Warning: Sappy post ahead. Feel free to skip it. It’s my blog and this is my therapy for the day.

I wish you could see the beautiful young women all your granddaughters have become.

I wonder what you’d think of them.

I wish you were here to talk some sense into Ashley.

I wonder what you’d say to her. I just know she would have listened to you the way that I listened to Grandpa Ray when I was pregnant with her.

I wish you could have known Isabelle. It kills me that she is 5 and starting kindergarten and she wasn’t even born until 2 1/2 years after you left us. To me, she has always resembled you.

I wonder if your eyes would have filled with tears when you first saw her.

I wish you could have been here to celebrate your 43 wedding anniversary with Mom. It’s not fair that, instead, she had to go to the cemetery on that day.

I wonder what you would have done together to celebrate your 40th. And your 50th. And your 60th.

I wish you could see the man that Mark has become.

I wonder what you would think of his life and how he has triumphed

I wish you could see our house the way it is now. (Not the messiness, but the things we have done to upgrade and remodel.) We need to replace the flooring in the kitchen and it bothers me that you have been gone so long that you have never seen it.

I wonder what you would think of it. I wonder what your opinion on laminate flooring would be.

I wish you could have seen first Ashley and then Emily drive a car. I know, it’s scary isn’t it? Emily was only 7 when you left us.

I wonder if you would have tried to teach them to drive too. You were so patient with me.

I wish you could have seen Ashley graduate from high school. Emily will start her junior year and you won’t be here to see her graduate either. That makes me sad.

I wonder what those graduation days would be like with you here.

I wish you were here to laugh with Sam. He is so funny and has such a good sense of humor. He reminds me of you and Brett sometimes. He even sounds like you all.

I wonder how close you would be. He hardly remembers you. His only memories are of you playing Mario on the Sega and of the last time he saw you at your house when you were in so much pain. He remembers you offered him a grape. He wasn’t quite five then.

I wish you could see how happy I finally am in my life.

I wonder if you would be proud of me.

I wish you could have read this blog.

I wonder if this is what you had in mind when you said I’d be a writer someday. I wonder if you would have been proud of me.

I wish you were here so I could tell you how much I love you and how I have missed you in my life these last 8 1/2 years.

I wonder how different you would be.

I wish Mom didn’t have to live with Brett and Amy.

I wonder if you would live in the same place that you lived when you died.

I wish Mom could retire without worry.

I wonder if you would be ready for retirement, too, and if you and Mom would travel or do something fun with your retirement. I hope so.

I wish you would have been here on 9/11.

I wonder what you would have had to say about that day and about these wars we are in. I wonder who you would vote for in the upcoming election. I can think of reasons you might vote for either of them and, conversely why you wouldn’t.

I wish you could have met Delilah. You would love her.

I wonder if you would have wanted another dog after Buster died and if he’s in heaven with you.

I wish you knew how much all of us miss you and love you.

I wonder if you know that we miss you and love you still. I think you probably do.

I am so frustrated right now. Whatever is going on in my life, I always want to share it with you. If I’m depressed, you lift me up or pray for me or whatever. When I am confused, you straighten me out. When I just need some support, there you are, holding me up. Right now, I’m so frustrated and I cannot even tell you about it. It has to do with my oldest. I can’t give you the details because, you know, it may get back to her or make other members of my family angry.

God. I love her immensely. Sometimes, I am so proud that she is doing this all on her own, no assistance financially or anything. It’s difficult, I’m sure, having the income from being a part time bar waitress. Still, somehow she does it. Pays the rent. Usually she gets her car payment in on time. But still, she frustrates me so that I just want to scream sometimes.

I just want her to get her shit together. I want her to be the Mom that I know she can be. I want her to have a clear mind. I want her to be able to make appropriate decisions for her child. I want her to put Isabelle first while making those decisions. I want her to SUCCEED. But if she isn’t going to, I don’t want her to drag Isabelle down with her. I want her to give us the chance to provide for Isabelle and take care of her basic needs if she feels like it is too much for her.

This Limbo that we are in is stressing all of us out. It’s hard on Isabelle, my other children, and Jason and I. I’m sure it’s hard on Ashley, too. It doesn’t have to be. She’s been shown the path to what could make life a whole lot easier for her, but she can’t or won’t take it.

Maybe I’ve said too much. I don’t know.

Thank you all for your thoughts, prayers, meditations or whatever that you sent Lisa’s way. It must have worked because she is out of the hospital and, in fact, was able to go to the Bead Expo, which is really important to her because she makes jewelry. Look at this:

She made that for me and I got it in the mail yesterday. It’s purple for pancreatic cancer. I think the awareness for this deadly disease that took my Dad is growing because of the recent death of Gene Upshaw, Randy Pausch (the “Last Lecture” professor) and the recent diagnosis of Patrick Swayze (who is the same age as my Dad was when he died from the disease). I wish that they would treat all cancers, particularly the most deadly ones, the way that they treat breast cancer. Sometimes it seems like that is the only cancer that there is. If you want join in the Stand Up To Cancer movement, please see any of the following pages:

The Movement
The Blog
The Merchandise
The Magazine
The Videos
On Twitter

Anyway, thank you, Lisa, and thank you, also, to all of you who were thinking of and praying for her. She could still use the prayers as she battles her rare, scary and terminal cancer.

Please pray for, think about, meditate on or whatever it is you do for Lisa. She is in the hospital and could use your thoughts and prayers and good vibes and whatever else you can do for her.

I mean, really, you can tell me. I can handle it.

I have lots of friends in the blogging world. Or at least I have the illusion that I have lots of friends in the blogging world. (Don’t spoil it for me, m’kay?) Anyway, there are people, friends if you will, that I love to read and I respect them and their opinions. When they tell me to read another person’s blog because it’s “really good” or they are “really special”, I check it out. Because I value their opinion. There are a few bloggers that everyone seems to like and I just don’t get them. I’m not talking about the A-list bloggers like Dooce or Perez or Huffington. I’m talking about the high to medium B-listers. (Not to be confused with blisters. Ha, I crack myself up.)

I just don’t get what everyone seems to see in them. I think their posts are boring at best. Sometimes they make no sense whatsoever except maybe to people who are high on mushrooms or acid. They either talk about boring shit like, “I’ve been here and I’m going there and when I get back from there, I’m going somewhere else and blahbittyblahblahblah and don’t you wish were me and please click on my ads and buy some of my shit so I get richer and can travel around the world some more while you stay at home in your pathetic little house with your pathetic little life buying shit from cool people like me so you have no money left to travel because you are a pathetic imbecile wannabe”, or rambling nonsensical shit like, “the sky is green and the ground is blue and when I went home today, I saw a rabbit in my front yard and it reminded me of the time when I was a child and my father locked me in the car while he went into the bar to get drunk with his friends and I was crying and cold and then I saw UFO and I was scared and then my Dad came out of the bar and he smacked me and then we went home.”

Hey! Wake up! See what I mean? B-o-r-i-n-g. Snore.

So, as I write this, I wonder who will read it and know who I am talking about and then they will be angry at me or, worse yet, feel hurt because I don’t get what they see in the b-listers (not blisters *guffaw*) and I worry. But, I’m feeling cranky and annoyed and truthful, I guess, and I feel like people only like them because of what it can get them and it makes me gag. So there it is.

Could this possibly be the post that causes my first piece of hate mail?

FYI, for this post, I did some research on the A-listers listed above by looking at Technorati. While there, I felt compelled to see how important I am, or am not. My Technorati rank is 116,127. Woohoo, go me! *eye roll* I thought I would check out that Kineda site where they use Technorati rank to tell you whether you are an A-list, B-list, etc. blogger, too, to see where I fit there. Officially, I am a

Whoop dee fucking doo! This is the official description of C-listers (anybody know what a clister is?):

The Middle Authority Group [C-List Bloggers]
(10-99 blogs linking in the last 6 months)
This contrasts somewhat with the second group, which enjoys an average age not much older than the first at 260 days and which posts 50% more frequently than the first. There is a clear correlation between posting volume and Technorati authority ranking.

I also checked those other blogs that I listed up there. Dooce and The Huffington post are, according to them, D-listers and Perez is considered an A-lister. Who cares, right? It’s kind of fun to compare yourself to others at the Kineda site. I know it doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. The ones I don’t get are, again, according to Kineda, a b-lister (done with the joke now) and a c-lister. So there.

Anyway. Where the hell was I going with this post? Oh yeah. Is there something wrong with me that I don’t just, OMG, LOVE the bloggers that everyone else seems to think are the be all and end all of blogging history?