🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
What Lies Beneath🎶
Coral Tells A Story🪸
Kidless Future👩❤️💋👨
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- How one sentence can clarify the future.
- My boys.
- The morning tweets of the birds around my home.
Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: FAIL. I’m definitely not this.
Wordle 1,037 X/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
🟨🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: FAIL. Seriously. WTF? First time I’ve ever had a double-fail.
Connections
Puzzle #315
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟪🟦🟩🟦
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟩🟪🟪
🟪🟪🟩🟪
🟩🟩🟪🟩
The song in my head when I woke up: “What Lies Beneath,” by Breaking Benjamin
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: Here we go, does it hurt?/Say goodbye to this world
Yard Work Tunes: Did a lot of weeding and such yesterday to some Metallica.
- Waste My Hate
- If Darkness Had a Son
- The Frayed Ends of Sanity
- Whiplash
- Hardwired
- Creeping Death
Something I’m looking forward to today: The cornhole tournament fundraiser for my baseball team.
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Our next baseball tournament, next weekend in O’Fallon.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Processing some wildly mixed emotions in an effective manner.
What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved some major journaling.
What I’ve written: Focusing Biotech on Sustainability: MBP Director Danielle Tullman-Ercek traveled to a conference in Australia and saw first-hand the stress climate change is putting on natural wonders; her goal is to train students to use biology to help fix it.
Today’s Stoic Though of the Day: “Get busy living or get busy dying; that’s goddamn right.” — Red, Shawshank Redemption
John’s translation of Today’s STD: “Life doesn’t always go how you planned. It throws curveballs and, worse, it throw fastballs right at your head that hurt like a motherfucker when they hit. You are only truly living when you are doing something useful to improve your life and the lives of those around you. So get back up and keep moving forward. Otherwise, you’re just wallowing in self-pity, and that’s a living death.”
I would imagine a lot of couples have moments when their kids are steamrolling toward adulthood and they look around and say something akin to, “OK cool. … Now what comes next?” Or maybe it’s just me.
As I wrote about yesterday, Boy The Elder is fast approaching his full adulthood. He turns 22, graduates college and gets married, all within the next six weeks. Boy The Younger is seven years his junior and rapidly needing less and less from his folks as he turns into the responsible young man we always knew he could be.
Which, in the not-too-distant future — cosmically speaking, anyhow — will leave Wifey Poo and I back where we started, as husband and wife sharing the same space, alone together.
Wifey Poo and I are the very definition of “opposites attract.” That is so strongly the case, it’s almost ridiculous. There are very few things we share in common. Want some extreme examples?
- There are two sizes of forks in our silverware drawer. Wifey Poo prefers the smaller. I prefer the larger.
- Wifey Poo’s internal thermostat runs cold. Mine runs hot.
- She likes sweet white wines. I like dry red wines.
- She’s a night owl who gets most of her stuff done in the evening. I’m a morning person who accomplishes a majority of my day’s work before others in my home are even awake.
- I feel first. She thinks first.
- I’m a coffee lover. She hates coffee. (And on this, she’s wrong.)
The list goes on and on and on.
Our kids have been our common bond for a long time now. Raising them. Attending their events. Fretting over their growth and development. Educating them. Driving them here. Picking them up there. It has been a joyous responsibility on which we have, in just about every instance, been on precisely the same line of the same page.
And soon, we’ll be done.
This weekend gave me a glimpse into what the future could look like. Boy The Elder is off doing Boy The Elder things. He came back to the area Friday night to go to a Cardinals game with the Best Man in his upcoming wedding, but that didn’t necessitate a stop at home. Saturday, he went to Silver Dollar City with The Fiddle (future daughter-in-law). Boy The Younger stayed at a friend’s house Friday night, come home for a bit Saturday, then headed off to a dance Saturday night.
Saturday morning, Wifey Poo and I knew we had to get some stuff done. It’s a rare non-baseball weekend for us, and we are hosting BTE’s rehearsal dinner at our home in less than six weeks. The front landscaping was a mess, full of weeds and leaves and random shit that we just haven’t gotten to. Our lawn has some bare patches, owing mostly to the Motherfucking Moles that sometimes run rampant.
And so we got to work. I enjoyed my time in the dirt, popping weeds and turning over the soil as we prepare for a mulch delivery. Wifey Poo raked up the dead spots in the lawn and put down grass seed and straw.
For a time, we worked independently-together, both with our earbuds in — her, I’m sure, listening to a murder podcast and me listening to 2010s Nu-Rock.
Then, for a while, the earbuds came out and we talked, loudly over the growing wind as we worked about 15 feet from each other. We talked about some of her homeschool-community friends, our kids, some hopes and dreams for our landscaping. And I could picture this being us in the future, toiling around our kidless home to keep it looking less than crappy. Wifey Poo has adopted a new word lately — unsightly. She laughs at how old she sounds when she says it. So do I. But keeping things from being unsightly sounds like a good common goal to me.
I guess my big realization is that it wasn’t the kids that were our common bond all these years. It was the love we found in each other that just so happened to result in the kids we brought into this world and soon will unleash fully upon it.
They might be gone soon. Our love, however, won’t be.
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