I spoke with my supervisor and HR this morning, I’m entitled to 3 days bereavement time off, which I’ll be using Wednesday-Friday so we can drive up for the memorial service on Thursday. This has worked out well, with the weekend I’ll have a total of 5 days in a row for this so we’re not rushing around and exhausting ourselves. And I can handle being at work today and tomorrow, at least it keeps my mind busy.
We had our second Saturday shaman class on Saturday, we had a nice time. Jim spoke about some things that really hit home with me, so it was an interesting day. Unfortunately I had a slight sinus headache during most of it (Advil only helped a little), and I have a more difficult time journeying when I have a headache. Toward the end of the day we got to play with “dowsing rods” (I still think this is silly, but it was fun) and then the really fun part – facepaint! We painted our faces in a way to reflect something of the spirit of our spirit guides. Yeah, a whole room full of adults painting their faces as animals, there were many jokes about driving home/going to the mall/etc without washing it off first.
We got home from that around 6:30 in the evening and took a nap. I don’t usually take naps, but my headache had gotten bad and I needed to. We got up around 8, ordered a pizza and hung out the rest of the evening. Working on wallaceandgromit.net, catching up with a friend I hadn’t talked to in a while (we’ve been so busy). It wasn’t until after 1am that I went to bed.
Sunday morning I heard the news about my grandfather, my cousin Melissa called to tell me. It wasn’t easy news to handle, I cried, I went downstairs and woke up Michael for a hug. I called Annette (youngest sister) to see if she had heard, she hadn’t and didn’t even know Granddad had been in the hospital. Sometimes I think my family needs a mailing list, getting the news to everyone all over the country is so uncoordinated. I spoke with my mother later in the day, she was upset, she had known him for over 20 years. She didn’t ask to come to the service, but wanted to make sure Annette would have a ride down for it, and needed to work things out with Annette’s probation officer so she can leave the state.
Michael’s been great. We ran some errands Sunday afternoon, then came home and I was feeling mopey. He suggested a few places we could go out to and I wasn’t in the mood for any until he mentioned going to the Victory brewery for dinner. I was hungry and that sounded good. So that’s where we went. It’s in Downingtown, in a part of town that I’d call “scary” and it’s tucked in a warehouse area, you don’t even see the front door until you pass a few tractor trailer bays (used to pick up beer from the brewery). It’s in a real warehouse, and was chilly, not anything like the upscale little brewery restaurants I’ve been to in the past. The service was fine, our burgers were good and the beer was great (yay Hopdevil!).
The evening was spent relaxing, watched West Wing and went to bed before 10pm.
After work I need to start getting stuff together so we can make our trip up to New Hampshire for Thursday. We’re not entirely sure when we’ll be leaving, where we will be staying, or how long. A good friend of ours in Maine offered to have us visit if we had time, that would be nice, but we’ll see – going up for a day and coming home might be better, and the Maine bit adds about 3 hours each way to our trip.
A bowl of popcorn and a funny movie tonight would be good medicine.