So much is going on.

The biggest news, of course, is that Jon is leaving to go to Job Corps on Tuesday. They had him come in and pick up his plane ticket on Thursday.  He's going to northern Kentucky, so he won't be particularly close to any family. That's my only concern - at least in southern Kentucky he'd've been within a couple of hours of my dad. But the bird has to fly the nest some time, and it's long past time for this one to spread his wings. At least it's structured, more so than if he were going to college. That should increase his chances of success.

Here's hoping!!!!

Everything else is pretty much house related, and probably the sorts of things that only homeowners can get truly excited about: we're refinancing to take out a bit of equity and drop our rate by about a point. Our payment will be lower but we'll jump back out to a 15-year note again. If I keep making the current payment amount, I should be able to get it paid off in 11 years, though, and the interest rate is much lower than we would have if we used a home equity line or something like that to do the work.

We're going to repaint (residing ended up being too expensive right now), replace the laminate in the dining/great room and the carpet in the library and office w/hardwoods (oak upstairs, maple down), build some book cases and put them as built-ins in the library, replace the current textured wall paper and dark wainscot in the library w/the built-ins in cream, w/a dusty rose on what little will show of the walls. It's a pretty dark room (two windows that always face away from the sun) and all of the light colors should do a lot to brighten it. I should also finally get the extra shelf space that I've been needing, so all of the stacks of migratory books that flock from room to room around my house should finally find a home. We have an in-wall gas heater on one wall, and we'll center it and make it a ventless gas fireplace. We already have the surround, and only need to find a fire box and logs.

We're also going to replace the windows (as old as the house, about 25 now) and the HVAC (about 12 years old and leaking coolant). That will let us take advantage of tax credits for this year and lower our energy bills significantly, so that will hopefully help pay for itself pretty quickly.

Finally, we got new furniture for the living room and library - two new sofas, an overstuffed chair, and an ottoman for the great room, to replace the ones that have been lived on by all of us, our dogs, and over a dozen fostered teenaged boys through the past ten years. We got something very similar to our old stuff (we still like the look) but it's amazing how much fresher it makes everything look.  (The furniture we just paid for, though. I'm not going to take equity out for something like that!!!)

So, lots of homebody stuff, all of it good. Now we'll just live these last couple of days before Jon leaves. Jeff has gone to get Joseph as I type, and we'll grill hamburgers and have one last nice family evening. Jon and I will meet my sister and her girls for breakfast in the morning. And then Tuesday afternoon, we'll take him to the airport.

Keep thinking good thoughts for him!!!!

The last few days have been unusually cool for late spring in this part of Georgia - in the middle 70s, and the rain and humidity that have been our constant companions for the past several weeks have taken a brief break. In spite of the fact that I've been battling some sort of stomach bug (not the sort that takes you totally out of commission, just the sort that makes you wish it would) I dragged myself out to the lake yesterday afternoon, and was glad that I did.

The lake is still over-full. After so many years of drought and the lake being drastically below full pool, it looks odd to see it coming up over its banks day after day. Feeder streams that have been mostly dry for years are now backed up and stagnant because the lake is too full to allow them to flow - it genuinely can not take any more. But the Army Corps of Engineers should do the spring release any day now. I"m actually looking forward to it, because I'm starting to worry that the many plants that have been flooded for weeks will not survive unless they're returned to dry land soon. We've lost so many trees to the combination of drought and storms that, although I know that it is nature's way, I hate to see more go.

Spring flowers, which tend to be the bright and showy ones, are done. Now we have summer flowers, which tend to be less obvious, sometimes even hard to find. Oddly, they also tend to be more fragrant, and more than once lately I've stopped on a walk after catching a bright sweet phrase of scent and tried to follow my nose to the unseen source.

They also tend to be more utilitarian - Small yellow stars of wild strawberries are everywhere, and the rabbits sniff impatiently around them. The white bells of blossom sway in the breeze on the blueberry bushes.The blackberry blossoms are already losing their petals, and the embryonic fruits sit like little spiky crowns in the centers. They look mostly like dying flowers right now, except to eyes that grew up watching for them in eager anticipation, seeing in the tiny hard clusters the shadow of the dark sweet fruits they will become. As a child I'd pick the berries that grew in the woods on our land and bring them home (at least I'd bring some home, the ones that didn't get eaten right there in the berry patch) to make into cobbler or jam. I learned how to stir the bushes with a long stick to make sure that I wasn't in competition with a local (and probably poisonous) reptile for the fruit, how to avoid the thorns, how to tell which would be sweet and which sour even though both were ripe. Now I just leave them for the animals and enjoy the memories...and perhaps steal one or two berries along the way :) 
But the cool dampness of recent days has also encouraged all of the bright green smells of growing in the woods. It started to drizzle while I was out hiking over the weekend (on the hike at Fort that I had requested as my mother's day gift) and everything smelled so fresh, so clean. When it gets hotter things smell more strongly, but not as good. Sometimes flowers are just the icing on the cake.

Jon has discovered that he may not be going to Job Corps on the 26th after all. Apparently they have to have something in writing from the court hearing regarding closing his records stating that his business with the court is complete and that he has no further obligations. Understandably, they don't want to send him into northern Kentucky if they'll have to turn around and send him back. I still think that closing his records is a good idea, but I fear that the longer this takes the more likely he is to sabotage himself and the placement. He's going to a lot of NA meetings, and we're encouraging/facilitating him going.

We had the oddest conversation today: he asked if Jeff and I would take custody of an infant of his to raise if he were to create one and stated that he had a basic assumption that anyone he would get pregnant would be an unfit mother. He and Jeff have had this talk (Jeff has told me about it), and we've told him jointly that we don't plan to raise any more children, grand or otherwise, but this is the first time that he's tried to have the conversation with me. It always ends with him angry, and trying to make us angry by saying that we are obviously unfit grandparents and that he will get his brother's adoptive father to take the child. I'm not completely sure what test he thinks he's administering to us, but it's clear that in his eyes, telling him that it is in everyone's best interest for him to not create a child unless/until he can raise it is a failing answer.

It will be good when he moves to the next phase of his life and has other things to occupy his time and thought than non-existent babies.
"We know the past but cannot control it.
We control the future but cannot know it."
-   Claude Shannon

So much going on....I should've made a lot of entries in the past couple of weeks, but have been too busy living life to write about it for the moment.

So, in brief:
My sister became seriously ill and was hospitalized, and decided in the process to start speaking to me again. She's ok (it was an infection that responded to aggressive IV antibiotics) and we've talked every few days. It's awkward, but it's going.

My father came to visit while Trish was in the hospital, and that was pretty good. He and she had some heated phone conversations while he was here about the fact that he stayed with me not with Bruce, but they haven't argued since. It was nice to see him, but a bit rushed because it was also the weekend that my sister in law was here with her family, a trip that had been planned for several weeks. I wish they had come on different weekends.

I've been assigned several new projects at work, including the implementation and roll-out of our new physical control system. It's a very therapeutic process and I like it a lot, but it is going to require a huge culture change, which I hope is well managed by the powers-that-be. I have the feeling that we're going to have one real shot at the marketing, and I hope it's good. I spent all of last week down in Forsyth at the training, thus having to reschedule the:

Vacation that Jeff and I took. It wasn't much, two days off to make a long weekend, but that's more than he'll usually do for anything that doesn't involve a holiday. We'd planned to do five days, including some days from last week, but we had to push it back and cancel our plans to go to Richmond in favor of a "stay-cation". It actually turned out well: we took the dogs hiking in the mountains one day, went to the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville one day (Jeff had never been) and stopped at a lovely national park that we didn't even know existed while we were on our way home. All in all, a very successful few days, even if it didn't involve Monticello.

Finally, and probably the biggest news: Jon has a Job Corps date, the 26 of this month. I'm trying not to be too excited until it actually happens, because that is a lot of time for him to sabotage himself, but I am cautiously optimistic. He was originally offered the 6th, but he has a court date on the 21st to seal his juvenile record and he requested a delayed date so that he can start with a clean slate, a decision which Jeff and I support. Here's hoping!

Brief book review post-script: I'm in the middle of "The Shadow of the Wind", and it definitely gets a two thumbs-up from me. Reminds me a bit of "The Ghost Writer" so far, but more melodic. Lovely prose. I hope it finishes as well as it has begun.

So I'm still thinking about my cousin's blog, and I think I can sum my last entry up with: It didn't dawn on her to ask them if they have killed people. It never dawned on me to think that they hadn't.

I ran this thought past Jeff, who snorted and said, "Your cousin was in the assault on Fallujah - yeah, he's killed people. And your uncle flew a fighter jet. What would you think?!"

I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm just grappling with the idea that people exposed to similar situations can come to such different places, or to similar places at such radically different times.

The other thing that I've been thinking of is the first part of her entry, where she talks about the video portraying the pleasure that some of the Marines take in killing.

Now, I've worked with enough unsavory people to know that some people just like to kill - their empathy circuits never closed so they don't connect to the humanity of their victim, and they love the feeling of ultimate power. A few of these people will make it into the military, but they would've probably ended up killing someone in civilian life and the military is not to blame for their actions.

Military people are specifically trained to kill, and to believe that their actions are noble and in service and protection of their country. This often generates cognitive dissonance: good people with good intentions are taught to perform a horrible act for a good cause. The problem is frequently this: what if they like it? Everyone likes to feel powerful, and killing is the ultimate power. An adrenaline rush is the act of drenching the brain in powerful psychoactive substances, and from everything I've been told, firefights are terrifying but also stimulating. "I've never felt more alive," is a phrase I've heard from many people.

And how does a fundamentally good person deal with those positives? How do they deal with the resultant shame, guilt? Part of it is with substances, which is why we have so much substance abuse and broken relationships in the military. Part of it is trying to forget the feelings...but how easy is it to forget the times you felt most alive? Part of it is trying to reconcile everything, and possibly seeking some religious answer or consolation, but that is a dangerous path, because they also risk believing that they are damned for their behavior no matter how valorous their intentions.

And the country that invests millions into making them killers invests little into helping them cope with the fact that they are killers. That, to me, is part of the tragedy. And for me it really is the crux of the issue, and it's one that she does not appear to find important enough to mention.

I've talked a lot with Jeff about these things, and he's validated a lot of my thoughts.

But he still hasn't come to grips with the issues himself.

This all got me thinking about my brother and father, who have both served as Marine officers in war zones, my brother in Iraq and Afghanistan and my father in Vietnam. And I realized that I have a hard time reconciling the father and brother with the killers that I know they were trained to be. If you knew either of these men, you would know them to be thoughtful, intelligent, generous, loyal and kind. Yet…they willingly joined an organization that would train them to kill human beings and then send them off to do so.

I don’t know if either of them ever actually killed anyone. My father dropped ordinance from a fighter plane in Vietnam, so my guess is that he probably did. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to ask him how he felt about that."
 
As anyone who has read my blog will recognize, this is my favorite uncle and my cousin who has done several tours in the Middle East that she's referring to. And it got me thinking how people can come from very similar backgrounds but have such different experiences of them, especially in this area.  We shared the same Battle of the Bulge veteran grandfather, both had fathers in the service in Vietnam-era military. She's only a year younger than I, so her sociocultural experience of the late 60s/early 70s would be similar to mine.

But it never dawned on me that I would not know that, when my uncle called home from Vietnam, he was calling home from a war, and that, in war, people died because other people killed them.  Perhaps it was because my aunt sheltered her and my father encouraged me? Daddy used to sit with me in his lap while we watched Walter Cronkite together, and he explained things during the commercials, but I don't think that she was allowed to watch the news (perhaps because my aunt couldn't bear to watch herself?)

Once, when I was very young, I asked my grandfather about the war. He didn't answer, but my grandmother said, very kindly, "He doesn't talk about that, honey." It was clear to me that he didn't talk about it because it was hard, and it made him sad. It was my first and best lesson in not asking those things that she says it never dawned on her to ask.

Perhaps my adult experiences have also shaped my thoughts. I've had to many people who were close to me that were combat vets - the quiet fellow from Waycross who was also a Marine tanker in the First Gulf war, my husband, my old room mate.

My old room mate was a particular education. He was special forces/black ops in Southeast Asia and later trained mujahdin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 80s. He once told me, "When I first came back from Vietnam and went to college on my GI bill, I felt totally disoriented. I saw a quiet campus and oblivious kids, and I kept thinking, 'I could kill them all, and here they are acting like I'm normal, like nothing is wrong, like they are safe.' A retired sergeant saw what I was going through and helped me through it. He told me, 'They should mark us in some way, tatoo our faces or something so that people know what we are. We look like them and they think we are like them, but on their behalf we have become something that would terrify them if they only knew. You have to hold it together, because you aren't safe and only you can make sure that no one ever has to know that.'"

How do you not know that someone you love is carrying something like that around? And my cousin is not a stupid or unobservant woman. Do people not think about it? Is it easier not to know what happens to the men and women that swear to go in harm's way so that we don't have to?

I have to go to a meeting now, but I'm still thinking about the other part of it, of what they have told me about missing it...I think that there is another entry still percolating in here...

We've found a place in Dawsonville that may well qualify as a "dream home": 3/2 ranch with full finished basement (now a game room, but I'm thinking library) on almost 11 acres of land that adjoins the Dawson National Forest and hooks up with it's hiking trail (about a 3 mile trail with good difficulty). The couple who own it are having a nasty divorce, the real estate agent says, and we may be able to get a good price.

Now I just need to know what they plan to do about my job. There isn't any word yet on whether I'm going exclusively back into the field, which would be the best case scenario for moving father north. Until we know that for sure, we don't plan to make any changes.

So we wait,and we see.

I've been coping with a bout of vertigo, and my doctor has me on steroids (short dosing schedule, thank heavens!). It seems to be helping, but I'm tired of getting dizzy and wobbly at random intervals, and will be glad when it is over.

Jeff saw our niece in Chuck E Cheeze when he went with his co-worker to take the co-worker's daughter for lunch on Friday. He didn't speak to her, and I wish he had. (He says that he now wishes he had as well.) She was there with her nanny, which gave me pause: Trish is off on maternity leave, Bruce is off on paternity leave, and his parents are both there. They have nothing better to do than to send her off with her nanny? But I guess that's me. Jeff checked her blog, and she has apparently made an entry about how much easier it is to manage two children than she thought it would be. I wonder just how much managing she's actually doing.

I wish I'd seen her, if only to give her a hug and tell her that I love her. I've come to the realization that I miss her more than my sister at this point. Trish has become this person that I don't recognize and don't think I'd choose to have in my life if she weren't related. Caetlin isn't to blame for her mother, but she is reaping the "rewards" of my sister's decision to "punish" my father and I. That just makes me more angry at Trish, but I do miss my Catie-bug.

Still counting down for Jon to go. Every day it gets a little harder. He says that he's trying to be clean again, so that he can pass his Job Corps drug test. We'll see. He's been clean in the past when he's been motivated. I'm just not sure how motivated he is. He's decided that his latest excuse is "I didn't remember, you know I had a brain injury and that I'm getting clean, so that means I don't have a good memory and you can't get mad at me." Mention of the fact that it is his reponsibility to cope with any alleged memory loss effectively rather than the world's responsiblity to deal with him goes over his head.

I'm counting the days until May 7.....

The Ugly:

Jon has confirmed that he is using again. We suspected, but that was all it was before.

He's justified it to himself: he has angry outbursts, and the psychiatrist won't give him benzodiazapines (live valium or xanax), so he has no other option but to smoke to control his outbursts. He also has state-dependent learning and has learned all of his coping skills while high so he has to be high to practice them.

He's got a million of them.

That has put us in a bit of a spot: his Job Corps application was turned in on February 9, and they have a policy of placing within 90 days, so we're about half-way through our wait. He hasn't done anything overt at this time to cause us to kick him out other than exhibiting the general unpleasantness that is part and parcel of being a teenaged boy. At the same time, we know his pattern: he starts off slow and then goes down hill really quickly. So if he's only now admitting that he's been using for a few months, he's probably working past the "starting off slow" part.

But I can't be responsible for him being homeless if he hasn't done something specific. So this is where I've arrived:

If he does any of the following things, he's out immediately, no questions asked:
1. bring drugs into my home (obviously I'd have to catch him, but I usually do eventually)
2. steals from us (he's not nearly as good at that as he thinks he is...like most of his bad behavior, actually)
3. gets arrested (although that, as my father said, is a rather self-correcting problem)
4. becomes violent
5. becomes disruptive (i.e. being up all night and keeping me/Jeff up all night as a result)
6. declines/misses his Job Corps call (I've told him that, whether he goes or not, his invitation to Job Corps marks the end of his living in my home)

I figure that if he can manage the above things for the six or so weeks until Job Corps is required to place him, then we should all be ok.

Now we wait, and we see...

In other Ugly news, my sister had her baby, and blogged about it, which is how anyone in our family knows.

My brother is coming on vacation in a couple of weeks, and he had a hard time trying to schedule how to get to all the people and places that he wants to visit. After a lot of consultation with a lot of people, he established a schedule. A couple of days later he got an email from our sister stating that she was going to visit our grandmother and wouldn't be available on the identified days after all, that he would have to change his schedule.

He was mad, our dad was miffed, and apparently our 93-year-old grandmother (who is apparently already quite angry with my sister's behavior) was furious. A few days later, my brother got a text message from our sister saying that she would not be going to grandmother's after all and that she would be available as scheduled.

Our theory is that Gram got to her. And if that's the case, Trish deserved it.