I gotta go down on Monday and visit my friend [Name]. [Name] is a native of Moscow. And the story on [Name] is that his parents, his father was an engineering professor and his mother was an economics professor at a university in Moscow. And as a young boy, they thought that he should learn how to speak English. So he had taken English classes. And when he went through school, and he finished getting his doctorate degree in engineering, he wanted to go to an English -- to get a job in an English-speaking country. And somewhere, he found a directory and he wrote letters to everybody in that directory in, I think, Australia, New Zealand, England, and the United States, of course. And I received one of those letters. And I was involved in selling my product all over the world and the Russian market looked like it was just going to be -- start becoming available to the world. And so, I wrote him and answered his letter and said, "Hey, if you ever come to the United States, I sure would be interested in talking to you." And I got a letter back from him saying, well, he wasn't -- wouldn't be able to come to the United States unless he had an invitation. And, you know, that he would need an invitation from me to be able to come to the United States. So I wrote back to him and said, "Well, I'm gonna be at a trade show in Warsaw, Poland. And if you could come over to Warsaw, Poland, we could maybe work something out." So, I went to the trade show in Warsaw and [Name] came over there to visit me. And we made a deal that I was going to pick up his cost of coming to -- he was gonna meet me in Paris, at a trade show in Paris. And then after the Paris show, he could accompany me to the United States, and he would attend a trade show in the United States and he would be living with me at my home. And after, he'd have a six months tourist visa, in effect an invitation to visit the trade show in Las Vegas. So that's what we did, he -- I picked up his airline ticket and came to Paris. Got him another ticket into the US…

My car still had its snow tires on it and I wasn't getting them off until like, Tuesday of this week. So I was like, okay, we can't take my car on the highway 'cause like, it's gonna be bad with the tires. So we took my husband's car, which is an electric car. And I thought we'd be fine, range-wise. In fact, I'd even looked for a place we could probably plug it in on our way up there if we stopped for lunch. Um. But we didn't end up plugging it for, in for lunch, but we went about our business. I really wasn't thinking about it. And that night, my husband said, "You know, we're gonna have to charge the car before we get home," and I was like, "Oh yeah." Um, you know, and I didn't want to, I didn't want to have to like, be sitting in the car for like, you know, two hours waiting for it to charge and he said, "No, no, no, it'll charge really fast if you can find, you know, just find us one of those plugs that has the rapid charging." I went online to do that and realized only then that the -- so, my husband's car is a Nissan Leaf, and it uses, I'm not gonna pronounce this right, it's like, I'm gonna call it Chad Demo (CHAdeMO). I'm sure it has a different name, but its charging plug is, is a Chad Demo size, and, um, at the time the car was manufactured, I think they thought more cars would do Chad Demo. But then, and my husband said, GM came out with its electric cars, it decided to use the same kind of plug that Teslas use, and so now most charging stations don't do Chad Demo. And now, in fact, even Nissan now sells cars with like both plugs, so you can do the other one, but my husband's car could only do Chad Demo. And I went online to look, to see, and there were only two places in the entire city of Midland that had Chad, Chad Demo. And I was like, "Oh, great." So what I told my husband I'd do was, "Well, I will, uh --" We only had 48 miles of charge and, you know, we had to get home. It was like, you know, 100 miles or…

I guess the first time, ironically, I can think of that somebody suggested I watch something and I thought I would hate it, uh, I was, I believe, seven years old. And my parents didn't get to catch this in theaters, so they brought it home as a rental on VHS. Um, and it was the first time we had a rental where you had two, two tapes that you had to switch out at a certain point in the movie. And that movie was Titanic, which is hilariously ironic that I thought I would hate it, uh, because it is my favorite movie. I watch it multiple times a year. I have it on VHS and VHS widescreen. I have a fan cut that includes all the deleted scenes, um, on my PC -- can't currently access it.  Titanic, when I first watched it, I, I remember the opening scene being like the, the waves and, you know? And they have the, the logo for Titanic show up or whatever? I was like, “Ugh, I'm not gonna like this movie,” and as I watched it, it, it struck me for a few reasons. I really resonated with Rose because my home life was terrible. And I, I'm not sure if the movie affected me this way, or I was already affected this way and I understood the movie better, but my childhood very much was focused on if I can find a man that has the ability to take me away from this home life and start a new life together, I, I have hope. Um, I always fantasized about somebody taking me away from my home life and, and completely leaving it and finding myself as a person and being free to do the things that I wanted to do. Um, and Rose does that in the movie, and I always, I think, held on to that. And then, as I got older, I fell in love with the historical accuracy of Titanic. I, at this point, Titanic -- I could really go without the love story. I really could. I would've rather watched a Titanic, maybe, that focused on an actual survivor story. And that's something I have, I've always admired as well about the movie is the different true events that they cram into this movie. Um, you know, just, just, um, the couple that dies…

You know what happened the other day that was kinda weird? I was wearing my Eloy shirt. Eloy is a German prog band. I guess, yeah. They're prog, they're all kind of like hard rock, and psych rock and, um, apocalyptic rock. Eloy is really good. Highly recommend checking out Eloy. They’re like one of my favorite bands at the moment and they have been for a couple years now. Um, anyways, I was wearing my Eloy shirt and it just said Eloy on it, and, um, I was at a restaurant in Traver-- in Grand Rapids. And this woman kept looking at me. Like a older woman. And I'm like, "Why does this lady keep making eye contact with me?" And so then we ate our meal, and I went to go leave and I walked by her and she goes, "Excuse me! I was just looking at your shirt and, and I was --" Um, what did she say? "I was looking at your shirt, and I was wondering like, what does your shirt mean?" And I was like, "It's, it's a, a German rock band." And she's like, "Well, that was the name of my father. And I -- and when I saw it, I just really felt his presence in this restaurant," like, "And he's been with me all day and I've been really feeling him here, and to see you with his -- the shirt with his name on it… I've never seen anyone else with his name." And she like was tearing up telling me this. And she's like, "And they're a German band?" And I'm like, "Yeah, Eloy." And she's like, "Well, thank you," like, "Thank you for telling me," or whatever, and she was like really emotional about it. And I was just like, "Oh my God, that's so amazing…"

In 1973, the guy that I had gone with in high school decided to split with me, and I spent the rest of '73 and '74, and part of '75 dating different people. Not shocking. I was in college and I went to Michigan State, of course. And the summer of '74, I went home and I was working at the bookstore.  One day in the bookstore, a friend of mine from high school came in and he asked me out and I started dating him a little bit. I always had gone out on occasion with one of my childhood friends. He was the kind of friend of mine that on different parts of the year, we would do things together, and if neither of us had a date for an event that we needed an event, we would go with the others because we had been friends since third grade or something and our mothers knew each other. And it was one of those things where, "Yes, you can take [diarist's name] to your grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary because she will behave appropriately," or, "You can take [friend's name] to your cousin's wedding because he will, he will be fine," and that kind of thing. So, we, we dated.  There was a guy that decided that -- I had met him on our trip to Europe and he was in Detroit for something and he decided to come and visit me. So one Monday in the summer of 1974, the guy from my trip to Germany had made arrangements to come and see me, and the guy that I dated in -- from high school that I had met at the bookstore, he decided to come over. My friend [same friend’s name] got off work and he decided that maybe we could go to a movie. So he came over, and of course, you know, there's no cell phones, there's no text messages, people just show up at your house. And the guy that I had gone out with at high school and in Michigan State who lived in Ypsi was over in the area, and he decided to come by my house. So there were four guys trying to see me in one afternoon that I didn't work in July. My mother looked at me, and she said, "What the heck is this?" And I said, "I…

So, on our first day here we decided to go on a hike. There's this giant mountain in the town, and it's got this like little chapel on top and the giant cross, and somebody in like the group said, "Hey, let's go hiking." And I didn't think they meant like the giant mountain, on day one in the middle of the day, as "Let's go hiking." But you know, I was like, "What else am I gonna do, sit around?" I didn't really wanna sit around. I'm trying to like do one -- like go to class and then do like one thing out in the afternoon each day. So I decided to go and oh my gosh, we had to walk uphill all the way across the entire town to even get to the mountain. So I was kind of like sweating it already when we got there. And then that thing was steep. It was so, so steep. And my group, they were like running. I'm like, "I have no idea how the heck you guys are going that fast." Like, I was trying to stop and get water, and at one point, a couple of the girls, we like stopped. And we like sat down and then three of them left, but my one friend and I stayed back for a minute because she has asthma. And I was like, "Okay, well, I'm not gonna like leave you because you're like the only person on this entire trip that I know. So we are gonna take it up nice and slow." So, by this point, because we waited a whole like three minutes, and we're like, halfway up this mountain, the group is nowhere in sight. So we're just like going along and we're following the path, and we get to this point where there's two different roads you can take. One is kind of like roped off and looks a little bit sketchy. And the other one is like up stairs, like, in the vague direction of the cross, which is where we're trying to get to on the top of this mountain. So we go up the stairs, and then there's like a bunch of things that are like kind of paths but not really. And we like try to follow the best ones, but we're pretty sure that we're like not exactly on…

Every morning the boat picked us up at 6 a.m. and they said, “Well, we'll be fishing until about two o'clock,” but most of the days, we'd quit maybe a half hour early. So we fished for four days from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from six in the morning until close to two in the afternoon. And the first day we were there, we went out for a tuna fish, and we ended up, I think we caught maybe about 100 pounds of tuna. The tuna was weighed probably about fifty or sixty pounds each and -- had a lot of fun bringing him in. The first one I was bringing in a shark took a bite out of it, but that's not an uncommon event there, that the shark sees that you've got a fish on the line and it’s vulnerable and it takes a sample. So, that was our first day of fishing. And the second day, I had never in my life, caught a bill fish. So, we went out looking for marlin. And I managed to hook one that weighed about 260 or 70 pounds. And took me about a half hour to reel it in and probably I was somewhat fortunate in that the marlin had totally swallowed my bait. And when he came, in the marlin was dead. So then you got the problem of trying to get a 260 pound fish into the boat and our captain and his helper managed to do that by taking a towel and wrapping it around that big sword on the front of the fish and getting its head up onto the edge of the boat and then slowly bringing it in like, maybe a foot at a time with tugging on it and bending on that sword to have some some leverage and still having some of the fish's body down in the water. But we managed to get that all in.

Have I ever had to be the bearer of bad news? Well, yes and I guess I thought of -- my mind immediately went to times when I've had to bear the worst news of all, which is that someone had passed away although in the cases I'm thinking about it's -- it wasn't completely unexpected. It was just I was there and the other people weren’t.  One was when my sister died. No, why am I saying my sister died? When my mom died, my sister was out with my aunt. I mean, I had come home because I knew mom was sick. There – I mean, she was now in hospice. They thought she had about six weeks or so. So I was just home to, you know, have a visit or whatever and she ended up passing away while I was home and my sister was out running errands with my -- my aunt. And so, I just had to hold it together and call, I don’t know if I called my aunt or my sister, but I said, “I think you guys should come home.” I wouldn't say why. And they didn't ask, which I was grateful for and they, they came home. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go beyond the little part of the question here, just say because I have more to talk about, delivering the bad news but, that was such a -- I've often thought about that being like this really nice gift that my mom gave me. Not that she passed away because I didn't want that to happen. But, you know, she was – I thought she had six more weeks. So this was a visit I made, and then I expected there was gonna come a phone call I would get that it was -- you know, it was time, and I would have to make that -- I would have to you know, get on a plane, and, you know, make the long drive from the airport to their house in -- like just consumed by grief either because she had passed away or was really close. And I dreaded that. I dreaded the prospect of being in that much, you know, anguish and feeling, you know, that emotionally beat up and having to do all of the travel. Just negotiating all of the travel. You know you hit…

What am I grateful for this week? I got a promotion on Tuesday so that’s really exciting and honestly unexpected because this doesn't happen often. So I'm really, really thrilled about it. It just feels kind of nice to get the title of the job that I am doing. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm getting like a mega raise, but working in higher ed, I'd be remiss if I -- I’d be ignorant if I thought I would get one, but it's -- there's something there. So that's nice. And I'm grateful for that and my bosses were wonderful about it, so that's nice. Let's see. I also won a book from Goodreads because they do giveaways and I always sign up because I always want a chance at winning something and this time I did! So that was really cool too. So I'm really happy about that. 

If you're over a certain age limit, like, we should just all swallow our pride and and know that you're not going to be as sharp as you used to be and that you probably need to just, you know, see how good you are still at seeing and at reacting. Because you could kill someone, you could injure someone. You know, who cares if you -- I'm not gonna say "Who cares about if you injure yourself?" because that's mean, but like, you know, don't think of just yourself basically. Like, think about the people that you could run over with your car. And so, you know, we've been trying to get her [a neighbor] to stop driving for a long time. Like, "Hey, maybe you should stop driving, maybe you shouldn't be driving? Maybe you should sell your car?" And she would, she would give it a shot for a little while, and then she would go back to driving because she doesn't want to like, bother people to take her places and if her -- she can't figure out how to work her phone, she can't call a taxi or an Uber. She doesn't -- can’t even like see to use her phone doesn't understand how it works. And so, like -- and she's really nice. And so like I go over there occasionally. And the last time I went and I what I saw her across the street and I was about to go grocery shopping and I went up, I was like, "Hey, I'm about to go grocery shopping. Do you need anything?" And she goes, "Oh well, can I come with you?" And I hesitated because I had planned on going -- like, I had like four things I was gonna do, and I was, I had to order in mind of the way I was gonna do it and like grocery shopping was the last thing I was gonna do. And so, I hesitated for a second to decide, oh, can I put these other things last and do the grocery shopping first? So I was like, "Um," and then I was like, "Yeah. Okay, that's fine." But she goes, "You hesitated, you hesitated. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. I'm gonna go to the grocery store like tomorrow with so-and-so, I don't need anything. I can wait until tomorrow." And…