45* The Red Rug

   It's surprising to me how easy it is to turn off my mind-}to shut it off and stop thinking. That was what it was like for me most of the past week. I would stare blankly into space and do anything to keep myself from thinking or feeling (mostly tv). It's very unproductive but it does stall the pain for long periods of time. It is a habit I am trying to break, now that I am in the "facing death" part of my recovery. Although I have known in every aspect of my life that Kenny is gone> I have lived on in this house as if he is away but not dead. I acknowledge his death with this blog and I think that the reason there are days I don't write is that those are the days I don't want to believe he is dead-the days I cannot face that he is more than just gone.
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   I attempted to make progress in cleaning up Kenny's room but it didn't go well,,too many distractions. I taped together a box to put his staying stuff in hours and hours ago->it remains empty. The only visible difference is that Kenny's red rug can now be seen because all of the video games and equipment made their way to the wire cubicles Kenny put together last summer. There is a yellow sticky note Kenny put on the structure he built, it says "Put together 8/28/11".
   I tried to keep my mind on, but the day was too busy to get any real thinking done, hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Until then...

{{{ RANDOM TOPIC }}}
---} the red rug {---

   So...a few years back, Kenny and I went walking around to check out the yard sales that were close to our house. We were a couple blocks away from home when Kenny spotted this old rug on somebody's lawn. It was a good sized rug but it was ratty and not all that pretty; it's a deep red with some blue shapes that are a cross of a rectangle and a hexagon and some strange space craft looking objects throughout the design and it looked like someone had tried to wash it because the fringe on one of the ends was pink; however that didn't matter to Kenny. For some reason he really liked that rug and squabbled with  the person a few minutes because he didn't have enough money and we needed to get the Navigator because it was big. We hurried ourselves home, I can't remember if he had more money at home or if Kenny borrowed from me but either way we returned to pick up the rug he liked so much.We rolled it up, put it in the back of the Navigator, sticking out the window. Ha ha ha. Even then it had some parts that were worn but Now there are holes worn all the way thru it and there are many worn out spots. Kenny placed it in front of his bed, it covers the space all the way to his t.v. It was the place he and his friends would use to play video games and he used that space for homework. He was playing with candles once; burning the wax down or something- there were lots off flames and he cracked the plate the candles were on. Wax went flowing all over his rug and it never came completely off.
   The last couple years I kept trying to get Kenny to let me replace that rug. Every time the curbside clean-up would come around I would ask Kenny repeatedly to "please get rid of that rug"...I even offered to buy him a black and gray checkered rug, which was very cool, in its place but he would not get rid of it. So here it stays, and when I leave this house and empty his room the rug will remain. 
      
Element of the day (day 45)
#41) Nb- Niobium -] metal 
Discovered in 1801 by Charles Hatchett, England.
A soft, shiny, bluish-white metal. Used in alloys, especially with steel. Alloyed with zirconium to make superconducting magnets. Also in jet and rocket engines. Sometimes used in jewelry for its bluish color. Until 1950, niobium was known as columbium.

Present in many minerals. Most common in pyrochlore, columbite, betafite, and samarskite. Mined in Brazil, Canada, Zaire, China and Nigeria.