![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
being responsible
Taxes done and paid for yay. And I made it to the pool twice this week, and cooked dinner most nights, so I get adulting points.
I have all these scattered notes from last weekend's gathering for my Dad's 80th birthday that need to be assembled into a proper post, even if just a private one, but these two things really stuck out.
1) My folks are getting old. As are my sisters. It's quite a preview of what's coming and does make me want to figure out how to change some things, health-wise.
2) My Dad is hilarious. Favorite story that doesn't need family context:
When he started college, he was at a land grant college in Utah, which at the time meant ROTC was mandatory for men. My Dad grew up poor in the north of Idaho during the Depression and hunting and fishing were a critical part of putting food on the table; he very much knows his way around rifles.
Part of ROTC was "Drill", where they had to put on their carefully maintained uniforms and take these basically decorative rifles and go do the walking and the parade stance and all that.
There was an officious junior who was would come and do Inspection during this time, grabbing the "rifles", snapping them open, and checking them for cleanliness and good order. He got to my Dad, opened it, and then barked
"Solider, your piece is filthy"
to which Dad replied
"Fuck you, it doesn't even have a firing pin"
and just walked off, never to return.
(He still got a B, because he aced the written test. They told them it to allot 5 hours; He did it in 20 minutes. He manged to avoid ROTC entirely after that, between transferring to a non-land grant college to finish his Associate's and then just ... strategically avoiding the ROTC table during registration when he got back to another land grant college for the rest of his Bachelor's.)
I have all these scattered notes from last weekend's gathering for my Dad's 80th birthday that need to be assembled into a proper post, even if just a private one, but these two things really stuck out.
1) My folks are getting old. As are my sisters. It's quite a preview of what's coming and does make me want to figure out how to change some things, health-wise.
2) My Dad is hilarious. Favorite story that doesn't need family context:
When he started college, he was at a land grant college in Utah, which at the time meant ROTC was mandatory for men. My Dad grew up poor in the north of Idaho during the Depression and hunting and fishing were a critical part of putting food on the table; he very much knows his way around rifles.
Part of ROTC was "Drill", where they had to put on their carefully maintained uniforms and take these basically decorative rifles and go do the walking and the parade stance and all that.
There was an officious junior who was would come and do Inspection during this time, grabbing the "rifles", snapping them open, and checking them for cleanliness and good order. He got to my Dad, opened it, and then barked
"Solider, your piece is filthy"
to which Dad replied
"Fuck you, it doesn't even have a firing pin"
and just walked off, never to return.
(He still got a B, because he aced the written test. They told them it to allot 5 hours; He did it in 20 minutes. He manged to avoid ROTC entirely after that, between transferring to a non-land grant college to finish his Associate's and then just ... strategically avoiding the ROTC table during registration when he got back to another land grant college for the rest of his Bachelor's.)