A long time has past

A long time has passed since I last posted to this blog. I had intended to keep it up but things got in the way. Not to be a sad sack and all but when I started this blog I had intended it to be an outlet and a template to get out of my current situation. At the time I had left a job that I really loved to return home to help my family. My wife's grandmother who was a real great woman and a matriarch of the family was ill. Unfortunately my job was as a commercial truck driver for P.A.M. Transport. In the two years that I drove for them I saw more of this country than I ever had. I met people from everywhere and saw the good and the bad. In my last post I mentioned the Appalachian Trail. Well I had the honor to drive an 18 Wheeler in every state that the AT passes through and to get a window side (usually open window) view of the Appalachians in every season from Maine to Georgia. I also got to see the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico, Ozark Plateau, and the Rocky Mountains.

Driving for P.A.M. Transport was a challenge and an adventure. The dispatchers were always fair to me and pretty cool. There's not a day now that I don't think back to those two years. I had times when I got caught in a blizzard, a tornado, a hurricane. Those were scary times in a truck. I mean to me the scariest part of driving a truck was high winds. I especially feared the Millard E. Tydings Bridge in Maryland on I-95. The thing passes 90 feet above the Susquehanna River in sort a wide gorge that is nearly a mile wide. A lot of times I would go through there and the high wind warnings would be flashing and well even a 20 mph breeze going across you could feel pushing you about if you were pulling a light load.

But I loved going to Texas and Michigan and Missouri. I loved how people from different parts of the country spoke. In Wisconsin I stopped at this one restaurant that had creme puffs the size of footballs. In Texas I found a great love of brisket. I look forward to getting some in this little truck stop in Laredo every time I went down there. While driving, I tried boudin in Louisiana which always was a nice treat. My one regret is that I was never able to stop in Philadelphia for a genuine Philly Cheesesteak.

It's like that you know. You get Chinese food and you really have to ask yourself, do Chinese people actually eat egg rolls, General Tso Chicken, and Crab Rangoon? Of course not. Do Mexican people actually eat Fajitas, Burritos, and have Queso sauce at every meal. I sort of doubt it.

Anyway, I miss all driving for P.A.M. Transport, as it was really a great time. But like I said, my family needed me home. See my wife had this accident a few years ago. Mind you she didn't get hurt but it shook her. She was going down the Interstate in a rain storm and she hit a puddle and hydroplaned. According to her the car spun around four or five times and finally came to a stop pointing into oncoming traffic (backwards). It scared her like Cougar was scared in the movie Top Gun. She hasn't driven much since that time. We try and push the issue with her some times and she does say that one day she will drive again. But I sort have a feeling that Cougar, if he ever did fly again did it low and slow. Maybe Cougar flew an ultralight or paraglider later on, but I doubt it. My wife has driven on short trips, but her record is driving 3 blocks to the store at 15 Mph. Maybe one day I'll get her a golf cart.

But she's a sweet girl and though the money was decent I had to come home and try to find a new career. I guess the math worked out that I could do more for the family at home than just making money. So Daddy came home to do more of the driving, cooking, cleaning, parenting than he had done in the two years before. Then came the hammer, my wife's Grandmother had been diagnosed with mesothelioma and was going to die. She had picked it up apparently, the asbestos that causes that kind of lung cancer, working in the shipyards in Wilmington, NC during World War II. So with me out of a job at the time I volunteered to be one of her caretakers, since she wanted to stay at home. So her daughters signed her up with Hospice of the Lower Cape Fear. It was a difficult time, nearly a year while the cancer finished my wife's grandmother. It's hard to see someone go down like that so fast. We tried to keep it relative you know. Hoping that in the end she would at least start to feel as good as she did a few months earlier, then hoping for last month, then last week, and then yesterday. We couldn't have made it without the Hospice of the Lower Cape Fear's doctors, nurses, and CNA's checking in with us.

So I had started this blog to help me vent and get going in a positive direction. Since my wife's grandmother died we have managed even in this economy. Instead of work I've tried to get going as a student again. But money has been tight and we've had to cut back on a lot of things. My son Caleb wants to be an artist and I've been itching to take him to Washington, D.C. to Corcoran Gallery and the Smithsonian Institute so that he can see the widest range of art possible. I don't know if he has the talent to be a painter, he is catching on to some basics and he seems to better with tactile art. He has made it into the county art show the past 3 years and its one area of his life that he enjoys. He's not driven by it, enjoys it, but I don't get the sense that he's a tortured soul yearning to express the essence of the universe. Which could be a good thing, I'd hate for him to grow up and go all van Gogh on us. No, he likes more normal stuff like hiking, soccer, camping, video games, and cartoons. Of course he's not a teenager yet and you never know what that's going to be like for anyone.

We have him and his brother in Cub Scouts now and I'm a really proud of them, and it's cool as an old guy to be able to squeeze the value of my own youth and experience into stuff they are doing today. Cub Scouts gives us a frame work to do that and a manual...see it says you need to do this or that right in the book. In a week or two we're going to start training for a serious hike and the guys are getting real interested in Conservation. We've really been looking into organizations like Leave No Trace Behind and we hope to get involved in the Mountain to Sea Trail effort in North Carolina.

It's been a struggle but we're starting to get that Nil Vicarious feeling and starting to take our own adventures in life. Times are bad now for the whole country and everyone is not as secure and prosperous as we'd like. But you know history is history. Your ancestors and my ancestors went through worse times and they got us to this point. If you managed to find this blog I thank you for checking in on it. The next few entries will hopefully be coming soon. I really look forward to posting some reports on our camping and activities. Our first trip will be to Carolina Beach State Park, which is south of Wilmington, NC near our home.