On April 19th its Mom and Dad’s fifty anniversary. The family is getting together for that, midday, in the middle of the three day weekend. I have some grumbles about that but it’s the week it falls and it’s special for mom and dad, and I fully realize it may be the last time we are all together as a family. I really should get some kind of gift but I really don’t want to gift some more random junk. Maybe I’ll get a gift card.
Mom keeps talking about trying live until the end of Trump’s second term to see how things turn out but I know that’s a real maybe in her mind, and the same is true for dad who appears fairly healthy on the surface but I know he’s dying from diabetes, the most recent thing is holes in his feet due to poor circulation from the disease. You can understand why I’m so horrified by processed foods and sugar more generally when it’s killing your dad.
It’s fine it’s important I be there. It’s meaningful to mom and dad and it’s only one day in a long weekend. It really is getting close to the end. I know it – and with death it seems like people are doing well and will recover until it’s over and you are at the funeral. This may be the last special event with all us together. Mom offered her classic spinach casserole or baked chicken tonight, I chose the later though maybe that was foolish with summer coming and no more winter family dinners together. Chicken seemed healthier.
I can dream of that homestead and look at properties but it’s only a matter of time before will be at that point beyond my parents and settling the estate between me and my sister. I doubt she wants the property, she has a nice suburban house with her two kids in Saratoga. It’s five acres and it has barns but the house is enormous for one person and it’s full of junk and nick-nacks that only seem to accumulate faster when you are retired and have Amazon. Plus it’s a full featured old grid tied house with all the normal problems.
Truth is it’s going to be an enormous headache if I end up with it getting rid of all the junk. Though I do eye the barn with the hay loft goat stalls, have ideas for improving the forests and pastures by brush hogging and cutting down the crap trees, adding solar panels to the barn for more light and egg production. Yet it’s such a mess there. Plus I don’t know how much time and money to invest there if I still want to move out west upon early retirement and build that off-grid cabin. After all, how much homesteading gear can I ship across the country affordably? I really don’t want to spend my whole life in New York in an enormous grid tied, primarily oil heated house, though they do have a wood stove. Even if I can have fires within reason and camp out back most of the summer.
I know that is getting ahead of myself. I need to enjoy those final moments with mom and dad as they aren’t that many left. Even if a lot of them is crotchidity old people discussions about how Trump is destroying everything. Or how boring both of our weeks have been – me building data structures and querying databases – and them visiting doctors. Truth is that I hope to back to the wilderness sooner than Anniversary – Easter – Earth Day Weekend and if I go an Earth Day event it will be early in the morning so it’s good to be in town that weekend.
One of the challenges is to find places where the Long Path leaves the public roads. Using OpenStreetMap data I created a line intersection of the Long Path against public roads, then with some hand editing made sure only to include off-road trail sections when they meet public roads. Then I ran it against the state's reverse geocoding service to add street addresses so you can use it with your phone or car GPS.
