The middle kid is off to college, and I couldn’t be more proud of her. I am also jealous. I’ll get to that.

Last Friday, I loaded up Mr. Truck and headed for St. George, UT. First, I have to admit, in spite of some great childhood memories of SG, I don’t much care for the place. Too hot too much of the year, to be honest. Not a lot to do there, either. Second, my dad lives there and I do not get down there very often, even though my dad is one of my favorite people in the world. It’s too hot.

January, however, is a GREAT time to run down. I actually caught a bit of a chill on Saturday morning.

Okay – to start this one off, it’s important to know that I have a very old, very shitty laptop. It still runs Windows 7, because it can’t run anything newer. I do a lot of high end graphic work, video and audio editing, stuff like that. My desktop machine is top shelf, but the tower and the 4 screens do not travel well, as I’m sure you can imagine.

I have to work in my downtime. Even if it’s meaningless busy work, I have to be working on something, or I start losing arguments to my internal dialogue – and that guy is an asshole.

I get to about Cedar City before I find out that my guy at the shop has the Covids, and that the shop was closed all day. I’d missed a message on the company group chat, and blissfully left town none the wiser. Thankfully Charles figured it out and ran the shop for me Friday, and again on Sunday when I couldn’t get out of SG on time.

I get to Dad’s place early in the evening, and we end up in his office, talking about westerns, people we know, watches, and finally setting up a ROKU for dad on the office TV. I tell Dad that I have a bunch of recording gear in Mr. Truck and that I want to spend a little time recording him telling me stories. He takes two beats, but agrees and we make the plan to do it the next afternoon. Give him a little time to collect his thoughts, stuff like that. He’s in his eighties and a lot of those memories are way, way back in the memory machine, see?

The next morning, I’m up at 4am, drinking instant coffee, watching the news, and trying to get this POS laptop to do anything. Anything at all. Facebook loaded, GMail didn’t. Couldn’t. It’s a POS.

Time passes and I nab Kylah from where she’s staying and we head over to the campus for Utah’s University Against the War of Northern Aggression (Dixie State University*). We wander around trying to figure out where the hell we’re supposed to do new student orientation. Once we find a map, we take our small collection of other lost new students to the correct building, and get in a long line with Ky’s mom and future step-dad. Not awkward at all.

We’re filed into an auditorium to begin what we now know is a 4 hour Q&A about the school and the programs it offers. THEN, they take the kid away for a campus tour, and it’s now a sparsely populated room with just parents. Two things: 1 – it could have been handled in 45 minutes, and 2 – holy shit, this school is actually awesome.

The support system they have for student success is incredible. I mean … incredible. When I started college, we had an ombudsman and that was about it. This place has a clinic, tutoring, peer counseling, success counseling, anon anon anon. Honestly, I was very impressed at this point.

So, four hours and 4 panels of Q&As later – with only one minor kerfuffle from a couple of parents that were pissy about the school’s name change because, I guess, naming a school something that’s not a racist throwback to SLAVERY is a reason to get a burr in their britches. It was embarrassing, but it was over pretty quickly.

“We’re feeding you lunch!” they say.

“Thank Odin,” I mutter.

We go outside to meet up with the kid, and they’re handing out bags of … Chik-fil-A. You can take the racist throwback out of the school name, but you can’t take the anti-LGBTQA+ restaurant out of the program, I guess.

After Hate Burger, I got a couple of hours to spend with Ky navigating the various minefields of University Bureaucracy. It was a morass of setbacks that I don’t feel like typing about, except to say that the people who tried to help along the way were pretty cool and did their best to get things fixed.

I’m proud of Kylah. She’s taking the first steps on what looks to be an interesting, and entertaining journey through early adulthood. It impresses me, and speaks to her kind heart and caring soul, that she’s headed into nursing. Nobody gives a shit the way Kylah gives a shit. She is just that amazing.

I drop Kylah off and head back to Dad’s. Dad wants to go to lunch, and since I only dabbled with the Hate Burger, I’m totally on board. After a few minutes of intense negotiation, we decide (he does) on Chuck-A-Rama (a lot of hyphenated food places so far today). We pull up, at 3 in the afternoon, and there is a line wrapping around the building. Okay, so Café Rio it is!

Setting up the portable studio back at the house came with its own set of complications. The recorder wouldn’t recognize the SD card, nor the second SD card I went to get to see if that would work. After a couple hours, though, it suddenly started working, for no apparent reason, and I asked Dad my first question:

“So,” I said, “you were born in American Fork?”

“No,” he answered. “I was born in Salt Lake City…” and then he talked for nearly an hour. It was awesome.

We recorded for a few hours, until he got tired, and then called it a day. We made it through his early twenties, just after his military service, and made plans to have me come down in a few weeks to get more. More on this when I get it edited.

The next day, I picked up Matthias, my youngest, and we took turns driving back to Salt Lake. It was wonderful having Matthias alone for a few hours, free from distractions. We didn’t get too deep, or too serious, and I loved the whole drive.

I’m too busy, between the comic shop, the magazine, the network, and the agency – and my kids are too busy having crowded and important lives that quality time is sparce. They don’t NEED me anymore, see? They grow up so damn fast. The whole weekend was swimming in family, which is something I almost never get.

Now I’m back in town, going through the motions of my day to day, and wishing I’d had more days to spend with people I love.

I’m jealous, btw, because more than anything I wish I was financially able to go back to college and pick up a couple more degrees. I love school. I loved my college years, even if my schools didn’t have a fraction of the programs that Kylah’s does. I want a Ph.D., and I’m pretty sure I’m never going to pull that one off.

I have no idea how to sign off this week, so … thank you for reading the Totally Not A Blog Newsletter Blog.

 

* The school is being renamed Utah Tech University, which I think is just fine, you know, without all the Confederacy, Slavery, and Civil War themes it has now.