The Midweek Weather

Greetings, everybody. I’ve been busy here, toiling away during my evenings. It’s good to have a hobby, neh? Or many hobbies, many hobbies that conflict with each other and cause me to lose focus and procrastinate the work I know is way more important. Yes. That too.

Over the past few weeks, I just knew there was something wrong with my app. Have you ever noticed a problem with anything, and you know you have to take time to deal with it, but you simply don't have the confidence to do so? That's what I've been feeling for over a month now. Imposter syndrome runs deep in my soul...and I took such a long break from developing my frgmnts app that I felt like I completely forgot how to do it. I wasn't even sure I remembered how to upload the app itself for review.

So I encumbered myself with every other little thing. Creating new pages for my Web site, new publishing tools to express myself more creatively, all sorts of photography, becoming super anxious, crying a lot, basically anything that would disallow me the time needed to jump back in and play with the app.

But it's done. I figured out what the root problem was, and it was an unintentional slip up I created for myself back in May when I was auditing the database side. Under normal circumstances, the problem would never manifest, but the moment that any hiccups appeared, the app would fail to load correctly. It was maddening. And it would usually appear right after I made a post myself, which was a performance that only a ghost in the machine would execute correctly. Paranoia, in the extreme.

So that's that, then. I urge you to update your app right away and enjoy the fruits of my labors. In other news: not much really. Kids are back in school. Well, some of them are. It's still that odd, transitional period of life where half of the kids are already graduated. Two of the kids are actively planning on college now, but that won't start until September. (You know...when school is normally supposed to start...like Hogwarts) But Sadie did start her sophomore year in high school on Monday, and that just blows me away. After SJ graduated in May, I remember telling people that yes...it felt odd and faintly sad that she was done with high school. But what was hitting me harder at that point was the fact that my youngest child...my tiny, tow-headed little infant ray of sunshine, Miss Sadie Gray, would be entering her 10th grade year.

It still...it still doesn't seem quite possible or right. The culmination of it all, the speed with which life evaporates and distills into something else is quite unreasonable, and yet situationally understandable. I am trying my damndest to not blink. But my eyes are watering, so I might as well cry for the fun of it all, right? Less than three years, and I will be blathering on about her upcoming high school graduation.  I'll probably have another grandchild by then, and more children married or soon to be.

Speaking of grandchildren: they are the absolute keenest thing ever. I came home from church this past Sunday to find my eldest's little family already at our house, and upon opening the door into the kitchen, I encountered absolute bliss: my son and his wife, pushing their daughter around on the bright red "Retro Rocket" that my mom bought for Sumner when he was barely a year old.

She saved it all these years, and after she passed and it was time to sell the house, I found it and stowed it away. It still had all of the rubber balls that my son played with as a baby, too. My wife was kind enough to grab it out of storage and clean it up. So to come home and see my little peanut of a granddaughter on it, laughing her little face off? It was a special kind of core memory in the making. It's times like this when I really wish my mom could still be around to see the new generation of children coming in the wake. I try to push those thoughts away, however...as the moments themselves are just too pure to lose. Besides, if hope and faith remain harbingers of better things, mom is likely aware of the joy this little baby feels. 

So to be a grandparent is to be a part of something bigger and better than anything experienced up until now. It's a special kind of "slow love", as I like to call it, where the pressure to know and be and do are eliminated from the equation. All that's left is to be present, whether that's for the laughter or screaming tantrums. And I get to just feel it and be. It's more than being able to hand them back when they start crying, tho I will admit to the crazy benefit that is.

Maybe it's more akin to knowing the pressure you feel when you are a new parent. A child in your life doesn't just come without baggage in tow, even if it's not their fault. New parents have bills, fledgling relationships, school, finding a bigger place to live, doctor's visits, constant worry about where they will go to school, who will they be friends with, any number of stressors and worries that come with loving the child in your arms.

So it's remarkably humbling to be a grandparent and love without pressure. That's the slow love I am trying to describe. There's still worry, concern, a little bit of stress...because these babies are extensions of the worry and love you placed upon your own child, now grown and putting into practice all the lessons you gave over 18+ years. But knowing that you survived, they survived, and even through all the mistakes and dramas, there is now another human being in this world? Too precious for words. Maybe that's why I am struggling to explain it all.

The grandbaby is nearing 7 months old now. Again, more blinking, but this at least is fun to watch.

I try to keep these Midweek posts as slim as possible. As I've said numerous times, I hope they are half as fun to read as they are to write. I do it more for others than I do for myself nowadays. Mainly my children. (Geez, what's wrong with me today? Getting all warm and emotional)

When my body has turned to dust and someone wonders what I was like, they should be able to gain a pretty good perspective from reading a bit of these digital pages. Or, more likely, they feed the data in some sort of biological AI automaton and receive a detailed report within 30 seconds. And maybe it won't take 30 gallons of water to run the intelligence models at that point, too. Who knows what the future holds!

Until then, fresh, disconcerting prattle will continue to unfold here at OTW. Thanks for visiting!