Ringtail Quest

On June 23rd, my last grandparent, Papa, entered the ground. He smoked most of the 92 years of his life. Cleaning out someone’s apartment after their death is so strange…everything left behind just becomes, stuff. It was a small service filled with awkward laughter: my parents, my two uncles and their partners, and me. There were a lot of adorable ducks at the graveyard. I said goodbye at the Cracker Barrel and headed home, still not comfortable eating inside.

My rental is nice. I have a small room for a bed, a large over-the-garage room for work and personal space, and a basement treadmill. There are lots of deer in the neighborhood. We’re surrounded by wonderful parks and scenery, and I appreciate the access to it, if not the traffic. The weather has been so much better overall. I’ve gained 15 or so pounds, less from eating and more from having fewer excuses to be out.

I still work for the same place, and we’ve been fully remote since COVID. It’s bittersweet and mostly unchanged from my last update: very little meaningful work, declining morale, shrinking teams, and expectations that don’t match reality. Just enough work to keep me too guilt-tinged to do many other things, to keep me in this continuous frustration cycle. But I do occasionally get that accomplished feeling some days. The latest: I’m being reassigned to a new team, but neither the old or new team seems to have any idea what I should be doing. My days are probably numbered.