Where's Jeremy (2013) - Part 1: A logistical summary - June

This is post #5 in Where’s Jeremy (2013)

June.

After living in my home for 6 and a half years, my parents and I finally signed the contract-for-deed, which means I'm "officially" buying the house from them now. The backstory if you're unfamiliar: I live in my grandparents' house; I moved in in 2006, after Grandma passed away and Grandpa moved to assisted living. My parents used their inheritance from my other Grandma's death (that same year) to buy the house from Grandpa, and now they are selling it to me. I am incredibly lucky, and I do not take it for granted.

One of the "joys of home ownership," as my parents call it, is home repairs! My dishwasher was making an awful grinding noise - my roommate Alec called it a "monster" - so I finally scheduled an appointment. All the labor and parts were free as part of CenterPoint's home Service Plus, but it took them 3 trips to A) diagnose the problem / order parts, B) come back, and determine not enough new parts were ordered, and then finally C) put the thing back together. It runs very quietly now. Ahh.

Friends Joe and Alee and Hannah and Richard (and more) and I spent several evenings outdoors, enjoying the Minneapolis Park&Rec Board's "Movies in the Park" - we saw Mighty Ducks, Hunger Games, Miracle, Wall-e, and Top Gun (though due to a noisy food truck right by where we were sitting, we truly only "saw" Top Gun, we did not hear it).

On June 28th, one of my best friends plead guilty to the crime he was accused of, and was sentenced to 9 years in prison (with good behavior he will serve 6). This is a story worthy of its own lengthy blog post, which I might some day write. The short version: because I was very intentional about spending time with Matthew, I leave the experience without the all-too-common regrets people have after suffering a loss: "I wish I would have spent more time, I wish I would have done this or that, I wish, I wish ..." because I did. I was there for him for the past year and a half, and, alongside other friends and family, I was there to support him in the court room. In my world, that is what friendship is supposed to look like. Matthew made a mistake that crossed both legal and moral lines, there are no two ways around that. But I refuse to be a fair-weather friend.

On June 30th, the last day of the month, I finished programming on the online casting database. My perpetual nightmare of working extremely long hours (all day at Cray, and then all evening on the database), literally making myself fall ill from working and not getting enough sleep, came to a rather anti-climactic close. Though there were still many tasks ahead (beta-testing, bug fixes, terms of service, announcements, and more), the largest part, the hardest part, was done. Words are incapable of expressing the tremendous relief I felt.