home again, jiggity-jog.

got back into houston around 1:00am. went back to work today. i feel pretty out of it at work. i’ve told stephen about things, but then he’s known what was going on the whole time pretty much. i told my dept manager last week because i was worried that management would notice the recent downtown in my productivity and attitude and such. so i wanted him to know what was going on and why my work might seem to have slipped recently and may be that way for awhile. he was really understanding about it. but then he’s a “yellow” (color designations for personality types based on a program called insights…don’t ask), so caring about others is what he likes to do.
the trip went okay. i completely lost it trying to load the motorcycle in the pickup by myself on saturday. i dropped it over once and broke a passenger peg, then i couldn’t get it started, then it started raining on me. it was too much for my fragile state. fortunately, about an hour later jack was able to come over and help me get it loaded. so i took off several hours later than i’d planned.
i got the motorcycle dropped off at my brother’s without too much incident. he had said his driveway was steep…i consider mine fairly steep and it’s maybe a 15 degree slope. well, i got to linc’s (first time i’d been to this place) and his driveway was like 40 degrees or something. it was crazy. after several scary manuvuers in my pickup, i ended up driving into the front yard and we unloaded the bike onto the porch and then moved it down into the carport.
the time home was somewhat awkard but not too emotionally traumatic. the awkwardness was because my parents and i never talked about the situation until the last night. it went about like i’d expected it to. my dad had sent me a couple of e-mails so i already knew sort of what he thought, and my mom had sent me numerous e-mails so i already knew where she was coming from.
surprisingly, the conversation with my grandmother went well. she wasn’t super strongly opinionated about much and i learned some new things about my family history. i’m sure it was troubling for her to hear though, and i hope that she can deal with it okay in the coming days, weeks, and months.
on monday i spent most of the day with my dad, going out to our land and shooting some guns. i had done neither in a long time. it was good to go out and try to reconnect with some of my family heritage, but it was also sad because i’ve not really been out on the land in a long time and a lot of things have fallen apart over time. a pecan grove almost completely died a few years ago during a long drought and hard freeze…i hadn’t seen it before. almost all of the trees were dead and falling down. the old “roads” (two dirt tire-tracks) on a lot of the land were barely visible, if visible at all. and pickly pear has taken over the places almost completely. it’s amazing. it makes me wish i lived closer to it, or on it, so i could do more to make things better. of course, that’d take both time and money, and neither my parents, nor my brother, nor i are very wealthy. and i for one am rather lazy, so time doesn’t really do much good for me either unfortunately.
while we were out and about, we also stopped by an old small cemetary out by the llano river off a dirt county road. some of my leifeste ancestors are buried there — several of whom are the ones that came over from germany. i was sort of overcome with emotion and had to choke back some tears. but then i’m not really in the best mental state these days, am i?