Halfway mark and my grandpa

Well, this is by my reckoning the half way point of the "blog a day for a year" thing (365 / 2 = 182.5), so yea me!

In honor of this event, the man in the picture above was my grandpa, now deceased for about 3 1/2 years. This picture was taken of him about 20 years ago on a beach near Fenwick Island, DE. He and I had some great times together - he taught me to fix things, shoot guns and bows, how to sharpen a knife, all about WW2, how to deal with life's problems, how to honor one's commitments...the list goes on and on.

Some of my favorite memories were of beachcombing with him, summer or winter, in all kinds of weather. Sometimes we'd use a metal detector, but mostly we'd just find cool shit on the beach (some of which appears in this very blog). In many ways, this blog is dedicated to him - he found (or would have found) all of this stuff interesting and valuable in some way.

He died due to the degenerative effects of Alzheimers - an awful disease that slowly strips away at human dignity and pride until there not much left but, almost literally, a skeleton. In a whole lot of ways that I won't go into, he deserved so much better. I'm glad I got to see him one last time before he died (the day before), and I miss him everyday. The picture above is probably how he'd want to be remembered - a man of the sea, a lover of nature, and an all-around good person on any random beach anywhere in the world.