Sugar and spice

Having spent the day with my sister and her kids, I knew that I could be the most help to my sister while she dealt with the funeral home and all the calls from family and friends if I took her daughters out for lunch and got them out of the house for a bit. Even though it was a very sad day for everyone, we managed to enjoy the time together. I took them to a Ruby Tuesday to eat, and we sat in a booth, in the back by the restrooms, and sat around for a couple hours just talking.

I decided that some of the things I could to do to help my sister get through this would be very practical and I wanted to take care of a lot of details that she might not have the time or energy to deal with. I took the girls shopping after lunch to get new dresses and shoes for the funeral home stuff, and I went ahead and bought a couple other more fun outfits for them so they would have something nice and feel a little special.

Channel Surfing

Can’t sleep. The past couple of days have been really hard on everyone in the family. I got back to the hotel tonight around 10:00, took a shower and just fell across the bed with the TV’s remote. Watched as much of the local channel news and reruns of sci-fi that I could stand and then I started flipping through the other cable channels. The hotel doesn’t have all that many channels, but there must be something on TV at 2:00 am besides infomercials with Susan Lucci’s skin care and the next great kitchen gadget.

As I was sufing the channels I came across a headshot of someone that I recognized immediately – Steve Cropper. Now I have been a big fan of Steve Cropper for many many years and I was intrigued – what is this show about? Turns out I struck gold and had come upon a special documentary show about Staxx records in Memphis back in the 1960’s. It had info on Booker T and the MGs, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, and all the greats of the Memphis sound, narrated by Samuel Jackson.

Great show – what a lucky break that I found it this morning.

Last Minute Savings

Yesterday started off like a normal Sunday, woke up and made coffee, walked the dogs, turned on the computer to check emails. That’s when everything went downhill really fast. I had an email from my sister that her husband had died the previous night, they had tried to call but my cell phone went right to voicemail, so they resorted to email to get the word to me.

Of course, I dropped everything and made arrangements to go to Maryland to be with the family. Thankfully, I was able to find some coupons online to take care a lot of the details for this unexpected trip and I saved some money.