Yesterday was a rough day for the family back east. My ex-father-in-law, Bob Cottage, died unexpectedly in North Carolina. While he has been sick a while (leukemia), he was doing better lately. He died a few minutes before EMTs showed up at his house to take him to the hospital.

And then we received the news of a COVID case in the immediate family, in Kentucky. Our family has been largely untouched by the pandemic, but I guess that’s over. We’ll be watching over this person anxiously.

On the Left Coast, yesterday we ended a two and a half day camping trip on Silver Strand State Beach, just south of Coronado. We “camped” in a blacktop parking lot next to a busy road, where we and two other friends parked their RVs right next to us. This campground is a traditional one for one of my friends; they’ve been coming here since childhood. So I suppose they could ignore the road noise, the press of humanity, the smell and noise of the sewage pump truck running up and down the aisles, and the plethora of Let’s Go Brandon flags on the big rig RVs. But I couldn’t. Add to all this the fact that I failed to bring a comfortable outdoor chair, so nowhere to sit, and it was a pretty miserable weekend.

In all fairness we did have some great meals and conversation around a little gas firepit by one of our RVs. It was good to see old friends. But there’s gotta be an easier way to accomplish that.

Final thought, there’s a LOT swirling around in my world all of a sudden. Some destructive chaos in one of my Board companies that I have to try and sort out, a death and a COVID case in the family, one of my brothers making a life-changing move, the ongoing saga of an old friend of mine fighting cancer…it’s a lot. Kind of makes me want to hunker down and just read books.