parker’s desk

It’s been a fairly busy last cou­ple of days…it’s only going to get busier in the next cou­ple of days as well, when I actu­ally start pack­ing what I’m going to shove into my car next Thurs­day for one long road trip.  I’ve done the drive to Cal­i­for­nia from Wis­con­sin back in ’98, and again from Cali to Wicon­sin in ’03, and that is close to dou­ble the miles.  This one is (sup­pos­edly) just a 20 hour drive.

The feel­ing is strange though, clos­ing this chap­ter of my life down.  I always knew Wis­con­sin wouldn’t be my final des­ti­na­tion, Kelly and I had never wanted to raise our kids here and it just clashes com­pletely with who we are as indi­vid­u­als.  Still, there is a lot of his­tory here…a lot of good his­tory in recent times, though I have to say the major­ity of the bad mem­o­ries of my life are all here as well.

So far the tough­est thing I’m hav­ing to deal with is an all-too-familiar feel­ing I specif­i­cally left the Marine Corps for.  I loved being a Marine at the end of it and prob­a­bly would have stayed in another tour if it wasn’t for my family…you’d always here the sto­ries, and even see them, about kids not remem­ber­ing their Fathers (or Moth­ers) when they came back from a deploy­ment and I didn’t want that for my kids.  Going on this three month deploy­ment (of sorts), while a smart and intel­li­gent move is def­i­nitely going to be the harder path.

My imme­di­ate fam­ily liv­ing in Wis­con­sin isn’t exactly jump­ing for joy, which I expected.  That expec­ta­tion doesn’t make the process any eas­ier on me at all, and while I wish they’d just con­grat­u­late me and offer help if it’s needed I guess the alter­na­tive is to remem­ber how this has made me (and the Wife) feel and try not to give it a repeat per­for­mance to our own kids when they choose to move on.

My sis­ter sur­prised me today, though.  I don’t typ­i­cally talk to her, we’ve had this awk­ward dis­tance between the two of us for a few years now I’d say.  That’s largely my own fault, I was bit­ter over the failed mar­riage she and a Marine Corps buddy of mine had and – per­haps unfairly – blamed her for most of it.  She’d changed a lot from the girl I knew grow­ing up in Cal­i­for­nia, too, and I think I’ve just largely come to think of her as not being her real self.

That said…today she and her hus­band did the one thing I had wished my fam­ily would have done…congratulated me, shared excite­ment over the move and left me feel­ing proud of this awe­some oppor­tu­nity instead of ashamed by it.  Need­less to say, it left me for a bit of a spin.

It’s a per­sonal goal of mine to make sure any­thing of mine is either packed or pre­pared for pack­ing, as Kelly’s going to have her hands full already man­ag­ing the close-up of our cur­rent home and the trip out to Texas with the kids & pets.  We’ve been such lazy box-packers the last few years that we have accu­mu­lated a lot of crap…me moreso than the bet­ter half, and I actu­ally man­aged to clear out eight large boxes into one sin­gle medium box.  Wow.

Going to go and start sort­ing all of my old, unwanted clothes now.

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