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Shoxthemonkey

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About Shoxthemonkey

  • Birthday 09/22/1952

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  1. The fathers don't need to be gone. Writing about him while he is still with you could spark lots of good conversations now. Do it anyway because I don't know how much time I have left and I want to read about it.
  2. I am going to need to sit down and write a lot of what I want to say and edit it over time before I post any more of it here. My hope is that this encourages a lot of you to do the same and share with us all.
  3. @Brisketexan started a thread about the passing of his father and it has started a lot of us that have also lost our fathers to look back fondly on lessons learned and experiences with them. @dcbc suggested that we start a thread for those memories, so here it is. Let's hear them. I'll start. My Dad was a farm kid that joined the Navy in 1944, served on the USS Wisconsin at Okinawa, saw the world and didn't want to go back to the farm. He eventually went to work for the USPS, working his way up to an office job in Schemes and Routing. It was his job to figure out how to get mail trucks to and from the sectional centers around Wichita and keep it all flowing. He also had to determine which carriers were given airmail routes that originated in Wichita. Enough background for now. 1973, I was a newlywed and my wife and I decided to fly to St Louis to visit my brother. We bought tickets from TWA and excitedly arrived at the airport, She had never flown before. We went to the counter and the ticket agent noticed the last name and asked if Old Man Shoxthemonkey was any relation to me. I said he was my father and we were promptly upgraded to first class. We took the trip, first class going and coming home, and thought, wow, what a trip! We stopped at the folks on the way home from the airport and recounted the story. My Dad flipped out, he was horrified. The next day he reported the incident to his superior and received a reprimand for it. I'm not sure it would have ever been known otherwise but it was a valuable lesson for me to do the right thing, even if it might have been possible to ignore it. I have a lot of funny memories too.
  4. I'm sorry for your loss, Brisket. It is painful to go through for sure but at some point the pain subsides a bit. The best part is that every damned day you will have a random thought that reminds you of your Dad and you will smile broadly. My Dad has been gone for 15 years and there hasn't been a day that I haven't thought of him and smiled.
  5. I was hoping that he would land on a moving walkway.
  6. Ouch. At least we don't have any wind with this. It could be so much worse.
  7. And I've never needed one and could have used it 3 times already.
  8. The wife and I are looking into the alerting watches for ourselves. Just another door I haven't wanted to go through but it seems like it might be helpful. We moved both of our parents to our town when they reached the point that they couldn't drive on their own. The wife is a retired nurse so it fell to her to check on them several times a week. Eventually that became daily and then it became too much for her and we moved them into assisted living. Every one of those changes was met with resistance because they knew that things would never go back to what it was. Now, we find ourselves facing a lot of the same things and it saddens the fuck out of me.
  9. The Calexico original is one of my favorites but Allison's voice and these harmonies make this better IMHO.
  10. Better players would make more of a difference.
  11. The handle you see in the foreground is my generator. I can unplug my furnace from the wall and plug it into the generator in less than a few minutes.
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