Special Delivery

Amongst the long list of crazy jobs I have had over the years is one I like to call "Underwear Man". Not as glamorous as "Underwear Model", if that's what you're thinking.

Jay's dad got us a job at a dingy, under-lit warehouse in Detroit, somewhere near Tiger Stadium. It was actually a pretty good job, except for the big hairy rats that dwelled in the dark corners of the place.

We used to unload trucks full of boxes of underwear, and then repack them for specific orders. These orders went out to places all across the country.

One day I was packing a box of underwear that was destined for a military academy that a friend of mine was actually attending at the time. This was too good an opportunity to pass up.

So, into the big stacks of squeaky-white undies, I carefully tucked a pink thong with a tag attached that said "Special Delivery for..." and then his name, which for obvious reasons I cannot repeat here. He had no idea that I worked at an "underwarehouse", so it would blindside him.

A couple of years later he confessed the event to me, out of the blue. He had actually received the "Special Delivery", along with a large dose of military-school taunting. This is how people get nicknames.

I never told him it was me.

The Heart Of The Matter

My mother acquired a heart condition when she was very young, probably from a bout with Scarlet Fever. Or it might have been congenital, we'll never know for sure. Her ticker never worked quite right, and it harbored a sinister clot that was like a ticking time-bomb for many years.

One night in 1972 my mom was in the kitchen getting ice cream for me, just the way I liked it back then, vanilla sprinkled with Quik chocolate milk powder. I know, crazy.

Anyhow, as she walked across the floor, she suddenly collapsed. I remember seeing her lying on the floor, eyes rolled up in her head, completely white.

The commotion that followed can only be described as seeming like the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan". Everything seemed simultaneously dreamy and jittery. Sounds were muffled. Individual frames still hang in my view, suspended in time.

I heard one of my older brothers pick up the phone and tell another one of my brothers to get off it, NOW!. He then called the paramedics.

Brian and I, 7 and 5, were ushered into our bedroom and the door was closed. I freaked out. I didn't know what to think. I remember feeling sheer panic gripping me like an icy hand. When we came out of our room to the sound of fading sirens, my mom was gone, taken to the hospital.

Her little time-bomb had exploded, the clot that was in her heart had come loose and gone to her brain. It's called an embolism.

My mother was put on blood thinners and made it through with effects on the left side of her body like a stroke, it was some time before she recovered the majority of her function. She never got it all back.

My parents decided that Brian and I needed to go away for a while while mom recovered. We were sent to my aunt and uncle's house in Cascade Township, near Grand Rapids. It was a terribly scary thing for us to go through, and I didn't understand why we couldn't just be with our mom. My aunt was much more strict than my mother was, and she got especially mad when her gourmet dinners were not eaten. I just wasn't into pasta primavera back then, unfortunately for me.

Needless to say, I missed a lot of desserts.

I started second grade in Cascade, and Brian and I had to take the bus. This was something we had never done before, we lived close to school at home. I remember the first day clearly, standing in a crowd of hundreds of kids outside the school. The bell rang and the kids scattered like frightened cockroaches. Very soon I was alone in the playground, wondering where I should go.

I entered the school and walked down the empty halls until I found the office and they got me to the proper classroom.

Finding the right bus after school was always challenging. After all, they were all big and yellow, their sole differentiating feature was a tiny number painted on the front fender. Brian came from a different class and I always checked carefully to make sure he was on the bus with me.

One day he wasn't there.

I got off the bus at home and my aunt was very mad that my brother wasn't with me. She didn't want to lose one of us on her watch. He had gotten on some other bus and after the driver had delivered all his pasty-faced passengers to their appropriate homes, there sat Brian in the back. The driver called to him and asked where he lived.

Brian said "Detroit".

He was delivered to my aunt's house quite a while after dark that day.

I had my first bad case of puppy-love in Cascade. A girl in my class named Elizabeth. She was blonde and tall and skinny and very athletic. I thought she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen, and I wanted to marry her.

Long before that could happen, we were sent back home.

Some years later my mom collapsed again at a local Chinese restaurant. it was discovered that her mitral valve was failing, and it's inefficiency was causing extreme tiredness, dizziness, and other effects. She would need open heart surgery to replace that bad valve. Such operations were not yet commonplace back in the 70's, but she really needed it.

So it was that my mom checked in to Harper Hospital one day and checked out some time later with a brand new mitral valve from a pig (they have very similar heart geometry). Although the doctors had some difficulty restarting her heart, she came out of it much improved. It took a long time for her to recover, her ribs and sternum hurt very badly. She had a little bell she would ring when she needed something. Sneezing was pure torture on her.

I used to joke with her that she would start "oinking", now that she was part pig :)

My mother's journey through life was often hijacked by her bad heart. The pig valve outlasted it's promised 10-year lifespan, ticking away until 1991 when my mother got her second valve replacement. No pigs were harmed this time around, her new valve was a high-tech carbon-fiber design made to last 50 years.

That's 40 years longer than my mom was made to last.

The Century Car

Happy 100th, Lizzie!

"The car that put the world on wheels" entered production a century ago today at Ford's Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit. Tough, dependable, versatile, and easy to maintain, it was an amazing engineering achievement for it's day, or any day.

So successful was this car that by 1921 the "Tin Lizzie" accounted for almost 60% of world automobile production. At peak output a new "T" rolled off the line every ten seconds. Some 15 million of them were manufactured by the time production ended in 1927 to make way for the Model A.

This car brought practical transportation to a great many people who lived isolated on farms and in remote rural areas. Thousands saw big cities and other far away destinations for the first time in their lives because of the Model T.

Among all of Lizzie's great gifts, perhaps her greatest was the gift of freedom.

One hundred years ago today, the world got a lot smaller.

"Better Sex Is Only A Discreet Phone Call Away"

Just wanted to get your attention.

I heard this on satellite radio today.

Uneasy Rider

So, I'm parked in front of the building where Dennis works yesterday, waiting for him to come down to the car. And along comes a rather large fellow who I don't know but who looks familiar to me. He walks right up to the car and grabs the door handle.

Thinking he has a message from Dennis or something, I unlock the car.

He climbs right in, muttering something about "Is this one of those tiny 35 MPG cars or something?"

I said "Um.....yes...." as I look at him like he's crazy.

He starts to put his seat belt on.

So I say to him "Hey sport, we going somewhere?"

Very puzzled, he looks at me for the first time.

"Oops! I got in the wrong car! The guy said he was right out front, so I thought..."

This is the kind of weird stuff that happens to me all the time.

Jailbreak Jake

As a part of my ongoing effort to get more exercise for the dogs and myself, I took Coco for a walk yesterday. I hadn't walked the dogs to our new park yet, so I decided to start with just one pooch. I would then add the second pooch on a later walk, if all went well. Since Coco is by far the most restless of the pair, I chose her for the trial run.

Jake was not happy. The two of them were outside in the dog run when I came out (with Jake's leash yet) to get Coco. Normally mild-mannered Jake freaked out. It was as if we were heading out for The New World and leaving him behind to scratch out a living on an Irish potato farm.

He escaped the dog run before I got Coco to the edge of our lawn. I stopped, went back, and put him back in. It looked like he just squeezed under the fence, so I secured the bottom by hammering in the stakes that hold the fence down. That would do it.

Jake was now officially a dog on a mission though, and all that green chicken-wire obstacle did was slow him down a bit. Like the Dingo Fence in Australia, it doesn't really hold up if the dingo is motivated. And our dingo was motivated. He was not about to let a little black furry upstart take his place as top dog.

Coco and I made it almost to the park before I saw Jake tearing across lawns and streets towards us at top speed.

I was not happy. I had to hold Coco's leash out away from my body as I stooped to hold Jake's collar for the long two-block walk home. It's not a very ergonomic situation for the lower back.

Upon arriving home I tied Coco's leash to the planter hook near the porch and got Jake into the basement. No fences this time. He sensed his impending imprisonment and started squealing like a stuck pig. I closed the basement door and went back outside just in time to see Coco leap from the porch and hang herself on the suspended leash. She was flailing around like a fuzzy piñata as my jaw dropped in shock.

As I leapt towards Coco all I could think about was that if I couldn't get there in time Heather would think I hung her on purpose. As it turned out, I got her free in seconds. Once she had time to recover her wits and re-expand her windpipe, off to the park we went for a very enjoyable walk filled with squirrels and scents and sunlight.

The Office

I am slowly getting the photography office together.

Well, my side of it is dedicated to photography. HB's side is reserved for serious scrapbooking.

Love Child

Breaking It In

Zach's birthday party was great. I think everyone had fun, and being that his was our first party here, we broke the house in amongst good friends and good times.

Zach got a powered model airplane from Grandma and Grandpa, and a mis-aligned engine sent it right into a neighbor's tree. It took five people and a rake, but it was eventually retrieved.

Here's a picture of Ben informing us of the crash.

Spacer'd Out!

The cruel metal dental spacers that Zach has had to endure since Kindergarten are history! He had them removed at the dentist today. They were required to keep his teeth separated correctly until his adult versions came in.

It will be strange for a while, I don't even remember a Zach who could eat Tootsie Rolls and chew gum.

We need to celebrate! Caramel apples are on me!

Fuzzy Water

Depending on what part of the country you are from, I am either not a "pop" person, or not a "soda" person.

I'll call it "pop" here because I am from Michigan, and that's what we do.

We were not allowed to have pop at dinner growing up, and I can't stand how unbelievably sweet it is anyhow. It makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it. And forget the diet stuff, I don't dig on the hour-long tinny aftertaste.

But I love carbonated water, especially when they're naturally carbonated like San Pellegrino. The only thing is, I sometimes want a little flavor in it.

I would love if someone would just make a product for me: a pop with about a fourth of the sugar of regular pop. No artificial sweeteners, just a tiny amount of sugar. Or better yet, fruit juice. I would really like that.

But there seems to be a standard level of sweetness that everyone sticks to (pun intended). Anything less and you could fail a taste test with your competitor because tasting things in close series really brings out differences in sweetness.

So I'm not holding my breath.

BUT!

We found a really great "fizzy" water that is made by Faygo. Ever heard of Faygo? You have if you live in the midwest, but not much further out. Faygo is a 100-year old Detroit company. In fact, it was Faygo who popularized the word "pop" to describe soda, which I guess explains the geographic variation.

Anyhow, this new fizzy water's only ingredients are carbonated water and natural flavor. No sugar, no artificial sweeteners. It comes in grapefruit, cherry, orange, lemon-lime, and raspberry. You can drink it all day long and it tastes great. Spill in on the floor and there is no sticky mess. My whole family loves it. We buy it by the case.

Maddie calls it "Fuzzy Water".

Autumnal Equinox

Hello, my fellow pumpkin and cider lovers,

Fall is here, and right around the corner are all of the nifty fall icons: chilly air, red and yellow chlorophyll-challenged leaves, cider mills, and little children roaming around dressed as Darth Vader.

I love fall, except for the promise of winter it brings. I'm not a winter person. Well, I was when I lived in Arizona. But there, winter means 70 degrees and sunny.

I think I need the sun. I am a sun-guy. And in Michigan the sun usually leaves us around early October and we don't see it again until April. I know it's up there, but something comes between us: a dozen miles of clouds.

So my challenge every year is to enjoy everything that is fall, without thinking about Act II, coming later.

One More

Good morning, and welcome to International Talk Like Yourself Again Day!

We're having Zach's "Wild Family & Friends Birthday Party" today, exactly one month after his birthday.

Yes, with all the advertised detriments associated with being a child of divorce, there are also a some big bonuses. Two sets of families, complete with more cousins, uncles, and parents. More attention all the way around.

And presents. This will be Zach's fourth birthday party this year.

Oh, he's going to have two Christmases as well.

Aaaargh!!!

Aye, ye scurvy dogs! I've a-hankerin' ta wish ye all a Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day!!!

Sparks & Speed

Detroit is infamous for it's aggressive, fast drivers. Ask anyone who's been here and somewhere else to compare it to. Growing up here, it seems normal to me. But whenever I go anywhere else in the country, I immediately notice how agonizingly slowly everyone drives there.

Notice, I said our drivers are "aggressive" and "fast". I did not say "bad". Bad drivers are what you find in Milwaukee on Saturday mornings. They are amateurs.

Detroit drivers are pros.

Perhaps it's because we've been driving longer than any other city. We got paved roads first. We make cars, so they're like potato chips here. Whatever the reason, be aware and alert at all times if you roll in Motown.

There is a certain hockey-like, rollerball-ish, hyper-active rhythm to the morning drive. You absolutely need to know what you are doing, or you will be eaten alive and spit out on the shoulder.

It looks for all the world like chaos, but there are patterns. And they have nothing to do with anything you learned in driver's ed.

The single most important goal of any driver on these roads is to maintain overall traffic speed. It is THE rule. Anyone who does anything to slow down the flow of traffic will be dealt with harshly and rapidly. You can do anything you want as long as it doesn't break that most important, cardinal rule. Passing on the right, something that would get you thrown in jail in Germany, is fine here. Driving 115 MPH is ok too, I've only seen one police car ever on the Southfield Freeway, and he was in the far right lane looking terrified.

But cut someone off and make them hit the brakes...and you'd better run and hide. Because that shit will get you killed. And rightly so, because you just violated the only rule.

Oh, just to add to the fun, there are obstacles. Lots of obstacles. With Detroit's industrial base, we get trucks of all kinds carrying lots of crazy things, from giant rolls of steel to boxes full of thousands of shiny spiral metal shavings. And I have seen accidents and mishaps involving just about all of them.

I've seen a ladder fall off a truck and immediately get run over by a dozen cars, damaging all of them cruelly.

I've seen the aftermath of a 12-ton roll of sheet steel that fell off a truck and popped open on the freeway like a giant coil spring, nearly cutting an overpass in half and taking the tops off of a couple of cars. It shut down I-75 for three hours.

And the aforementioned metal shavings, when that crate hit the road it looked like a million stars had just been spilled from a galaxy. Beautiful, it their own way. Unfortunately, they were also razor-sharp and several cars lost tires to those stars.

And just today a truck dropped a large paver brick onto the road that missed me by a foot and clobbered the new Edge driving next to me. And a half-mile later, two big cardboard boxes appeared out of nowhere and there was not enough room between them for my car...I hit one hard, sending it flying off into the weeds at high velocity.

But one of my favorite events was the "Rusty 1976 Chrysler Cordoba" incident. A man cruised up the early morning Southfield Freeway, sitting on cracking Corinthian Leather and drinking a hot beverage, his car about 75 feet in front of me and one lane to the right. Suddenly and without warning, the old Chrysler shuddered and ejected the left rear wheel, brakes, half of the differential and drive shaft, leaf spring, and about a hundred rusty bolts and pieces of metal - right onto the road!

His car, immediately unstable traveling at freeway speeds with only three wheels, started spinning rapidly out of control. It must have gone three complete revolutions in front of me, shooting sparks in every direction. Meanwhile, the tire & wheel assembly hit the road and bounced twenty feet into the air, in a parabolic trajectory aimed right at me!

In a split-second, the tire-missile bounced right in front of my rapidly braking car and shot off towards the shoulder, wobbling mid-air like a falling top. Meanwhile, the car had hit the dividing wall hard and was slowing to a screeching stop in front of me. Only the extra-early, pre-rush-hour time of day saved this guy from wiping out ten cars.

I slowed to a crawl as I drove past him. There he sat, motionless, staring off ahead into cloudy confusion, wondering if this was all real. His hands still gripped the steering wheel like a baby baboon hanging on to it's mother's fur for dear life.

Just another day on the freeways of Detroit.

Split

I just ate a very tasty banana split. But this one didn't have the "split" part.

It was still good.

Slicing Me

My "procedure" (don't you hate that word?) went well yesterday, and I came out of it 0.0000034 lbs lighter! Now we wait to see what the biopsy reveals...

tick...tick...

Robinwood Park

I took the kids to our new local park yesterday, and a good time was had by all!. It's a great park, big spaces, lots of trees, sand volleyball, multiple play and picnic areas and a really nice track that winds all through it.

And it's only a couple of blocks away.

Cocina

I love my new kitchen. I am cooking again and it feels great. Yesterday I made up a beef salad that was well-received by the vast chewing hordes.

And my family liked it too.

-Ectomy Day

Oh, and it's "Precancerous Skin Thingy" Removal Day too, so wish me luck!

The Potholes Of Life

I was startled awake by the sound of doors closing and footsteps on the floor above me. I looked at the clock, it was very early in the morning.

I got a sickly feeling inside me. Something wasn't right. Then it hit me. Silence.

It was too quiet. The humming of my dad's ventilator was gone.

Now I understood what the commotion was about.

He was gone.

I could hardly believe it. Just a few months ago he was riding his green ten-speed bike on many-mile journeys across the city. He learned to ski a few years prior and we had so much fun flying down the runs at the local ski resorts.

He just seemed so healthy.

He had probably gone blind from his rapidly advancing cancer the week before, but it didn't really matter because his mind was completely entrenched in dealing with all the pain and suffering he was enduring. I was relieved that he wasn't going through that any more, for sure.

But I was selfish too, I wanted my dad back. As I drifted uneasily back to sleep in my tears, I thought of how different my life would be from that moment on.

Now there would be no more skiing with my father. No more "helping" him build things in his basement workshop. No more of his cheesy sight-gags involving thumbs being slammed in trunks. No more stories of World War II, the snowball fights of his childhood, or how he met my mother.

And a thousand other things, I am still discovering them to this day.

It's amazing how big a scar that left in my life. It's like a giant pothole in the road that never gets fixed. Eventually it fills with water, and then it looks like it's not there anymore. But inevitably one day you forget and drive into it, and there you are, stuck. And it all comes flowing back at once.

That's what happened to me today.

WildNet Is Back, Baby!!

The cable guy was here and he got us all set up. We now have HDTV and internet Again. And the internet is smokin'. I tested it at north of 25 MBPS! Apparently we're on a very sparse cable loop.

So, let the fun begin...again...

The Disappearing Landscape

The man in the brown truck brought me the most interesting book today, but it really came from Ingrid. She always seems to get me just the right thing. This time it's the Annie Leibovitz book American Music, which is a collection of photographs of the "disappearing landscape" of American music.

There are juke joints, old blues guys, and folk singers from the heart of America, all rendered in amazingly lush color and silver gelatin black & white.

I love it, Ingie!

Happy & Colorful

The Great Monsoon Of 2008

So, wow. It was already a pretty wet summer, but once Mr. H. Ike added his bit to the situation we got some serious rain! It was interesting to see how the area handles that much rain, something we may not see again for years.

Turns out I'm really glad we got the house on high ground. All that rain from our property made some wet ponds and a stream in my neighbor's yard as it worked it's way to the drainage canal. Once there it formed a pretty good river as it ran away from us.

Our hills did great at keeping the water well away from us. Here's a scene looking out our window during the deluge.

Lisa Days

It was a an "All-Lisa" weekend! We all went out to Black Lotus on Friday for some good times, and yesterday she was over to help us unpack.

She helped Heather unpack clothing while I did books and kept Lisa in Chardonnay :)

It was good to see ya Lisa, and Thanks!

Week, Ending

Happy Friday, Peeps!!!

It's foggy and rainy and grey and I just don't care because it's Friday! I'm going to go home after work, finish the final proofs for a wedding album, and then spend the weekend immersed in a perfect yin-yang blend of unpacking and relaxing.

And maybe a little blogging.

Thoughts Arrive Like Butterflies

I guess everyone knows that music has a way of tripping off old memories. There is something about songs when they become linked to certain places or times, a certain transformative power that is almost scary.

No matter where I am or what I am doing, every time I hear Even Flow by Pearl Jam I am instantly swept away and placed neatly in 1991 Phoenix Arizona.

I am rolling down the Superstition Freeway towards Mesa, squinting into sunshine hardly dimmed by my car's "limo-black" windows. It's August and hot, really hot, heat like you only get in summertime Phoenix (It was 122 degrees there on June 26th, 1990, and I have a tee-shirt to prove it). Just released and instantly a favorite, Even Flow is playing loudly on my stereo and everything just feels...well...it feels right.

"Even flow, thoughts arrive like butterflies
Oh, he don't know, so he chases them away
Someday yet, he'll begin his life again...life again..."

But it wasn't always so.

The landscape in Arizona was so completely unlike anything I grew up with, I might as well have moved to an alien planet. Majestic red buttes and mesas towered above me. Mesquite trees crouched at the side of the freeway, twisted and seeming more dead than alive. Enormous Saguaro cacti, some weighing tons, reached towards the burning sun with strong prickly green arms. The pale blue sky was huge and ever-cloudless. Sunsets were blazing oceans of color, in reds, purples, and oranges that seemed to be a mile deep.

There is no way for me to adequately describe the feeling I had in the spring of 1990, right out of college, moving, alone, two thousand miles away to a place with which I had no previous connection whatsoever. It was traumatic in the extreme. The feeling of isolation was complete and relentless.

I had no friends. I didn't recognize any of the stores or streets. I was used to Farmer Jack, but here they had Safeway. Arbor Drugs was replaced by Drug Emporium, Harmony House by Tower Records. The street signs were big and hung over the road with the traffic lights. I had no idea which neighborhoods were safe and which were not. It got dark very early because Arizona doesn't go on daylight savings time.

There was no email, phone calls home were long distance and very expensive. I wrote many letters, but they aren't very interactive and didn't really help with my loneliness.

I was cut off from everything and everyone I ever knew. I had to do something.

I tried to get into a routine. After work I would go out for a run, unless it was too hot and then I would wait for dark. I watched M*A*S*H reruns at night on my fuzzy black & white 13-inch television and then tried to sleep. It wasn't really living, but it gave me a sense of purpose to be doing something structured.

It took me weeks to come out of survival mode, relax and start to get involved in my new surroundings. I made friends. I explored. By the late summer of 1991 when "Ten" came out, I was married, settled in and knew my way around the city, from the ritzy shops of Scottsdale and Paradise Valley to the wonderful Mexican markets of Guadalupe Road.

So on that fateful day I drove down the freeway, feeling confident and adjusted, Even Flow planted itself in my mind and hasn't let go yet. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's here for good.

This irony was not lost on me though: It took Eddie Vedder's ballad for the homeless man to make me realize that I was finally home.

Drinking From The Internet Fire Hose

I really miss the internet. I have gotten quite attached to that bugger over the last ten years. I think it was around 1996 or 1997 the first time I got on the actual web and snooped around. Back in those days, even big corporate sites were just pages of text on a grey background. There was no Flash, no Cascading Style Sheets, no embedded video. It was raw like tuna sashimi.

Since then we've both grown up and become pretty good friends.

But it's more complicated to get internet in a new house than I had originally thought it would be. BIG CABLE has to come out and verify that there is indeed a house on this lot. Then they need to run new cable from some point to our local box, and from there to our house. The rest is just installation and activation.

But we are stuck in step one. Seems BIG CABLE needs 7-10 work days to do all that complicated cable running and house verifying.

There are six or seven WiFi networks within the grasp of the MacBook, and I must admit I've been "borrowing bandwidth" from some poor local sucker who doesn't have the technical expertise to 1) change the default name of his router from "linksys" to something more descriptive, and 2) turn on even the most rudimentary security protocol. I mean, come on, the Airport Extreme we use just about forces you to turn on some form of access protection. I think after we get our internet up I might try to find this guy and tell him to plug his leak. Note, I said "after" we get our internet up, because I still need him.

(Is that bad of me? I would do the same for him, of course :)

I use WPA2 which is pretty strong, certainly much better than WEP, and not even in the same ballpark as "default", which is pretty much a big neon "Free WiFi" advertisement. And our network name is "WildNet", just to let everyone know there will be crazy things happening on there. Our router lets us generate temporary "guest" passwords that only last one day, so you can let your creepy uncle Harlan check his mail today and know that he won't be spying on you tomorrow and every day thereafter with your golden master password in his sweaty hands.

But I digress.

We hope to be back "on the grid" in the next few days, emailing, blogging, shopping, checking store hours, uploading photos to Flickr, reading RSS feeds, and researching stent procedures and dog doors.

All from the comfort of our own connection.

Of Spears And Snoozles

For those of you following the drama of my interrupted sleep cycles, the mystery of the shrinking snooze interval has been solved. Seems there is an obscure series of button-pushes that will change the snooze time on my alarm clock. This little gem was hidden deep in the furrowed cracks of the most badly-written owner's manual you're ever likely to come across.

Now my snooze snoozles along at a more respectable ten minutes. Another modern-day pestilence mitigated. Those Neanderthals of ages past never knew how easy that had it, hunting mammoths with wooden spears is nothing compared to doing battle with a scrappy RCA alarm clock.

Medicinality

Friends and Allies,

Here's a little medical update for you, as we've had our share of procedures and tests lately. I think you'll like this post.

Incidentally, thanks to everyone who called and wrote us about these, it really does help.

Zach's MRI results came back completely normal. Which means his original diagnosis of Benign Rolandic Epilepsy stands. This is really good news because that is the kind that he will outgrow.

HB's test for gestational diabetes was also normal. Another big relief as this simplifies things drastically and makes us all a little more relaxed.

Finally, Heather's mom's stint procedure went great, they inserted two of the little stainless steel buggers in a row, and now she is feeling much better. She's got a little dizziness, but nothing serious.

And just to add something in here for me, I have to have a pre-cancerous skin thingy removed from me on Thursday. Seems I really should have listened to my mom in Florida that one year when we ran around without sunscreen on.

Connecting With Daddy

Madison wants to help Daddy with everything. She is amazingly curious about electrical and mechanical systems of all types. And she is fiercely independent.

Here she can be seen helping me make the DVD player connections to the TV. She was a little put-off by my choice of what she considered to be poorly shielded cable with no gold connectors, but she let it slide.

This time.

The First Piece

Zach and I went to the house a couple days before the move to bring a few things over. He placed the first piece of furniture in the new house. As you can see, although his choice of location is inspired, the wicker end table looked a little lonely.

Packing It In

I fired up The Beast last night and transferred all the un-accounted-for photos to it so I have some to share today, as you may have guessed by now.

Here's one of the big day, our last dance with the old house.

As you can see, I no longer cared what the lawn looked like...after all, the house wasn't ours anymore :)

Brian leveraged his years of experience working for UPS by packing our truck to the density of a Pulsar. Turns out he has a hidden talent for using every square millimeter of space in a truck. I think he saved us a whole trip. Note Dennis looking on in amazement.

Deluxe Model

Here's a picture of the new doggie door I installed in the garage wall, and the stairs that lead to it.

Pay no attention to that black furry abomination to the right, we're calling the exterminator tomorrow.

UPDATE: Just to mix things up, Coco used the door to get back in this morning, but Jake somehow forgot how to use the steps. It's a good thing they're cute, because they're dumber than a bag of hammers.

:)

Rocking The House

My brother Mark and sister-in-law Mary have a very cool coffee table in their house. I loved it the first time I saw it, it's so interesting and unique.

It's a hundred year old trolley, used in the furniture factories of Grand Rapids in days long-past. Mary has a friend who restores and sells them. I had to ask her how much it was, because I really wanted one.

Eighty-Five bucks!!!

Well, anyone with any sense can see that these are worth WAY more than $85. It's the real deal - made of hardwood, and the wheels are solid cast iron. But this kind woman only charges for her materials, not her time - which is considerable.

My brother Mark was in an antique shop in Traverse City and saw one exactly like this going for around $3,000! What's more, he knows of someone who has dozens of un-restored carts lying around in a barn. I think he smells and opportunity brewing. I wouldn't doubt if he went and bought the lot of them for Mary to restore :)

Anyhow, we got ours this weekend, and it's really "grand", with a serious helping of presence. Mary says it's the kind of unique conversation piece that makes a house "Rock". And it does, this 100 year old cart looks great in our one-month-old living room. It bestows instant authenticity. And you don't have to worry about the kids ruining it, it's built like a tank and it's seen worse, probably much worse, than anything we could throw at it.

Sorry, but don't bother asking me for this woman's phone number. She's on to the game now. We got the last of the bargain-carts. I think she'll be raising her price a bit for her next one.

Like, by a few grand.

Pokes & Probes

Today Jake goes to the vet for his yearly exam and booster shots. And since he lost his driver's license as a result of that nasty business with the sidewalk, the cat, and the old lady, I have to take him.

So, another journey to the unruly, strange-smelling, alien-dog waiting room, as Jake nervously smells everything he can reach on his short leash. Then the girl opens the door and shouts "Jake Wild", causing every mammal in the office to jump, and back to the shiny stainless steel room to shots and pokes and probes, followed by a huge bill and a quick exit.

If all goes well, Jake will be found to be free of all major parasites, worms, and bacteria. He'll go back home and rejoin his little pack with nary a thought of the event.

I, on the other hand, will have a large hole in my checking account to fill. Once again, the dog gets off easy.

Press Release

DOGGIE DOOR TRAINING REPORT, DAY FIVE

For Immediate Release

Troy. Troubles continued today in the debacle caused by the sudden appearance of a new portal leading to the dog run. This new door is covered with two flaps of a material that appear to all canines to be impenetrable.

An incident at the entrance involving Coco occurred at approximately 4:35 PM Sunday. A short but intense tussle was ignited and ended with urine being distributed on the walls of the garage, as well as hurt feelings all around.

In later news, Coco escaped the temporary prison compound at the side of the house and was seen running at full tilt across the lawn and through a gap in the neighbor's fence. Recovery operations took almost five minutes.

When all hope of teaching middle-aged dogs new tricks had nearly faded, Jake surprised everyone by coming in through the door by himself, walking into the house, and slurping water from his dish in the laundry room.

Coco has yet to fully grasp the concept.

More news to follow...

Down By Five

Something happened to my alarm clock. I'm not sure when it happened. And I certainly don't know how it happened. But it did.

I lost five minutes of snooze time.

My alarm clock has always snoozed for nine minutes. There is not button or function that I can see anywhere on this evil device that allows the user to set the snooze length. Time zone, yes. Display brightness, check. No snooze length, nope.

But nonetheless, it now only snoozes for four minutes. And that's not really a snooze at all. That's more like a doze, or perhaps a mild nodding-off.

Anything under 6 minutes & 30 seconds is just an annoying tease as far as I'm concerned.

So until I get some time to delve into the "Jenglish" owner's manual, printed in seven languages on super-transparent phone book paper with a font so tiny that only a gnat could read it without magnification, I will continue hitting my new four-minute snooze nine times, instead of my old schedule of hitting the nine-minute snooze four times.

And I'll probably be crabby.

Life Support

Look at this thing. It's a surge protector for my computer system. It's big, scary, heavy, and complicated. And I need TWO of them to handle The Beast's appetite for power. Here is a list of plugs I need in my side of the office:

Mac Pro
Apple Cinema Display
Wacom drawing tablet
Harmon Kardon speakers
Canon flatbed scanner
Epson 13" printer
Canon printer/fax
Epson 8" printer
Black Hole drive
Blue Whale drive
Orange Julius drive
White Dwarf drive
Purple Popsicle drive (x2)
Powered USB hub #1
Powered USB hub #2
6500K desk light
Airport Extreme WiFi router
Cable bridge
Shredder
Tiny fan
Aqua Wave off-site drive (occasional)
MacBook (occasional)
Spares for other occasional devices (2)

If I counted right, that's 25 outlets!!! And many of them have huge transformers at the end that make them not play nice with their neighbors.

All I can say is, it's a good thing the new house has 150 Amp service and nine smoke detectors!

Pee Portal

I did it. I sawed and drilled into my brand new house to install the dog door. It wasn't easy to get up the courage to do that. It's in the garage, but the garage is finished in this house, and the walls look every bit as good as the interior walls.

The whole time I thought of it as a tattoo, or a navel piercing. A scar, yes, but it will look good. And it does. It looks like it was made to be there.

Here's the funny part though. The property slopes steeply from front to back, to allow for the walkout basement, so I knew the outside of door would be high. I guess I wasn't expecting it to be 3 feet off the ground!

So today I will go get a ramp, which could add to the fun of training the dogs to use the door.

Incidentally, my idea of training the dogs for this contraption differs somewhat from the guidelines in the dog door manual. Pet Safe's version involves carefully introducing the dogs to the door, removing the flaps, and encouraging them to come through by use of a treat or coaxing. Then re-installing the flaps.

My method, both quicker and easier, is to grab Coco and throw her through the door from about five feet away. This will show Jake how the door works and give us all a much-needed laugh at the same time.

The Nichols Girls Go To The Hospital

Heather is at Beaumont today having a glucose monitoring test to see if she has gestational diabetes. She flirted with it during her first pregnancy, and her fast-test results this time indicated she needed more testing.

And Heather's mom has a procedure today to open up an artery that is 90% blocked. If the others are in bad shape too, she may be having a bypass right away. She's really worried (justifiably) about this. We should know more about her prognosis later this afternoon.

So let's all throw good thoughts and well-wishes at the "Nichols Girls" today.

Lost And Found

In the carnival of madness that is my life right now, it will benefit me greatly to slow down, take a deep breath, and picture a time when tripping on boxes and looking for missing coffee grinders will be a thing of the past.

It's easy to go nuts in an environment that is upside down and sideways, where hardly anything is quite right, and everything else is quite wrong.

Living for years in a house, you get used to knowing where everything is. When you do lose something, it's usually something new or old, seldom used or not really necessary.

Now we are in a place where we cannot locate basic, very important things. Like clothes. Toothbrushes. Um, and the hard drive containing my life's collection of music.

We have the lawn fertilizer spreader, which I use once a year, but not the coffee grinder, an everyday necessity. We've located the glass top to a coffee table we'll never use again, in fact we trip over it every day, but just try to find a decent bath towel that hasn't been used on the dogs...

But my pillow!

That's what I miss the most. We have Heather's, but now that she's claimed that back, I am sleeping on a hard, compact pillow better suited to torturing a medieval prisoner or building a bunker with than putting your head down on. I wish I had the slightest clue where that thing could be stuffed right now. In a box at the bottom of the heap in the garage? Perhaps. In the basement, under the rubber Halloween skeleton? Maybe.

Rubber Halloween skeleton?

Yes, we have that. Good thing too, because Halloween is only a couple months away.

Boxes And Boxes

Hey....'sup schoolgirls and schoolboys?

Yes, we're very light on blogging communications lately, partly due to the massive mountain of boxes we need to unpack and partly because the cable company needs to run wires (and maybe build a road?) out to our place.

The mail man found us yesterday, so we're on the map in at least one way. We'll see if the garbage man finds us today too.

We've got all major appliances working, with cold water and ice, and hot burners to cook with. No microwave oven yet, but you just know I won't miss it.

I am about to hack into the brand new garage drywall today to install the doggie door. Wish me luck. No more carrying pooches out to pee! Yay!

In other fun news, Zach slept in the house for the first time Tuesday night. He loved his room. Maddie loves hers too. I'll be building the bed frame for our room tonight, so no more sharing the low-down air with the dogs.

The office is "getting there", I have a slimmed-down manifestation of The Beast running enough to access my photographs. I put up some cool shiny aluminum blinds in there that really look nice, as well as serving to hide my many thousands of dollars worth of Apple hardware.

All in all, we're moving along nicely.

I'll chat more when I can. Until then, keep your chins up, raise a glass of red to us, and breathe easy in the knowledge that it is not YOUR time to move right now.

The Fallout

Hi, Various Critters!

Did you miss me?

We did it! The big, hairy, wonderful and scary move went down Saturday and it was like bringing an atomic bomb to a balloon fight. Chaos, fire, and brimstone, everywhere. There were scrapes, drops, falls, groans, slips, skinned knees, sore muscles, banged heads and bruised arms. Our poor Motrin had to work overtime, as five-alarm calls were breaking out all over our bodies. As close as I can calculate, I expended somewhere between 3 and 4 million calories. Everyone was exhausted and fully spent after the 12-hour day.

But thanks to our tenacious and sweaty crew, we did it!

We awoke Sunday morning to a house stuffed full of boxes. It was like a recently stomped-on ant hill, and we slowly began the process of rebuilding it one grain of sand at a time.

We took time Sunday to go to IKEA for a few (dozen) things, and spent the rest of the long weekend, holiday-BBQ-less, as we unpacked.

It's a big responsibility unpacking into a new home. You need to pick the best place to put all your stuff, and if you chose wrong you might hamstring yourself for years. But if you do it right, you can really improve your overall efficiency.

Like the kitchen for instance. We put some effort into trying to arrange everything for the best possible workflow. We have a sort of mini-factory now, where the food flows from the fridge or pantry to the stove (where spices and wooden spoons await) to the counter (where we have a giant permanent trivet) to be put into serving dishes ("more than Crate & Barrel"), to the next counter where serving utensils and plates are, and then on to the dinner table. It's all in a row, like a glorious assembly line of food. That's what you get when an engineer and an occupational therapist combine process and labor-reduction techniques. :)

We made a decision to set up a scaled-down version of our AV system in the living room, with an eye towards our future purchase of a wall-mounted flat-panel TV. I have only set up the TV and DVD player (Apple TV and Cable DVR will be next). All the rest (Receiver/Amp, big speakers, surround speakers, center channel, more wire than the space shuttle, and various black boxes and selectors) I will sell and get new, more compact stuff when we upgrade to the hang-on-wall flat panel TV.

Other tasks done so far:

Temporary dog fence is up, made of plastic chicken wire and metal stakes. It keeps the poop off the back yard lawn and keeps the dogs out of trouble. Like Coco, this was a hairy bitch to put up.

I "upgraded" the two shower heads, with a hose-extension type in the kid's bath and a multi-pattern-spewing luxury unit in the master bath.

Washer, dryer and stove are all in place and working. Fridge is almost done, we just need to hook up the water, which is more involved than it deserves to be.

Next up: Hack into the nice new garage wall and install the doggie door. We are tired of carrying the jackals outside to pee.

Things are changing fast, check back for updates. We don't have cable TV or internet yet, but expect it sometime this week.

Until next time, take care of yourselves...