Rainy Sunday in Georgia

It has been a busy week. Not only have I been preoccupied with pulling together the story of my youth for a website of my old neighborhood, I have also been helping Wheelie come to grips with finding some of his old friends via an online search.
He wasn't much for digging up the past, you see. But for some reason he got the bug all of a sudden. Maybe after all these years of watching me finding my old friends, and how much I enjoy just reliving and recalling my younger days, he got the itch himself)

He was particularly interested in finding some of the 'kids' he took under his wing back in the days when he ran a small record store in Berkeley, when he was freshly married, just got out of the army (he was stationed in Germany).
There was a group of hoodlums who would hang out in front of his store, drinking beer, getting blasted and punching people out.
Wheelie got tired of that quickly and made the decision to invite these kids to his house and get rowdy there instead. So he could keep an eye on them, and basically steer them away from going down the wrong side of the fork in the road.

Some of those kids ended up living with him off and on, but basically they became a group of friends. Wheelie still talks about those "wild" beach parties he would organize. He had a few dozen pictures from those days, and it looks like they had fun there. To me these people don't much look like hoodlums though. The beer aside, they look like clean cut college kids to me. This was early 1960's.

Anyway, he thought that the safest bet was to find this one couple that seemed destined for a long relationship. It's the couple sitting on the sand on the right, Marcia and David.

Since he kind of figured he knew where they lived, he went and searched on the web via several 'search' websites.
Low and behold, he found them. Still married, still in the same place they settled down. With grown kids, grand kids, and from the sound of it, still pretty darn happy.

Something seems to have loosened up in Wheelie. He began writing. It's difficult for him to do (typing) since he only uses one finger, and most of the time his hand shakes so much it takes him a minute just to hit the correct key. So it's quite an effort.

But he managed to get a few emails off, with wonderful results.

Since he's afraid to send attachments (don't ask, I don't understand either) I went and scanned and enlarged all those beach pictures and sent them out snail mail yesterday.

In the meantime, I was tossing around in boxes of pictures for my own story, and trying to recall names and stories. Feel free to read it, but I'm afraid it's in Dutch, ha ha.

I will re-write it in English and hopefully will blog it tomorrow.

So it's Sunday again. Boo-boo is taking her nap. Sunday is a short day, the restaurant only being open for brunch. Tomorrow is our regular day off. Tuesday she starts Day Care. She will go there Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, so we're still on the hook for the weekend, which is much better than it was. We pick her up around 5 still, so she will still have dinner/bath and go to bed here in the evenings. But at least we have our days back.

Bugs has been talking to an attorney to see how she can get Daddy to give up his parental rights.
He will most likely be in jail for the next five or six years, so she will not see a penny in child support anyway. The attorney costs money (noooo!!!!) We're willing to deep a little further into debt to pay for his retainer.
We all just want this to go away.

Things are looking up, I think....

Perhaps while the roller coaster is going upwards, I might even start to think about a short visit home for my father's 89th birthday. This is in July.

We'll see.....

SGMKJ!