Well, let's do some quick catching up.

My Dad did die, in fact I did have to make that decision shortly after that last writing. I never got around to eulogizing him here. Maybe I will when I've better processed losing him. It's been nearly 8 months and I'm just not there yet.

Lost a couple other people, near and far. My Uncle Frankie's widow, Toni lost her brother a couple weeks later, crushed under a car he was trying to repair. My neighbor lost their 20 year old daughter to a brain tumor... Well, that's enough of that.

Life is like that. Findings and losses, victories and defeats, tragedies and triumphs. You don't get to separate them. You find them climbing on each others' backs for your attention. You don't get to enjoy or suffer them in isolation. You go from feeling kicked in the teeth to euphoria, pulled and pushed at the same moment. You probably linger on the item feeding the euphoria because the other is too painful. Yet when the euphoria wears off, the pain is still there to deal with. If you're lucky you've found a little bit of perspective that will make the pain easier to bear, or at least give you a little added strength to stand up under it.

The company I work for is, for the most part, a really good company to work for. Forgetting the "in this economy" crapphrase that I'm so tired of hearing, it's still a good company to work for. That said, we're not without our problems. At the same time that I felt my own production team was kicking my teeth in with a lack of communciation and follow through (notice I said "felt," truth is we've got a lot of growing pains and they're doing a bang-up job) I got word that my sales in the first quarter were high enough to win me a trip for my wife and I to Hawai'i this summer. So I'm really pissed and really delighted at the same time.

Actually, now I'm over the pissed part, because we've begun dealing with those issues in what I would call a constructive, long-term way, but I'm still going to Hawai'i in July.

We attended a cancer benefit concert last Friday in Berkeley in the name of my late brother-in-law, Dino. It was a beautiful party/concert. Dino's old band played, his dad and brother joined in on a couple songs, his mom and dad got up to speak to us, and they apparently raised over $6,500 dollars to benefit cancer research. We also got totally hammered, but that's a fringe benefit.

Yet the next day, when we went to see Theresa's mom, she was bawling, because she misses him so terribly. We all shared some tears together. You can't separate them, you know.

Life is like that.