Birthday parties, A Visiting mom and my best friend passing away

As always the months tend to fly by and that was the case with June. I wanted to complete a blogathon on this website, but I found that with my wife’s birthday party and all of the work and things going on, I was unable to finish the job. At the end of the month, things got to even more difficult and strange with the sudden death of my best friend Karl Berlin, he died the day after my wife’s birthday party.

Karl

Goodbye to my best friend

It was bit of a shock to say the least with my friend dying suddenly. He was only 61 years old and the night before he was at a party with us and he looked to be happy and healthy. The very next morning he woke up with some chest pains and his wife got the ambulance in pretty quickly. It wasn’t long before they had him in hospital and tried to do an operation, but it was too late. Many people have said that it is a better thing if you go quickly and you don’t have a lingering death although dying too young and before your time is very sad indeed. karl died on Thursday and funerals happen very fast here in Spain. The service and funeral was on the Monday which was at the limit of how long it can be between dying and being cremated. There were a lot of people at the funeral, quite a lot of expats from England of course. I got up and spoke about how sad I was to lose my best friend and how I thought it was strange that somebody so clever should be so useless and learning languages. I didn’t say much, but it seems everybody appreciated that I spoke from the heart. He really was the nicest guy you could wish to meet and know as a friend.

So I had to deal with going to a funeral and trying to help where I could as well as keeping my mother entertained while she was here to visit from England. My mother is pretty easy to keep amused, all I have to do is to take her to the beach when it is possible. This month of June the weather hasn’t been great though. We have had one or two days when the weather has been either cloudy or it has been raining. In fact, looking at the weather forecast there will be one or two days in the first part of July when we can expect some thunderstorms.

Mom

Mom to the beach

Life has to go on and with my mother visiting I need to take her to the beach for some sun and relaxation. The old girl will be going home again tomorrow and so we have to make the best of the time while she is here. I am still disappointed that my daughter-in-law and my mother didn’t get to meet each other. It was because of the French Air traffic controllers having a strike and stopping all of the planes coming from Dublin. Now we will have to wait until they come over with the baby which could be maybe in January and I will have to try and arrange for my mother to come over for a visit at the same time. It would have been really nice to see Iris with the big bump and the baby still growing. Mind you we were able to get a glimpse of that on Skype. She was able to talk to us and show us the bump when they called us to wish Victoria a happy birthday.