kara's side

kara and i drove up to seattle yesterday to meet her nephew jon and his wife robin. i'd never met them, and kara and jon hadn't seen each other in something like 15 years. that's a long time. he's in town for a few days for a conference. he's a financial advisor and robin's a cpa. they're about my age but they've been married twice as long as kara and i, and they have 2 kids in addition to 2 dogs and 2 cats. they live in texas.

jon is kara's brother tommy's son from his 2nd of 3 marriages. he's the only child from that marriage (tommy's 3rd marriage produced several offspring) and apparently after the divorce jon's mother spirited him away from the rest of the family. that's likely at least part of the reason jon grew up into a responsible and thoughtful person, as opposed to most of the rest of the family, at least to hear kara tell it.

i'm going to have to get kara to draw me a map, a tree, of her family. i get lost easily. lots of marriages and divorces, lots of great gaps of years between siblings, it's hard to keep track of who's related to whom and how.

i was a bit anxious about the get-together, as i generally am when meeting new folks and feeling pressure to maintain conversation and be interesting, but the afternoon was relaxed and i enjoyed it. we walked around capitol hill a bit and went into the back room of a bar called charlie's. we talked about the family some. jon and kara have that history, of course, and it tends to be more colorful than not. we also talked about christopher guest, u2, electric cars, real housewives, maggie may's in austin, and other things. robin and jon seemed to like seattle, and kept saying how different it is, in just walking around, from where they live. it went well. it was good. i like them. i hope we do keep in touch.

while we were gone, dagmar and steve survived their longest stretch in the crate without a pee break. they did fine.