This is a continuation of the previous post and if you haven’t you can read it here.

Mom called about 9:30 and said she would be up about 4pm to get me which gave me just enough time to do my laundry, charge camera batteries and the cell phone, go to Target for dog bones and read all the blogs I would miss while I was gone.   I’m dedicated like that or maybe just addicted.

Mom arrived a little after 4pm and asked if Scout and I wanted to go eat before heading back to my parents house and since I’m never one to pass up a night of not having to cook I said yes.   We got back to the house about 6:00 loaded my stuff into the car and head for the freeway.

From my house it’s about 20 minutes to get to Highway 50 and after a 10 minute drive up Hwy 50 I take a crappy, winding, narrow two lane short cut  called Latrobe Road and that drops me out onto Hwy 16 and then onto Hwy 49.

About 15 minutes into the drive down Hazel Avenue the car started pulling to the right and then I noticed the battery light came on and then the temperature gage showed hot, like pull over now hot.  We were not very far from a well lit Chevron station and I raced to get there before the car completly overheated.

I called Dad to let him know what was going on and then called AAA to send a tow truck.  Thank all the good karma for AAA and 100 miles of towing.

The tow truck driver showed up in about 20 minutes, loaded the car onto the truck and just for safety sake I called Scout to let him know the tow company name and truck number.  Safe is better than sorry if you’re going to get in a tow truck and drive down a winding, crappy, dark country road with what might be a serial killer.

Joe Tow didn’t turn out to be a serial killer he turned out to be a whack-a-doodle where some of the hour long ride conversation may have included things like;

I’m a tow truck driver but my real job is as a roofer but with the economy I had to find something to pay the bills.

I have a dog, she’s part rottweiler and when I take her to the park people get their dogs and leave because their scared.  Rottweilers are good dogs it’s just the owners that are bad.

I’m 41, single and I don’t have any children.

I really like having this dog she keeps my mom company while I’m working.  My mom lives with me.

I’ve been a roofer for 23 years and I don’t hire any subcontractors, do you know what a subcontractor is?

I do tile roofs but I don’t recommend a tile roof cause if a tree falls on your house it breaks the tile and that’s really hard to replace.

I have a lot of common sense but nobody else does.  It’s funny they call it common sense when it isn’t that common.

Yeah, it went something like that only he may have said he was a roofer for 23 years about a trazillion times but we made it to my parents house safe and sound unloaded the car and went in and went to bed.

4am comes sooner than you want it to if you’re going to be driving a long, long way.

On Saturday the 27th my mom called in the morning and left a message on my cell phone saying how she hadn’t heard from me in a while which I kind of chuckled about because we had been to their house the previous weekend.   I waited until after dinner to call her back.

In her usual upbeat manner Mom asked if I had read my email in the last couple of days and when I said no I got this;

“um, oh, well your Dad got a call on Wednesday and your Uncle Jack died, I sent all you kids an email.”

There’s no urgency for bad news in our family and bad news isn’t delivered as catastrophy, it’s delivered exactly like my mother did, casual, maybe a little shoulder shrug, not anything we can do cause they’re dead kind of thing.   That’s not to say there is no grief, or sadness or mourning.

There were no plans to make a trip to Arizona because my sister, Blossom, lives within two hours of Jack and could make whatever arrangements and take care of whatever needed to be taken care of.

When I got off the phone I felt sad and thought how interesting it would have been to see the house and sort the belongings and imagine who this person was that I hadn’t seen since I was 4 or 5 years old.

Be careful what you wish for.

Sunday morning there was a message on the house phone from my dad asking me to call him as soon as possible.   I’m pretty sure he was encouraging the urgency of a return call given my recent record with my mom but  I don’t like messages that tell me “as soon as possible” especially from my dad. Nothing good ever comes from that kind of message.

Dad: What are you doing next week?
Me: Nothing.
Dad: Would you like to go with us to Arizona?
Me: Sure.
Dad: I’ll have your mom come get you.
Me: Ok.

The first thing you want to do when you’re going to take close up photos is drink a LOT of coffee because that makes you really steady while you focus on really small objects like raindrops.

You can click each photo to make them bigger or after making the first one bigger if you click the right arrow fast you can see the rain drops come together.

Once again it’s all about how helpful I am.