Coming from an older family, I have to do this every so often.  My maternal grandmother, then my father’s father, then his mother, then two of my uncles, with other family members sprinkled in between.  I swore off funerals, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I would send a card, flowers, and visit the family, but I couldn’t bear another funeral.

Then my dad died.  Not exactly an optional funeral.  Not only did I have another funeral to visit, I needed a suit– which isn’t “off the rack” for a guy my size.  So, in the middle of all the preparation, I had to visit a tailor.  I was looking for something I probably would never wear (or want to wear) again.  What I came out with was the most perfect suit I’ve ever worn… for one dollar.  You see, I took a paid week of vacation off from my job, and they– without me knowing it– gave me back the vacation time on the sly.  One perfect suit– one dollar.

This weekend, I pulled The Suit out of the closet.  Oh, I wear parts of it (usually just the slacks and shirt) every now and then, but only for funerals do I wear the entire thing.  Pulling it on is almost a ritual– from the dress dress hose (calf-high like are worn with kilts) to making sure the handkerchief is tucked into the breast pocket (and make sure another one is tucked into the right hip pocket…) to the dress boots I always wear.

The Suit came out of storage for my cousin.  The son of a Baptist minister, he was a WWII SeaBee, who would not speak of his time in the Pacific.  The only thing missing from his service was a reference to the Navy’s prayer for burial at sea.

“… looking for the general Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at Whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto His glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.”

——-

Other families are pulling out their suits today.  One of the pro-liberty crowd is absent– straightarrow has passed on.  The man was almost ever-present on gun blogs, always sharing a bit of his wit in every comment.  To some, he was blunt– I just thought he was honest.  Allow me to quote something that was quoted over at Weer’d's–

…our concept of freedom and liberty, not exactly the same things, has been so diluted in our modern citizens that they really have no mental capacity to deny their emotional training, at the hands of government, to see clearly what has been lost.

Even though the intellectual capacity may exist in its raw state, the spirit needed to question oppressive authority is all but dead in a great many of our people. Many of them being too young to remember liberty are not aware that what we now have hasn’t always been so. By the time they gain enough wisdom to listen to their elders, their elders have died, taking with them the ideals of liberty and rugged individualism that made and kept this country great for many many decades. Until modern media simply overwhelmed truth and history. –Straightarrow

Here’s to absent friends.

Now, we certainly don’t raise a fuss,
Much less yammer like a stupid cuss
Like the dolts on the TV
Who’ve let loose their wee-wee-
They insist that we leave on a bus!

This truly is extraordinary
They think us quite daft to tarry
But they should know by now
That ’til it kills a cow
The wind can be drowned with Chuck Berry!

Me, dear readers, don’t be quick to judge
No need to fill your drawers with fudge
As a matter of fact,
You’re seen as shy of tact
If from the hurricane bash you budge!

But now that will be enough of that-
I must continue our little chat
About things various
Challenges before us
Like how we must stop the Congress stat.

On second thought, let’s not go there now,
I’d rather behind a old mule plow-
Least then I could harass
Or even command the ass!
But I feel my blood boiling, so chao!

No, that’s not an error– one thousand rounds.  To put this in perspective, I currently have 595 rounds of .380 ACP in my ammo bunker.  (And it’s a mix– Sellier & Bellot, Winchester, Aguila, Speer, RWS, Fiocchi and even some of the old Santa Barbara Toledo Spanish mil-surp stuff.)  1,000 rounds means I could stop hunting ammo… I’ll never go boom-less again…

Doctor’s Trip: Since September of 2009, I’ve lost 35 pounds, 4 1/2 inches off my stomach (not my waist, my belly), my BMI has come down 6 points, and my percentage of body fat has come down almost 10 points.  Problem was that the medicine I was on was beginning to lose effectiveness on me.  Solution?  Switch meds to one that acts more like caffeine… and is 1/6 the cost.

Housework:  Imagine 300, but the Persians are dust bunnies.  That’s what it looked like under my computer desk.  Hours of cleaning later, and it looks good.  Heck, the room even smells better.  (Before you think I exaggerate, as I was typing this, one of the housemates walked in and said “The room even smells better!”)  Now, all I have to do is organize my DVDs, which means new racks… and shelve the books, which means new shelves…  Well, I do have another month before classes start…

Writing: I’m still working on a bunch of stuff, short stories and the like.  The one I keep referring to has gained a life of its own– I intended it to be a small toss-out… then I started looking into it, doing research… now I’ve got almost 5,000 words of research, plus papers I’ve read to see how plausible the story line was.  Then the site I chose for the story popped up in the news… for something eerily similar to what I had just written.

The hardest writing I’m doing right now is my own profile.  How can I describe myself in x words or less (and y words or more, natch)?  I have a hard time writing a resume, and that’s hard facts… how am I supposed to write a self-selling fluff piece… on myself?

So… thoughts?

A Whale clean up the oil spill?  No, no– it doesn’t make the water 99.9985% pure!  (The Gulf wasn’t that clean to begin with, nitwits!)

Large groups of people coming together to clean the shore?  No, no– they’re holding “Hands Across the Sand”… apparently they think they can ward the oil off… or something.  (Draw a Venn diagram consisting of three concentric circles.  The first is “not-so-bright people,” the second is “leftists,” and the last is “eco-nuts.”)

The economy going down faster than Ashley Dupree when Mr. Spitzer walks in the room?  Hey– it could be worse!  (Don’t worry, Obama voter, it will be!)

The President doing everything shy of putting on a tricorner hat and speaking with a bad Corsican accent?  Hey, at least he’s not Bush!  (Yes, an Obama voter has told me this.  I almost lost it.)

In short, it’s come to the point that I have to either take it easy, or go buy a horse and change my name to Quantrill.  Maybe I can just do funny stories…

Notice the area in the red box.