Stacy leaves tomorrow for Texas (the 22nd, for the log, is also my Dad's 83rd birthday, so feliz coomp to him).  The house is boxes and sideways furniture and pacing cats, and Maddy's playing Jewel Pandora (which keeps delivering by the way--I'm talking the tear-jerking works).  Stace and I have cohabitated (with a couple hiatuses) for the last decade, and while I feel deeply that this move and the new job (Natural History, Natural Sciences, and Environmental Studies Editor at Texas A&M in College Station) precipitating it are Right and also awesome, I'm very sad.  It's crazy all the close friends who've moved away: Ilona, Teri, Maysam, Emma, Meredith, Aylin, Mel.  I know twenties transience is typical, and it's the nature of the Bay that people pass through, but the adieus are adding up.  My whole loosey-goosey squirrely denial-ridden M.O. is to focus in on the fluidity of things, the possibility of returns, the ease with which we can in this age communicate and visit (I'm appallingly bad about both), but these migrations are eras ending, time passing, life happening, paths diverging.  And Eisen's embarkation is Major. 

Sunday December 20 the fam-damn headed up to Nor-Cal; Mom and Franz took the van/sleigh and put Dad on a plane to spare him the cramped eight-hour drive.  Maddy and I had both worked that morning--The Nutcracker was playing at the Paramount Theater a block away and the brunch service was in a word...nuts.  Rama, Tim, and Saul came toward the end of the madness to watch the foot-game at Fauna; I hung briefly when I got off but then rushed home to get stuff homey and cozy and clean for the influx of people and things.  It was pouring rain and I listened to three Joanna vinyls (Ys, Have One On Me, and Divers) in their entirety while I Molly-Maided.  I love going to town on an empty house, and the steady storming made it even more satisfying, plus with the twinkly Christmas lights and ye olde gramophone it was next-level.  I got stuff looking decent and then it was of course immediate chaos when the fam arrived.  Maddy and Dad picked up a few huge Lanesplitter pizzas which we munched while watching the weirdo wine documentary Somm.  Rama supervised Poundo (who is great with people but not always with other dogs) pretty closely throughout the evening, and while there weren't any major blowouts with Gypsy and Heidi Rama decided to drop P off at his Ma's and Dave's the next day as a precaution.

I love new beginnings and fresh starts.  Morning, preferably dawn or pre, is unequivocally my favorite time of day (dusk is second).  From when I was a kiddo and on through college I relished the start of the new school year/new semester.  In grammar school it probably had a lot to do with the requisite batch of pristine, gleaming supplies, pencils pointed and nary a dog-ear on my Pee-Chees.  In college it was a brand spanking new reading list and a crisp syllabus and the certainty that this time I'd exhibit superlative time management skillz and would escape my usual end-of-semester fate.  Never to be so--I inevitably found myself crushed by the inexorably advancing wheel of deadlines.  Ah, I remember it well--the months of avoidance (I would read anything except what was assigned) and then the onslaught of last-minute 4 a.m. writing frenzies and the literal sprints across campus to turn in papers before the hard 3 p.m. cutoffs.  And the over-arching sense that I could have/should have done better, read more, read harder, taken more from it, that if I'd started my papers earlier my concluding paragraphs wouldn't have consistently read like I'd expectorated my sloppily-masticated thesis statements back onto the page.  I didn't pay the piper most times grades-wise, but I wished I'd been better. 

Rama's family goes on an annual or so trip to Yosemite, spearheaded by his stepdad Dave, whereon they stay at the tent cabins at Camp Curry, do a bunch of hiking, and just generally enjoy each other and the natch byoot (natural beauty).  I got to join in last year, May 2014, and I could see why Rama spoke abut the trip with such anticipation.  Somehow I'd only been through Yosemite once before 2014, back in the diz-niz as a stop on a fam RV trip, and really don't remember much more than a trolley ride through golden valley meadows and just being vilely overheated and basking like the proverbial hog in shit in a souvenir shop's blasting air conditioning. 

Friday morning August 28th Rama and I were to fly down to Southern CA for my brother Eric's Saturday wedding.  Maddy couldn't go (crappiest thing ever) because her fire academy class had begun and absence was not an option.  Thursday evening at work I got the dreaded gut-leadening call from Mom that Dad was in the ER.  He'd had some stroke-like word-slurring and she'd called 911.  The episode had been brief and he was already back to normal by the time she phoned me, which meant it had likely been another TIA (mini-stroke with no lasting effects), and though that was relatively good news, it definitely did a little number on my pre-vaycay joie de vivre.  (I think we're all feeling pretty fragile and PTSD-ed after Dad's West Nile brush with death last October.  Also inexpressibly grateful he's here and himself.)  Anyway, the hospital decided to keep him overnight for observation with the plan to release him some time the next day if all was still well.  I was funkified, but very glad I'd be home with him the next day (again, Maddy not going = most bummerish of bummers).  Sleep helped reset me, and the next day dawned lovely.