This past weekend MJ and I spent the weekend in Phoenix, Arizona for my Uncle Keith’s memorial service. On Friday night we took an ~8PM flight out of San Francisco to put us on the ground in Phoenix shortly after 10. We picked up our rental car and were checked into the Scottsdale Cottonwoods Resort and Suites before midnight.
Saturday morning we met up with my Grandpa (mother’s father), his wife Jo and my Aunt Elaine for breakfast before the service. It was my first time meeting Jo and I hadn’t seen my grandfather since my grandmother’s funeral back in 2008. From there we went to the service where we were able to see my Aunt Pam (Keith was her husband) and her daughers Karyn and Shannon and their families, including my newest family member, my cousin Shannon’s four month old son Frankie.
The service itself was beauiful. As a firefighter at NASA for much of his career and then volunteer work with Phoenix-area firefighter organizations he was given a firefighter send-off. I mentioned in a previous post that my uncle and I weren’t close, but the outpouring of love from people whose lives he impacted was truly touching.
Late that afternoon we went to my Aunt Pam’s to spend time together. I got to introduce MJ to Pam’s bird Baby Bird, one of the few birds in the world that I can mostly deal with (birds are scary!). Dinner was at La Torretta, an Italian restaurant that my Uncle had enjoyed often with my Aunt. Afterwards we headed back to the hotel to relax for the evening.
Sunday morning MJ and hit the pool in the early morning, got a snack at the pool bar and shot for the noon checkout time. From there it was over to my Aunt Pam’s again for an afternoon with family. There was plenty of nagging about when MJ and I would be getting married (now that my family approved, of course), I really need to get going with plans. After some BBQ we headed down to the pool for my second dip of the day.
More photos from the trip are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627804819950/
Around 5:30PM we headed toward the Phoenix airport, returned the rental car and spent about 40 minutes in the USAir Lounge before our flight.
Our flight home was uneventful, but the train ride was. Not far from Colma station on BART a man jumped in front of our train and was killed. Sitting in the back of the train we didn’t know what happened, or that anything was wrong (BART stops for a few minutes at a time on the tracks often for “no reason”) until the very upset conductor told us that someone had been hit. It took almost an hour for a rescue train to come and after several plans didn’t quite work out, they evacuated us (and all our luggage!) across the tracks in the tunnel and over to the other train, I captured part of the move with my camera and uploaded it here: http://youtu.be/XhNBCRggdYg. The rescue train took us to the Daly City stop where everyone was interviewed by the Daly City police before finally boarding trains home. It was almost 2AM by the time we got home. This morning I found this article, the details have been kept pretty vague. The whole experience was surreal and sad, my heart goes out to the friends and family of person who lost their life last night, suicide is a terrible way to lose someone.
This week is a very busy one for us. I’m taking MJ to the airport Wednesday morning to fly out to Philly, and I’m joining him by taking a redeye Friday night. Until then my todo list is huge and includes prepping an Ubuntu talk that I’m giving in Philly next week.