Thoughts on the Departed

For anyone that actually pays attention to this blog at all, I'm sorry that I haven't kept updated in the last 2-3 months. Life has been extremely hectic, and lately, very sad.

A small recap:

December was the normal festiveness. Christmas, like last year, was held 4 times: once with my mother, another with my father, again another with my girlfriend's parents, and finally when my girlfriend's sister came to the house. Needless to say, this was an exhausting period of time for me.

January was the beginning of my final college semester. Classes involve Emerging Technology, where my project is delving into Microsoft's XNA Game Studio 2.0 to create a classic 2d rpg with all the goodies, Advanced Database Design, which, pardon my language, is another term for scholarly rape, Abstract Data Structures and Design, aka abstract programming with Java, Fundamentals of Network Security, aka Hacking 101, and finally, Customer Service, the bird course of the semester. Normally, the beginning of a semester is usually pretty light.

Wrong.

Again, pardon the language, but I now have a pretty good idea of just what getting fisted is like. From the very first day, every single class, apart from Customer Service, shoved material down your throat faster than you could mentally disassemble and store the given information. It was mayhem in 4 weeks.

Another thing that roughed up the situation was the fact that, from February 15th to February 22nd, I was on a trip to Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic (which was, needless to say, amazing). This meant that I had to do a week of work ahead of time, because, nice as I am, I had decided in July that this trip would take place, not on my reading week, but on my girlfriend's reading week, to make it easier on her. I'm nice, aren't I? *pats self on back*

So January/3/4 of February were ridiculously hectic for me.

Then the trip. I won't go into a lot of detail on the trip, since I may save that for another post, or simply not speak of it at all, since there is just too much information, and it would be wasted without pictures. We have 490+ pictures. You see how this would be ridiculous for a blog post.

However, as I returned from my vacation, beaming with happiness (and a nice tan), I was informed of the fact that my grandfather had passed away while I was gone. Not only had he passed away, but that the family had held his funeral while I was gone as well.

Under normal circumstance, people expect an elderly person to die, usually when they're sickly or up in years. My grandfather's death, however sick he was, caught me like a blow to the stomach. I was floored, and still am.

George Evert Grant was my grandfather's full name. He served in the army during WWII, and was given a soldier's farewell. He died quickly at the age of 84 at the hand of a stomach tumor. He was my idol.

I can't even begin to describe my pain, or what his loss is doing to me inside.

The only way I have found to cope with this right now, is to bury myself in the work that needs to be done for me to succeed in my studies, and to program, and video edit. These things keep my mind occupied.

As to the editing part. In my previous post, I mentioned Rough Hands. That died, quite quickly, mainly because of a lack of video quality, and because of time. However, last night I began work on a video that I have had in mind for a very long time. I don't know the exact details of the lyrics, nor do they really matter for this video. A few lyrics do matter, but the main part is the flow of the video, and I have a strong feeling that I'm conveying it well. The current time stamp is 0 minutes, 42 seconds. Wish me luck.

I don't know if anyone really reads this blog on a regular basis, or checks up on it, but I'll be going ahead with the video game reviews, regardless of whether people really read this or not. It will 1: give me something to do. 2: give me much needed practice in analytical writing and reviewing and 3: hopefully benefit any new readers.

In any case, this is all I have for you today, and for the last 2 months.

For those of you that do read, thank you for reading and please be patient with me. Normally I don't keep up with these side projects (blog) and I often need encouragement to keep doing it.

Take care,

Clay