Day 131

Today was a relatively good day. My anger from yesterday was mostly gone by the time I woke up this morning. (Yeah, sleep!) I had a good call this afternoon with a customer prospect that is getting very close to contract negotiations, and Dawn and I went for a nice walk in the park. And without dumb and dumber this time. It was a good day to be outside. A little on cool but low humidity. I'm looking forward to this weekend and spending more time outdoors. Pretty sure that I'll fire up the lawnmower on Saturday...

As we are well into the back half of April, I'm sitting here wondering what our summer plans would have been had we, you know, never left the Before. There would have been a trip to Iowa but I don't know if Damian or I would have gone. Damian probably, but me probably not. It would have been a lot easier on Dawn since Damian would have been able to handle part of the driving. After Iowa I don't know what we would have done. I'm not sure that we would have been able to get Damian to go to any sailing camps or clinics. Probably just a couple regattas. I had told him in the fall that he wasn't going to sit around the house all summer so he was either going sailing or going to work. His choice. If I had to put money on it, he would have gotten a job. Either part time at the warehouse where Dawn works or at Micro Center. 

Damian loved Micro Center. It's a big box store for computer nerds. I remember taking him there a couple of years ago because he HAD to have a new graphics card. The one is his gaming computer was just not powerful or fast enough even though it was only a year old. As we were looking at the cards behind the glass front of the locked case a sales associate came up and asked us if we needed any help. Damian looked at me like I was going to do all the talking. I just looked at him and said, "This all you, Damian. Tell him what you are looking for and why." With that encouragement, he whipped around and rattled off the make and model of graphics card he was looking for and told the guy he wanted it for his gaming computer. The sales guy then asked Damian what kind of motherboard he had in his PC and before I knew it they were speaking 100% nerd: cores, overclocking, flux capacitor... Almost immediately my fight or flight instinct kicked in and I hurried off to go look at the big screen TVs. I knew then that Damian was in his element. That he had found his tribe, nerdy though they may be. Given his technical aptitude, depth of knowledge, confidence and poise, I have no doubt that Damian would have made a great part time Micro Center employee. The only downside is that he would have burned through his paychecks buying computer equipment but I would have been mostly ok with that. My outlook being that the more he learns about computers now the farther he will be able to go with it in his career. 

Damian was such a smart kid. I miss his big, nerd brain. 

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