Tag: Family

Dead Address Book Entries — I struggle with this too. My last grandparent, Cleo, passed on a while ago and I have been unable to delete his email address from my address book. I see it, and I remember him, and my other grandparents, and I just can’t remove it. I suppose some day my address book will be full of similar entries.

* Senseo coffee maker. This appears to the best rated single serve machine.
* Nightvision binoculars. I have no idea what is really the best deal in this space.
* Handheld GPS with topo/trail maps. Not sure what the right unit us. REI has lots of choices. UPDATE: Jeff Ort of sourcelabs has had good experiences with the Garmin eTrex Vista and would recommend the Garmin line.

The school pack of choice around here — Timbuk2 — Messenger Bags and Backpacks. We’ve had great experiences with these.

Good weekend at — The Gottman Institute – Marriage- Weekend Workshop — During this weekend workshop, gain new insights and learn research-based relationship skills that can dramatically improve the intimacy and friendship in your relationship

Looking for self defense courses in the area. Home Alive seems like the best organization in terms of affordability and time commitment. BCC has some courses too. Insights Training seems like it might be for harder core people, some parts of the website scare me. A lot of the martial arts studios offer courses as well such as this one.

Escapable Logic:

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you

We’ve raised our own personal terror alert to Blue — we are “guarded”. We had three police cars in our driveway this morning, after 3-4 young people celebrating a 21st birthday got out of hand, broke into the boat locker in the park next door, stole a canoe, landed at our dock, and wandered thru our yard to the street at 6:45am. Unfortunately they parked their car at the park, and were nicely caught on a security camera, so they spent the remainder of the day in jail.

Happy Birthday Liz.

Pinewood Derby. Helping my son build a boat for science class, I started reminiscing about a similar project from my youth. My Pinewood Derby entry — I slaved over it, with only help from my dad on the powertools. My car looked terrible, it was basically a box with lead weights attached, spray-painted gold. Clearly some of the other kids were way more skilled than me, or had had substantial parental help. But despite looks, I came in second that day, which was pretty exciting. I won a pen and pencil set which was way cooler than the first place prize, a canteen.

Gosh knows why I remember this day with such clarity. Clearly it had a big impression on me. In some way I was really proud of the achievement. And there is something primal about working with your dad on a project like this. I hope my son has the same memories. Obviously a lot of people care a lot about the Pinewood Derby — a lot of info up on Google about.

Happy Birthday Annie! Hope your day is great.

Carrie’s Page. Hey my aunt is the only cool member of my extended family apparently — the only relative with a web presence at all — Just My Dogs by Carrie Hutchman

Dad News. Making great progress. Plans to check out today and be home this afternoon! Thanks much to all the well wishers.

Dad update. He continues to do well. Physically making good strides. Is up occasionally today, and is eating solid food (though, as his roommate says, everything tastes like dirt). He is not feeling the most settled today, painkillers and anesthetics are taking their toll, but he looks better and is getting better.

Cleveland Clinic TV Stations. I’m flipping channels at the guest house here. A saudi network, abu dhabi, kuwait, indian, another arabic channel, a turkish channel? Very interesting spread, indicates a lot about the customer base. Why no european, no spanish language, no asian? Where do these people go for cardiac care?

Dad. I just saw dad in the icu. He is doing great, they are moving him out of intensive care in the next hour. He looks good, is awake and lucid, and is anxious to get all the tubes out. Mom is doing great too.

The surgery was very successful. They were able to do a valve repair with a cosgrove ring and did not need to replace the valve which is great news. And they performed a maze procedure to correct his arhythmia as well. So very good news.

The cleveland clinic has quite an amazing heartcare facility. According to signs in the hall it is the number one rated heart facility in the country. There are a huge number of foreign patients coming and going here, they have translators on staff. My father’s doctor, dr cosgrove, invented the ring that was implanted in my father — the cosgrove ring. I certainly feel that we are in good hands here.

Travel to Cleveland. Haven’t been on a redeye in years. I used to travel 4-5 days a week including redeyes, early mornings, middays, etc. My most extreme travel was maybe my 24 hoiur trip to paris for a dressing down by a client. I left cleveland and was back in 24 hours, and saw about 4 minutes of paris.

The newly remodelled northwest facility in dtw is great. Very spacious. A marked difference from my last trip here. I used to travel thru here weekly back when I was consulting for gm, standard tube of canada, ontario paper, and other midwest clients.

But of course my most memorable detroit airport moment was the night Liz was born. I was on a consulting assignment for standard tube of canada in woodstock ontario. A colleague and I were driving to detroit the night of november 19 to interview some automotive customers the following day. Between london and detroit we hit black ice and spun into the ditch, thankfully we were not hurt nor was the car damaged. We were towed out later and got to detroit around 2am. I spoke with C and all was fine, she was due in a week.

A half hour later the phone rang. C’s water had broken. She was heading for the hospital. I scrambled out of bed and got a cab to detroit city airport. Before leaving I called ahead to a charter operator and had them get a pilot out of bed. He met me at the airport and we left detroit in a little 4 seater and hopped across the lake to cleveland.

Getting a cab at 4am in cleveland was hard. After repeated calls with greater desparation on each call, the taxi dispatcher came out personally and took me to the hospital. I arrived a few minutes after 5 and at 529 Liz arrived. and she let the world know she was here, she was talking from the word go.

Father”s Day. A memorable card.