I’ve never met my wife’s father. Frank passed away long before we met, in the early 90s when she was still a teenager. Yet, I feel like I know him, admire him, and would have really enjoyed having a relationship with him. Continue reading “What a legacy”
Remembering my father
Ronald C. Brockmeier, my father, passed away on January 21, 2020 in Dorchester, Wisconsin. He was 79, and had spent about two and a half years suffering from vascular dementia and memory loss. He was preceded by his wife, Tina, who passed in July 2019.
It’s hard to write anything short of a novel about my father’s passing. How do you compress a life into a few paragraphs or pages? He was many things, and “easy to describe” wasn’t one of them. Continue reading “Remembering my father”
Home again, home again…
There’s nothing like the feeling of returning home after a trip, particularly when you’ve been driving all over the place and having to stay in bunch of different places.
Got back from Missouri last night. Drove 70 through Kansas, which has to be one of the most boring stretches of road ever. It would be better if the speed limit were higher, say 90 or so. This was a good trip, speeding-wise, though. I saw quite a few state troopers out and about in Kansas and Missouri – but they all had other people pulled over or were getting ready to pull other people over when I was doing the speed limit. I still think that you should be able to just buy a pass at the beginning of each year for up to 3 speeding tickets. Get pulled over, just hand the pass over and no ticket. Kind of like an indulgence.
While I enjoy visiting my friends and family that live in Missouri, there’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed and having all your stuff in one convenient place. Not to mention having high-speed Internet and being able to walk about in your boxers without offending anyone…
Brought two of my younger siblings back with me to Colorado. So far we’ve been having a pretty good time, though my youngest brother is frothing at the mouth because I haven’t been letting him listen to his vampire/goth stuff in the car. (He who owns the car and does all the driving gets to pick the CDs, I’m pretty sure that should have been one of the commandments. Might have been omitted because Moses decided that “Thou shalt respect the driver’s tunes” would have confused too many people…)
Saw “About a Boy” in Columbia with my friend Hannah while my brothers watched “Spider-Man.” There are some good things about multi-plexes… “About a Boy” was quite good, perhaps better than I expected. I wasn’t avoiding “Spider-Man,” I’ve already seen it.
I never, ever want to drive through Kansas again. Ever. Unfortunately, the options are limited to not visiting my friends and family in Missouri, paying outrageous airfare between Denver and St. Louis, driving all the way through Kansas, or paying decent airfare between Denver and Kansas City and renting a car to drive to St. Louis. Normally, flying into Kansas City is the best option – but since I was bringing back passengers driving through Kansas was the only option. Amtrak is way too expensive these days, not to mention they really don’t have a decent route between Denver and St. Louis, and I’m not too big on buses. It’s been more than 30 years since Star Trek – where the hell are our transporters, anyway? Teleportation couldn’t be any more harrowing than flying…
This weekend, weather permitting, looks like a good time to go to Estes Park so my brothers can get a better look at the mountains. I’ll be taking my digital camera, so if pictures of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding scenery sounds interesting be sure to check back Monday-ish.
(An old post copied into WordPress from Archive.org. Pardon the terrible writing I was a youngster then.)