10.19.2005

The toughest person I know.

My wife. As I held her hand, her fingers in a vise-like grip around mine, I watched the nurses change the dressing on her wound. I know there are others with worse injuries, but this is just one in a series of events she has been dealing with for two years now. Imagine a golf ball sized hole in your abdomen being packed with gauze twice a day. The agony she had to endure as they first pulled out two feet of 1/2 inch wide gauze, scrubbed with peroxide-soaked q-tips, and then repack with gauze broke my heart. I can promise you anytime I start to feel an ache or pain, I will just remember what she as been going through and it will not hurt so much anymore. All I can do for her is be there for her, take care of her and our home, and love her with all that I have. Twelve hour days on the job are nothing in comparison to this. Well, I called in Jess as a runaway today and within an hour they had found her. Blind, dumb luck as an officer went to a house to check out some type of complaint that in no way involved Jess when around from the back yard she came stating, "your probably here for me". He checked in and sure enough she was listed as runaway. So off I went to pick her up once again. I took her home and then returned to work. She is going to cost me alot of money before this is over but I just hope somehow I can get through to her about what it is going to cost her in the long run. Only time will tell. Ok, a bit of selfish dreaming. The following is a list of the things I want, material things that I allow myself to dream about from time to time. I will have them, someday, when other priorities have been met. 1. new laptop with dvd burner. 2. motorcycle. something along the lines of a 1982 Suzuki 650 or Honda V45 Magna. 3. A digital SLR camera, Canon rebel most likely. 4. A new George Foreman grill. This I will get for Christmas from someone. 5. A small trailer to pull behind my van for when Tam and I go on a picnic and to carry the motorcycle to her mothers in W. Texas for country rides. 6. A collapsable gas grill for the picnic. That is all I can think of right now, but I am sure there will be more. Most of this stuff ties all together. I like to shoot the pictures and then I will use the laptop to edit the photos, post them to the net and write about what we have done. The photos will be of the things we have done or 2-3 hour road trips on the motorcycle. This is what I want to do, it is my calling that I have been searching for. I don't have to have the motorcyle of course, but it will make for some enjoyable, relaxing excursions on a Sunday morning as everyone else sleeps. There are so many small towns within an hours ride of Tam's childhood home (where her mother still lives) that have so much character and stories to be told. I don't expect to ever do that for a living but with the internet and blogging becoming so mainstream, I don't have to. The satisfaction of leaving a type of lifetime diary behind, one that the whole world can take part of, is a fantastic thing. How many stories have been left behind, but only a few people ever heard or read about them? Too many I am sure. I know that alot of what I write about here is drivel, or simply one man's ramblings. But as I progress farther into this I hope to once again write something worthy of the test of time. That is why I started this blog, way back when we lived in South Dakota and I wanted a way for our families to be able to keep up with what we were doing. It was a good idea then and it has only grown into a way to leave behind a legacy. As long as our modern digital age continues, this history will stay alive. I do hope that at some point Google develops a way for a blog to be downloaded to the author's computer so that it may be archived. I just don't want a lifetime of writing to be lost by a company going under. Not that Google will go under, but you can never tell.

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