Laughter is the Best Medicine

This week can be summed up in two words: whomp whomp....My family has been dealing with a lot of things over the past two weeks, but I'm really making an effort to not be a total Debbie Downer about it. I posted earlier in the week about the loss of our family dog, Marley. I also mentioned briefly last week that I'd gotten news about a family member's declining health, and this week it went downhill quickly from there as the doctor's had predicted. Yesterday, my Uncle Steve passed away. I took a red eye to Virginia last night and am writing this from the patio of my parents house. Even though the circumstances suck, it is nice to be home and I am excited to spend time with my family.

Everyone deals with the loss of a loved one in a different way. My dad, my sister and I, much to my mother's dismay, deal with things like this by making jokes. Often under our breath at inappropriate times. Laughter is our medicine, and it helps that we're pretty damn funny too. Or at least we like to think so :)

We usually haven't even gotten out of the car at the graveside service before one of us says, "Good thing we got here early, people are dying to get in this place!" Classic Barnes family humor. Our mom has gotten used to it and has perfected her eye roll, but she still cracks a smile most of the time. I just wish we didn't have to say it as many times as we've had to.

It's an unfortunate reason to get to see your family you don't get together with often enough, but I like to look at the bright side of things, we'll get to see each other now and I'm planning to take advantage of that while I'm here. I'm very much in the 'celebrate life' camp, so cracking jokes and reminiscing about funny stories is one way that we do that.

That's not the only unfortunate news of the week, but I think that's quite enough 'whomp whomp' for one post :)

To cheer it up a bit, I Googled 'funny cat pictures' and I highly recommend you do the same. There were so many I couldn't even choose which ones I'd want to post. For some reason this one made me laugh the hardest though...

Basher needs a hat like that asap!