The reason is simply that my father was my most loyal reader. He commented to me on more than one occasion that he enjoyed what I wrote and continued to encourage me on it. I don’t think he knew how much writing I actually did before I started this blog, or at least I never wrote anything that he related with. So this blog turned out to be something special between us.

Now, when I sit down to write a post… I just come up blank. I think about Dad and just cannot focus on the post. It is basically too emotional for me to write.

I hope in time that I can come back to it, but for the immediate future, I’ll be walking away.

Thanks for reading.

Yesterday Amy and I went to a wonderful Christmas party hosted by my writing group. One thing I enjoyed about it was interacting with people I did not know too well and also I finally got to show off my wife to them. As I was getting ready for bed, I realized the perfect way to express my appreciation for the invitation was a Thank You card with a quick note in it.

Thank you notes, much like RSVPs, are a form of etiquette that has mostly dropped off the radar and that is too bad. It does not take much effort and truly shows that you are a caring person as well as showing others how important they are to you. Plus, since few people actually bother to do it anymore it has even more impact.

One problem with this is the card itself. Few of us have stationary or a stock of thank you cards piled up in our desks. Thanks to email and Microsoft Word we rarely need to hand write anything other than thanks for wedding and child birth gifts. I actually solved this dilemma for myself a few years ago. I actually designed my own thank you cards. You can do it pretty much any program, even Word, although I chose CorelDraw. A few years back I made a logo for myself to help me appear more professional when approaching magazines and publishers. I took that logo and placed it on the front of the card. I divided the page in half and duplicated the card outline so that each time I printed a sheet, I had two cards. Honestly, it took me 15 minutes to design this. Now when I need a thank you card, I put a sheet of cardstock in the printer, print the file, and then cut the two cards out. Fold and you now have a blank card to write something in.

The great thing about these cards is that the space is pretty limited, so you can fill it up quickly with just a few sentences. A brief thank you and a description of one thing that you are thanking them for is all you need. Then grab an envelope, stamp, and plop it in the mail. For a few minutes of effort, your recipient will most certainly be touched at your thoughtfulness and you will have made the world just a little bit better.

Sunday started off a beautiful 70 degrees and sunny. By the evening, the temperature dropped to below freezing and sleet hit. The next morning a nice and shiny covering of icy lay on the ground. Unfortunately, this scenario is not unusual in Oklahoma. Driving to work wasn’t too bad, just the neighborhood streets were really slick. The next day was a little worse as all of the driving on the streets melted the ice just enough to zambonie it. When Amy came home from work, she couldn’t get the car up the driveway, the tires just spun. So I came out to see what I could do.

I tried the male approach of driving faster but that didn’t work. My neighbor offered to help push my car, but he had no traction and all I did was push him back. We didn’t have any salt or sand or kitty litter so that wasn’t an option. It was time to look at my options.

I could leave the car parked in front of my house, but it might be difficult to pull out and another car might slide into it. My car was fine on the driveway because there was no ice under it. I could angle it into the garage and drive Amy’s car into the dry spot on the driveway, but that would mean she’d have to go outside with the kids to get them in the car and also scrape her windshield. I wanted to invent a flame thrower to just melt the ice, but that had hazards of its own. The last option I had was to break out the shovel and clear the ice off the driveway.

In my youth, I would have picked option 1 or 2, but I’m a man of action now and I wanted the best solution, so I grabbed the shovel. The ice was too hard for a regular snow shovel so I grabbed our garden shovel. I realized I just needed to make a path up the driveway, rather than clear the whole thing, so I picked a good part to start (where the tire tracks were, I’m brilliant I tell you) and I started.

Both my neighbor and wife came out to see if there was anything they could do, but there was no need. It would be hard work but the job would get done. And that was my attitude. It would be difficult work, but it would get done and it wouldn’t be impossible, quite a cry from my normal thought process of what is the path of least resistance. It took a while but I succeeded. I got in Amy’s car and drove it up into the garage no problem. My arms and legs were tired and I couldn’t grip things very strongly, but the car was in the garage.

Often there are many ways to approach a problem. Sometimes to get the best solution, you just need to do the most tedious and labor intensive method. There is no use in griping about it, the best thing is to grab the shovel and start digging. The job will get done, it just takes some time.

Saturday evening I received a phone call telling me that my grandmother had passed away. She was 89 and still self-sufficient for the most part. I will miss her, but I’m glad for the time I had with her. I called every pretty much every week and did so the Sunday before she passed, so I’m glad for that. I had also sent her pictures of the kids a few weeks ago so she saw those as well. Overall she passed quickly and her quality of life was still pretty high. She was an amazing lady and I’m a better person thanks to her.

A few years back I was heading to a family reunion on the other side of my family. I realized that I had a lot of memories of my family that they had probably forgotten or never known about. So I wrote a short book about each of the people in my immediate family. I took pictures representative of things that I associated with them and wrote a few pages about my memories of them. My ultimate goal was that years later, my kids could read the book and know more about their family history.

I sent copies of the book to everyone in it and it was quite the hit. It sparked some nice discussions about the memories I listed there and I am glad that I did it. I would strongly recommend that you write down the memories you have of your various family members. It ensures that little things about them will be remembered forever.