What did you do today?

[Charlie Horse]

Well.  I just got some bad news.  I've been moving to my craptastic apartment in a little town down by the redrock deserts in central utah.  My friend Cactus Dan lives down there already.  In the past we've done a lot of horse riding together (he boarded a horse next door) and more recently you may remember him from some San Rafael trip pictures I posted a year and a half ago.  Today my neighbor informed me that he had died a few days ago due to complications from a pancreas problem he's had for a few years.  What bugs me is that last saturday when I was hauling some of my crap out there, I had stopped by his house to borrow a screw gun (I was setting up my storage unit which acts as my garage near my craptastic apartment and forgot mine).  His truck was gone so I figured he was out taking pictures in the Wild West ™ like he likes to do.  I had no idea but I had lunch at the chinese buffet and dinner at the diner just on the other side of the highway exit that the hospital is at.  I could have visited if only I'd thought to look for his truck at the hospital (He'd had some problems a few months ago so it wasn't really a stretch of the imagination).  I feel kinda bad about that.  I've been worried the last week.  It'd been 3 weeks since he'd messaged me last and I'd started thinking one of his parents (like 95 years old) had passed away and he'd headed back east.  I was going to talk to his neighbor on monday to get the story.  Turned out kinda worst-case-scenario, didn't it.

Tuesday I'm making another trailer-run of crap out there and I'm going to stop and talk to his sister, who is wrapping up his affairs.  It looks like I'll probably end up stuck with his retired old horse, Sagan.  Yay.  I dunno.  I was counting on borrowing his oversized truck to haul my horses up the canyon in a couple weeks.  In my mind I'd planned a lot of cool outings and adventures, horse rides and goat hikes with him.  Its really weird for me to delete that much data out of my brain.  He and I are both into 3D animation and we'd have these shop-talk conversations about inverse kinematics, matrix math, up-vectors, and character rigging that I don't think I'll ever have with anyone else again.  End of an era.  

He and Sasha are both gone now.  Too early for them both, too.  I guess it'll just be me and the goats next time I head out into the sandstone.