Things change

You know… things change.

Like last week when Jen and I were trying to decide what to do for dinner and she suggested an Indian restaurant and I didn’t instantly vomit.  I’d only been to one Indian place before and it was all veggie and I ended up having Coca~Cola for dinner.  This place was a little more suited to my tastes… and in this case it really does taste like chicken… okay, that was a crappy joke.  Sorry.

Anyway, I ate dinner at an Indian place in Salem and it was good and I’ll go back.  What really set the world on it’s ear though was that this weekend Jen once again got me to do something previously unimaginable to those who know me for the narrow minded doofus that I generally am.  We ate dinner at a Japanese place.  I’d done that a couple of times before, it was good, I like it, I’d go back… but what was different this time was… chopsticks.

Not these chopsticks:

… these chopsticks:

Yup, those are chopsticks holding a tasty piece of steak, and the hands holding said stick like eating utensils are mine…

and yes that is me hamming it up as Jen photographed the momentous occasion of me eating stuff with two skinny pieces of wood.  I have to admit that I used a fork to eat the fried rice, but I did managed to get some using the chopsticks before I gave up.

*** Massive Change of Subject ***

My grandmother died in 1997.  Around the 1st anniversary of her passing me and a bunch of my close relatives went to visit her grave together, then we all went out to lunch together.  As it turns out, my mother’s parents and my father’s mother, aunts and uncles, are all in the same cemetery.  That allowed us to visit the graves of all of my grandparents (my father’s father doesn’t count.  He split in 1950, never to be seen again, and when he died his ashes were spread out over a lake he used to fish in, some where in Utah or Oregon I think.).  By a further coincidence, my father’s grandparents are also in the same cemetery.

That innocuous little Sunday morning has turned into an annual event, with more and more people joining us each year.  Due to the proximity of Christmas, one year my mother decided to leave little Christmas trees by the headstones.  That too became a tradition. 

This year my mother left a little green (OK, it’s fake) tree at each headstone, and my cousin Erin left a little battery operated, light-up snowman for my grandparents.  My cousin Tom took a picture of the Powers grave, which sort of opened the floodgates for me… if he’s gonna take a shot, then I’ma gonna take a shot too!  We are all under the assumption that the trees and Mr Snowman probably would be gone by the time it got dark, but now we can all see what it looked like during this year’s (very insensitively titled… by my mother, I think) Dead Relatives Tour.

That’s my mother’s parents, John and Bridget, and their first child, John Jr who died a couple of weeks after childbirth.

The stone on the right, the one with the snowman (thanks Erin!) is Cecilia.  My father’s mother, and the reason we were all so happy when my friend Mike the Bass Player told us he was going to name his daughter Cecilia.  On the left is my father’s aunt Peggie and her husband Walter and their daughter Barbara.

This one is my father’s aunt and uncle, Nancy and Jimmy.  This one is important because in recent years Jimmy had not been given a flag.  He fought the second world war in the pacific and damn well deserved to have a flag on his grave.  This year he wasn’t overlooked.  Thankfully.

So there you have it.  Some things change when you least expect them… like me eating something other than a hamburger for dinner… and other things stay the same, like the eighth annual graveside visit.

Like how I tied that all together there?  Almost makes you think I know what the hell I’m gonna write prior to actually spewing out this drivel.