A sad/busy time.

Yeah it's the holidays which are always a busy time. Last week we had a death in the family. My mother's sister , my aunt Tina, passed. She was the last  member of my parents generation, at least in the U.S. I found myself more emotional at her passing than I did at my own parents passing. Maybe because she was the last one of that generation, at least in this country. I believe my father's sisters are still living. One is in Italy and one is in Austrailia. My sister has just purchased a house and will be moving shortly. This has taken up some of my time, not that I mind lending a hand. Besides I could end up living there in the future. Work has been tough. My company is in bad shape. They have eliminated the little pins they give us when we hit an aniversary date. Not that they were anything to write home about. Everybody got the same little pin no matter how many years of service you had. This was no big deal since they were cheap little pins. The only difference was what number the had written on the front. Before my original company was sold to the present company, the anniversary pins got better every five years. They were made of gold ( Don't ask me what kind because I know nothing about gold but I realse they weren't solid gold.) After 10 years they had a little ruby inserted. After 15 years they had a ruby and a small diamond chip and so on down the line. I'm sure these pins weren't real expensive but they were different at every milestone and just looked a lot nicer. Of course the original company is now defunct though the name still exits. I realise that this pin issue is small potatoes when you compare it to the 700 people they laid off last week. I managed to survive that. I thought I would be one of the first to go since I have over 41 years of service. Our vacation set up has been altered along with other things as well. 

November and December are always busy for me. In these two months there are 3 birthdays (My sisters and mine) and two major holidays. This may be the first year that my family will not be getting together for Thanksgiving. Last year was the first year that Thanksgiving was just my sisters, brother in law and myself. The years before my uncle Sam would spend the holidays with us instead of his own 4 daughters though one does live in England. There's a lot of drama going on between my cousins and I guess he just didn't want to deal with all the potential crap that could occur.  He was a lot of fun and the whole day was filled with laughter. He passed in 2011. He was a favorite of my sisters and me. We all miss you uncle Sam.

On the flip side, though I don't intend to get into politics per se and I am not picking sides here, but after the Presidential election, my lady friend and I were watching some post election programs and they showed a few humorous campaign comercials for both sides. The Obama ad was okay but the Republican one had a surprise ending that just cracked us up. I ended up finding it on YouTube. I downloaded it and cut it down from a minute to about 10 seconds. I stuck my own intro on it. It was something I put together last year to use at begining of any video I might come up with. The intro is twice as long as the clip but it was fun to make.

Well it appears that my little video is not uploading. So I will publish without it and try it again later. It could be my computer. It's been running slow lately. So I guess,

I'm outta here.