I was out of town this past weekend, for a celebration of life for my grandmother who passed away back in mid July. I grew up in Tallahassee, FL which is where she was when she passed, so it was a quick weekend trip of arriving late Friday night and getting back home mid afternoon yesterday.
At the celebration of life, my grandmother had asked that her four grandsons would speak. Two of my cousins were not able to attend, so my Uncle read their prepared remarks for them, and then my brother spoke and then I did. I’ve never had to deliver a eulogy before, and despite all of my experiences as a writer, this one was tough.
Eulogies occupy a weird space I think - you want to say nice things, but of course no one is ever perfect in their life. The goal is to share good memories and celebrate the person, but it’s hard to sometimes look past their relationships with other people. And with my grandmother there was a lot of complications with other family members. So I did the best I could, touching on the good and ignoring the bad, getting teared up more than I expected and apparently I did a good job because people complimented me afterwards.
But I’d like to think that when my time comes, if there is a eulogy or celebration of life, that people can be honest and not overlook my imperfections (the ones that we all have) and can at least acknowledge them because those imperfections are what make our relationships all the more human.
I’m glad that there were so many people for the celebration of life, and glad I was able to spend time with my family and be there for my mom and other family members, but I’m not looking forward to having to do any other eulogies any time soon.
I previously shared about my four cats, so to keep Blaugust going while I travel this weekend, I thought I should share some pictures from them at their uhh…most cat. Enjoy!
Elton John, pretending no one can see him
Blondie doing her best impression of a sleeping meer cat or whatever this is
Tina Turner, having a drink from the faucet. Seriously, this cat is obsessed with water, sinks, faucets and anything wet
Bisque, feeling how we all do knowing tomorrow is Monday
I’m out of town for the weekend for a celebration of life (more on that probably next week), so this post is coming to you from the future OOoooooOOo. Or is it from the past? I don’t know, I just scheduled it to post when I wasn’t going to be able to
In the meantime, since it’s a quick trip I packed pretty light. Sadly though, these two didn’t come with me, but they would have if they could have.
Check back tomorrow for some “funny cat pics”, as no matter how enshittified the Internet gets, everyone still seems to love a good cat pic.
Happy Caturday all!
Since switching to Apple Music from Spotify, I’ve started totally fresh with what they recommend. This is helpful because it’s a clean slate, but it also makes it hard to discover stuff that you might like based on your preferences. A clean slate is nice but I still need to have somewhere to start if I’m going to jump into music fresh.
I like a lot of indie rock, mostly leaning more towards indie pop, but I’m open to most styles of music in general (except 99.999999% of country)
Anyway, I was browsing the new releases in indie and came across American Football, a band that I’ve never heard before. On their newest album, American Football (Lp4) , they seem to mix some excellent backing sound with a bit of rock, a bit more orchestral sound and great song writing that is somewhat muted behind the music.
I really liked it and need to give it another listen or three. I’m really bad at describing albums/music so I’ll just say the standout tracks that caught my ear are Patron Saint of Pale , Wake Her Up and No Soul to Save . Here’s an embed of the album if you’re on Apple (or just want to search on Spotify or wherever for them), check it out!
In response to a birthday wish blog post by Michael Klamerus, I’m going to talk about an obscure game from when I was a kid - Operation Inner Space!
I played this game at least a dozen times at a friends house back in the early 90s. It originally ran on Windows 3.1 and was a total blast to play.
The premise of the game is that you are “inside” your computer. After a long intro screen where your space ship is “transported” into your computer. You choose the drive you want to play on (yes, back when you had a C, D or E drive) a you then float around in space, similar to Asteroids, blasting random space junk but also at random intervals actual files on your computer. Shooting an icon is fun, but blasting a .exe or .dll file? That’s the best!
But the thing that actually really made me remember this game were the ships themselves. There were dozens to choose from, from animals to funky space ships to even a rubber duck. The novelty of being “inside” your computer, blasting random files as a purple rubber duck was just catnip to my pre-teen brain.
There‘s something weird and wonderful about old PC games like Operation Inner Space. Developers didn’t have millions of dollar budgets, or marketing machines or even the internet. You had to learn about new games from word of mouth or through magazines or BBSs if you did have internet access. And then you could share those floppy discs with friends, games that were written efficiently to maximize disk space. That whole era has a strong DIY vibe that you just can’t find anymore, and is why I love stuff like the IndieWeb nowadays so much.
And the most amazing part about Operation: Inner Space ? You can still buy it and play it! The company’s website has a full walk through on how to get it to run on 64 bit computers, including how to set it up using DosBox for play on Linux or Mac. Yes the full version costs $25 (yes really) but as someone who LOVES old games (I mean, I have a Galaga tattoo for god’s sake) this just hits a sweet spot for me. I may have to get DosBox working and try the shareware demo and relive my summer days from 30+ years ago.
And if you’re curious to see what it was all about, check out this YouTube video showing the gameplay