Visiting home for the wrong reason...

So, last Monday Peggy Taylor, one of my Mother's best friends and the mother of two of my childhood friends, died from brain cancer that she'd been suffering from for a few years. So, in a rush, my wife and I gathered up a bunch of our nice clothes in a hurry and flew out to Maryland for the service on Thursday. There wasn't a body or a casket, as she had donated her body for research, but she was very much there nonetheless.

Something like this makes you really appreciate your own parents, and happily enough this is a perfect time to do that, as my Mom's birthday is in a few days and all of her sons are here to celebrate it with her for once.

I've also had the chance to meet up with a couple of old friends from high school that I hadn't met in a long time, Dave Burnham and Rob Stevens - it was really great to catch up with the both of them and to share some of what had happened to us. Dave's got two boys, and Rob has a girl, which put me in the rear with none. But it was really cute - it was a birthday party for Dave's youngest kid, and it was a lot of fun watching them run around and have fun.

Tonight we celebrate my mother's birthday, and tomorrow we celebrate my cousin's... so it's a lot of birthdays to balance out the loss, I suppose.