love lies bleeding in my hands

I'm too tired to mess around with the photo contest tonight, so you have until 10pm CDT on Saturday if you want to vote in the first round! You also don't have to leave comments on every single one - you're welcome to post one aggregated 'ballot' as a single comment if you so choose.

Today was a nice enough day, despite the weather. I took pains to look presentable, mostly because I felt like it, but partially because we were planning to go out for dinner tonight -- and the weather gave me opportunity to wear the new silver metallic sweater I'd bought just before going to Europe, for what is hopefully the last time this season. Then, I had my triweekly call with Gyre, in which I got the dirt on what's happening at work, caught up on his life, and discussed the potential of me going back to Mountain View (currently v. high).

I was really unproductive this afternoon, although I did finish unpacking and putting things away, and I went through all of my piled-up correspondence and made a list of what I need to take care of over the next few days. My brother and I went for a brief drive around town, which was depressing as always. Then, my parents, brother and I climbed into my dad's pickup (which is hard for me to get into because it's so ridiculously tall) and went out to decorate graves for Memorial Day.

This is the first time I've been home for Memorial Day since my senior year of high school (unless Aunt Becky and I left for Australia before that? I can't remember). Where Memorial Day in California means a three-day weekend (and my freshman year of college, my dorm complex hosted a party called 'Red White and Beer', which offended my patriotic sensibilities so much that I skipped the party), Memorial Day in Iowa necessitates grave decorating. My mom's side of the family involved going to three cemeteries, and leaving flowers at the graves of her parents, grandparents, some great-grandparents, three of her uncles, and my brother-in-law Roger, who was killed rather tragically in a car accident nine years ago. I also saw some awesome names (like one of her great-grandfathers, whose first name was 'Greenbury'), and got an impromptu tour of some of the backwaters of the county.

We still have to visit my father's side of the family tomorrow, but that's easier (at least physically) because they're all in one place, in the cemetery a mile west of our house. But it's really sad to walk through cemeteries where almost no one has been remembered -- the Seymour cemetery (where most of my mom's family is buried, as well as my brother-in-law) is still v. active, and they were putting out the big Memorial Day flags when we were there, so there was a pretty respectable level of decoration on the graves. But the Confidence cemetery (where her paternal grandparents and great-grandparents were buried) is split into two segments, and their graves were in the older segment -- where almost everyone died before 1960, and many of them died before 1900. There were only a couple of other graves with flowers on them -- on many of the other graves, the stones are crumbling, the engravings are weathering away, and everything is falling into the quiet desolation that makes old cemeteries so peaceful and yet so sad.

So I felt happy at participating in familial obligations, even if it really just amounted to watching my mom place flowers on the graves of a bunch of people I'd never met. We followed the cemeteries with supper in Centerville, the next major town to our east, which is where my parents met oh so many years ago. I had a ribeye and a baked potato, helping to improve my steak reserves after the terrible drought I suffered in England. Now, even though my brother and his friend Logan are playing Nintendo in the big room on our floor (conveniently using my television, which I had never bothered to hook up, but which was one of my brother's first targets for improvement when he came back a few weeks ago), I think I'm going to go to bed!