And Colin said "Your ice was frozen."

Well, it sounds dumb out of context, but imagine 3 big guys all in suits and a girl in nice clothes...all in black - walk into your gas station store and start doing battle with your freezer. They then turn around and leave, purchasing nothing... Well, I supose if they could have removed the product from the freezer, it might have worked out better. Apparently, the woman looked at them upon leaving and my brother simply explained that her "ice was frozen".

Uncle Stevie funeral was well done - I think between the wonderful funeral conductor (I'm not sure her actual title) and the speeches of those who loved him, they managed to capture the essance of what made him special and send him off the the beyond with our love and best wishes. I met relatives that I never knew I had - and who I hope I may run into again - a neat group of people all round. I'm not sure that it'll hit me until the next family dinner that he is really gone...perhaps his spirit never will be - perhaps he'll come back and haunt our family dinners once and a while - surely he will in our hearts if not in spirit.

I think I realized today the importance of people in society to carry these events and help the living make sense of their grief and their joy (i.e. weddings) and responsibility to be a good person on earth. If only major religions could focus on making the world a kinder place - rather than carrying on about inane things like creationism (Even if God did follow genesis to the letter - I really don't think any deity worth worshipping is going to get their knickers in their knot about a bit of factual misdirection on ancient history - I suspect that they'd rather see people work on taking care of their own communities (rather than killing people because they have a different point of view/different community) and be good folk in genreal. Sigh, they've done a good thing to get religion out of politics in the West - but the world would benifit if they could get the politics out of religion. One thing I didn't know about Uncle Stevie was how much he thought about spirituality - he even wrote a cryptic and esoteric book on it. I've thought about it less lately - as items like Watershed Systems design have been hogging my attention a bit - but one day hopefully I'll have time to think about non school-stuff again.

Cheers,

Jennith