Today started out like any other Monday, badly. I was running late, hadn’t gotten as much done this last weekend as I wanted and I was unable to get to sleep until past midnight despite having attempted to go to bed at 8pm. After walking into my meeting five minutes late my personal phone rings and I almost ignored it until I saw that it was from my mom. She never calls me on Monday mornings, because she knows it is the worst day for anything, unless it is an emergency. When I answered she told me that my grandpa in California had died last night.

Now I have mixed feelings on how to feel at the moment. On one hand I am sad, but not enough to cry and on the other hand I am happy since his health had been declining for the last few years. About 5ish years ago he had a stroke and was no longer able to speak or to eat normally. Add onto it that in all that time I have not taken the time to go down and visit him except for one time. My mom and even my sister has managed to get down there at least twice a year, but somehow I was always too busy.

All of this leads me to the bag of bricks I mentioned in the title of this post. When my grandpa on my mom’s side died I was fine(translation: composed) at the funeral/memorial as he had been in pain for years and years. Then my grandma on my mom’s side died shortly thereafter and I completely broke down and had to leave the viewing since she was her health failed suddenly and immediately after my grandpa had died. Now I am faced with a situation where for the last few years my grandpa on my dad’s side whose health has been deteriorating only for the last few years, but I only ever saw it once. Will I be able to hold some semblance of composure or is it going to hit me like a ton of bricks where I will completely break down? Unfortunately I have no idea and that scares me. For some reason I don’t like to not be in control of my emotions especially in a public setting and I am crying uncontrollably. 

I guess I’ll see in a few days when I head off to Cali for a few days over the weekend.

Now when she originally called she told me she had two things to talk to me about. Having dispatched the first I asked what the second was, assuming of course that it related to cell phone or computer related help. Not this time, apparently my mom went to the gym for a little while and when she came out she couldn’t find her car. She walked over to where she thought she parked and didn’t see it. So she walked around most of the parking lot looking for her missing car with no luck. Just as she was about to call the police she decided to walk back to where her car used to be and she noticed that the car was similar. It had was the same color, make and model. It also had the same pattern of dirt/soot that you always recognize is your car after a snowstorm and inside it had the same stuff that she had left in the car when she went to the gym in the first place.

Now this is an odd turn of events, because the car didn’t have the right license plates. So she used to remote to unlock the car and……IT WORKED! Apparently someone had switched her license plates with their own, thinking that no one would notice immediately. Unfortunately for them a long time ago my mom had another car that was Champagne colored and, it seems, nearly every other person in the state had one too. So instead of looking for your car it became more important to find the your license plate in a sea of Champagne colored cars. Getting back to the original story now, I asked my mom if she had checked some of the other cars too see if it was some kind of prank. Maybe someone rowdy teenagers had decided it would be a funny prank to play musical chairs with everyone’s plates. I struck out and she wasn’t able to find her plates. So to the bastard who decided that he didn’t want to renew his license plates, deal with his emmissions or needed to get rid of plates of a stolen car or something. I have a message for you: