpitas, and my gas gauge showed 1/4 tank as I rolled along at 10mph for mile after mile. Got to Pleasanton and filled-up and hit the road again where things were marginally better, 30mph-ish with bursts up to 50mph. This is awful “togetherness” is shit I do not miss. Eventually things cleared up even more in the EastBay, and getting over the bridge at Benicia the traffic was flowing pretty good at 75mph and better all the way past Dixon, through Davis where the cops were out ticketing (two cars), across the flooded Yolo Bypass, through the dismal bustle of Sacramento, and up into the hills to home at 7:45.
Not Clauswitz 