Posted on

Four U-Hauls and an Empty Nest!!!

Since July 2nd I have rented four different U-Hauls! I’ve driven around town and gone north, south, and west. I knew this would be a busy summer but it didn’t turn out exactly as I thought and that’s a good thing!

I’ll start with the second U-Haul. On August 12th, after a week in Catalina and a wedding, we headed to LA to move Sierra to Loyola Law. It was a quick trip! Zio Matt drove the U-Haul and I was grateful that I didn’t have to! Aunt Denise tagged along and we got her moved in to a beautiful apartment. A month later she is studying hard and enjoying the experience!

The third U-Haul was a cargo van that I rented to take Camille to school. After all my past U-Haul drama, I finally found Rodeo Rentals. The owner is excellent! I was supposed to rent a trailer to tow but I did not have the correct lights on my car so he helped me decide the next best option, which was the easy to drive cargo van. The bonus of the cargo van was the extra space I had to bring IKEA purchases home. More on that later! Camille got settled in and is all ready to start school next week!

So the dreaded empty nest has happened! And I’ve barely had time to think about it! A series of things have happened that have made it a little easier to deal with my empty nest!

Patrick took good care of me and that carried on after he died. The decisions he made have enabled me to have a secure future and I’m very blessed that this has given me opportunities. The biggest opportunity yet came in late June when I went into escrow on a family beach house with my sister and brother-in-law. This is not something Patrick and I would have been able to do but he would have absolutely loved it! I’m so excited about the family trips in the future! Buying and furnishing the house has been fun!

After our offer was accepted we began making plans. I gave up my garage to store the furniture we began accumulating, beginning with an epic Costco trip on July 2nd that required a U-Haul to get our purchases home!

We thought it was going to be a quick escrow but there’s always some sort of snag. So, after a lot of false alarms we officially closed last week, the day I moved Camille to Davis. The trip to IKEA, to get a desk for Camille, morphed into a three hour shopping experience, mainly to get things for my room at the beach house (see picture below).

On Saturday we packed up the fourth U-Haul and drove to the beach house. There is still a lot of work left but we mostly moved in last weekend. I was fortunate that I was able to take my computer and do my school work while I worked on getting everything hooked up.

I still can’t believe how blessed I am to be a part owner of a beach house. Sometimes I feel a tiny bit guilty that I am finding joy in life. This is not what I had planned but I am 100% sure that I have Patrick’s blessing.

Just in case I started feeling too special, reality struck and my Clovis house was semi-flooded when a toilet valve broke. I left paradise and came home to loud fans and musty smells! And guess what? It was not the end of the world and nowhere near the worst thing that has happened to me. Denise and Denny came through just like they always do! Denny shut the water off and Denise dealt with the plumber and the cleanup people until I could get home. I’m not sure what’s going to happen as far as damage and cleanup but I will just deal with it as it comes up.

I’m reluctant to share this next part because I don’t want to jinx it. Right after I moved Sierra to LA, I met someone really special. His name is Bruce. We are enjoying getting to know each other and he is bravely meeting my big, crazy family. His first introduction was a teNyenhuis family get together. And, he was able to help with the beach house move and really get to know my siblings and one set of parents. They loved him! Tomorrow, he’s going to the Boyles family reunion with me! He deserves more than a short little paragraph and I’m sure I’ll write more in the future.

So, it’s been a busy, crazy, wonderful summer. I’m excited to see the girls following their dreams and I am very blessed that the good things happening made it a little easier to face the dreaded empty nest! Hopefully things will slow a little more and I will have more time to write. For now, thank you for always being there for me! ❤️❤️❤️

Posted on

The Days that Change our Lives

I remember growing up and hearing about Pearl Harbor, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy. I always thought those must have been difficult days but it was hard to really grasp the enormous effect they had on the nation.

I began to understand a bit more the day the Challenger exploded. I was going to school to be a teacher and was really excited that a teacher was going into space. I couldn’t watch the lift-off because I had class and I think I was in class when I heard about it. I left school after that class and went to watch the news with Ruben, my boyfriend at the time. I was sure that the astronauts were in some sort of escape pod and would be pulled safely out of the ocean. I held onto that hope for hours before finally realizing there would be no rescue. I think that may have been the first time that I realized our nation was not as invincible as I thought.

Almost 10 years later I watched in horror as the devastation in Oklahoma City was shown. This was upsetting in a different way as I realized that there were truly evil people in the United States and world. There were other tragedies over the years but I always assumed that my generation, and the ones that followed, would never experience the fear and horror that our parents and grandparents experienced.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I wasn’t feeling well and was still in bed and planning to call in sick. Then the phone rang and it was my sister Denise calling. She was in tears and told me that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. I turned on the news and Patrick and I watched as the terror unfolded. I felt like the world was falling apart. For a while it seemed like it wouldn’t end as we received word of additional crashes and watched as the towers fell. I spent that day and the next several days waiting for people to be rescued from the rubble. I couldn’t imagine that so many people would be dead.

This was also the first time I realized that when things like this happen, and you have people depending on you, it’s important to hold it together for them. I’m not saying this to brag, it’s just the way life is. I pulled myself together and went to work. I knew that life wasn’t stopping, people would still be calling Aetna, and my team would need to answer calls.

The phones were slower than usual, which was a blessing. At one point I left and bought a small tv for my desk and it was tuned into the news a lot of the time over the next few weeks. We were preparing for Customer Service Week and the City of Fresno was issuing a Proclamation in recognition of that. On the afternoon of September 11th I had a meeting with our HR rep to draft the proclamation. I couldn’t believe she still wanted to meet. I just wanted to pick up my babies and go home to watch the news! We got through it and I left for the daycare center. When I got there it was just like any other day. They knew they couldn’t focus on the terror and it was the right decision but it was very strange to me at the time. Things slowly went back to normal, at least as normal as anything could be. A few weeks later the mayor, Alan Autry, came to Aetna to deliver the proclamation and speak to us. He managed to take the message of customer service and tie it into patriotism. He reminded us that we were all doing our part to keep the country going. He ended by encouraging us to join him in singing God Bless America and it was very inspiring.

September 11th affected me profoundly and the world hasn’t really been the same since then. In those early days we all came together as a country and that made us all stronger. Sometimes it feels like our country will never be united like that again and that makes me sad. I wish that we could all focus on our commonalities instead of differences. You never know when we will need to come together again to get through another tragedy.

I think there have been many things in my life that prepared me for the personal tragedy I was destined to experience. 9/11 taught me that I have inner resources of strength that I didn’t even know existed. I also learned that no matter what, life goes on. People say that I’m strong and many people feel they don’t have that kind of strength. I prefer to think I am determined. Determined to keep moving forward. Determined to show my girls how to move forward. Determined to leave a legacy for Patrick. I will never forget 9/11 and I will never forget Patrick.

Posted on

The Infamous Flip-Phone

I now have the infamous flip phone and it works. I was bracing myself not to be disappointed if it didn’t but I charged it for a few hours and it worked!

I don’t know why but it has always been very helpful to me to have details of those last few days. Many people had shared their final texts with him so I didn’t think there would be any surprises. Still, I was hoping there might be something.

I wanted to know what the last texts and calls sent and received were. The last text exchange was between he and I on Monday, April 18th. They were normal texts about him dropping the bus off and me picking him up. The last call he received was later that day when Burnett’s Auto Repair called to tell him what was wrong with the bus. The next day he called me a little after 5:00. I don’t remember exactly what that call was about. And, of course, there was a missed call from me on the morning of the 20th, when I was looking for him.

There were no voice mails because he went through a lot of trouble to turn off that feature. In typical stubborn Patrick fashion he decided that he didn’t want to get voice mails. I’m sure he had a very long explanation for why and I know I knew it at one time but the memory has faded. Those of you who knew him can probably imagine that it was equal parts logical and ridiculous! All I know is that his boss and employees were probably very annoyed about not being able to leave a message!

I looked through the pictures and they were a pretty good summary of things that were important to him. I apologize for the poor quality of the pictures. I’m still trying to figure out how to get them off the phone so, for now, I only have pictures of pictures.

There were a few pictures of me.

A lot of pictures of the girls…

Sierra’s eye was bothering her and he thought she looked like a pirate.
Fishing with Camille

The girls on his 49th birthday, right before the Paul McCartney concert.

I will put the rest of the pictures at the end of this post. I also found quite a few texts in his “drafts” folder. Here is one that he was possibly planning to send out, it’s exactly the kind of gem I was looking for!!!

“Hey it’s Patrick. If you don’t know who I am please disregard this message as it’s going out to my entire address book. After much soul searching I have decided to abandon my cell phone as it has not substantially improved the quality of my life. Just another inconvenience. Anyway if you need to contact me call my wife, she loves her phone more than she could ever love any man and knows how to find me. Peace out.”