my grandpa

I am not doing a good job studying right now, so I thought I should actually do something useful and update this.  I wish the stories I think to write on here could just magically appear, but so far that is not possible, and unfortunately you, the reader, will just have to wait until I find a better system to my life here before I update this more often.  

Now on a funny note and to show the state of my mind right now I will tell you what I was just doing in my attempt to "study." I have made up about 100 index cards with the most necessary information (hopefully) I need to know for my test on Saturday. I just finished the cards and instead of reading through them I just kept quickly flipping them like you would a flip book where the pictures move if you flip fast enough. Well I could get any pictures to come out, but I wonder if my mind still retained some of the words on the cards. I doubt it and will try to avoid this study method for the future.

On another note, I think my grandfather is a pretty amazing guy. For those of you who don't know, I moved into his house with him a couple of weeks ago. He is about 84 or something close to that, and he is amazingly active. I never see him during the day while I sit here at the table studying hour after hour. He goes to meet his friends for coffee at 8 every morning (I just realized this yesterday, as I hadn't woken up that early here, before this week.)  Then he spends his day busy fixing this or that, helping a friend cut down a tree, golfing with his buddies, mowing the lawn, and who knows what else. Usually around 4 or 5 he will come inside and say, "Well, I think I will call it a day." He then will read, watch the news, and maybe check his stocks and play some solitaire on the computer for the evening. I hope I will be that energetic and active when I am his age. 

The other night, as we were watching the news about Ike, he recalled a bad storm that hit this area in 1930. At that time he was going to trade school to be a carpenter. The storm was so bad that they couldn't drive all the way home, stopped about half way, and ended up walking home the next day, as there were too many trees down to drive.  This story led to him telling me about his Navy days, and spending 29 months on a ship in the south pacific, without a trip back to the states during that time.  His longest stint being on board the ship for 6 months without ever walking on land. Bombs and artillery were heard most hours of the day. As soon as he came back to the states, he took a month leave, came home and married my grandmother, whom he was engaged to. They had each been writing letters every day to each other while separated. 

I had never heard those stories before, or if I had, I had forgotten them. I look forward to hearing more stories and finding out about the many adventures of my grandfather.