Too much going down all at once

This past weekend, my mother and I went up to Vermont for a family reunion, to see her side of the family: Grandpa Holden, Aunt Linda, Uncle Tenny and Aunt Joy and their children, Cameron and Caelyn. They all seem to be doing well – I was particularly glad to see Grandpa well and happy. Cae’s shot up like a weed, and Cameron has a new girlfriend – I haven’t met her yet, but I’m already predisposed to like her, since she has Aunt Joy’s approval.

The reunion itself was for the family on Grandpa Holden’s mother’s side, who are scattered seemingly all over New England (and perhaps a few places further-flung). I introduced myself to relatives I hadn’t seen since I was half my present height and whose names I couldn’t remember, but I mostly hung out with Cae and Cam, and some of my other closer relatives. Still, I got a lot of good photographs to show my future host family in Kazakhstan (lots of good scenery in northern Vermont)! Now the more formidable task is to memorise the names, faces and relations of my unknown and sundry relatives in them.

But on the way back, the trip went south (literally and figuratively) in the worst way. It was nighttime, it had been raining, there was stop-and-go traffic, and my mother was getting tired at the wheel – and we rear-ended the Bimmer in front of us going 10 at 45. Our car was completely totalled such that it would never drive again, and the bumper had fallen off theirs, but thank God no one was that badly hurt – just very shaken-up. An off-duty police officer named Jeff called 911 for us and let us sit in the back of his car to calm down for a little while, but when the Staties showed up and we got out to talk to them, he drove off – with my backpack and everything in it (computer, cellphone, pay stubs) still, unbeknownst to him, in the back seat. Thank Jeff and God, though, he returned the backpack to the Brown police after figuring out through one of my pay stubs that I was working there, and my computer is still working fine. Dad came to get us after the accident in our Dodge pickup, and we got home without further incident, though we were all badly shaken up.

In better news, the Peace Corps has sent me some ‘actionable’ documents, which means I get more forms to fill out! It’s all coming together now – and that makes me happier. I did learn that I had been sent free account info for Russian lessons on Rosetta Stone, but I had to go digging through the spam folder in my Brown e-mail to find it; however, I’ve gotten started on those, though I haven’t really gotten any farther than <Я ем яблоко> and <Он пют вода>. Also, my sister Catherine has gotten back from her internship at the University of Arizona, if only (as her usual overachieving / masochistic self) to start taking an advanced calculus summer class at RIC to keep up with her double anthro / chem major at Beloit.

Well, no one can say it hasn’t been an eventful week, for better and for worse.