Life is weird...

If you've known me in real life, you would more than likely have heard me use the phrase (more than once).  It's sort of my go to phrase when I really don't know how to respond, or the response in my head wouldn't be suitable for the audience outside of my head.  Well, that's sort of where I've been... in the weird part of life.

I stepped away from my blog back in August to get the school year underway.  It was a big school year start, Bobcat was starting the 7th grade and lots of things in our daily life were being switched around to change up our school year.

It was a great start.  The subjects were working, co-op was going well... I felt really good about how things were unrolling. But I still wasn't making time to blog... there was still just too much on my plate to spend time here... to collect my thoughts in sentence format.  So where's the weird part???  This will take a few turns, but it will all get out on this page with time.

For the first time since October I redid the calendar in our school room... you know the kind with the changeable months and dry erase markers.  October was shaping up to be a fun month... we were about to leave for a camping trip after co-op on the 18th.  Nearly every day since I've come into this room, our office, and seen that calendar and couldn't bring myself to change it.  It contained all the dates for what was supposed to happen, but it lacked the ONE thing that did happen.

Two weeks ago, for the first time since October 18th, I listened to a voice mail that I hadn't deleted.  I just bought a new phone, and was selling that one.  I knew that was the last time I would hear that message.  I had never deleted it before because it was like a little snap shot of what my life was like at 11:01, and how everything changed at 11:02.

It's weird, when we are faced with a tragedy, what we choose to do... or not do.

At 11:02, October 18, 2012, my phone was on silent and I was about to head into my classroom to teach co-op.  I didn't feel it buzz in my pocket.  At 11:05, I decided to see if Daddio had responded to a picture of Bubba I sent him, after his first Mass he got to serve at.  That's when I saw that I had a voicemail from my mother's home.  At first glance I decided not to even check it.  I would just check it in an hour after my class... but the class before wasn't quite done, so I stepped around the corner so I could quickly listen to it.  The voice in the message identified himself as a police officer and that it was an emergency.  He wanted me to call the home number immediately... and in the background I could hear my mother screaming.

My father had been killed in a car accident that morning on his way to work.  The call came right after the officers arrived at my mother's home.

Life has been weird since then.  I've had to do things, that at 33 I really hadn't planned on.  I've had to say things to loved ones, that at 33 I never thought I would be saying.  Today, as I erased the calendar, I cried, because I was replacing it with February.  As I filled in all the birthdays I chose to put my father's birthday on there... next week my dad would have be 58.  Life is weird.