I have a web counter on the main page of my site. It tracks visits to the site and I get a weekly report telling how many people came by. There has been a steady increase in the number over the past year. Two weeks ago I had 18 visits. This past week is was 27. Wow. This is amazing to me. I like that people are reading my thoughts, and perhaps coming back to read more. It is also sobering in a way. If I go a few days without adding something to the site I feel like people will stop coming. A two-edged sword as it were.
To all of you who are, dare I say it, regulars, I thank you.
Speaking of the web counter, I just switched to a new service. The old one just went from free to costing a nominal annual fee. The new counter is a little more ostentatious than I would prefer, but not too bad.
My brother and his wife had their first child together last spring. Her name is Riley. Her maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Riley so this was a family nod. To add to that tie Riley was born on the same day as her grandmother, March 13th. To say that the arrival of their first grandchild unhinged my parents would be an understatement. Who knew they were this nuts about grandchildren. It has been a joy to watch them enjoy their granddaughter.
It has also been hard to watch. I am extremely fortunate that I found and married my perfect partner. Michele is my friend, my very best friend, and my lover, and my companion, and my hero. We are wonderful together. We both knew before we walked down the aisle that children would not play a part in our life together. This is not an easy position to realize on our society. We have both struggled with strong feelings of quilt and inadequacy as a result. When my brother and his wife presented my parents with a grandchild I was very jealous. It has been very painful to watch the attention and focus be lavished on them. For a long time as the oldest son I had a favored position, at least from my perspective. Now in a flash it was gone. I have struggled greatly with feelings of jealously and hurt.
Before Riley was born the doctors discovered an enlargement of one of her kidneys. Her mom had dozens of ultrasounds as they tried to determine what this meant. At birth she was happy, healthy and outwardly perfect. Riley’s parents were told to bring her back at six months for a series of tests, including a CAT scan to further investigate this enlargement.
Everyone’s worst fears were realized when the word was neuroblastoma. This childhood cancer can be deadly. The early discovery and localized appearance of the tumor were in her favor. Within two days she was admitted to the hospital. More tests resulted in surgery being scheduled.
To further set the stage you must know that 28 years ago my sister died from leukemia at age 11. She would have been Riley’s aunt. My family has never faced or overcome the scars left by Amy’s death. I have fought and struggled for years to understand and cope with the emotional baggage left by that event. The prospect that little Riley’s may die from cancer as well sent me into a tailspin.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001 the terrorist attack on NYC and DC happened and the world became a very scary place. The enormity of this global horror hadn’t begun to sink in when I had to set all of that aside and go to be with my family at my brother’s side during Riley’s surgery on Wednesday.
Her procedure lasted for more than 5 hours. In the end the were able to remove all of the tumor. Riley is recovering nicely and should be allowed home in a few days. There will be one more procedure to collect bone marrow but that can’t happen until the airlines and air freight carriers are working again as the sample must go to Boston of all places.
In the span of 6 days the entire world stopped making sense. On Friday everything was fine. That evening Riley was diagnosed as maybe having a malignant monster inside her. On Tuesday a monster reached out and altered our reality forever, and ripped our sense of freedom from us. On Wednesday a brave little girl underwent life saving surgery with barely a whimper of protest.
We live in a terrible and tragic world, which also contains great good and heroism. A week ago I had priorities in my life. I knew what I needed to accomplish. Today none of those has any importance to me. How can I be at all concerned about work deadlines or gas prices when in 24 hours time I watched in horror as thousands lost their lives on live television and waited while a few dedicated people performed a miracle on one small girl? I feel adrift in a sea of emotions and images. I can barely concentrate long enough to brush my teeth and yet I find myself doing familiar things with ease.
I don’t know what any of this means. I know there are lessons here for me to learn. I learned a long time ago that life was fleeting and ephemeral. I have been rudely reminded of that this week.
I say to you dear reader, I love you. I care that you are here in this life. You make a difference, you are vital to this world. Treasure who you are and what you bring to the lives around you. Stop and tell those you love how you feel. Share the only thing that is truly yours to give - your love.
I love all of you.
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” ? Yamamoto Isoroku, Admiral Japanese Imperial Navy upon learning the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred before the formal declaration of war was made in Washington DC.
We had a pool installed in our back yard last month. Everything is done except for restringing the fence. We are fortunate enough to live in the county where our original 42" chain link is high enough. I’ve called a couple of places to get estimates and finally connected with one company. We set an appointment for noon. This was about 9:00 am the same day.
I rearranged my schedule so I could be at home at noon. Its 20 or 25 minutes each way, so if I want to eat anything I wind up being out of the office a minimum of 90 minutes. That’s 90 minutes I cannot get paid for. As an independent consultant time is literally money. This year’s rate is $80/hour. So the extra 30 minutes tacked on to my lunch “Costs” me $40. Not a lot in terms of my annual income. And I’m not really too upset about that.
What chaps my ass though, is the rudeness of the company representative to show up 35 minutes early and not even be there when I arrived. Normally on a Tuesday my wife wouldn’t have been home at that time, but we were fortunate that she was home this day. I just don’t understand the thinking that says its okay to make an appointment and then not honor it. I don’t really care if you are early. I made decisions, plans and expended some effort to meet the agreed upon time. You did not. You therefore are rude.
The icing on this particular cake is that the person representing the company tried to argue with my wife about whether we lived inside or outside the city limits. WE have tax papers and permits from the county clearly stating we live in the county and not the city. But this idiot knows more than the county or us.
I am going to enjoy calling them up and iterating the reasons why they aren’t going to get one dime of my money on this project.
I have a collection of MP3 music on the PC I use at work. Most days I spend some time under my headphones listening to the music I like.
Only is it really the music I like?
Sometimes I find myself listening to things that I believe I like and I wonder, ‘do I like this because it does something for me or because the masses like it and I want to be like them?’
Wow. That’s pretty heady. More than music, do I like anything from my self, or is it all the result of wanting to be like everyone else? Eeeeuuuu. If I like things just to be like everyone else then am I really an individual at all? Or am I just a mirror of the fads, tastes, likes and dislikes of my generation?
I guess I am really starting to closely examine my motives for almost everything I say, do or think. What really makes me tick? Why am I me and not someone else?
What do you like?
Oh yeah?
For the past few days one of our cats has been acting very strange. We had a party to celebrate my 40th birthday on Saturday. Between my brother’s family, my parents and our friends from next door we had 14 extra people in the house (and out and in and out and in) for hours that afternoon and evening. Normally it’s just the two of our two cats, Abby and Nekko and us.
Nekko doesn’t much like changes to her routine. She is a cat of great will and usually gets what she wants through persistence. Having to stay hidden for so many hours must have been traumatizing for her. However, within a short time of the last guest leaving she was out exploring the scents and smells left behind.
Sunday morning she tried to jump up on our printer stand, which gives access to the neighboring desks. The stand is rather full as it also holds the TV cable converter box and a VCR. She has tried this path to the desk several times in the past with mixed results. Sunday was once again a failed attempt. Not only did she come tumbling down, as there was no place to land, but the remote, a cat brush, and a pair of scissors came tumbling down after her. She high-tailed it to the guest bedroom. We didn’t see her again until quite late that evening.
It is normal for her to “bed lump” for hours at a time. She burrows down under the spread and sleeps there for 3 or 4 hours at a stretch. We weren’t too concerned until that evening when we did finally see her again. Normally she announces her return to a room with a tribbling sound. That evening she slunk along the walls and when we noticed her she ran away to hide. She did make it to her food and water when we weren’t looking but disappeared as soon as we called to her.
Needless to say we were both quite worried by this radical departure in her behavior. We thought she might have hurt herself in the fall so we found her hiding place and caught her. She hates this. Hissing and growling until she resigned herself to the indignity of being held. I carefully felt all of her limbs and tail. Those and her torso all seemed fine. She did allow herself to be petted for a few minutes before slinking off to hide again.
By Monday morning we had worked ourselves up to a fever pitch worrying about her. Deciding that we needed the reassurance of a vet we got the dreaded cat carrier out and went looking for her. Nekko is a master at hiding. She never hides in the same place twice in a row, and she finds very unlikely places to secret herself. The first time we caught her she was under the bed. The second time she was hidden between the pillows at the head of the bed, where the spread is held up anyway, and she didn’t show. Crafty.
She fought going into the box, and cried piteously the whole way to the first vet’s office. The girl there was not helpful at all. Rather than hear that we had a potential emergency she want to lecture us on all the shots Nekko would have to have before she could stay. When we explained that we weren’t going to leave her and come back she seemed rather shocked. It was then we discovered that the vet himself wouldn’t be in until 2 hours later. She did find another clinic whose vet was already there for us. Back in the car, more driving and more motion sickness for our poor cat.
Dr. Atkins was wonderful. He was very gentle with Nekko and very understanding of our fears. He felt that she was fine, if perhaps a bit traumatized by all that had happened to her in such a short time. He said if the conditions persisted for more than a few days we should bring her back for some more testing, otherwise she should be okay.
She stayed hidden most of Monday. And we left her to her own company thinking it was what she needed. However, by Tuesday evening we were starting to get concerned again. This was a cat who plopped herself down in front of you multiple times a day and demanded attention. Now we weren’t seeing her at all. And when we did see her and spoke she ran away and hid. I did some reading on the Internet and discovered a page about feline depression. All of Nekko’s actions seemed to match the description given. The cure was to lavish her with attention and praise. We hunted her down and spent about an hour just petting her and talking to her. She didn’t resist and seemed to enjoy the contact. Later my wife carried her back out to the office area where all this began and Nekko allowed herself to be held for some time. Both of us praised her and talked to her. Finally she got down, but she didn’t leave right away. Instead she sat with her back to us. We both agreed that she must be mad at our taking her to the vet. Eventually she went off to hide again.
This morning my wife got up to find Nekko sitting in the bedroom with her. Normally Nekko gets up on the bed and sleeps with my wife once I leave. When Nekko wants to play she stands on Michele until Michele gets up. Weighing in at 15 pounds this is a surprisingly effective technique. She followed Michele to the bathroom and then disappeared again. When Michele went through the living room Nekko was sitting in the sun, a daily ritual for her before the Trauma. She stayed there for a while and then went back to bed lumping.
We hope that with some more praise we’ll get our precious, precocious, spunky, quirky, demanding little Nekko back.
We just got another of the ubiquitous AOL CDs in the mail. Usually we toss these without even thinking about it. But this one caught my eye. It offers 1000 “free” hours in the first 45 days of usage. Wow! 1000 hours. A “meg.” Hubba hubba.
Wait a minute… Just how many hours are there in 45 days? Hmmm. 24 * 45 = 1080. Oops. AOL can “give” you all this free time because you don’t have this much free time. They aren’t giving you anything at all. Plus, they are banking on the fact that you will forget to cancel if you don’t want the service, and if you do remember to, the calls and trouble to do so will prevent you from completing the task. Thereby gaining them a new customer for free.
80 hours of sleep for 45 days. That’s less than 2 hours per day.
Toss….
Update: I installed it just to see. I originally started using the internet via AOL 1.0. It fit on one diskette. This thing takes over 20 meg when it is installed.
By the way it is a nasty install - it changes settings in your copy of IE 5.5. Un-installing it doesn’t remove the residue. Editing the registry helps but still doesn’t get rid of the footprints. AOL SUCKS. But then, we knew that…
I think our lives are made up of two things, objects that we collect and the emotions that we associate with those objects. Our society today focuses all of its attention on objects. We are constantly bombarded with messages that tell us having objects is good. Having the “right” object will make us perfect. This pursuit of objects is the foundation of our consumerism religion. We are constantly in the pursuit of the right object so that we can be perfect for having it. Of course, we take everyone else’s word for what the “right” object is right now.
We have grown up believing that the real world consists of objects. Clothes, cars, stereos, televisions, computers, cell phones, houses, and so on. All these objects and more are used to define the measure of a man or woman. If you have a palatial house filled with expensive objects you are envied. You are a success. If you live out of a shopping cart on the street you are ignored and pitied, you are a failure. And yet when you start to look at the lives of those who have it seems they aren’t always happy. And when you look at those who haven’t, often times they are extremely happy and content. Obviously there is more going on here than meets the physical eye.
The other piece to this equation is emotion. Our society has made expressing emotion out to be a sign of weakness. It is something that is derided and scorned. We ruthlessly stamp out emotion in our young boys so they’ll grow up to be strong men. And then we wonder why a teenage male takes a gun to school and kills. We revere star athletes for their physical abilities while turning a blind eye to often drug addicted, petty criminal lives. Being a physical superstar isn’t enough without emotional depth.
When you were a child and hand made a birthday card for your mother she was overjoyed. The card was sloppily done and hard to read but the love and joy associated with it made it appear golden to your mother. She saved that card in her drawer for years. She takes it out and relives the rush of love and happiness she felt when you first presented it to her. She no longer has the object that was given as the “real” gift. Can you name the presents you got for your 5th birthday? Can you remember the first big birthday party you had growing up? I can vividly remember the skating party I had in the 4th grade where my whole class came. But I couldn’t tell you a single gift I got that year. The emotional gift I got was far more meaningful and important than the physical ones.
For some time now I have been focusing on my emotional growth. My lifestyle was not geared towards objects, nor did it support collecting new objects. I know that I have reached a new stage in this emotional growth as my lifestyle has changed to allow me the option of collecting new objects. Before when I had no choice but to resist temptation it was easy to stay focused on the emotional content of my life. Now that I can act on temptation I have to struggle against falling under the spell of objects for objects sake
The State Police here have an unmarked Mustang they use for speeding ticket revenue generation. From a distance you can’t tell this is a police car. Even up close it is hard to tell, the license plate is not a special government one and there is only one extra antenna. I’ve seen it in action a couple of times so I know what it looks like. This saved me the other day.
Coming home from work I go past the lake and local zoo. The road follows the shoreline so it is curvy and fun to drive. The Audi TT hugs the corners like it is on rails and it is fun to drive, um, aggressively. Last evening I was approaching the curve by the zoo when all of a sudden here was the red-and-white mustang glued to my bumper. We were at the bottom of a slight hill and I was going maybe 7 or 8 miles an hour over the posted 45. From that point on I stayed glued to the limit.
The cop stayed glued to my bumper, even tailgating. I got the impression he was trying to provoke me into speeding. As I turned onto the country road that leads to our house he followed. Just before our house the speed limit drops 10 miles an hour, as I slowed for that he got very close, again trying to push me I think. I could almost hear his frustration when I put my signal on and slowed to a crawl to enter our driveway. I stop at the end of our lane to get the mail. As I got out of the car the Mustang was already far down the road, accelerating far past the limit.
We don’t live in a police state, for which I am grateful. However, I wish someone would tell Officer Speed that
This is a prime example of the great leadership we can expect over the next 4 years!
“Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“Welcome to Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“Mars is essentially in the same orbit…Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 8/11/94
“The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 9/15/95
“I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy but that could change.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 5/22/98
“One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is ’to be prepared’.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 12/6/93
“Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 11/30/96
“I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“The future will be better tomorrow.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“We’re going to have the best educated American people in the world.” * Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 9/21/97
“People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr. to Sam Donaldson, 8/17/93
“We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“Public speaking is very easy.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr. to reporters in 10/9
“I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“When I have been asked who caused the riots and the killings in LA, my answer has been direct & simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame. George W. Bush, Jr.
“Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 5/20/96
“We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.” * Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 9/22/97
“For NASA, space is still a high priority.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 9/5/93
“Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr., 9/18/95
“The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that George Bush may or may not make.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.
“It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.” Governor George W. Bush, Jr.