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It snuck up on me.

On Sunday, I glanced at my calendar for the coming week, and was surprised to see that my father's birthday would be on Tuesday. Somehow I hadn't quite gotten around to noticing that it was coming up.

It's been three and a half years. He would have been 69 today.

And my mother died 28 years ago today. Which means I'm almost as old as Peter was the day she died.

I've been pretty swamped the past couple days--spent all day Sunday doing magazine stuff, then around 8 p.m. switched over to day-job stuff (I missed a deadline last week) and worked on that 'til 1 a.m. or something. Didn't get started on day job 'til noonish on Monday, but stayed 'til, what, 11:30 p.m.? Something like that. Still not done with deadline, but inching ever closer.

Anyway, so I'm kind of exhausted and out of it, and not really up to dealing with much of anything.

Sometimes, these days, a week or two will go by without my even thinking of Peter or Marcy. I wasn't expecting this particular anniversary to hit me especially hard. (Though I've been thinking about Peter lately. I've pretty much abandoned that blog where I was posting stuff about him; at some point I'd like to go back to that.) But it took me by surprise again a few minutes ago. Though that's probably at least partly the exhaustion talking.

This entry isn't coming out at all the way I wanted it to. Not sure what it was I was trying to say, but this isn't it. But I'm gonna post it anyway.

. . . I originally ended this entry here, about an hour ago, with a final line saying that it was time I went to sleep. And it was. But I decided to run through a scale on the Ocarina iPhone app as I prepared for bed, and I accidentally happened across a few notes of "Suo Gan," and one thing led to another, and I ended up creating and posting a score for that tune on the Ocarina score forum. It turns out that it's extremely easy to convert ABC-format tunes into Ocarina-format scores. So now I've converted a very pretty and easy-to-play lullabye and played it to myself a few times through to make sure it was right, and I'm now in a better, or at least less sad, mood than I was earlier.

But am now even sleepier than I was an hour ago. (Funny how that works.) I've got to stop staying up past 2 a.m.

Anyway, I'm much too sleepy to rewrite this entry from scratch, but I figured it would be too weird to post it as-was without clarifying that I'm not as mopey as I was earlier. So here's a sort of muddled compromise that at least probably gives an accurate rendition of my muddled state of mind.