Oct 22 - a month looms

There is no forgetting. Memories of Alexander are all around. That is a good thing. He was / is special. I guess that we're all special, all unique. We all leave our fingerprints on the world.

So far it's been a quiet morning. Abby found a comforter on the floor and has taken it over. She likes having a pillow. The cats have been in evidence, wandering around, eyeing Abby; Abby has seen the cats but not reacted.

Jeffrey got up a half-hour ago -- 9:30. That's because he's on call and didn't get to bed until around 4am. Everyone takes their turn being on-call.

Sandy just had a shower.

Emma is sitting in front of the TV in her little recliner, eating her breakfast -- pancakes, courtesy Jeffrey. She had French Toast yesterday, courtesy Sandy.

I've taken a few pictures, having brought both the D7000 as well as the F100. The F100 certainly makes more noise !

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Sara coerced Jeffrey and me into doing some furniture moving. I tried in vain to prove with my tape measure that the leather couch downstairs wouldn't fit up the stairs, but didn't win that argument. Jeffrey pointed out that the one side was compressible so that 36 inches WOULD fit into 33.5 inches ... rats. I'll tell you one thing, that couch wouldn't fall down the stairwell once we had it in there !

Being a pull-out, it's extremely heavy. My recommendation was that we remove the hardware, which we did. That turned out to be pretty easy. The stairs have two landings ... fun ... and a sharp left turn just to get onto the stairwell ... double fun. Anyway, the deed is done. The rest of the moving was comparatively easy -- move the existing couch into the sun room (all one level), dismantle the play house and take it downstairs, move bookshelves around, that sort of thing.

A couple of sheets helped facilitate the move. Leather is very bad at clinging to a surface and getting damaged, but the sheets (and a little elbow grease) did the job.

That done, it was cleanup time for me and we -- Sandy, Emma and I -- headed for Phoenixville and dinnner with Mariadela and Leonas. Mariadela was in Columbia helping to move her mother when we were down before, so we had not seen her in a while. Leonas had come to the funeral home ...

Dinner was ok, the company was better ! Emma played on her boardie (ipad) during dinner, consuming lots of French Fries and not touching her hamburg. Mariadela gave us the run-down on her Mom's move. We talked about how all of our kids are doing, especially Jeffrey and Sara of course with the passing of Alexander.

Leonas is scheduled, loosely, to take a trip to Saudia Arabia / Egypt etc. and Mariadela will likely do a trip to Germany at the same time (women not invited to the Arab countries meeting), and then they'll get together after his meetings. She intends to come down to Florida at some point, but we'll play that one by ear, no particular time discussed.

We got back home after 8pm, Emma having stayed awake in the car -- playing with the boardie again. Soon afterward she was off to bed.

The cats have gotten quite used to Abby, coming down and eyeing her as they head over to their food dishes in the kitchen. Abby, for her part, eyes the cats, but doesn't move. She grew up with a cat -- Mr. Tibbs -- so this is really nothing new. As I told Sara, the next step would be for them to play together, but I don't think that's going to happen.

I went to Mass this a.m., going to Holy Rosary in Reading, a church that I haven't been to before but once I spied the 7:30 a.m. Mass it was a must. Sandy called while I was there and asked me to pick up milk and juice, which I did.

Jeffrey has taken Emma to Sunday School, nothing else really on the agenda for today. Tomorrow, mid morning, we'll head south.

I had picked up a couple of bottles of Italian wine at the local store and may get over there today to pick up some to take to Florida. Anything else ... not really.

Onward ?