Merry Christmas, from the archives

While I recharge the batteries and get ready for another Christmas Eve, I present to you this forum's first-ever Christmas post, from (unbelievably) four years ago, when life was a lot different. We never got a chance to do that "one last time" gathering; Grandma went on to her much-deserved rest in 2004, and the little house in Anytown is on the market, if not already sold. A reminder that while the holidays are wonderful, they sometimes make me wistful.

All the best to you and yours, and enjoy this blast from the not-so-recent past.

Christmas, Anytown style

Here's how it was: Christmas Eve, any year in the 1970s. Eight adult siblings (including my dad) and their spouses, probably 20 cousins (including me) ranging in age from 10 to just-born, a few ex-wives of the aforementioned siblings, and my grandparents, all packed into their house, which seated maybe six comfortably. Big, thick cloud of smoke hanging over the proceedings (apparently, back in the 1970s, secondhand smoke wasn't bad for kids). Somebody's dressed as Santa; one of my uncles, but I'm not sure who, and I certainly wasn't going to make my way through the crowd to figure it out. Not much food around, and certainly nothing I liked. We're supposed to start opening presents at 5:00, but it's 5:20, and one aunt-uncle-cousins bloc isn't here yet. They're always late. There's a Christmas tree in the corner, but you can hardly see it because it's covered with those shiny silver icicles. Small flashing lights on the tree inside, big flashing lights on the evergreen in the front yard, big flashbulb going off every once in a while on someone's Polaroid. If it's not snowing and it's above 20 degrees, a few of us will venture outside every once in a while to get away from the smoke and the noise. Back inside, the late arrivals have showed up. Wrapping paper is flying, cousins are hollering, and toys are piling up to the ceiling. If you have a cousin of the same gender and in the same basic age group, you got the same gift as he did. Conflict avoidance, of course. You can't play with anything, though; there's no room to play with anything. The family wasn't well-off, by any means; my dad and two of his brothers worked in the same factory, and they were on strike that winter. Or sitting out a temporary layoff. Didn't matter; none of the kids would have ever known the difference.

Here's what it became: Christmas Eve, sometime in the late 1980s. Same family, same gathering, although in the slightly larger house of the Uncle Who Made Good. Some of the cousins, such as myself, are in their late teens or early 20s. We're bringing girlfriends or boyfriends to the gathering, and we're not staying very long. We're getting gifts we really don't have a lot of use for, in complete honesty. And I can only stay until 6, because I have to go to work. There's more food around, but I've already been to one of the few places in Anytown that's open on Christmas Eve, probably the Waffle House. I leave, not particularly filled with Christmas spirit, but more relieved that I've made my appearance.

Here's how it is: Christmas Eve, 2001. The siblings are getting older; all the cousins are grown and many have kids of their own. Some are in Texas, some in Colorado, some in South Carolina, one in medical school. A few are still bumming around Anytown, doing the best they can with what they have. The Christmas gathering is a much smaller affair in a much bigger place, at the palatial estate of the Uncle Who Made Good. It'll probably be the only time my grandparents get out of their house all year. Phone rings a few times; it's the cousin from Texas or Colorado or South Carolina calling to wish the gathering a merry Christmas. The same aunt-uncle-cousins bloc, minus the cousins, will be late. Or they won't show up at all, which'll make Grandma sad, but probably nobody else will miss them. My own kids wouldn't have a clue how to conduct themselves in a large, loud group like the one I grew up with. It would just freak them out. We'll have our own gathering here in Texas; wrapping paper will fly, toys will pile to the ceiling; it'll have everything but the cloud of smoke.

Maybe soon we'll get that whole group together one last time. Maybe we'll do it at my grandparents' little house in Anytown. Until then, I'll count the memory as one of my best gifts of this or any year.

Cheap space-filler

A meme, via largelypro.com, basically just so I can say that I have a December post.

A is for Age: 37. The same age my Dad was when one second of inattention behind the wheel changed our lives forever.
B is for Booze: Macallan, 12 year. Disposable income is fun.
C is for Career: Software guy. Install it, teach it, document it. But I still think of myself as a journalist.
D is for Dad?s name: Same as mine, which explains how my credit report once showed a Sears account that "I" opened in 1978, when I was 10.
E is for Essential items to bring to a party: A four-pack of Grolsch swing-tops. Great conversation starters.
F is for Favorite song or music: I have a different favorite song every day, but one sticks in my head more than most. On June 1, 1986, the day I graduated from high school, I had the house to myself for a few minutes before I had to leave for the ceremony. I turned on the stereo and Boston's "Don't Look Back" was on. I closed my eyes and listened to it ... then, during the bridge, for reasons, I still can't understand, I jumped as high as I possibly could and let out a yell, because finally, my life was going to go forward. It's not even that band's best song, but whenever I hear it, I always remember that moment.
G is for Goof off thing to do: Not much time for that, but when I do, it usually involves idly surfing the Web.
H is for Hometown: Springfield, Mo., aka Anytown USA. Haven't been there since my grandmother's funeral in 2004.
I is for Instrument you play: For the last 25 years, it's been guitar. At times in my life, I have also publicly played violin, viola, cello and bass.
J is for Jam or Jelly you like: Welch's grape jelly. Accept no substitutes.
K is for Kids: Three, 11, 6 and 5, girl, boy, girl, respectively.
L is for Living arrangement: Plastic white suburbia, wife, her four dogs, the kids, and a cat who we can't persuade to leave.
M is for Mom?s name: Stephanie. Named for her father's political hero, Stephen Douglas. Explains a lot about her father.
N is for Name of best friend: Natalie. Thankfully, I'm also married to her.
Overnight Stay in a Hospital: Three days after getting smacked down with the flu last February in New Hampshire.
P is for Phobias: I'm afraid of water, and dogs, which explains why I have a house with a large swimming pool and four golden retrievers.
Q is for Quote you like: "Two elephants for a quarter is only a good deal if you need two elephants and you have a quarter."
R is for Relationship that lasted longest: The Wife and I began Year 16 in October.
S is for Siblings: A younger sister.
T is for Texas, ever been? Lived there for three years. Many things to love about that place. Many things to hate. It's a land of extremes.
U is for Unique trait: What makes me unique? Hell, I don't have a clue. I'm a pretty average guy.
V if for vegetable you love: Will eat just about any vegetable cold, or steamed. Once they lose their crunch, though, they lose me.
W is for Worst traits: Procrastination, and a tendency to shut down when I get frustrated.
X- is for X-rays you?ve had: I have a fuzzy memory of that hospital stay mentioned earlier involving X-rays, but I'm not sure. The source for this meme points out that this is a rather desperate attempt to come up with something for X. I agree.
Y is for Yummy food you make: I'm not much of a cook, but I can grill a steak as well as anybody and better than most.
Z is for Zodiac sign: Cancer.

It's just a number

It just occurred to me that people who went to high school with me are turning 40 this year.

And Madonna is 47.

Random stray thought

I find myself at 1:48 a.m. suddenly needing to know the Danish word for "fortuitous."

The new "normal"

The Young Daughter came home from the hospital Friday afternoon, none the worse for wear. After a few hours to get re-oriented, she was back up to full speed. She was in rare form at dinner, making up for lost time by applying a week's worth of torture on her big brother. (He's an easy target.) In short, all is well.

What they didn't come home with Friday afternoon was answers. These "episodes" she has are not common with her malady. We've rung up a doctor back in Texas, who originally diagnosed the Young Daughter back in 2001. This doctor is now in possession of all the records and is presenting the case to her colleagues next week. We expect to have an answer then, and we expect the answer to be low-dose chemotherapy to attack a couple of small lesions on her cerebellum. In the process, hopefully, it might zap a couple of optic gliomas, too.

This is not at all the worst-case scenario. Chemotherapy is no walk in the park, but I'm assured it's not near as bad as it used to be. The problem here is, though, as I write this, nobody's sure it's going to work. It might be a situation where we're "trying" chemo, the same way you'd "try taking a Motrin" if you had a headache.

But sometimes, all you can do is try. We're trying now to take this one step at a time. Right now, everybody's home. The Wife is two hours away at a dog show, her first time out of the Young Daughter's sight in a week. This is a good thing, for all involved. At 10:16 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 5, we're having a "normal" day. That's all that matters right now.

Hey you! The one with the black cloud over your head

I haven't been happy the last few days, and I'm perfectly justified. You don't like it? Screw you. My kid has been in the hospital all week tethered to some machine that's measuring her brain waves, testing for a condition nobody thinks she has. My wife is sleeping on a "bed" that a homeless person would turn down, with a blue light shining on her all night so they can film my daughter not having seizures. Neither of them signed up for that duty. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

So yeah. I've been a little testy.

Driving to work today, my grim countenance firmly installed, I find myself stopped at a light behind a little Toyota truck.

Its license plate: MO FAITH.

Deep breath. Awright. I'll give that a try.

Thanks for the message, whoever you are. And thanks for making me muster a smile.

When you learn that, can you teach me?

Direct quote:

"Well, if I want to do computer animation, which I do, I'm going to need to learn Flash. So I'm going to put the Adobe project on hold for a while and concetrate on Flash."

I did not hear this at the software company at which I work.

I heard it from the back seat of my car, from the Old Daughter. She's in sixth grade. She has a dual-processor Mac G4 (and is the only kid on the block who not only has a dual-processor G4, but knows she has a dual-processor G4 and thinks it's cool that she has a dual-processor G4.) She was teaching herself Illustrator and Photoshop, but apparently something else has grabbed her attention. It's nice to see some sign that she's actually 11.

That little woman fascinates me.

Pepto. Bismol.

It's early, early in the morning on Nov. 1, and somebody in my house is rushing to the commode after gorging on too much junk food.

Not the Old Daughter. Not The Boy. They have the advantage of having a parent around who tells them "no" to the second piece of candy.

Nope, the one chugging indigestion medicine in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 1 was me. Junk food is not a cure for anxiety and depression, but it sure as hell is a good treatment, at least right until it wakes you up in the middle of the night.

In our next episode, all my teeth fall out and I can't find them because my gut obscures my view of the ground. Stay tuned.

Today

She passed out at her party.

This would be reasonably acceptable behavior, of course, for a college sophomore who had one Red-Bull-and-Vodka too many while celebrating her birthday. However, it's much less so for somebody who's turning 5 at Gymboree.

The Young Daughter's having "episodes," as we call them. They look kind of like seizures, but we're pretty sure they're not. The usual progression: Young Daughter is playing at full speed, then she starts to look kind of out of it, then she goes all pale, then she wants to go to sleep right there, wherever "right there" is. Then, usually, she throws up.

Mercifully, that last part didn't happen Sunday. But the rest of it did, right up to falling asleep on her mom's shoulder while 20 screaming kids ran around jumping on things and throwing balls and dancing and stuff.

It's hard, really, to pin down what she does during these "episodes." The simplest way to put it would be that she's just not herself. Pretty much all of the behavior related to these incidents is 180 degrees out of character for her.

The hospital trip to diagnose these things was scheduled last week, before yesterday's occurrence. She'll stay until they can figure out what it is. So far, they've set aside five days. That's a long damn time, when you're 5 years old.

--------

This forum is almost exactly one year younger than the Young Daughter. The first post is dated Oct. 21, 2001, two days before her first birthday. It was at a "well-baby checkup" two days later that we found out that she might be somewhat less than well.

Up until the last few months, the impact of what I used to somewhat lightly call the dread disease was pretty minimal. She had some spots on her skin. She had to go to elongated doctor's appointments every few months. She had to undergo MRIs under general anesthesia. Turns out one of those, back in 2003, almost killed her. In the course of trying to track the neurofibromatosis, we discovered that she also has a condition known as malignant hyperthermia, where general anesthesia causes her to run fevers well into triple digits.

Even after that scare, we slipped back into something resembling a routine. In the back of my mind, though, ever since I learned how to spell neurofibromatosis, I thought that 2005 was going to be a rough ride. The disease flares up in tandem with hormonal activity -- it usually starts to get really bad around puberty, but you also start seeing effects around age 4.

My original fear was that she'd regress developmentally. That hasn't seemed to happen, at least not in the cognitive sense. She ALSO has a hormonal deficiency which has put her in the single-digiteth percentile on height and weight for her age. She's not a dwarf; she looks like a perfectly proportioned 3-year-old.

After the brain tumors (which sounds a whole lot more direct than "optic gliomas") were discovered, things changed a bit. We needed to do more tracking, because if those tumors -- which are otherwise benign -- start to grow in her head, there's a chance they'll get in the way of stuff that actually needs the room more. So, more MRIs. More eye exams.

Then, the "episodes." Rare at first, then more frequent, then noticeable to even the casual observer.

-------

Normalcy, now, is not an option. The Wife and the Young Daughter will spend the next several days in the hospital while people who spent lots and lots and lots of money on their educations rub their chins and squint a lot and say, in Doctor Voice, "Well, we don't know what's going on." The treatment could be chemotherapy; 18 months of hell punctuated by the occasional really bad day. The treatment could be surgery, where somebody opens the hood on my kid's head and rearranges some wires, which might or might not fix the problem. The treatment could be, "Well, these things are going to happen every once in a while; they're not causing any permanent damage and they're not really a sign of anything; you just have to keep a close eye, keep her comfortable and accept this as your new "normal."

All of those choices pretty much suck.

Meanwhile, the palms of my hands are scorched from the friction caused by my attempt to stop the world from turning for a few days. Everything's on hold right now. It's all on hold. The other two kids have to have Halloween tonight; you can't begin to guess the depths of my lack of enthusiasm for taking them around the neighborhood begging for candy while everyone asks "Where's your other one?" or, for those who know, "How's your other one?"

The Wife spent almost 40 minutes this morning rattling off the list of responsibilities for which I need to be responsible over the course of the coming week, while she sits in the incredibly uncomfortable accommodations offered by our local children's hospital. Her job is damn hard, much harder than mine, and requires greater organizational skill than I posess (and my organizational skills, frankly, are quite good.)

And oh, yeah, I need to figure out a way to hold down my job, too, to pretend to care that somebody's database is down or that the software is behaving funny or that they really wish their problem would move to the front of my line. I've been doing a pretty good job of feigning interest for the last month. One major project was completed last week, and another is starting to build steam. Several minor projects also are calling for my attention. For today, anyway, they're just hearing it ring, or hearing "please leave a message after the tone and I'll get back to you after I find out whether they're going to drill holes in my daughter's head."

For today, anyway. At some point, I pull my hands back and let it all start spinning again.

---------

I have no desire for anyone's sympathy. Neither does The Wife, nor the Young Daughter. Yeah, it's a crappy way to spend the day, in the hospital, but sympathy isn't going to help anything. Many are in far, far, far worse situations than we are.

I do care that you care. I appreciate the well wishes and the kind thoughts and all the people who are interrupting their lives to help us while ours are being interrupted. I appreciate it more than my facility with the language will allow me to express.

It's time now to spin the globe. Gotta jump back on.

Where the path leads next

The Young Daughter has taken a turn. It hasn't been a good turn. A bunch of doctors tell us what they think it is. Nobody is willing to commit. Nobody is willing to offer a course of treatment.

The Young Daughter goes into the hospital on Monday, length of stay undetermined. The mission: Find out what it is that is going on, and get some answers.

The disease is neurofibromatosis type 1, for those of you just joining us. The Wife is recording events and news here. Just send up some good wishes. Right now, those help more than anything.

Rosa Parks, 1913-2005

"I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die -- the dream of freedom and peace."

Others have gained more fame and fortune and notoriety during the struggle, but it all started that day in 1955, when that driver said, "I'm going to have you arrested," and she gently replied, "You may do that."

It had nothing to do with a seat on the bus, people. It had to do with teaching us how to be human beings, to treat each other with the respect all of us deserve -- and to stand up (or stay seated, in her case) for what is right.

The lesson hasn't been learned yet, but thanks to her, we're well on our way. Those of us born after 1964 will never know how much courage it took for her to say, "You may do that." We have Mrs. Parks to thank.

Baa

Last night in Tampa, 22,120 sheep flocked to the St. Pete Times Forum (why is the arena in Tampa named after the newspaper in St. Petersburg? Do you think the City of Dallas would have allowed the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to swoop in and do such a thing? But I digress) ... anyway, 22,120 sheep flocked to the big arena in downtown Tampa to welcome back the NHL and their Stanley Cup Champion Lightning.

This, of course, being the same NHL that decided NOT TO PLAY AT ALL LAST YEAR rather than figure out an equitable way to divide its multi-billions among its members.

And no fans of the Stanley Cup Champion Lightning are even the slightest bit angry about this? That it was Oct. 5, 2005, and they were hoisting a banner that read "2004 STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS"? Nobody thought it was the slightest bit ridiculous?

Sheep. Baa. This is why the professional sports moguls are the leading geniuses of the Western world. Nobody takes more money and gives back less. Wish I had thought of it first.

It must stop. Now.

She is just another one of more than 1,900 so far, just another dead soldier. She's the first woman from Palm Beach County to die in Iraq. She was 21. Born in 1984, the year I got my driver's license.

I should insert a political comment about how f---ing stupid war is in general and this war is specifically. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to send up a wish for peace for this woman and all those who believed in her, and leave it, because that's all I can do.

Random stray thought

If I'm going to work at home, I need a more comfortable chair.

Hey kid: Shut up

From a story in today's Cincinnati Enquirer exploring a phenomenon it calls "premature affluence":

What makes parents do it, experts say, are motives that range from sheer financial ability to "guilt giving" to make up for an absence of parental time or attention. And then there's simple convenience - a 16-year-old with his own car, for example, can haul younger siblings to soccer practice. Worse still, some parents give out of dread of what happens if they don't. "I've had parents tell me they're scared to come home from the store without a certain toy," said psychologist Buffone.

Scared? Scared?

A fellow parent once gave me his No. 1 Rule of Parenting, and we stick with it: "Never take shit from your kids."

Scared. Give me a break.

Thing is, if parents have already created this expectation in children old enough to cause that fear, they've already lost. It's too late to undo that.

And don't even get me started on the "guilt giving" thing.

Quick breather

Today, for the first time in several days, I didn't spend every waking moment thinking about, talking aobut, using, testing, and cursing at software. Here's what I did instead:

-- Slept like a baby on an Airbus A320, not worried for a second that the landing gear might go sideways ...
-- Went to a birthday party. The guest of honor was turning 5. About 30 of her friends were there to share the joy, including my three children. Talked football and airplanes with the guest of honor's dad, who is an Air Force pilot. On Nov. 11, he's leaving for Turkey for 15 months.
-- Hung out with the kids after coming home from the birthday party. We watched Shark Tale for the 23rd time. The animated Robert De Niro is pretty funny.
-- Played guitar and sang. Did neither very well, of course, but my audience of zero didn't care.
-- Monitored the Young Daughter after a CAT scan this afternoon. She had two seizure episodes earlier this week. Anxiously awaiting the results to determine what the next step is.
-- Standing watch at home tonight while The Wife takes a night off. God, she's earned it. She's been dealing with pretty much everything while I've been holding the hand of the software I'm installing. Everything, of course, ranging from dealing with normal life plus seizures plus bad news from the extended family.

It's been a long damn 168 hours for both of us. I plan to be unreachable for the next 12. Then it's time to get up and do it all again.

We can help

Their dog crapped in our yard. Usually, that's not a good way to get to know someone.

But my wife, of course, is a Dog Person. When the very apologetic woman with the black lab and the 7-year-old boy in tow stopped to apologize -- "I don't have a bag, I'm so sorry" -- The Wife assured her that it was OK, and that it certainly was not the first or last dog turd that would find a home in our yard.

I must point out that nobody gets out of our yard without getting to know The Wife. This is a woman who met one of her best friends in the checkout line at Kroger, and another in a random outing to the park three days after we moved to Florida the first time. When you and she cross paths, you will get to know her, and in minutes, you'll be giving her information you wouldn't just give any stranger. She's irresistable that way.

This stranger, with the kid and the dog, somehow let slip that she was visiting from New Orleans. Well, not "visiting," exactly. They got out of their East New Orleans neighborhood just before Hurricane Katrina dropped in with its 125-mph shredder.

She and 10 of her relatives are staying with relatives in our neighborhood. They don't know how long they'll be staying. They don't know if they have a home to go back to. They only know what they see on CNN, and what they see on CNN doesn't exactly make them optimistic.

The 10 range in age from 7 to 87. The black lab is one of four dogs who made the involuntary trip east on Interstate 10. They got out alive, but with only enough to get them through a few days. The "few days," of course, has turned into "indefinitely." And nothing is more indefinite than homelessness.

"Well, we'll help you," The Wife said. Understand, this was not, "oh, my gosh, you poor, poor people," or "oh my gosh, survivors in our midst!" or anything like that. Just a matter of fact: "Well, we'll help you."

And help she will. While I was in the air from Connecticut on the way home, she rallied a few of her friends in the neighborhood and made a plan.

The first thing, above all else, to take into consideration was the people's dignity. These are middle-class people, just like us, just like everyone around us, who are not used to taking handouts. They don't need a handout.

There are things they do need. Their hosts are going to see some pretty high utility bills with 10 extra people in the house. The dogs need food, and toys. The boys, ages 7 and 13, need something to stave off boredom -- and, more importantly, things to call their own, as they only carried with them what they could.

So: Her next step was to lead the coordination efforts, and to emphasize that this was not Goodwill. "I don't want them to wind up with a bunch of castoff stuff that these people will just have to move," she said. So she's serving as the neighborhood clearing house for material, making sure that each individual person's needs are filled -- from the 7-year-old's Hot Wheels to the matriarch's clip-on earrings.

Later that afternoon, she met the woman again in the park by the school. This time, the 87-year-old grandmother was with her, soaking up the sun in her wheelchair, looking little the worse for wear after two weeks of hell. The Wife shared her plans with the people, and quietly but firmly rebuffed their protestations. The old woman took my wife's hands. She looked her in the eye. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you, and bless you." She said a prayer.

"You're welcome," my wife said. But the old woman didn't let go.

"Bend down here, please," the old woman said. My wife leaned her 6-foot frame forward. The old woman made the sign of the Cross on my wife's forehead. She said a prayer in a foreign language; The Wife thinks it was Latin. The Wife, of course, is resolute. This is not sympathy she's providing; it's help. But it was hard for her to keep the tears in, and it was impossible for me as she related the story to me.

Later Friday evening, she held a meeting with the family to assess each person's specific needs.

Today, she's working with banks -- after hours -- to establish an account for them.

Tomorrow, after the logisitics get worked out, she and her two friends are going to canvass the neighborhood and get these people helped.

No sympathy. No pandering. Just help. It could be us next time.

This, folks, is what makes her The Best Woman in the World.

They're people, too

New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass is the latest Louisiana public official to lose it on TV. And the worst is yet to come for these people.

God help them. They have the most difficult jobs in America right now.

Hang on while I get the sand out of my hair

That would be appropriate, of course, only if Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff had hair. He was playing the "Uh, nobody saw this coming" defense in his presser this afternoon.

Mr. Chertoff, they saw it coming two years ago:

http://www.nola.com/hurricane/?/washingaway/

And the National Weather Service put this in its normally dry, straight-to-the-point advisory on Sunday afternoon:

WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

Don't give me the "Nobody saw this coming" bullshit. Save it for the hearings.

Textbook example of failure

We're learning more lessons than a classroom full of first-graders. We still don't know the worst of the Gulf South tragedy, and already we're talking about "lessons learned." That learning comes too late for many, many people. But maybe we'll be better and smarter next time.

LESSON ONE: (blank), shelter and (blank)
Three basic human needs: food, shelter and clothing. We all learned that in first grade. One is not enough without the other two. If you're going to send all the people who can't get away to a large sports arena, make sure the damn thing is stocked with food and water. For good measure, park a couple of tankers outside to take over when the plumbing quits. In short: Do the same level of minimal planning that you'd do if you were planning to hold a football game or a boxing match or a Billy Graham Crusade, only over the course of several days.

LESSON TWO: Geography
You have a river flowing on one side. You have a lake on the other. You've built walls to keep a dry area between the two. A short drive away is an ocean; an ocean with waters that run 90-plus degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime, acting as fuel for tropical weather systems. Don't stand up there, Mr. FEMA, and tell me that "nobody thought about a hurricane and a flood at the same time." Hell, my wife and I thought about that Saturday night, and we're not exactly disaster planning experts. Maybe there'll be job openings for us at FEMA soon.

LESSON THREE: Sociology
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued the mandatory evacuation order on Saturday, and offered up the Superdome as a "shelter of last resort." The Wife, upon hearing of this Saturday night: "The roof's gonna peel off that thing like a tuna can." My reply: "Yep, and there's gonna be several thousand cranky, unhappy, hungry people in there."

In general, who won't heed a mandatory evacuation order?

1/The stubborn
2/The stupid
3/The poor and/or infirm
4/People who have issues regarding respect for authority

(And hey, put your deck of race cards away. Notice NO REFERENCE to race in any of the above. Millions and millions of white people - some of whom to which I am related - fit all four of the criteria.)

In the midst of a natural disaster, you're dealing with about 75,000 people who fit at least one of the above four categories. Under the best of circumstances, that's not going to be an orderly group of people.

A group of 75,000 people in a small area who are not scared, bored, hungry, tired, dehydrated, and defending the lives of themselves and their children is going to be hard to manage. Throw in any one of those mitigating circumstances -- never mind all of them -- and you might as well light up a Lucky Strike on a drilling rig. The fact that somebody thought it would be OK to toss them into the Superdome with no food, water or security is simply the height (depth?) of idiocy.

There's nothing inherently wrong with being stubborn, stupid, poor or infirm. But those people needed a leader, or perhaps several leaders, and those leaders needed to be leading from the minute those people hit the Superdome's concourses. Authorities under no circumstances should have treated them like animals, but they should have understood with whom they were dealing and planned and acted accordingly.

LESSON FOUR: Division of power
City government is responsible for the cities. County government (or, in Louisiana, parish government) is responsible for the parishes. State government is responsible for the states. Federal government is NOT responsible for filling in gaps caused by the incompetence of the other three. We can't talk out of one side of our mouths about wanting less federal government and then talk out of the other side asking where they were in our time of need. When the time comes to go back and assess the failure in New Orleans, that assessment starts at City Hall, works its way to the parish government offices and then heads northwest to Baton Rouge, and stops there.

Should Washington have stepped in sooner to cover for that failure, which became obvious Monday afternoon? Perhaps. But that then calls into question the need for local and state governments at all. Should Washington have come through with the money to finish the levee project? Perhaps, but once it didn't, it was time for the state to step in and adjust its budget.

We've seen something awful. This is the worst disaster in American history since the Civil War. In terms of death toll, it's going to make September 11 look like a bad car accident. In terms of sustained human suffering, it's going to rival and perhaps eclipse the Great Depression. Nobody has addressed for even a second a question of what all these people holed up in the Astrodome and Alamodome and Reunion Arena and other assorted large sporting facilities around the South are going to do in two weeks.

It's time to find out if the United States has any social conscience at all. Pray for us.

Sad wordplay

New Orleans' airport code is MSY. All I can think when I see that is "misery."

A tip for the New Orleans Police Department

... and for law enforcement throughout the Gulf South:

See a looter, shoot on sight, shoot to kill.

This should be pretty simple.

Shoot to kill. Or, if you don't want that on your conscience, shoot to hurt, and let whatever's in the floodwaters do the rest.

Fuckwads.

Watch out, NOLA, and stay safe

Back on Thursday, I was leading system training a group of newsroom users up in Illinois. We were having a good time using the new editorial and page-building system to make fake pages, trying to wind "Katrina," "Waves" and "Sunshine State" into one headline. ... and don't it feel GOOD! (There, now the song is stuck in your head, too.)

Now, it doesn't seem so funny.

In 1998, I was a graphic artist at the Medium-Sized Newspaper in Florida. Hurricane Georges was bearing down on the Gulf Coast, and as the only member of the Sunday night staff, I was assigned to assemble a graphic on what would happen to New Orleans if the Big One ever came across Lake Pontchartrain. The scenario I drew was basically really, really awful; levees breached, pumps overwhelmed, devastating damage and loss of life in one of America's great cities. I called the newsroom of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans to verify a couple of facts I had found in my research. "Hang on," the very nice young editor on the other end of the phone said, "we just lost power again." I apologized for taking her away from her work on what was certainly a very busy evening. "That's OK," she said. "We can't really do anything anyway. We're just waiting."

Georges veered off and took down a couple of Motel 6s in Mississippi. New Orleans was spared that time.

I found myself walking around in the French Quarter a year later, taking a break as I drove from Florida to Texas to take the job at the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper. I went down to where the river starts to meet the Gulf, and looked at the system of levees and dikes and pumps that I had drawn, sight unseen except for photographs. And I thought, Yeah, if that storm had hit, that would have been really bad. I can't say I fell in love with the city; even on a Saturday afternoon, the smell of debauchery hung in the air. And that's not a pretty smell. I ran into a lot of people from the fringes of society as I walked around and looked at the great architecture and the restaurants and the nightclub with the sign that read, "Come in and see if YOU can guess what gender they are!" But as a party town, I could certainly see the appeal.

I hope all the doomsayers are wrong on this one, but it doesn't look very good for the City of New Orleans. My thoughts are especially with all those people at the Times-Picayune building with their families and sleeping bags and snack foods, wondering what hell they're about to witness and then have to write about and photograph. I won't be calling this time, but if I was, I'd be sending prayers and best wishes.

Why bother?

I had a bad day at work today; the kind of bad day that makes you want to re-think your entire existence, your career, your way of life. Basically, I'm creating failure, and I'm surrounded by failure. Without going into specifics, I can guarantee we have no happy customers today, and no happy employees.

Bad days always end, however, and they often end at home. There I have three kids and wife who I love more than anything int he world and who, on most days, think I'm OK.

Bad days never really end, however, because at the end of a bad day, there's the wallowing and the what-if and the what-now, all the kinds of things you think at the end of a bad day.

We all talked about our days at the kitchen table. My entry: "My day was bad." The Young Daughter, 4, starts singing, "Bad day, bad day, go away, my day was BAD!" Flourish, big smile, mouth open wide enough to land a 757. That's her way of saying she cares.

I tucked the Young Daughter in tonight. I sighed deeply. The Young Daughter said, in reply, "What?" I said, "I had a long day."

She replied, "Yeah, I had a long day too in the hospital."

--------

Normally I'd mark that down as a perspective builder. But hers is one more situation about which I can do nothing. Meanwhile, I have a Vice President of Sales, an office fulll of co-workers and 12 customers who don't give a flying fuck that my kid has a tumor in her head, even if they knew, which they don't.

I have to deal with all that, too. The one and only thing I can do for the Young Daughter and the rest of the house is to generate income and maintain a vaild health insurance policy. Walking out in a huff is not going to be the answer, no matter what.

----

But I'm at my end. I just can't do anything to fix anything. Working harder isn't the answer; in 12 hours of work today, which started with a phone call to Europe at 5:30 a.m. my time, I accomplished about an hour's worth of actual accomplishment. This time last year, I was the new guy who didn't know what I was doing. This time this year, I have the word "Senior" in my title; I don't know a lot more about what I'm doing, but I'm expected to impart that knowledge to the three new people we just hired, boom-boom-boom, as well as manage the four projects I have to manage, as well as trying to write documentation.

Meanwhile, The Wife spent a good chunk of today on the phone with doctors. The Young Daughter has a team of specialists doing battle against the dread disease. They're all very good doctors, individually. Until today, they had been concentrating on their own little areas, in isolation. The Wife finally demanded today that ONE of them take charge of the situation. ONE of them has to know a little bit about everything. As I put it, "Somebody needs to be the project manager." I think she made some progress. She's taken charge of the situation the best way she knows how, which is to say, she has taken charge of the situation, grabbed the situation by the neck and is leading it in the right direction. She's not a neurologist. She's more important. She's a mom. My admiration for her keeps growing by the minute, even as I know she's nearing the end of her rope, too.

So what it comes down to is this: My problems mean really nothing. My bad day means really nothing. Which, at this very moment, just makes me ask the question above.

Barrier to the abyss

I'm back from Canada. I still have $50 Canadian in my pocket ($41 US, roughly) and a few more words in my French vocabulary. Montreal was wonderful; saw Andy Roddick get eliminated in the first round of a U.S. Open tuneup, heard lots of French, saw lots of fantastic architecture. I'll be back in mid-September. The chill of fall will likely already be in the air.

Returned Friday for an appointment with my daughter's pediatric neuro-oncologist. The fact that my daughter even has a pediatric neuro-oncologist is bad enough. We were making prepartions for the Young Daughter to begin chemotherapy to combat these tumors in her head. Made the appointment for the surgery, read the literature, began getting ourselves mentally prepared.

Then: Well, not yet. No growth in the tumor. No chemo yet.

This is good news. Sort of. The tumors are still there. She'll have to do it eventually, probably sooner rather than later. But not yet.

This is good. And bad. We wait.

Reward

After a really bad travel day, after which I said for the 10th time, "I'm never flying US Airways again," knowing full well that I will, I wound up here. It doesn't suck.

First day of school

The Old Daughter came home from her first day of middle school today. She announced that she was no longer going by her first name and wanted to go by her middle name.

Her first name is pretty cool. Her middle name is a family name, not one that most 11-year-old girls would want to carry.

Why? "I wanted a change."

Well, you don't change stuff on the first day of middle school, not when you're riding a bus for the first time and not when we might need to find you by the name we know. She was taken aback by that, and reacted accordingly, and somewhat emotionally. Well, that was not the way we wanted to start middle school.

We compromised: Academically, she must be known by her first name, or if she wants to use all three of her names, fine. Her friends can call her anything she wants.

I wonder if we handled that the right way. Thoughts?

A simple "thank you" would have sufficed

By all accounts, the crew of Air France 538 deserves to be lauded for its quick response after Tuesday's crash in Toronto -- which happened less than an hour before I took off for Detroit. The crew emptied an Airbus A340 in 90 seconds. An Airbus A340 is a big damn plane. Two aisles, 2-4-2 seating in the main cabin. A total of 309 people survived the crash, breakup of the plane and subsequent explosion.

As usual, however, you can't please everyone, even if you save his or her life. From msnbc.com:

Gwen Dunlop, a Toronto resident who was on the flight returning from vacation in France, said when the plane first touched down the passengers believed they had landed safely and clapped with relief.

"Only seconds later, it started really moving and obviously it wasn't OK," said Dunlop. "At some point the wing was off. The oxygen masks never came down; the plane was filling up with smoke."

"One of the hostesses said, 'You can calm down, it?s OK,' and yet the plane was on fire and smoke was pouring in," Dunlop told The AP. "I don't like to criticize, but the staff did not seem helpful or prepared."

Ungrateful bitch. Shut up and be happy you remember how "unprepared" they seemed.

Summer of bleah

Yeah, geez, I lost TWO WHOLE MONTHS there. I'd like to be able to blame some sort of computer crash or sunspots or something, but the bottom line is, well ... I just haven't felt very inspired to post.

Two whole months. During those months, I've eaten lunch on Chicago's Magnificient Mile, stepped out onto the rocks in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine, turned 37, and taken my family to Washington, D.C., on vacation.

I became the proud owner of a 1989 Honda Pacific Coast 800, putting me back in the saddle after a 10-year hiatus.

That was the cool stuff.

I also worked my ass off, slept very little, ate too much and walked through the time basically uninspired.

Alas, that wasn't the worst.

The Young Daughter's dread disease has begun to manifest itself in ways that are a lot less benign than the little spots on her skin.

She's 4. She's grown a half-inch in the last 18 months. She's begun to have mild seizures. She walked around last weekend with an ambulatory EEG device, a mass of wires glued to her head to try to discern what's going on in there.

As The Wife put it: "You know, it doesn't get any better from here. It only gets worse."

That's probably the case. In the best-case scenario, we listen to medical professionals tell us to "check back in 6 months" while they wait to see if anything changes. We buy medicine, we schedule doctor appointments -- four last month alone -- and we wait.

So, that was our summer. School starts Thursday. Life continues to move forward, and it'll move forward at the pace at which it always has. The Young Daughter doesn't cope. She just lives, with a smile on her face and a 100-decibel sentence at her lips.

Her favorite song is Travis Tritt's "It's a Great Day to Be Alive." She discovered the repeat button on her little CD player and sets it at night to play, over and over and over, all night.

There's a message in there.

Random stray thought

What amazes me is how 10 days pass in the time it used to take for one day.

The May installment

Since we've apparently gone monthly, it seems a little disappointing to think I'm burning the May installment on May 6. But: We've got a big trip coming up, nine days to wrap up the New Hampshire project. Then on to Illinois, with interludes in a little Central New York burg I'll call the Town of the Living Dead.

So, might as well get it over with now.

The Little Sister had a kid today. A girl. Don't know anything more yet, other than that she arrived sometime around 5 p.m. CDT via c-section. Everybody's healthy and happy, I'm told. This is a good thing. I haven't talked to the Little Sister near as much as I should have over the last, oh, 20 years or so. There's no animosity between us, certainly; neither one of us is big communicators, and her definition of reality is, shall we say, somewhat different from mine. That's OK; when we do talk, we usually find plenty of room to meet in the middle.

When it was announced that a little niece was on the way for me, I had trepidation. She and the baby's father aren't married; he, in fact, is nearly 12 years younger than she. On the surface, this sounds a little less than ideal. But by all accounts, he's a very good guy, and he's helped her keep her head on straight. I mused later that having a child might be the very thing to get her back on track and help her stabilize a bit after a rough decade. In my last several conversations with her, that theory seems to have been confirmed. This is a very good thing, and I hope the trend continues.

And no matter what, it's always a happy day when new life appears.

-----

New life has also blessed the family in canine form. Go here to see The Wife's Thousand-Dollar Puppies. One could have been yours, had you put your name on the list eight weeks ago. But you didn't, so you're out of luck. I've admitted before that I'm not exactly a dog person, and I continue to not be. These little guys, however, are cute as they can be, and pretty damn low-maintenance to boot.

-----

When I left the Medium-Sized Metropolitan newspaper last year to start The New Life, I left hoping that several people who were in similar ruts to mine would also take the plunge. Thankfully, they have. Lynniechan is on her way to becoming a full-time massage therapist, a job for which she would seem to be very well-suited. As a top-notch athlete (rowing), she has above-average knowledge of how the human body works. She likes people, as long as she can keep unwanted communication to a minimum. She, like many of us, hasn't updated much lately, but when she does update, it's obvious she's a lot happier now than she was this time last year. I know I'm a better person after I get a massage; she's contributing to make the world a better place by making lots of people into better people.

The Tiffster has joined the revolution, taking off her copy-editor green eyeshade and heading to the world of online journalism. After years of doing work at a level up here (think really high) and getting recognition at a level down here (think sewer), she's finally in a spot where she can call a lot of her own shots and have a chance to really shine. One of the things that online journalism has been short of in its infancy is, well, journalists. The Tiffster is one of the very best, and readers of her newspaper's site are in for a treat starting June 1.

RER blew everything up. He left a fairly cush (if extremely underpaid) job as a TV reporter to be ... a poker blogger. Three years ago, of course, there was no such thing as a poker blogger. Check the stuff out here. I don't know much about poker or poker blogging, but I know the man is racking up frequent-flyer miles at a faster rate than I am, and while I'm schlepping off to places like Central New York, New Hampshire and rural Washington State, he's going to Monaco, Paris, Copenhagen and London. A poker blogger. How cool is that?

------

We're planning an actual family vacation this year. We haven't had one of those since 2001, when we spent a week at a beach house in South Carolina. This year's destination: Washington, D.C. All three mini-humans are old enough to find something to appreciate. The Old Daughter, our history geek, will enjoy pretty much everything; The Boy is ready to wander the Air and Space Museum all day long; and the Young Daughter will have a great time at the National Zoo. Throw in some top-notch architecture for The Wife and my getting to watch it all, and it should be a great time. Love those Delta SkyMiles and Marriott points.

-----

There you have it. See you in June. Or, who knows, maybe before.

Uh, where am I ... ?

Dateline: Washington, D.C., a little after midnight.

I love baseball; I haven't followed it daily and religiously for a few years, but I still love the opportunity to sit and watch a ballgame. I had this opportunity Tuesday night. I celebrated the way I usually celebrate when I watch a game on TV: I feel asleep. Woke up in an oops-I-fell-asleep-watching-TV fog about 20 minutes ago.

The fog, of course, obscures whatever it is I was just going to type. So now I'm kind of winging it ...

I just noticed that I missed an entire month of posting, for the first time since we launched this forum back in October 2001. I guess I can't really be surprised. March 2005 was a busy month, too busy; the kind of month where the engine was running at redline but the car wasn't really going anywhere.

When I finally escaped the March madness (not to be confused with March Madness, in which three of my Final Four picks were eliminated before the round of eight), I emerged with a nice raise, a new Blackberry, five more pounds, and ... well, and an April calendar that is almost as packed.

The questions come up:

Is it worth it? Well, yeah. It's paying off financially, I'm learning a lot and I'm enjoying myself.
Well, I wasn't really asking about you. What about your family? I miss my family. They say they miss me. I try to maximize the time I have at home. One of the reasons that the travel schedule has become so frantic is that I'm taking those Businessman's Special flights, the flights that 1/allow you to leave at 5:55 a.m. to make a 10 a.m. meeting and/or 2/leave the job site at 9 p.m., which get you home at 2 a.m., but at least it's home and not another night in the hotel room. Some of my co-workers prefer a more relaxed travel schedule, where they have an extra night on either end of the trip and less rush to the airport. Not me, not now.
OK, come back and answer my first question: Is it worth it? Well, it beats the hell out of spending 9 hours a day behind a desk.
You haven't answered my question. Hey, you know what? You're starting to annoy me. Define "worth it." I'm still trying to.

Ugh, the fog. I hate falling asleep while watching TV.

So anyway, I have a BlackBerry. No more searching for wireless hotspots in airports. I could conceivably post directly from my airplane seat before they tell me to turn off all portable electronic devices. E-mail, AIM, phone and the web, all at my fingertips, all the time.

All. The. Time.

Overall, this is probably not a good thing.

Time to concede to the fog. Time to go to sleep for real. Day 103 of 2005 starts for me in a few hours.

Nothing left of me

Just had a long, long five days in southern New Hampshire. Talk about leaving it all on the field. I am just flat exhausted. So tired I can't sleep. I hate that feeling.

All I can do is write about it

I never intended for this to become a monthly publication. Really, I didn't. It's just ... well, anything I use to finish that sentence would simply be an excuse, and there is no room for excuses here.

I think a lot. That's what you do when you're on the road without anybody; you think. It's rare for all that thought to generate any end result, but I do it anyway because that's all I can do.

A roundup of the recent:

Denmark was fabulous. Cold, but fabulous. The thing that surprised me the most: How not different everything was. I had no trouble finding McDonald's, Burger King and 7-Eleven. People drive on the right. Coke and Pepsi and Marlboros are consumed in large quantities. Sure, some things were quite distinct from what we're used to in the U.S. Gas sells for about $6 a gallon. The sign on the beer cooler in the 7-Eleven translated to, "Don't even think about buying beer if you were born on or before March 8, 1990." More than 49 percent of Danes would have voted against George W. Bush.

But overall, I really expected to feel much more like a foreigner than I did. I'm not sure to what that should be attributed.

Going back to the Very Large Metropolitan Area was a little weird. I was at the same time homesick and so, so glad to be gone. I visited the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper while I was there; the bad mood created by October's layoffs still remains, like the smell of mildew in a car after the windows were left open during a rainstorm. I finally settled on, "It's very good to have lived here." I'm glad I was there; it's a good thing, however, that I'm not there now.

Now, I'm in a small town in southern New Hampshire, watching the World Champion Red Sox (as they are known here) taking on the Yankees on Opening Night. Last time we were here was in late February. We visited a restaurant in downtown Boston. On the bar TV: A replay of Game 5 of last year's World Series, as if it was on a continuous loop. Oh, yeah, the Patriots won the Super Bowl, too. But the Patriots could win the Super Bowl every year and still not inspire the passion that's generated by the World Champion Red Sox.

The Boy turned 6 last week. He has his first girlfriend, a charming and beautiful little girl named Amelia. He told The Wife, "You know, most of the boys in my class don't like love." He thought about it for a second. "But I think love is important." Spinning lines like that, he has to be very careful about peaking too soon.

The Wife's Champion Dog is pregnant. Anybody want a $1,000 puppy? (You think I'm kidding.)

David Wells just gave up a run-scoring balk. I think I actually heard somebody say,
"Gohddammit, ya fat bastahd!"

Dateline: Anytown, DK

I'm sitting in the international departure terminal in Newark, N.J. In a little more than two hours, I'll be leaving United States airspace for the first time in my life.

I'm going to Denmark, home of the company for which I work. I'll spend a week meeting my Danish co-workers on their home turf and learning more about our product from the people who actually assemble it. I'm repeating the phrase Jeg taler ikke dansk (I don't speak Danish), which in my southern U.S. accent comes out sounding more like "Yay taylor iggy dance." They tell me that's how I'm supposed to say it. The fact that I taylor iggy dance is OK; most of the Danish are conversant in English; many speak it better than you or I.

The Airbus A330 on which I'll spend the next eight hours is parked right outside the window by which I'm sitting. I'll land at 7:35 a.m. in Copenhagen, which will be 1:35 a.m. EST. Another 45-minute flight to the city in which I'll be staying, and I'll be a foreigner for the first time.

I have three books, four magazines, a digital camera, this machine, 900 songs in my iPod, a bottle of Dasani and a bag of miniature Reese's peanut butter cups. I have a passport, a boarding pass and 1,000 Danish kroner in my back pocket which I purchased for 202 American dollars. The femte kroner note features a picture of a fetching woman in a hat, the first time I've ever seen a picture of a woman on money. The woman's name is Karen Blixen. A quick Google reveals she wrote Out of Africa, among many, many other things during her 70-year life which ended in 1962. Imagine the Americans honoring artists on their money. We're stuck with #$#*(ing politicians.

It's going to be an interesting week. Check back for updates.

Time again to talk music

A long-overdue discovery and a rediscovery ...

The discovery: My heart is still seared from listening to Eddie from Ohio's Julie Murphy Wells sing "Oh My Brother." Oh my God, what a voice, what a delivery. I'm embarrassed to have not discovered this Virginia-based fusion of folk and bluegrass and soul -- i.e., music -- 10 years ago. They've been around since '91; I've known about them since '01, thanks to RER; yet I didn't give them a serious listen until a couple of weeks ago. They're more than worth your time. A good portion of their catalog is available on iTunes. I'm currently listening to their two live albums, Portable EFO Show and Three Rooms. I'm told they're way better live than in the studio. My next task: Hope my travel schedule and theirs converges at some point.

The rediscovery: Growing up in Springfield, Mo., I always kind of took the Ozark Mountain Daredevils for granted. A pretty good country-ish rock band, kind of like a hillbilly-flavored Eagles. I found a few of their songs on iTunes not long ago, and am reminded that my dad's former high school classmates were actually a helluva band. Recommended cuts: "If You Want to Get to Heaven," probably their best rock-'n'-roll song; "Jackie Blue," which had a run at Billboard's Top 5 in 1974 and was, I learned, remade by Smashing Pumpkins; and "Homemade Wine," off the best album you've never heard, Men from Earth. Some of the ex-Daredevils, including Michael "Supe" Granda and Ruell Chappell, are still hanging around Anytown making music. One, Steve Canaday, died in a plane crash in 1999 after a stint as Lee Roy Parnell's tour manager. These guys were probably the biggest stars to come out of Anytown before Brad Pitt. Worth a listen.

Your turn; tell me what you're listening to these days.

Once, it's a tragedy. Twice, it's a crime

A school district in Florida has suffered the deaths of two children in the last four months because of a bus driver's incompetence. That's two too many.

It's time to start holding some people criminally responsible.

Wait ... um ... hey ...

God, it just got a little crazy there for a while.

A co-worker's death. A business trip extended by the flu. The Young Daughter's dread disease rearing its ugly head. A little too much reality to digest all in one month.

A couple of weeks ago in New Hampshire, my new co-worker and I didn't feel very good. I plowed through the workshop we were conducting; she curled up in a fetal position in her hotel room for most of the trip. We somehow made our way back to the airport Thursday morning. She resumed the fetal position at the gate. I went to the bathroom to throw up.

When I came back, I decided I wasn't quite ready to fly just yet and went to tell the gate agent this, so she could put me on a later flight. Then I discovered I was using the gate agent's counter to hold myself up. I told her, "I think I need medical attention." Next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance.

I called The Wife. I didn't tell her much. She, of course, went into an utter panic. Early the next day, she found herself in New Hampshire, too, sitting beside me while I grumbled in my hospital bed about being hot, then cold, then hot. The Company was kind enough to fly her up there for me. It was a lifesaver.

I was kicked out of the hospital Saturday morning, with a diagnosis of flu and pneumonia. The Wife and I spent the next two days in a hotel room in Manchester, N.H., where I, well, slept from Saturday afternoon until the kickoff of the Super Bowl.

It was the next Friday before I felt like I was back at full strength. Basically, flu sucks. It's the first time I've had it in probably five years, and by far the worst that I've had it. Damn that shortage of flu shots. Next year, I'm getting in line.

-----------------

How about this lede: My kid has a brain tumor.

OK, it's a very small brain tumor. As yet, it's not threatening anything. It's something that bears watching, say her doctors, but nothing more than that at present.

Benign tumors are a symptom of neurofibromatosis, a mysterious genetic neurological disease. Of course, best we can tell, it's nowhere in our genetics; we're not comforted by the fact that 50 percent of the cases occur spontaneously, with no genetic basis.

The tumors don't cause any serious medical problems, unless they get too close to a vital organ, or the brain. That's why this bears watching.

Right now, everything's fine. She's 100 percent fully active and healthy. We check it again in a couple of months. Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center are working on a cure. We root for them like we've never rooted for anybody in our lives.

--------------------

I shook off the flu just in time for my brutal travel schedule to resume. This gave me the opportunity to visit California for the first time. Not just California, mind you: San Francisco, California, which is my new favorite city, based on only four hours there. My God, what a beautiful place. Water, mountains, the Golden Gate, great restaurants every-friggin'-where you turn. I can certainly see the appeal, and why people are willing to pay five times what they'd pay to live anywhere else.

The co-worker who was in Montreal urged me to eat dinner at a delightful downtown restaurant called The Crustacean, which, as you might suspect, serves seafood. It's seafood with a Vietnamese twist, however, I had a whole dungeness crab simmered in a three-wine sauce with black pepper and scallions, with garlic rice on the side. It was fabulous, and worth almost every bit of the per-diem-plus that I paid for it.

I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, just to say I did. Dipped down into historic Sausalito, and racked my brain trying to think of that sticks-in-your-head-like-glue song, "Sausalito Summer Nights." (Answer: The one-hit wonder Diesel, in 1982.) We drove to Frisco in the Rambler/The radiator running dry ...

Next week: New Hampshire, again, reluctantly. I get home Friday with enough time to do laundry and sleep before boarding a plane for my first-ever venture off United States soil.

I'm headed to the home office in Denmark for some training. I'll spend a few days with a customer in Copenhagen, and a few days at the company's Scandinavian headquarters in a little North Sea town called Aalborg.

Then, back to New Hampshire. Then Minnesota, then Dallas for a big trade show. It'll be my first time back in the Very Large Metropolitan Area for something other than an airport layover since leaving in 2002.

All the time on the road is good; it means The Company is prospering, which means The Family and I are prospering.

But it also means an awful lot of stuff is whizzing by at 542 mph. I'm moving, as Seger once sang, eight miles a minute for months at a time.

I'm going to go take a minute I have now to go hug some people I love. You go do the same, and be thankful you can.

Sharon, 1966-2005

She didn't make it. Dammit.

Melanoma. Fought it like hell for two years before finally turning away Sunday.

Dammit. 38 years old. Two children, one born the same day as our son, one born in late 2002. Two little girls.

Madison, Hannah, Brian, peace to y'all. I don't know what would bring that peace; something much stronger than all of us. Peace to y'all.

Goodbye, LZ

In 1989, I was pretty much at a life crossroads. I had just been promoted to a full-time job in the career of my choice. I was 21-going-on-16, and in the process of attempting to piss it all away. Drinking too much, driving too fast, spending money I didn't have, hanging out with people who had no vision of their own futures.

I became aware of the uncomfortable position in which I had put myself by the time 1989 became 1990. I began turning the corner, and had a lot of help from friends and family and career mentors in making that turn.

One of those mentors was the then-new editor of the Anytown Daily Bugle. He was a relatively young guy himself, and he had made a few bad choices during the early years of his career. He shared the consequences of those choices with me, and showed me how focusing on work could help pull me out of my personal downward spiral. He had no reason to do this; it's not typical for a top editor to pay any attention at all to a young sports copy editor, unless there was a screwup in print.

But he did, and I responded by working at about 114 percent of my talent level. Some of the best work I ever did came during that 1990-92 era, and the learning I did during that time laid the foundation for the job I have today. I have a file in which I've kept every complimentary letter or memo I've ever received relating to my work. I have a sheaf of them with the initials "LZ" at the end. He made sure that every good move I made was noticed, and through my boss, that every bad move I made was corrected.

He promoted me into my first management position in late 1991. I was going to be assisting our young sports editor in running the department. Then, in a surprise move, the sports ediitor left to take a job in Florida. Suddenly, for a month, I ran the show.

I'm not sure I did it very well, but I kept things afloat and kept us from embarrassing ourselves in print. The editor hired another man who became one of my mentors as sports editor, and I settled in as his assistant in January 1992.

At the end of December 1991, we all received an extra payroll envelope with our Christmas bonuses, which by then had dwindled to $30 per employee. Imagine my surprise when I opened my envelope to see an extra "0" after the "$30."

In it, a handwritten note: "A little something extra. Great work this month. Looking forward to the future. -LZ"

I'm not sure what happened in the summer of '92 between him and the publisher, but he quit. The publisher was, um, moved to a corporate damage control position shortly thereafter. A new editor took over; I learned a lot from him, too.

But I'll never ever forget the lessons I learned from Lou Ziegler, especially those relating to how to treat the people who work for you. Praise publicly and frequently; criticize privately and only when necessary, but every time it's necessary. I took those lessons to bigger jobs and bigger places, but the techniques and the results were the same.

Lou died Saturday at 56. He was running the newsroom in Fargo, N.D.; despite his declining health, he was still teaching and helping people until shortly before his death.

Peace, man, and thanks for helping me save my career.

Hey Julio, another drink, por favor

Did the Leader of the Free World just say we need more Hispanics here to "do jobs Americans won't do?" Twice?

Jobs Americans WON'T DO? We're too good for work all of a sudden?

And worse, a room full of journalists didn't call him on that remark?

"Jobs Americans won't do." As I recall, from 1789 to 1863, we called that slavery.

Screw us.

A comprehensive update

It's 7:31 a.m. in central Minnesota. The temperature outside is 18 below zero, and it's not expected to get much warmer. The sun is poking its head up over the eastern horizon; it appears as if it's trying to decide whether it really wants to come up or not.

My first start-to-finish project with my new company is scheduled to launch on Monday. So far, everything's on track and in order. I've been lucky enough to have been working with very skilled people on the customer side. If everything goes as planned -- and there's no reason to think that it won't -- a small newspaper in central Minnesota will be using a computer system that I installed, starting Monday.

This for me has been the culmination of a wild, wild year. Eleven months ago, I was sitting on the other side of the computers, doing the same thing I had been doing for all of my adult life and a good chunk of my late adolescence. I was bored to tears, tired of the constant second-guessing that goes on at every level of a newsroom, and frustrated with the thought that, because I had devoted my entire life and what little formal education I had to the pursuit of journalism, I wasn't qualified to do anything else.

Then this thing fell into my lap. I was given the opportunity to use what I knew about how a newsroom works in conjunction with what was arguably my best natural skill -- manipulating the technology -- to help design, sell and install that technology in other newsrooms. It gave me a chance to make good on one of my frequent grumbles: "When I design my own computer system, it sure as hell isn't going to work like this one ... "

Well, OK, I'm not exactly designing it, but I'm getting a chance to contribute. My newsroom experience has gained me much respect inside the company and with customers. People don't second-guess every decision I make. I don't second-guess every decision I make. In short, career-wise, it so far appears that I've made a perfect landing.

I pointed out last year, when I was deciding whether to do this, that it's a volatile industry. And it still is. We're hiring a bunch of people right now. A lot of those people might be let go if business takes a turn. I might be let go if business takes a turn. Our company is one of the smaller players in the industry; the chance of being bought out is very real, at least in the medium term. A lot of uncertainties are attached to this gig.

But one thing is certain: So far, it works for me. Right now, I'll take that.

-----------------------------

The new career has meant a new lifestyle for the family. After nearly a decade and a half of working at night, on weekends, working a non-set, uncertain schedule, having to drop everything and come to work to cover a major news event, I'm now leading the normal life of a 9-to-5er.

Well, almost. I'm also on the road most weekdays and a few weekends. If we have to work for a client on Monday, we have to travel on Sunday night. So it's not perfect.

But it's better than the previous arrangement. My weekends have largely been free to spend with the family; to let The Wife pursue her pursuits without worrying that she's going to get a call at 2 p.m. Saturday saying I have to go to work because a terrorist was found in the Middle East. We're able to have weekends with the kids and explore the wonder that is Florida. I have friends in our neighborhood, friends outside of work. We spend weekend nights with them, drinking, talking, basically just doing what humans are supposed to do in their time off: relaxing.

I'm home for dinner most nights. We have what's called "Circle Time" at dinner, which The Wife devised as a way to give the kids a forum to report on the events of their days. The Old Daughter lists hers off methodically. The Boy breathlessly speaks of the latest book he's read or the five or six people he played with at recess. The Young Daughter stretches out her time by reporting what she's done, then repeating it. I usually say, "I helped people with their computers." What I'm doing is not nearly as important as what they're doing.

-------------------------

The travel is rough sometimes. I enjoy being out and seeing new things and meeting new people. I don't like being away from the family for extended periods. But the perks are good.

The Wife and I used those perks -- a bundle of Delta SkyMiles and Marriott Rewards points -- to spend her 34th birthday in beautiful downtown Manhattan. The Wife has always wanted to see a Broadway show. So last Saturday, we went to a Broadway show.

It was weird to think that it was almost as easy for us to go to a Broadway show on Broadway as it would have been to go to a Broadway show in St. Petersburg. We left Friday night, went to the show Saturday and came home Sunday. Spent $400 on food, transportation, show tickets and stuff.

We ate lunch Saturday at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. We ate lunch Sunday at an Italian joint in Little Italy. Both would rank near the top in our experience of those restaurant genres, although neither was ranked high enough in the eyes of travel-guide writers to merit a mention. That's part of what makes New York fun: The ability to discover great stuff just by looking for it.

We saw Wonderful Town at the Al Hirschfeld Theater on West 45th Street. Brooke Shields played the lead. She's actually far more talented than her career credits would suggest. Live theatre seems to be her niche, and she has a much-underused gift for physical comedy. The music was good without being cheesy. The seats were comfortable. The company was great. It couldn't have been a better evening.


This is not the kind of thing we'd be able to do if I wasn't doing what I was doing. It doesn't take all of the sting about being away from home, but it helps a little bit.

------------------------------

Life's not perfect. It never is. But mine right now is basically a sequence of perfect moments. That's about as close as you can hope to get in this less-than-perfect world. I didn't just change careers on Feb. 4, 2004. I changed everything, and I dragged four people along with me for the ride.

Risky? Yeah. But so far, worth it. The lesson: You're never bound to something that sucks unless you choose to be bound to something that sucks. It takes more than a finger-snap and a decision, but really, in the broad sense, not that much more.

New York, New York

Trip report to come. Let's just say that it was everything we expected and then some. Nothing about that city is overrated.

Welcome to the new life

It's 7:45 a.m. I'm awake before everybody else, which is the new "normal" in our house. After years of being a night person, I've learned to enjoy a good sunrise.

It's Jan. 2. Tomorrow, I'll be on an airplane for the first of two times this week. I'll be heading to New Hampshire for work until Wednesday, then on Friday, The Wife and I are leaving to celebrate her birthday in New York. We've never been to New York. (I'm listening to suggestions, by the way; we're only going to be there for the weekend, so we're going to be trying to pack a lot into a very short time.) This is also the new "normal" in our house, a house from which 12 months ago we were lamenting the fact that we didn't leave very often.

Roughly this time last year, I urged my readers -- which is to say, I urged myself -- to break free of whatever was binding them to stuff that sucked and to head out in search of something good. In a triumph that ranks as one of the biggest triumphs in my entire existence, I have done so. I hear tales from elsewhere of others doing so, too: Otis, Lynniechan, Janel (aka West Virginia Mountain Mama), countless other people I know.

It can perhaps be attributed to some form of mid-life crisis. But the best way to deal with a crisis is to face it head-on and take action. I'm proud of everybody I know who has done so in the past year. That includes myself.

Happy 2005, y'all. May it be a year of doing whatever the hell you want to do.

Peeking from behind the barrier

See, I wasn't going to go an entire month without posting something. I just need to gather my thoughts a bit. It's been a wild month; travel, parties, gifts galore, excitement and bliss and wonder. Basically, all the reasons one would wake up every morning.

So today, the day after Christmas, I'm surrounded by the debris from the Mini-Humans' barrage of Christmas joy. Dora the Explorer is praising my youngest from the TV screen. The oldest just emerged from her room, wearing a new outfit. The Boy is trying to decide which of his new pirate ships should pillage the castle.

Had a good conversation with my little sister last night. She's going to give me a niece in May. It's the first time I've spoken to her since the news broke. Life has been kind of a struggle for her the last several years, to say the least. Much of the drama has been self-created, but that hasn't made it any easier. Anyway, for the first time in, like, ever, she has a reason now to believe in the future. I couldn't be happier for her.

No work Friday, no work yesterday, no work today, no work tomorrow. No thinking about configuration issues or search requests or integration with existing systems. See how I'm not thinking about it?

This is what contentment feels like. I feel the overall inspiration coming back. I'm starting to feel like Me again. This is a good thing.

Good stuff all around

Good suggestion from utexas.edu, which has resulted in dark text on a light-ish background. This isn't the final design -- in fact, it's still mostly the generic template you'll see on 24,695 other sites. But at least it's an easier-to-read generic rendition.

Good news from the Carolinas. Always glad to hear things are going well for Otis and his group.

Good company for Thanksgiving dinner -- The Wife and the Mini-Humans. We have no family nearby, and their visits to us are reserved for Christmas. We were invited to a friend's dinner, and The Wife (who doesn't give up traditions easily) was strongly considering it. She presented the idea to the children; the younger two were all fired up about hanging out with their friends, but the Old Daughter vetoed it. "Thanksgiving is for family," she said. "That's our tradition. We should stick to it." So noted. It's comforting that a kid who has seen so much change in her life can find something to use as an anchor. Further evidence that when it comes to her, I really have nothing to worry about.

Good story in one of the Edge of America's rags today, worth a look. Brian Griese is a son of privilege. Thankfully, he knows it, and chooses to use the gifts he has received for the good of others. Few causes are more noble than his cause.

Good to be able to paint the outside of your house in late November. Bad to have to paint the outside of your house in late November. But good to be able to do it.

Good to watch The Wife lounging on the couch watching her favorite movie, Gone With the Wind. A well-deserved reward for a great Thanksgiving dinner, and for making my life generally, well, good.

Good to hear good reports from Anytown about Thanksgiving. My grandfather got out of the house and went to the celebration, which probably wasn't easy for him. Today marked the first time since 1937 that he wasn't celebrating my grandmother's birthday with her. The aunts and uncles and a few cousins got together, and, I'm told, a reasonably good time was had by all.

Awful lot of goodness around. Be thankful for all of it.

Silent cry, invisible tear

Looks like bad weather today in my hometown, not unlike a November 24 from 17 years ago. Today's a little bit of a rough day. Not that every day since that day hasn't been in its own little way, but when those numbers all come together, a "1," a "1," a "2," a "4," for some reason, it's just a little bit rougher.

I miss my father. Yeah, I know, he's still here. But the brutal truth is, he's not. And I think that sucks.

It's OK for me to think that. And I'll be fine, in a while, for a while.

I just needed a few minutes alone with November 24 to tell it what I really think of it.

Yasser Arafat, 1929-not soon enough

Proving once again there is no justice in the world, gallstones got him before the Israelis did. The fact that his name is on the Nobel Peace Prize is an insult to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin and to Shimon Peres.

Speak ill of this dead bastard all you want.

Nothing matters and what if it did?

Click, Drag and Delete have been pretty busy tonight. I keep trying to write something coherent, but bullshit comes out instead. My tolerance for bullshit is pretty low, and getting lower all the time.

I've been trying to make sense of the post-election babble. What are people really trying to say? Because 51 percent of us were too stupid to vote for W, the country's going straight to hell in a handbasket? Funny thing; most of the people who seem to be the most blue about Kerry's loss have access to computers and a good command of the written word, and jobs that give them a platform to share their feelings. Most of the people who stand around with my wife waiting to pick up their kids from school couldn't be more pleased with the election results. I know of nobody among the rapidly widening circle of friends we're gaining here on the Western Edge who voted for Kerry. If they did, they're doing a good job verbally faking their happiness over the result of the election.

What does that actually prove? Well, really, nothing. My suburb might or might not be typical. I would lean toward "not." A majority of my neighbors are officers in the Air Force, who work at the nearby base that houses Central Command. Some of them are headed to Iraq soon. Some of them have had to send people who report to them over there. All of them have strong feelings about the war, for and against. All of them voted for Bush.

It seems very possible that we're outgrowing our little democracy. What "unites" us? Really, nothing.

It took the deaths of 3,000 people who decided to not skip work one Tuesday in 2001 to get us to unite for a common cause, and that lasted, what, about two months? Then we were back to bitching and squabbling and back-biting. And that's not the fault of the left; if we must resort to schoolyard discourse (and apparently we must), the right started the whole "we're perfect and you're stupid" thing. They started it ...

An aside that doesn't really fit in anywhere else in this rant: Stop trying to convince me George W. Bush is a knuckle-dragging functional illiterate. He's not the most articulate person who's ever stood in front of the Great Seal. But last time I checked, they weren't just handing out degrees from Yale, even to people whose dads went there. I dropped out of a not-very-prestigious state university. I'm not going to pretend I'm smarter than somebody who found a way to make it through Yale.

God knows there's hypocrisy to spare in both red and blue hues. Bill Clinton was a womanizer who got a hummer from a chubby babe right there in the Oval Office. His successor sat in that same Oval Office and sent people off to die for ... well, for ... well, to defend us against ... uh, dammit, we had to bomb somebody! Michael Moore is a lying sack of shit. So is Ken Lay and the rest of his Enron cronies. I'm not sure any of Moore's lies have cost anybody their retirement savings.

Bottom line: We're facing a pretty serious hero shortage on both sides. Why? Because the good people are too damn smart to get involved. Colin Powell knows better. You know somebody's gunning for Barack Obama, the latest political Flavor of the Month,; not to attack his political ideas, all of which are sound, but to find out which of his college girlfriends he cheated on or how many speeding tickets he has or some other indiscretion with an actual relevance value of zero. We're going to be stuck with Hillary Clinton in 2008, not because she's the best or the brightest, but because she has good "name recognition."

The pool of statesmen and stateswomen is pretty thin these days. Good leaders are out there, but they're too busy leading to get caught up in the smoke-and-mirrors act that is the United States political system. The truly intelligent and visionary people don't want to play the game -- or they get drummed out of the game. (See index entries "McCain, John, too much integrity for own good," and "Dean, Howard, too visionary and passionate to be taken seriously").

Besides, we don't really want a leader as our president. We want somebody who looks good on TV and who can quip one-liners. We don't want a human; we want an image. Is Arnold Schwarzenegger the governor of California because he has an advanced degree in international economics? No. Did you know he has an advanced degree in international economics? Probably not. Lots of people have degrees in international economics. None of them was the Terminator. You likely won't see any of them as the governor of California.

So, now that I've declared the Repbulic extinct, what do I care about? I care that I'm not paying more than my fair share of the tax burden. I care that the things for which I am paying those taxes are of the highest quality, and are being built and maintained by people who are themselves being paid a living wage. I care that my children are safe, and I know that's primarily the responsibility of my wife and me. I'm less worried about international terrorists than I am about the registered sex offender who lives eight houses away from us. I care that the person who's being paid to watch him while he's on probation is doing her job. (We checked. She is.) I care mostly about stuff that's happening within about a 12-mile radius of wherever I am at the moment.

The most important vote I cast last Tuesday wasn't for president; it was for sheriff and the county commission.

I'm not choosing to be isolated; I'm choosing to mind my own house, and to take as much control as possible of what I can see. I'm participating in the process, but only to the extent where it affects me. I don't care what they do in Boston. I don't care what they do in Wyoming. I'm not sure anybody else in my immediate line of sight does, either. My hot-button issue is not abortion, or gay marriage, or "moral values," whatever the fuck that means. My issue is taxes. Bush sees it my way on taxes. Therefore, I voted for Bush. It's up to the people I send to Congress to keep him honest. (My vote for Senate went to the Democratic candidate, who lost to her slimebag opponent by about 132 votes ... Oops, there we go with the schoolyard stuff again. My bad. But he is a slimebag.) Bush wouldn't have been able to send all those people off to die if Congress hadn't let him. Kerry wasn't going to do anything about it anytime soon. All things being basically equal -- and they were -- the Republicans keep my taxes low, I'm voting Republican. As soon as the Democrats find some way to make it personally beneficial for me to vote for them, I'll vote for them.

So much for "united" states, huh? That's pretty much what I'm suspecting.

A logical criticism for what I have just written would go as follows: "You wrote god-knows-how-many-hundred-words and I still don't know what you believe." If that's the case, you weren't paying attention, and I'll sum it up in a few sentences.

I believe in the power of the individual, and I believe in the power of integrity and vision. Few of the choices with which I was presented last Tuesday showed me any of that. I support integrity and vision, no matter what party provides it. Does that explain anything?

(I'm not sure that this was any lower on the bullshit scale than any of the stuff that fell victim to Click, Drag and Delete, but I needed something to show for the last hour of typing. If I lose my balance while standing on this fence, it's really going to hurt my nuts. Click "Publish Post" and go on to the next thing, I guess.)

A weekend in Florida

On a beautiful Saturday in November (and here in Florida, there is rarely anything other than beautiful days in November), here's the way my two days off are shaping up ...

Surrounded by chaos: I have four extra children this weekend. The three younger ones pair off with our three quite nicely, and the oldest one is 11-going-on-34, so she's actually quite helpful. However, there is no way to have seven kids in your house and have peace ? no matter the hour. One of the kids who isn't ours was in bed with us last night.

The kids belong to friends of ours. They're off at the husband's 20-year high-school reunion in Wisconsin. Compounding the pain: The Wife is off at a dog show. I'm not yet at the edge of my sanity, but I can certainly see the edge from here. Thankfully, I have a bottle of 80-proof Danish liqueur within easy reach, when it becomes necessary. (Memo to Department of Children and Families: For me, not the kids.)

The friends who left us their kids are the most interesting people I think we've ever known. He is a major in the Air Force, tall, good-looking, flies KC-135 airborne refueling tankers when he's not leading his troops. He went to the Air Force Academy on a wrestling scholarship. I forgive The Wife's crush on him. I can certainly see why. His wife is also good-looking and in excellent shape; she is a nurse, the PTA president, a volunteer for god-knows-how-many other causes and still manages to find time to raise four smart, well-adjusted, good-looking and talented children. Their son is 5; he plays on my son's football team, and also plays the piano and does complex math. Their daughters are 4, 8 and 11, and are all smart and talented in their ways.

I can get through all of that without having to mention that they also face with grace and aplomb the daily challenges of being an interracial couple. He's white and grew up in rural Wisconsin; she's black and grew up in inner-city Chicago. That's the only thing that visibly separates them from the rest of us average suburban folk. For them, however, it's a complete non-issue. Yes, they take some crap every once in a while, but not nearly to the degree that they would have, say, 30 or even 20 years ago. For all the backward steps the country is taking as this tilt to the right continues, we certainly seem to be making strides against the cancer of racism.

The price of victory: The Boy's 3-7 football team somehow managed to squeak into the league playoffs. This sucked, because we were more than prepared for the season to be over. The coaches are becoming more annoying, and getting up at 6 a.m. every Saturday is just getting old.

In a stunning development, our Broncos pulled out a most unfortunate victory. This means yet one more week of football practice and one more Saturday of being awake at an ungodly hour. Thankfully, we're playing the champions of the other division, who went 9-1.

This experience has certainly confirmed all of my previous bitching about organized youth sports. Two weeks ago, one of our team's assistant coaches was kicked out of the game for questioning the officials. A parent was kicked out of the stands shortly thereafter. They weren't being violent or belligerent, just annoying and immature. Their reactions were well out of proportion to the importance of a game involving 5- to 7-year-old boys.

Because the coach was ejected, he was barred from participating on the field the next week. So he instead sat atop the press box with a video camera ... and a cell phone. He was calling plays down to the remaining coaches on the field.

I can't imagine any circumstance under which that would have been necessary.

New arrival: We have a new Champion Dog wanna-be in our house. A cute little golden retriever puppy replaced The Wife's male dog, who had behavior issues that derailed his chase for a championship. I don't like dogs, at all. This is a well-known fact. However, I'm going to take a shot at getting off on the right foot with this dog. Maybe if I'm reasonably nice to it, it won't hate me so much. Wish me luck.

Well, kids are starting to holler at each other in the other room. Guess I should see what's going on. Where's that liqueur again?

What's new is old again, or something like that

It's time for a change here at Dateline: Anytown, USA. It's been a while, and the debris was starting to get pretty thick. I was writing my name in the dust. The stench was not yet overwhelming, but it was certainly noticeable. And the occasional cockroach crawling by was yet another sign that I needed to do some serious cleanup.

I had three choices:

1/Put in the necessary mental elbow grease to do the much-needed renovations
2/At least do the minimum to clean up the existing mess
3/Blow the whole damn thing up and start over

Because I'm lazy, and because I secretly enjoy a little bit of violence and mayhem now and then, I chose "3."

So much to talk about. So much has happened over the last several months. So many new adventures, so many new towns, so many takeoffs and landings. Lots of new people, which has been a good thing for me; I'm making progress against rapidly advancing agoraphobia. I'm not exactly a social butterfly, but I'm no longer actively avoiding other humans.

So much to think about. Wondering if my former Governor can fix in four years the damage he's done in the previous four. I earlier said I wasn't going to tell you how I voted. I'm going to go back on that, because it deserves some reflection, and because I kind of like pissing you off. I voted for Bush -- not because I think he's done a particularly good job, but because I think the Democrats can do better than Kerry, and I want them to focus on doing so in '08. Kerry didn't show me anything to make me think he was a better alternative, at least not in the short term. Remember, he got hornswoggled by that whole WMD thing, too. I have a history of votes that I question later: I voted for Perot in '92. I have a feeling I'm going to be questioning this one soon.

So much to be pissed off about. As mentioned in a post in the dusty forum, my former employer laid off a whole bunch of people last week. One of them was the best human being with whom I had ever worked. He was my boss when I had the boring job that I whined so much about. He was the only good thing about that job. He was also the only bad thing about that job. He never quite got his arms around the upper-management thing. After I left in '02, he got shoved aside and shoved aside and shoved aside until he finally was pushed off the edge. He's 43, with a kid in high school and a kid in middle school. I'd like to think he'll have no problem finding another job; he's smart and he's skilled. But it's not a great market for 40-ish white males, so ...

Some 60 people were excused from further participation. I know about 25 names. To a person, most of them were older people; some of them were people who hadn't kept up with the technology, some of them were people whose jobs had been kind of phased out as the newspaper reduced its coverage, and some of them were certainly less than competent. But I hate it when anybody leaves a job under any terms other than his or her own, through no real fault of their own.

And I especially hate it when good, hard-working people are victims of mismanagement by those in very high places. This newspaper pissed away more than $60 million over the last five years; $40-some million on a bad technology investment and the rest on refunds to advertisers after it was revealed they had been fudging their circulation numbers. Upper management was quick to say the circulation scandal had absolutely nothing to do with the layoffs. Upper management is, of course, full of shit.

Now, of course, the question looms: How in the hell do I wrap this up with something that'll make you come back for the next one? I've asked myself that question every time I've sat in front of this (or any other) keyboard over the last three years. I've never come up with a good answer for it. But y'all keep coming back anyway, for some reason. I'll keep searching for that answer.

This is only a test

If this were an actual post, it'd still be boring as hell. But it's not. It's just a test.

Meanwhile, back here at the funny farm ...
We're off to a good start with Election 2004 here in Florida.

Now hear this, America
The way I see it, folks, we have two choices:

We can let the ruling class decide who leads our country for the next four years

We can be the ruling class.

Choose the latter. Get the hell out and vote tomorrow.

As always, I don't care who you vote for, and I'm not telling you who I'm voting for. I do care that you put in the time and effort to make the decision. Don't leave it up to the radicals on either wing. You have an opinion; scream it from the rooftops. I want to hear you.