~Friday~ I was grateful for both a kind and caring management team and for being in a job where it’s possible to work remotely, as I really wasn’t feeling at all social today, and I had to make a few personal calls that I would rather not have made from the office, such as the one telling my mother that her baby sister had died.
Although I did work from home, I wouldn’t use the adjective productive anywhere in the description of my day, certainly not juxtaposed to the word very.
As a few more details emerged during the day from Karen, who is handling all of the arrangements for my aunt, I passed the information on to my Uncle Rene in Florida, who is disseminating it to the other brothers. I also had a couple of phone calls back-and-forth with my parents about possible flight times and departure dates.
By the end of the evening, plans were finalized on a short 1:00 graveside service at the Rhode Island Veterans Memorial Cemetery, where my aunt’s ashes will be buried along with my uncle’s. What’s not yet finalized is the mass. I was thinking it was going to be in the same church as my uncle’s mass, and as short, but in conversation with Karen she said she’s trying to get a church that one of my aunt’s friends go to to have the service, and in passing she mentioned a “high” mass, the mention of course which always reminds me of this (I know I just had this in my blog recently):
Tallulah Bankhead is believed to have been at an Episcopal mass in New York City one time when an incense-bearer came walking down the aisle (it was high church—a “smells and bells” service). She apparently reached out, grabbed him by the arm, and said, “Darling, your dress is divine, but your purse is on fire.”
I got to the gym at around 7:00 with a plan for a 60-minute cardio workout. Though definitely an odd choice for workout music, I started off listening to the Verdi Requiem, which of course is on my mind with my aunt and this mention of a potential “high mass” (I hope the weed’s good. 
But I digress…), and because it’s one of the two pieces of music I want played at my own memorial service.
However romantic a notion it is, the fact of the matter is that that music is not conducive to an earnest workout, not to mention that there are parts of it that are so low in volume that it’s hard to hear in a gym, so I switched it off and plugged my earbuds into the TV remote when I saw Jeopardy come on, particularly interested in today’s show since it was part of the “College Championships” series.
That tournament always takes me back to the taping of one of the shows that I went to at the RBC Center back on October 2, 2005. Oh the glory of having not missed a day of blogging in six years! I truly would never have remembered all of the details in that blog entry, and reading it now these things struck me or made me laugh:
- Love that I scanned my admission ticket in.
- Love the story of how we ended up sitting in the second row center seats, and I like it mostly because we got those seats as a result of doing something I would never do on my own—be late for an event. It just goes to show you that being on time and scheduled for everything in your life is not always the best way to be.
- Love that I created a crude diagram to illustrate, complete with numbers indicating where we started, where we were moved to, and where we ended up. I love me. (As if you couldn’t already tell.)
- Love how very much my dislike of Alex Trebek shines through.
- Love how that link that I’d included in the entry to a picture of Johnny Gilbert has become a “dead link” and what the Jeopardy people have done with what happens when you click on it now. Clever.
Go ahead, take a look at that day. 
Now that’s what I call the quintessential digital digression! Whew. Where was I? Oh yeah, back at the gym…
When today’s Jeopardy show finished up, so after 30 minutes, I stopped on the cross-trainer and moved over to the treadmill for another 30 minutes. I figured I’d watch Wheel of Fortune for the next 30 minutes, which would help the time pass faster as well. Well, poor vision and eyeglasses out in the car do not make for a good viewing of the “The Wheel,” as the most fun part of it to me is trying to guess the puzzles before the contestants do. Being able to read the puzzle is kinda germane to that task.
When it was all said and done, I’d burned off 550 calories on the cross-trainer and 315 on the treadmill. Who’s counting?
Back home, up until it was actually time to do so, I had planned to take a gander down to The Borough, where I’d raise a glass to my aunt. A nice tradition that I’ve picked up from Robert, who unfortunately has had many toasts over the years.
In the end though, the thought of schlepping out there in the cold and wet doused my desire to downtown it, and I stayed in.