the last few weeks have been filled both with new opportunities and resurfaced memories.

today i was looking on google maps and i pulled up my grandparents house in connecticut. i have a lot of memories from there, even though i did not spend nearly as much time with that side of my family as i did with my mother’s side. their house was a marvelous, old, new england style home with a wood burning stove, though i wonder if the stove is still there. i used to go there for the christmas celebration for that side of the family and remember loving that house and the smell of that stove. they also had a pool that we enjoyed in the summer. it was a round pool, and i remember everyone making a whirlpool by circling the pool in one direction and i thought it was the greatest thing to try and swim against the current. the house was also next to a cemetery, and i remember being petrified to be there at night while my sister and aunt seemed fearless.

looking at the satellite image of the house, i never realized how amazingly close to the house we lived when we lived in our apartment complex. i mapped the directions and it was actually less than a mile. less than a mile, yet it might as well been on the other side of the world. with everything going on right now, i am overwhelmed with sadness.

i was listening to a talk radio station last night and they had mitch albom as their guest. mitch, who wrote tuesdays with morrie and the five people you meet in heaven, was promoting his new book for one more day. i haven not read his other books, but i believe they were pretty popular as i recognize the names. as he was discussing his latest book, he talked about how he came up with the idea and it struck a chord with me. how many relationships do we have that if the person was gone tomorrow we would be wishing we had them for one more day?

i thought about my grandfather. i think about how little i talk to him. i think about how that mile seemed like a thousand. i have it on my to-do list to write him. it has been on my to-do list for almost a year. what if i never get the chance to send it?

i thought about my father. i think about how i have not talked to him in ten years. i think about the opportunities i have had to contact him but never did. what if i never get the chance to contact him?

i think about my friends. i have the best friends that i have ever had at any stage of my life, and i try to show them in my own way how important they are to me. if i have enough to drink, i may even tell them. i feel that i am doing some of the right things now with my friends, but that i never went back and took the time to do the same thing with those strained family relationships from the past.

i have already lost some people that were and always will be important to me. there will always be things that i wish i had said or done differently. the question, i guess, is whether I am going to make the same mistake again.

about the same time i reformated my server at home to install linux, the portable hard drive that had all of my music on it died. actually, i tripped over the cable and sent it crashing to the floor. oops.

i thought i was going to have to rescan in all of my CDs, which just didn’t sound like fun. since all of my songs were still on my ipod (luckily, since i had to reformat that a few weeks ago, too), i knew there had to be an easy way to pull the files off the ipod back to my computer. as you may (or may not) know, the ipod file system isn’t exactly intuitive.

enter igadget. it actually does a lot of things, but it provides some useful tools to grab playlists and songs from the ipod and puts them in a nice, intelligent format back on the PC. you can select by playlist, artist, song, whatever. very, very handy.

http://www.purpleghost.com/ProductDetail.aspx?productid=9

i haven’t written anything in a while, even after i made a decision to make more of an effort. actually, i just noticed that i said the same thing on my previous post. in my defense, the last few weeks have been pretty chaotic & intense. i was actually going to make a longer entry, but i haven’t been able to find the right words & nothing really seems right. i think i’m still trying to get a grasp of everything that has happened.

i cleared a huge obstacle in my life last week. many aspects of my life were on hold while i worked on this obstacle and now that it is done, i’m trying to figure out what’s next.

next. i had all but given up on “next”. i’ve been so focused on this obstacle that i think i conditioned my mind to put up barriers to anything after. the obstacle took a lot of my time and energy. i put a lot of things on hold, and have slowly started to work things back in. photography, reading, writing (no arithmetic).

next. what is next? one of the things i put on hold was dating. maybe it’s time? i haven’t exactly had the best luck in that department. there is lucky, there is unlucky, and there is me. but as unlucky as i have been, i miss…maybe not dating, but the potential. i miss sharing things with someone. i have my friends, of course, who i share a lot of things with. but when you are with someone, things are just shared differently. there is significance in that sharing that is more meaningful. it starts with the little things, the “this activity is so much better when you share it someone.” my friends have gotten to the sharing of their lives together, to sharing the experience of pregnancy and, soon, to sharing the birth and raising of their child. but even without the huge life events, the sharing isn’t any less significant. how do you know that your next first kiss won’t be your last first kiss? how do you know that you won’t be discussing the seemingly insignificant event that made you laugh with your grandkids some day?

it all seems very deep for a guy sitting on the couch in his scooby-doo boxers and an underdog t-shirt.