Working

So far this week, I have managed to..........

Cause the head of operations to call his father/owner to ask him why he was sticking his nose in the operations because I mis-identified an executive for the owner.

Accidentally hit the wrong IM person and sent a message complaining about a co-worker not working on anything important by sending it to the very person who wasn't working on anything important.  Great way to get your point across, in a very bad way.

And the best was when I was wondering if a co-workers wife was still out of town since I received an email from her (she also works there).  However I managed to ask the question at a really inappropriate time.

Guy:  "Oh, I forgot, I have to go home to let the dog out."
Me:  "I thought Jenny was out of town."

Took me a full 5 seconds to realize why it seemed as if I had thrown a grenade in the room. 

I claim sleep deprivation.  75 hour week with about 10 hours sleep. 

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

This Old House with Random Memories

This is where I grew up.  Before my dad built on and built on and built on.  We moved in when I was four years old.  Four kids, two bedrooms, one bath and five acres to run around on like rugrats.  What are rugrats?  I guess I really don't know, but I remember being called one fairly often.

Sitting on the front porch is the box where the glass jugs of milk were delivered.  Two gallons a week.  I remember that shortly after we finally had wall to wall carpet installed in the living room, my brother Mark carried in the glass jugs and accidentally banged them together, busting both wide open soaking the carpet. 

Surrounding the front porch, there were cactus plants which taught me early on never to smear your little baby hands all over, I never forgot that lesson and have never planted a cactus.  We called the big window in front a picture window in which each pane was a separate piece of glass.  I'm assuming the term picture window went by the wayside about the same time as the term milkman.

I once took a flying leap onto the side of the porch and landed squarely on the shin of one leg.  That sucker was swollen and bruised for weeks, you didn't rush kids off to the doc back then unless they were bleeding, PROFUSELY.

The bush along the sidewalk was a forsythia.   It was ugly except for when a few days in the spring when it bloomed.  All along the front was a hedge which had to be trimmed quite often.  I remember Mom hacking away at it with the old style, manual hedger.   Years later both the hedge and the forsythia were yanked out.

The leaves on the tree on the left side of the picture was Mike's tree.  There were two big trees in front and two in the back and for some strange rugrat reason, we kids decided that we each had a tree.  Helen and Mike's were in front and Mark and mine were in the back.  Mark had the best climbing tree.  I could climb it even when I was little.  I once climbed so high I could see a big castle on the other side of State Road 37.  When I got older, the "castle" had somehow morphed into a farmer's silo.  Why would someone turn a perfectly wonderful castle into an ordinary silo?  That is not progress, I wonder if they also took away the moat, the princess and the white knight, not that I ever saw them.

On the foundation of the house that is on the right side of the picture, the little white door was where the coal was delivered and dumped into the coal bin in the basement.  I still remember my brothers getting up on cold winter mornings and shoveling more coal into the furnace.

God, I'm old.

This is the house where we all held dad's hands while he passed away in 1992.  It was the only house he ever owned.

It sits empty now.  Do you think the memories are still playing on the side of a wall inside like an old projector when no one is looking?

This Time Last Week - Update

UPDATE:  Amazingly Kevin has managed to hang on.  Tomorrow they are putting a more permanent feeding tube in along with a tracheotomy.  While he is only showing signs of slight reactions, the swelling and bleeding of his brain has subsided and they are beginning to resume the radiation treatments.

His story has somehow exploded in the media.  Large article tonight in the local paper, several mentions of local and not so local papers and blogs.  Over 26k visits to his caring bridge website.  I can imagine that ourpouring of caring gives just a bit of comfort for his poor parents and siblings, not to mention the extended family.

Tomorrow night, his high school is having a benefit for him during the basketball game.  It's a fairly large school and with all the publicity, I'm sure it will be packed and they will collect quite a bit to cover the health costs and to help the parents who have not been able to leave his bedside to go to work. 

A somewhat official slogan has grown out of all this.  "You've got this Kev."  I hope it's true.  I pray it's true.

Miracles do sometimes happen.  Let's all continue to pray we get to witness one. 



Original Post::

Kevin, it appeared, was a happy healthy 15 year old, playing basketball, football and baseball for his high school team.

Tonight nearly 500 people showed up at the hospital after receiving word that he has 24 to 48 hours left.  His story was broadcast in Kentucky after the Wildcats coach showed up at the hospital earlier this week.  The caring bridge site now has over 10,000 visits.

One of my friends left this note on my fb page.  It was beautiful and I wanted to share it:

prayers going up...praying that God gives family and friends peace and comfort and that His Will be done..praying for all medical staff caring for this child...and mostly praying for this child...Heavenly Father please wrap your loving arms around this child and give him everything he needs at this time...Amen...

That says it all.  

When Super Bowl Sunday Brings Heartbreak

We were having a few family over for Super Bowl Sunday.  Not many.

My brother was to bring the pizzas, I had made snacks and we were all waiting for a great Colts win. 

The day didn't turn out the way we expected.

And the days following got even worse.

About 30 minutes before the game, Mark called and said he was waiting to see if his wife could make it home before it was time to come over.

Joetta's 15-year-old nephew is an overall athlete, a sophmore at his high school.  With just a couple odd minor symptoms in the last couple weeks, Sunday he woke up and was more or less paralyzed on one side of his body.  He couldn't walk and was slurring his speech.

They rushed him to the emergency room that morning.  Several tests were ran.  By the time Mark called me, it appeared that most of the test didn't appear as serious as the symptoms would suggest.  So Mark first came to the house and an hour later, Joetta left the hospital to come watch the rest of the game.  It was apparently just some type of inflammation and they put him on antibiotics and we were watching the results.

Ironically, Kevin was placed in the new Peyton Manning Childrens Hospital at St. Vincent, on Super Bowl weekend and Kevin is NOT a Colts fan nor a Peyton fan.  The family put posters of Peyton in the room to encourage him to rally up and get out of the hospital as soon as possible.

On Monday, word came back that it may indeed be a tumor in the brain.  They would need a biopsy to determine if it was cancer, the problem was it was located at the pons area of the brain.  They determined that  biopsy could not be performed.

Kevin's favorite coach is from KY Wildcats.  After hearing Kevin's story, Coach Calipari braved the nasty snow storm we had earlier this week and flew up to visit Kevin in the hospital.

Last night, they had a diagnosis.

Pontine Glioma. 

Researching this only brings siginificant heartache.  The "best" news is that with radiation, Kevin will respond well to radiation, recover somewhat and will have a recurrence in 5 to 9 months.  The experts and research all agree that a year is to be expected.

Due to the advancement of the tumor, they began radiation therapy last night and another this morning.   So far the response seems to be less than hopeful.  We are all praying, we all have hope. 

I sincerely want to believe there is fairness in this world.  It's just so hard to see through the fog of pain, stunned disbelief and how a happy healthy 15 year old is playing football, basketball and baseball one minute dealing with some evil deadly tumor the next.

Please, please, pray for a miracle for Kevin tonight and wish all of his family peace.

Go Colts

Happy Birthday Ronnie

Anyone else tired of winter?

I know I am.

A Random Picture

I've been a little speechless (blogless) lately.  No real reason.

Tonight I decided to randomly go through my 10k pictures and came upon this one.

It brings back good memories.

Taken at my mom's when she lived on the lake.  My niece(the new mom), my mom and my sister (Cissy Apple), toasting their margarita glasses on a summer evening around the campfire.

Here's to a warm summer night, a wonderful family and many more memories to come.

Early Adopters

I first heard the term in some class. Can't remember which, probably Economics. Economics is an antithesis to the mind of an accountant, so I got very little out of the class. Supply and Demand? Yeah, I got that one. But all those other concepts "all things remaining the same except", not so much, mainly because all other things do not remain constant, so it always blew the economic theory in my 2+2=4 ideal world.

Anyway, I did remember the term "early adopters". Those geeky people who have to buy the very first technowhatchamacallit on the first day available. I remember my brother's first Betamax. The thing was the size of a minibarn. I'm pretty sure the price tag was around $800 or so. It was around the time when Reagan was shot because he played the shooting frame by frame over and over again.

A few months ago a big Panasonic truck set up shop where I work.  It was a traveling 3D show.  I went in the trailer not expecting much.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, 3D.  Saw that on my tv set back in the 60's watching Creature From the Black Lagoon. 

So Panasonic is on the road floating out the trial balloon of 3D TV's.  Prepare to be awed.  The glasses read infrared messages from the screen that direct your eyes to the full effect of the 3D.

The 15 minute video is awesome.  Part of it was filmed at the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in China.  The view was shot from the a standing position on the floor when the 2000 drummers were operating in complete unison.  You actually felt like you were standing right next to them.  It really is amazing.

When PC's were making their first appearances, our department purchased one.  Back in the day when they had no hard drives.  You put in a floppy disk with the DOS operating system, took that out, put in the software, took that out and used an empty floppy to save your work.

This was a floppy floppy, not the hard "floppies" that came later.

The first day the CPA I worked for put the disk in and hit a couple buttons and before he knew it he had initialized the operating system on the disk.  POOF.  Gone.  That was my first lesson on what not to do on a pc.

Several years later, my department purchased a "portable" Compaq.  It came with some weird thing called Windows.  I opened Win.exe when we first got it and could not figure out what anyone would use it for.  Made no sense to me and was such a memory hog that you couldn't even open it when we had loaded a few files on the hard drive.  I distinctly remember thinking it was good they gave the Windows away free on the pc, because no one would ever end up buying it.  Yes, I know, I'm not much a visionary. 

Never been an early adopter,  we were late in buying a desktop pc at home.  I finally got a laptop and a wireless connection only two years ago.  We just replaced our rear projection TV with a 55 inch Samsung LED that daily makes me feel more beautiful.  Really.  They should advertise this benefit to get more women buyers.  The reason?   You can see every wrinkle, pimple, pucker, freckle, tiniest scar on every glamorous beauty that you thought was perfect.  I'm just glad I don't see my actual face on it, I might not feel so beautiful then.

So now out comes this new whatchacallit horribly named the I-Pad.  I don't get it.  But then I didn't get Windows either at first. 

Seriously.  Is this necessary?  It just looks to me like something one of those early adopters will buy and destroy within a month by dropping it.  How are you supposed to hang on to it? 

I can just imagine Dooney & Bourke is rushing around creating an over priced I-Pad skin to get on the market next week. 

The Winning Strategy

Pretty simple, really. And funny.