18 Years

18 years is a long time. It's 216 months, it's 936 weeks, it's 6,570 days, it's 157,680 hours, it's 9,460,800 minutes, and it's 567,648,000 seconds (give or take). It's the amount of time from the day you're born until you're old enough to vote. Or to join the military. It's 4 1/2 presidential terms. It's 9 Olympic Games (if you count Summer and Winter). 18 years ago it was 1994. Sometimes it seems so long ago, sometime jut like yesterday

A lot has changed in 18 years. CD's? More or less gone replaced by digital music files that can be played on an infinite number of devices. Cell phones have taken over our lives (for better or worse). What's funny is even tho we walk around with phones we talk a lot less. Text messaging, email and tweeting rule the day. There's this thing called social media with which we tell everyone every detail of our day, post infinite pictures and let everyone know where we are every second of the day! I know, sounds lame but its kinda fun. We're all trying to be "greener". Television is loaded with dreck known as "reality tv" in which they get everyone interested in a bunch of uninteresting people. Balanced with this is some of the best tv of the decade found on pay cable channels. Video stores have gone the way of the dinosaurs and we rent movies with the click of a button on our tv remote. Record stores are all but gone and books stores are heading the same way. There's still good music out there but so much "popular" music is "artists" sampling other songs and making music with nary a guitar or drum kit in sight. Cash and checks have been replaced by debit cards, we shop "online", and smoking is about 1 step away from leprosy.  In the past 18 years we've seen 3 Patriot's Super Bowls, an NBA Championship for the Celtics, a Stanley freakin Cup for the Bruins and the Sox manged to win not one but TWO Worlds Series. We've added words like texted, Facebooked, and Skyped to our vocabulary. And we blog incessantly. Blogging is when we sit down and write a bunch of boring stuff that nobody really reads. Like this. Yes, things have changed.

Some things haven't changed. The family is still crazy/awesome/nuts and I wouldn't trade them in for anything. We welcomed Dom, Anna, Brendan and Olivia (and Willie the cat) to the family fold and they are all special! Mom is still the toughest, kindest, greatest person there is. The last several years weren't the easiest on dad but he hung in there like a trooper until the very end. We've lost a lot of good people but made a lot of new friends. Suffered through tragedy yet had so many great times. We've all had our ups and downs but you know what? We're doing OK. There's a term for how we're doing...it's on the tip of my tongue? Oh yeah, it's called life

18 years is a long time. I still can't believe it's been 18 years.  Each year it gets harder and harder to think how different these past 18 years would have been, could have been. It's hard having so many indelible, lasting memories but no NEW memories. We still laugh when we speak of you and when we do we always remind the kids how much they would have loved you. I have no idea how different things would have been if you were still here but they would have been a lot more interesting, a lot more fun

18 years is a long time

Patricia "Mimi" O'Rourke

June 16, 1967-June 27, 1994