Update on Mr Honey

This was stolen and edited from an email I sent out recently.

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I am hanging in there. I have the waterworks going every now and then. When I was at the airport in Boston I saw something that reminded me of Abbey near the end. It was tough and I had to put on my sunglasses to hide my moist eyes. I was catching up with a friend on the phone last night and was explaining how on Valentines day Abbey and I would give each other monkeys...that was our thing. I still have all those monkeys up above the TV in the living room.

I am doing my best to move on with life. The darkroom in the basement is pretty well done and I have developed 4 rolls of film down there. I found that there were some pictures of Abbey that I had forgotten about. I have been printing out pictures that I have taken and building up a portfolio. Not sure what I am going to do with it yet. I have also signed up for a photo trek. I am going to Vietnam and Cambodia in February with a program called the "Mentor Series". They setup trips all over the world and put together these great photo trek packages. There will be two professional photographers that will be on this trek with us and each day we will take 5 of my best photos and the pros will give me a critique and advice for the next day. I am really looking forward to it. The trip is pretty well packed with photo locations and full days of exploring local villages and temples. I am thinking about where I can go next...I have a travel book upstairs and have earmarked quite a few different pages.

We finally sold the 4Runner to one of my cousins. She will be coming out on business next weekend and will pick it up then. A lot of people ask me if I feel ok in this house with Abbey gone. I think that the work that mom and Carol did helped out more than I will ever know. If I was here to try and pack up Abbey's stuff I would have wanted to go through each and every little thing and it would have been long and arduous task. There is still plenty here that reminds me of my honey, but I think it is at a much more manageable level.

So far this year I have been to 3 funerals and missed one because of work. 4 funerals in 3 months seems just crazy to me. One of those funerals was for a former co-worker. He used to work for me at FRII and we hired him when he was just 16. He was a smart and cocky kid. He had a wife and two kids. I found out this past Monday that he had jumped out of the 20th floor window of a hotel in downtown Denver to commit suicide. I talked with my mom about it and I just don't understand what can be so bad in a person's life that they have to end it and take their own life. I don't know. Mom just always has the right words.

Life is a strange thing and I think it got stranger for me back in 2007. My sense of what a normal life is changed back then. My life was no longer normal. Abbey and I kept wanting it to go back to the normal that we knew before but that was not to be. I don't know that we ever came to grasp the fact that what we were living was our new normal. We didn't grasp that because we did not want it to be our normal. My normal changed again in August. I have decided that as of now I am going to make my normal. I have that choice...I have that ability.

No matter what I have been through up to this point in my life, I would do it all over again.

Things will get better.