Actually, I hadn't read #10 and on yet.

My days have been taken up helping a good friend's family with his estate. There is a time crunch involved, so take the bit in your teeth, run like the wind, and know I will catch up.

The work is pretty physical, involving the careful disassembly of anything we can salvage of a scale railway layout of some size and great complexity, hauling the components mostly to my workshop, and handling the redistribution amongst our local crowd; an effort at recycling model railway components, books, and tools he would have approved of. Between that and clearing the house in general, is a pretty focussed and intense exercise at the moment.

My back is holding up as well as can be expected, though a reminder all is not perfect nor will it be. Other components are compensating for the limitations of the fusion, much like a man with a prosthetic limb discovers, so I tire far faster than my cohorts but so-far find rest periods work well enough and a night's sleep allows recovery for the most part. I can't reasonably expect more given the damage done, so pretty pleased even though often seriously uncomfortable.

The gent in question lead an amazing life in many ways. He was a son of a railroad family, several of whom were Pullman porters. He served in the Army in the Korean War in an anti-aircraft artillery unit equipped with half-tracks armed with quad 50-calibre machine guns. After that, he used his GI-bill benefits to attend university, one of his degrees from Columbia University, a groundbreaking achievement as a black man in the late 1950s and the 1960s, then a long career in intel analysis, a career in which he was highly respected and he rose to a quite high level in that hierarchy.

I knew him for easily forty years, a quiet, cheerful, unassuming, yet powerful soul. He and his wife (she was a power in her own right!) raised several daughters who in turn raised another solid generation. When he check out he was in his nineties, still living independently at home, a helluva life in all.