The weekends are always hard.  Holiday weekends seem to be the hardest though.

This past weekend, Pudding brought The Wolves and her significant other in to visit with my parents and I on Saturday.  We all went to a Shiro of Japan Hibachi restaurant.  It was the first time the kids had ever been to a place like that, and they definitely enjoyed themselves. 

As an opening, the chef started by lighting the grill on fire and some knife and fork play.  Typical fare.  Then he started tossing eggs… and the first egg he tossed got caught in the hood over the grill where it laid up on the lip.  Blinky found this absolutely hysterical, and every ten minutes would start giggling and laughing about the egg.  The chef was a good sport, and when she started laughing he would smile and say in his really broken English, “Haha I make one mistake and little girl mock me.  Haha.”

After dinner, we went next door to where the were having a fair in a parking lot of the mall complex where the restaurant was.  The fair is identical to the fair that we had all gone to on Mother’s Day… where the picture on top was snapped… along with the pictures from this post and this post.  The rides were the same… the music was the same… the laughter was the same… but IT wasn’t the same.  He wasn’t there.  It was hard walking through those grounds… but I did it hand in hand with Blinky… if for no other reason than for Blinky.

Sunday… well Sunday I watched the Heroes Season 1 DVD collection, I worked on some videos, and I took about 5 brief naps.  Sleeping has become both my best friend and my worst enemy.  I’ve been napping alot… more than I should be even with the screwy hours I’ve been working.  The thing is… my sleep at night is plagued and interrupted.  When I get up in the morning, I’m more tired than I was when I went to bed.  The fact that a week from today marks 6 years since that clear September morning… which also was a Tuesday as it is this year… I’m sure isn’t helping.

Yesterday I went to Puddings for a BBQ.  I constantly found myself gazing into horizons lost in thoughts of “what if”, memories of BBQs past, and the feeling of a vacuum in my chest while the sounds of kids laughing in the background sounded incomplete… kind of like me.

Labor Day weekend. 

It was hard work getting through it… and it made me dread what’s coming up in 4 months.