It's amazing to me the number of different versions but similar ways I get the following e-mail "me-me" with the promise to send it right back to the person...today's was alphabetically...Most of the questions are things no one really cares about...you should be able to come up with your own questions (and you have to answer as many as the age you are...this way I don't have to hear about some 13 year old's 60 favorite flavors of ice cream.) So here goes 36 me-me's:

Yeah right...if there is anything you want to know just ask...or sometimes I will toss in a "Conversation Piece" Question on here but really...does it really matter?

It was a sad day today. Kim's mom died over the weekend. Kim is a co-worker of mine. Her mom was diagnoised with a fairly aggressive form of lung cancer and had been having a rough time of it. They were trying chemo but it really wasn't making her mom feel well. (Kim just last year helped her brother through a bout of cancer as well. The nurses at the cancer clinic even joked with her that she should investigate if there's a family discount.)

She has a fairly complicated family life and seems to be the glue that holds her family together. She's always pretty upbeat at work and always the one everyone goes to when they need help...you know that kind of person? The one you want on your team. The one you know will succeed. So when I heard that her mom had died this weekend it just broke my heart for her. Because of the conversations we have had about just wanting more time and because I have a feeling she's trying to be so strong when in reality this STUPID disease defeated her mom much more quickly than any of us had ever imagined. We had had a discussion several months ago when this had first started and she was listening to me ramble on about dad and she shared with me about her mom's plight into stage 4. About how she didn't know how to be ready to go to the next step of being there to prepare her mom to die. How do you handle hospice? How do you know when to take family leave? How does that even work? She mentioned last week when I saw her that her mom wasn't doing well and had moved into her house in St. Paul Park.

Do you ever really know how to say goodbye? Can you ever even prepare? As Grey's Anatomy said the other night...you never know exactly what it's like until you are a member of the club and its terrible to finally get your membership.

So I didn't feel like cooking tonight so I stopped off at the American Motorsports Grill where I had their monday night special...meatloaf for $7.95...there's one more thing to know about me, I will typically contemplate ordering meatloaf if it is on the menu (provided it doesn't have a lot of weird ingredients in it) and if it has some sort of mushroom gravy I will typically order it anyhow.

I got home in time to get an unexpected phone call from my cousin Arnie.

For those of you who've never met Arnie, he's one of my favorite people to hang out with in the family because he takes these life's adventures and enjoys similar music and getting to know people activities. Of course he's now taken up running marathons (something I assure you we will probably NOT have that in common) however the cool thing he's trying to do is run a marathon in every state. He's taking the train one way at the end of next month to New Orleans to run a marathon there and he will fly back. He says he's doing that to see a bit of america in a different way. (He typically drives places and when he does he tends to get off the highway and stop through those small towns to have a piece of pie or see the big ball of twines along the way.) When he visited up here to see Martina McBride a few summers ago he drove home via Hwy 61 and stopped in Lake City because he saw it was the birthplace of waterskiing.

He called because he was feeling guilty that he hadn't mailed my christmas present. We always try and share something eclectic with each other. This year I bought him a book (kind of like the how to do everything books only this was how to do all of the Super Hero type stuff) He has my curiosity piqued. It's not necessarily about the gift but about the thought behind it that has me wondering.