The sad news just keeps on coming

Ms. Packrat just found out that the second gentleman she was affianced to has died.  Although she had not seen him in close to 30 years, she's found herself quite sad to hear that this particular man is dead and that after the end of their engagement, that he never got his feet under himself again.  One of the things that caused Ms.Packrat to end their engagement was a major issue with money management.  She has been told that the money issues later turned into alcohol issues and then into drug issues, all three problems feeding each other and making bad situations far worse. His daughter from his first marriage, whom I remember as a delightful redheaded sprite,  gave me the news.  He was a talented photographer and a very interesting, humorous man - I'm so sorry to hear that his demons won.
It was good to talk to his daughter though - brought back memories of that time in my late 20s when I was a reporter and all things seemed possible.  She has turned out well, although she said her baby brother struggles with the same demons their father did.
Time passes, events and memories recede and then you find yourself smacking into news like this.

moving matters

Ms. Packratty's department at work, almong with most of the rest of IT got moved to a satellite location some miles from the main office.  The move did not go as planned, but it was not as messed up as Ms. Packratty feared it would be and long before noon, things were operational at her desk.  There are a few things broken in a softwware sense, but they should be cleared out shortly and Ms. Packratty was able to nip out to the Havana for a #17.  Yum.
It's on call week and Ms.Packratty hates that, but she likes the on call pay going to pay off the art work she commissioned and once that's done (sometime next year), it'll go into more trip savings.  The present on call pay structure for a year will pay for about 4 pro-rated days doing something without scrimping, 3 days if an overseas flight is involved. That's worth the early morning people who don't understand that locking out their password is NOT an emergency.
The garden is thriving - lots of sprouting action when I checked Sunday.  Still have a few blank spaces to fill in - I wish there were lettuces that would hold up better to the heat, but they bolt too quickly to spend the limited space on them.
Storm warning tonight, but no "action"  just a lot of distant rumbles.

Sad and angry - garden vandal

We had a fierce rain last night and this morning, I looked at the five tomato plants thriving in the Earthbox outside my front door and realized they needed stakes.  Came home this evening and two of them had been neatly snapped off halfway up.  I'm fairly certain it was my downstairs neighbor or her boyfriend's bratty little boy, but it makes me sad and angry.  I'm staking up the others and just pulling these.  Unhappily, I think they were two of the six yellow pears I was able to find after checking every Home Depot and Pikes within5 miles of work and home.  The other four are at the community garden, but what a crappy thing to do.  Or if your kid did it - to fail to apologize for.  The downstairs neighbor is undoubtably angry at me because I am on the condo board and she was almost 2 years in arrears and we just notified her to pay up or lose parking privileges.  Either neighbor or kid, though, it's tacky and I'm really really irritated.  The trouble with living in a condo or a neighborhood of any kind is that you can't pick your neighbors and when you get someone low class in, well, you have this sort of thing.

Garden update

Stopped by the community garden on the way home and watered.  The tomatoes seem to be settlng in.  No basil, squash or cucumber sprouts yet - I have space for a few more tomatoes and then some sort of mixed greens, I think.  Pictures when things sprout!

Big move at work Friday, we'll be in temp quarters for about 4 months while the space we work in now is used to house another group while their space is reno-ed and then they move back and our space gets reno-ed.  Wondering how much can go wrong - suspect quite a bit.

Old losses

It's a very odd thing to find out that an old friend - one you drifted away from long ago, but for whom you had still good feelings - not only isn't off somewhere living their life, but to find out that they've been dead a double decade is a bit of a shock.  Ms. Packratty had a friend in college and just found out last night that she had died, well shy of 40, more than 2 decades ago.

This friend was one of the few milbrats I knew in college, but unlike Ms. Packratty, she had not found milbrat life tolerable, let alone comfortable.  While Ms. Packratty did have times when she was unhappy in a particular place, overall, the adventures of always going someplace new were sufficient to outweigh the pain of change.  This particular friend had also been hampered by the fact that her parents made it quite clear that they valued her brothers more.  For example, her younger brother died in a car wreck driving back to college, which his parents were paying for.  Car, college, dorm - while his sister was scraping grants, loans and part-time work together to try to finish school.  After the older boy died, the family's affections turned to the youngest, another boy.  I'm not sure she ever finished college or attained anything she might have wanted to.  I do blame her family for not valuing and supporting her, although I wish she could have put some of her injuries behind instead of apparently letting them rule her.

I also still wonder deeply about my friend from high school and the swim team, who was married and a dentist serving in the US Navy who apparently killed himself, leaving a wife and 3 children behind.  It was years before I found out what happened to him and I guess I will always truly wonder what really happened to turn the unfailingly sunny person I knew into someone who would wreck his car to take his life.  I know the suicide rate among dentists has been reported to be higher than other professionals although some recent studies disagree. I have kind of wondered if the move away from mercury fillings might be a factor in changing that statistic.  Mercury exposure HAS been linked to depression, violence and suicide so I'm guessing the move away from mercury based amalgam is a good thing.  Still, I'll probably wonder until my dying day about that friend and mourn my other friends whose lives ended too soon.

I'll always miss Kathy and wonder what her life would have been like if she'd lived long enough for the new therapies which turn her type of leukemia into a chronic thing to live with.  I don't see her in my dreams anymore, not since that dream where she told me she was well now and smiled brilliantly and was gone.

I don't really know what killed Bob Birkler in Florida - they said pneumonia.  I got that stack of books we'd been trading back and forth in the mail and a copy of his obit and nothing else.  Just gone.  I wasn't a romantic connection with him, but I wish someone had told me what truly happened. And his family lived overseas, so there was no one to ask. 

And then there's the couple of friends I can't *find"*.  I last saw Dorothy Messer in SC and then lost touch;  she was married to a fellow named Richard Fahey.  Same for Stephanie Miller from HS - she's disappeared from view and I can't find her.  I'd love to say hello to Lucy Boynton from USF days too.  We were always on the edge of being really good friends but never turned that particular corner.  Other folks - we might not be in touch, but I know they are alive and well and that's all I need to know.  What brought us together years ago might be gone, washed or worn away, but I know they're OK and that's enough for the old affections.

Rain and coolness and gardening

The rain came in and cooled Ms. Packratty's world down and it is Saturday, so she will be venturing off to get her tomatoes and basil in the ground at the North Fulton Community garden.  It looks like a beautiful day for it with overcast and coolness, so that she won't sweat to death or sunburn and her transplants will suffer minimal shock.
Charlie is itching to go along and Ms. P needs to get the tomato stakes from The House at the Top of The Hill, so perhaps he'll get a chance to play with his buddy Charm.  Even though she's been a mother, she still loves to tussle and cavort with Charlie - who will be turning seven next month but still cats like Mr. Puppy most of the time.

Pictures to come of the garden.  We did get quite a bit of lettuce all winter and the little round carrots were good.  The cabbage never headed even though it was planted in late September as sets.  The leeks are still too small to cut and the parsley is thriving, although I THOUGHT I planted Italian flat leaf.  Maybe not.

Sweaty weather

It's warm at Chez Packratty.  The temperature has been in the higher bit of the mid-80s every day this week, dropping to the mid-60s at night.  Unfortunately, it doesn't really drop fast enough for Miss Packratty, who is trying to stave off turning on the air but is finding bedtime a bit warmer than she likes.  In order to not use the extra a/c unit upstairs, she has been thinking about moving to the downstairs bedroom for the summer and needs to put away luggage and other items if she is going to do that.  Perhaps this weekend.  It has been the dreaded month-end close time at work along with the usual seasonings of crisis and politicking and Ms. Packratty is looking forward to having Friday off.  She has to work Saturday in exchange, but only until 3 p.m.

So she got five tomatos popped into the new planter - we shall see how it does - and has a whole mess more that she plans to try to plant in the community garden space Saturday evening. And basil seeds to plant once she empties out pots and figures out which ones are still OK and which are beyond use.  Friday she has to get her hair cut - it's a terrible mess - and then she plans to go play.

She received a note from Alessandro, her delightful Italian landlord,  with the name and address of the store where the marvelous little over the sink hanging dish drainer thingie came from - their website is down, but perhaps it will be repaired.  If not, that store and c.u.c.i.n.a. will go on her list of must visit shops in 2014.  We have been thinking about going back through the guidebooks before she puts them away and trying to figure out what has to go on the must-see in 2014.

And call her "Hoping For Rain".  A good thunderstorm or three would make things much more pleasant around here.