Home Again

I arrived home again on Tuesday evening after a 14 hour 5 minute drive from the wet land, which was indeed wet as I left.  In fact, I even hit some snow flurries along my drive as I hit the summit of the Siskiyou range.  It was an uneventful drive otherwise, thankfully, and reaching home was a relief from the tedium of a long boring drive south beyond the central part of the state.

Since Tuesday, I've been unpacking, doing laundry, re-acclimating myself to my own home, updating our own financial records, and cleaning house.  Yes indeed, house cleaning!  It has largely waited for me for the five weeks I was gone on this last trip.  Of course, not much was done during the first five weeks I was gone nor the one week I'd been home in between either, so you can imagine how much there is to do.

During the past five weeks up in the wet land, I have enjoyed the continuing spring blooms and greening up of trees that displayed beautiful arrays of flowers and of course the rains, funny how I forgot how hard it rained up there, but then I really don't remember it ever raining that hard there.  My dad assured me it did, but then his memory isn't superb these days.  I was also able to get his financials in order along with getting him to take care of addressing his need to assign someone to be his power of attorney in general, as well as update his advanced directive and his will - all done!  He, and I, can now relax for the most part. 

One brother stepped up to the plate and took over paying Dad's water & light bill...of course, it was largely because said brother needed a utility bill with his own name on it in order to get per diem payments when he's on far away job sites which, I understand, can be as much as a couple thousand dollars per month, so it's clearly to his benefit and a small cost to him to take over the payment.  And it obviously will help my dad.  My sister stepped in and added a cell phone to her plan so that he can have a phone on him when he goes out for his early morning two-mile walks.  Hopefully he'll truly be able to use it, he's not very tech-savvy.

I'm looking to be at home for at least four to six weeks.  After being largely absent from the blogosphere for three months, getting back to it may be a slow and intermittent process.  My dad's health and abilities is not ideal so the future is a day-by-day thing where I can't make any long-term plans or goal-setting other than in what will likely be 4-6 week increments for the time being and going back and forth on that 890 mile each way drive.

In other news, Marty had taken a temp job for low pay after completing his month-long training in February.  The job began two days after I went back up north.  While I was still up north again, and while still working at the low-paying job,  he'd been having some interviews with a company only a couple of blocks from where he used to work prior to his August lay-off.  They have given him an offer and he is in the processes with having given his sample for drug-testing and filling out an additional application for the parent company and getting a back-ground check.  There should be no issues on any count there, so could be starting a new job within the next few weeks.  This is good news from a financial standpoint, but I'd been trying my best to encourage Marty and Nick about a move to the northern wet land.

And Nick?  Well, his best news is that he now has his driver's permit.  Of course, technically, it isn't valid until he's had his first two hours of "professional" driver's training, which will be on Wednesday, and then he can drive with us.  He will also still need a total of six hours of "pro" instruction.
I will explain in another post about our adventures in his acquiring his permit...I will only say, our local DMV is not on my happy list!