{"id":8240,"date":"2019-12-30T21:44:19","date_gmt":"2019-12-31T02:44:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/?p=8240"},"modified":"2019-12-31T10:38:01","modified_gmt":"2019-12-31T15:38:01","slug":"survivin-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/?p=8240","title":{"rendered":"Survivin’ It"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, yeah … the first Christmas after Dad died. Survived it. My step-mother decided to still have the annual Christmas Eve Breakfast for Dinner Gathering. The familiarity of it was nice but sad at the same time without Dad running around handing out presents to everyone. Nobody got weepy which was good. I saved that for a few of days later.<\/p>\n

I was in Walmart on Friday evening and walked past a guy who was wearing a uniform from the place my dad managed right up until he got too sick to work. Dad generally wasn’t seen out of his work shirt the last few years. The loss and sadness really hit me. I managed to make it out of the store and back to the car before breaking down and creating a scene.<\/p>\n

Saturday we tripped over the Gatlinburg with Graham and Kristen for moonshine and an escape room adventure. The usual places were visited … Ole Smoky, Sugarlands, and Doc Collier.<\/p>\n

\"Ole <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Sugarlands\" <\/a> <\/div>
\"Doc <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n

\"Big<\/a><\/span>
\nGraham and Kristen are big into escape rooms and wanted to check out MOONSHINE<\/em> HILL HOOTENANNY<\/em><\/strong><\/a> at Gatlin’s Escape Games. The room was fun and way more high tech than I thought it would be. I felt like we overthought some of the puzzles and that got us behind time with only one hour to break into Maw\u2019s shack, sabotage her moonshine recipe, and blow her \u2018shine still to smithereens. SPOILERS: We failed (and found out that Kristen’s desire to win is both awesome and a little scary). But it was fun and I am looking forward to trying another escape room sometime soon.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

And yesterday, I was bummed to read about the passing of Vaughan Oliver<\/strong><\/a>, mastermind designer of some the most iconic album sleeves of the 80’s and 90’s. He provided the visuals that went right along side of some of my favorite albums of the era (most notably for me are Cocteau Twins’ Treasure<\/em>, The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa<\/em> and Doolittle<\/em>, and The Breeders’ Last Splash<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\"Vaughan<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Surfer <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Doolittle\" <\/a> <\/div>
\"Last <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Treasure\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, yeah … the first Christmas after Dad died. Survived it. My step-mother decided to still have the annual Christmas Eve Breakfast for Dinner Gathering. The familiarity of it was nice but sad at the same time without Dad running around handing out presents to everyone. Nobody got weepy which was good. I saved that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,52,10,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily","category-graphic-design","category-music","category-photos"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8EnCu-28U","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8240"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8254,"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8240\/revisions\/8254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theboywonder.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}