Some blog posts are for my own record keeping so, as I often do with personal items, I've left the longer posts about my mom's funeral unpublished.
I do want to say how pleased I was that several of my friends came to the funeral. I was having a particularly unemotional day (a relief since I'm a messy crier) and felt a little self-conscious about not being overwhelmed with grief. However, they all know me and it was just the moral support I needed.
Mom is buried just steps from my sister Heather and we put one of the large bouquets from the grandchildren on her grave. The one thing that stood out was the cliche of a giant crow cawing from the pine tree at the head of Heather's grave. Honestly, do funeral homes put out special crow bird-seed to attract them?

We went to Laurel's for the rest of the afternoon. The kids went swimming and I tried out my new Tough 6020 camera.

At some point, they decided we should have dinner so Tara and Ryan went to the store to pick up vegetables and steak. The cousins and Randall did everything and it was a fantastic meal. When the dining table came up one table setting short, I was voted person least qualified to sit at the adult's table and sent outside to the "kids table". I was fine with that since our family is one of story-tellers, each story well-crafted and practiced. And long-winded. The people laugh on cue for the punch line but you just know they're ready to pounce with their amusing tale.

The kids table was way more entertaining! My nieces, nephews and son are fun and witty. And Robin's two boys kept us laughing. John (5 or 6 yrs old) had swallowed so much pool water that he'd thrown up just before dinner. He was lightheaded and loopy, describing in detail the operation he's going to have in a couple of weeks to take skin from his forehead to fix a hole in his ear-drum.

Andrew (maybe 8 yrs old) listed all the R-rated movies he's watched at the homes of his friends and recited lines of dialogue , the nature of which he clearly had no idea. It wasn't anything too shocking, The Hangover, Inglorious Basterds, that sort of thing, but he kept us laughing, never sure exactly why.

We were going to do some karaoke but the dvd was missing from the box and Tara figured it was in Melissa's room which was locked. She hadn't come home and apparently to break into her room meant death or a voodoo curse or something so we had to give up on that idea.

I stayed about 20 minutes too long and by the time we'd dropped Katherine and Isabel off at the hotel and driven home, my ears were buzzing with fatigue and I had a wicked headache. After figuring out which flight they'd take home the next day, the cousins said goodnight. I didn't sleep great - too much rich funeral food and wine I guess.

The next morning, I drove Judi and Linda to the airport and then headed to the club for a paddle. I was exhausted but the lake just had little bumps rolling in towards the harbour so I did a straight out and back. It felt like a short paddle but I still covered 10k and felt MUCH better than I had in days after the enforced inactivity.