Fully Functional Blog? Check.

Ay yi yi.

I think I've got it all patched up now. Y'see, I KNEW all of you were posting the comments. I could watch it happen on the sitemeter. As it turns out, somehow the comment moderation feature got triggered to the 'on' position, and the comments weren't visible when I went to moderate. I turned the moderation off today and switched it back on again and MAGICALLY, there they were.

I sincerely apologize for this bit of technical difficulties and I will scroll back as I have time to respond to all of you.

For what it's worth, I've turned the moderation off. If it doesn't stay that way, I'm going to nail it there.

If it Ain't Broke...

A few years ago, I worked as a Medical Technologist. This is a title given to people who work in medical laboratories who have bachelor's degrees and maintain an accreditation from any of two or three nationally recognized organizations. I'm relatively mechanically inclined and can be pretty handy with a screwdriver and duct tape, so I was often put in charge of maintenance on the machines and with diagnostics on those instruments that were malfunctioning.

I got sent to several training schools and inservices for different machines. One of the most common things that they taught in any of these was that if you replaced a part in the out of order instrument and that part didn't solve the problem, put the old part back in before trying anything different. The strategy here is a good one. You must make sure that you're not introducing a new problem into the system, and the odds that you've got two simultaneous problems are relatively low. I kept this advice with me and followed it whenever performing diagnostics on an instrument. It served me well.

Fast forward a while to my life in corporate America. It has been my experience that large corporations put a lot of time, effort, and money into refining existing processes. Innovation is a very good thing, when you approach it correctly. But I've found that often these improvement projects are taken on by different teams and they're not necessarily coordinated in any way. If one team finds a potential problem area in a specific process, they'll come up with a solution which may not benefit the system as a whole. The lack of coordinated efforts mean that two or more of these teams may work on different processes and completely cancel out any benefit they may have enjoyed from their solutions.

It may be oversimplification, but the credo of the laboratory instrument diagnostician may serve large corporations as well. It might help them to try one thing at a time before moving on to the next step.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've noticed that a goodly percentage of my readers (like, 2 out of the 4 total) have had some problems posting comments in the last week or two. I've twiddled a couple of knobs in my profile settings that may help. Or not. We'll see.


"Any of you out there with telekinetic powers? Raise my hand."

The Bandit Situation

I am about to reach the breaking point with our next-door neighbors' dog. He's an Australian shepherd cross and they just leave him in a 10'X12' cage in one corner of their yard. Unfortunately, the cage is right up against our fence and is just a few feet from our patio. We spend a lot of time out on the patio, and the dog has become increasingly territorial and noisy. When they first got the dog, he was okay. He didn't bark much, and he seemed like a nice pooch.

They put him (and their other dog) in the cage this summer because the two of them had completely torn up their yard. The dogs have gotten progressively more insane as the summer progressed, but the shepherd in particular has become a nuisance. He jumps up on the fence and snaps at whoever passes by. He barks whenever he hears our back door open. He has torn one of the cedar fence pickets off.

I have mentioned the problem to my neighbors and they seem to be unconcerned. I don't really understand why they keep the dogs at all, because they don't pay any attention to them. I don't really blame the dogs for being a bit ringy, given the situation, but I have left a large hickory axehandle next to the fence. If that dog tears another hole in our fence and manages to harm one of our dogs (or worse yet, the kids), I'm going to try the axehandle solution.

Priorities

Our youngest daughter, A, has decided that she NEEDS to be read a Shel Silverstein poem every night before bed. My wife and I both enjoy his poems as well, so it's been fun for us.

Last night, my wife read her the poem about the polar bear in the Frigidaire. A's eyes got very big, and you could tell that she was concerned by the situation. When my wife asked her what was wrong, she said "The bear would eat ALL THE BUTTER!"

Learning to Fall

I was watching the kids play around in the backyard last week. A has never been the most graceful creature, to put it mildly, and after a short while she took a tumble. I readied myself for the worst, because she usually leads with her head. She's had one split tooth, and who knows how many bumps to the noggin. This time, she didn't go down hard. For a fall, it was almost graceful. She has finally learned to fall.

It sounds silly, but it's a necessary thing to learn and it doesn't always come naturally. C has always been good at it. She tucks up, and lets gravity do its work. A hasn't exactly fought it, but until recently hadn't quite learned how to react.

The same thing applies metaphorically for all of us. We all know people who can't cope. It bothers me to be around people who can't deal when life extends its leg and trips them up. Even the smallest stumble can trigger a reaction so out of proportion that it's painful to watch. Sometimes, folks, you just have to tuck up, protect your head, and roll with it.


Then you get back up.

Autumn?

It wasn't a bad weekend at all. I got a lot of stuff done around the house that I've been meaning to do for quite a while. We also had our first snowfall of the year. There were just a few flakes at our house, but it looks like the top of the mountain got about 6 inches. The kids got to make snowmen at our friends' house on the mountain yesterday. It was 89 degrees on Wednesday, 86 on Thursday, and snowing on Saturday. Wyoming weather is fun like that.

Dear Coworkers,

Yeah, when you go into the breakroom and break off those tiny little pieces of donuts? You're not fooling anyone. There were two dozen donuts there this morning. They're all gone except these little pieces. There were only 10 of us here today and I didn't have any donuts.

Not taking a whole donut at a time doesn't mean you didn't eat a whole donut. Or two whole donuts. Three?

Short Attention Span Summary

Yeah, you're right. I'm boring myself here. I'll summarize all of this crapola with a quick recap of the next couple of years.


September '01 - When we picked out a casket for my brother, the funeral director didn't have any on hand that were long enough (Kyle was about 6'6".) His first offer was to bend Kyle's knees. To this day, that strikes me as odd. We opted instead to have a casket shipped from Denver. It's funny the things that stick with you.

December '01 - My mom went to the doctor for the first time in many, many years to have some enlarged lymph nodes looked at. She was subsequently diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and started chemotherapy.

January '02 - We found out that my wife was pregnant. Since everyone was so starved for good news, we decided that we would let the cat out of the bag early. This was a big mistake.

February '02 - Miscarriage...crap.

June '02 - Pregnant again! Yay!

July-August '02 - Progesterone levels too low...Scary.

September '02 - Almost one year to the day after my brother's accident, I am informed that the lab that I had worked at for the last 3 1/2 years would be closed within the next month, leaving me unemployed with a baby on the way.

The University of Wyoming holds a memorial service for the eight runners.

October '02 - I am jobless. My wife begins substitute teaching as much as she can while pregnant. Health insurance is very, very expensive and uses up nearly all of the severance package I had received from the laboratory.

December '02 - My friend and neighbor, a member of the Army National Guard, receives notice that he will leave for Iraq.

My neighbor greets me early New Year's Eve morning, jubilantly exclaiming that Jack 'n' Cokes make an excellent breakfast.

January '03 - We say goodbye to my neighbor and promise to help his wife out however we can until he returns.

I am informed that I have been hired by my current employer, but must begin training the next month in Missoula, Montana.

February '03 - A is born on the third, which was to be my first day of work. I call my extraordinarily understanding boss that morning and my first week of employment will be on family leave.

I begin training the next week, and for the next 6 months I only see my family on weekends, flying out early every Monday morning and returning late Friday night.

August '03 - I finally return to Casper for good.

September '03 - We learn that my neighbor was killed in Tikrit by an improvised explosive device.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



I shaved off my moustache a couple of years ago. I started growing it back the very next day because it spooked me when I looked up in the mirror and saw my brother's face staring back at me. Those little flashes of pain are the ones that are worst - when I see someone who reminds me of him there's also the reminder that I'll never see him again. I'll never meet the woman he might choose to marry. We'll never sit on the patio and barbecue, and watch our kids play around the backyard. I'll never hear him mimic Jerry Lewis or explain to me that it's hard for angry musicians to maintain their intensity as they become successful because they can't be that pissed off while sitting around their swimming pool surrounded by beautiful women.





For what it's worth, there are bright sides. My mom has been in remission for nearly four years. Other than an understandable bitterness, she is doing well. Unfortunately, her younger brother died of cancer two years ago this November. This was very hard on her, and makes me more than a little wary of my own genetic predisposition toward the same.

Our family life returned to normal eventually. C is still a bit overly clingy toward me on occasion. I don't mind.

Our neighbor's wife eventually moved back to her hometown, and successfully started her own business. I hear she's dating again. Shortly before her husband left for Iraq, they had come over to our house. He was messing about with our refrigerator magnet poetry set and assembled the sentence "I fiddle with produce." It somehow went untouched until well after he died. I put a piece of tape over it, and every time I look at it I think of Robert.

C has shown a healthy aptitude for running, and eerily inherited a lot of her uncle's mannerisms and facial expressions. I don't mind that, either.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In other news, the first frost of the year happened this morning.

What I Learned This Weekend

Click here.

Jesse Haskins? He's the little brother of the kid who caused my brother's death by driving drunk.

Words fail me.

Direct from the Front Page of Today's Local Paper

Still Running

9/16/01

It started out as a fine Sunday morning. My wife and C had gone with her parents to Jackson for the weekend, and I'd puttered around the house all weekend. I woke up that morning to beautiful, warm weather and a day to myself.

My parents have called me on Sunday morning since I left for college, so it wasn't anything unusual when the phone rang. When I answered, my dad said he had bad news, that my brother had died. He didn't know many particulars, only that several members of the UW cross country team had died in a wreck.

I called my boss at the time, who surprised me by being very understanding, and told me to take as much time off as I needed. I piled some clothes and the dogs in the car and headed for my parents' house, two hours away. I tried to call my father-in-law's cell phone repeatedly, but there was no answer. I would learn later that he had turned it off all weekend because he didn't want to be bothered. A small, petty part of me resents that action to this day.

By the time I got to my parents' house, most of the family had assembled. My sister was trying to fly in from Seattle, but travel was very difficult because of the terrorist attacks earlier in the week. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and assorted family friends and random sympathizers streamed through the house. For some inexplicable reason, everyone brought a ham.

A few details had come to light about the accident. There were eight killed, all told. Eight. All were track and/or cross country athletes. They had gone to Fort Collins on Saturday because all UW athletic events that weekend were cancelled due to the events of September eleventh. The driver of the other vehicle was also a UW athlete. The accident occurred around 2AM, some 18 miles to the south of Laramie as my brother and his friends were on their way back home.

I drove with my uncle to my in-laws house (both sets of our parents live in the same town and put a note on my wife's car asking her to call me as soon as she got back. When she did call late that afternoon, I had to tell her over the phone what had happened. See, this is one of the least pleasant things that she and I have in common. She lost her older sister in a wreck over twenty years ago.

Later, we would learn that the other driver had been drinking. He'd been drinking for quite a while, then had decided to drive to Fort Collins to visit his girlfriend. When he was taken to the hospital after the wreck, he had refused a blood alcohol test.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Another shameless music plug:

Just before I started to write this entry, I found some new music. One of my favorite semi-local bands broke up last year, but most of the members have formed a new band called Beneath Your Ego. They have put some new songs up on their Myspace site.

I highly recommend the songs Breathe and Lines. But - Come Next Fall is creeping me out in a very good way. Give them a listen. And I too hope you still see your shadows come next fall.

Yet Another Reason Why She's the One for Me

We spent quite a bit of last Sunday and Monday gathering firewood on the mountain. It's relatively rough terrain, and backbreaking work. You know, fun.

This year, we had a great find. There was a HUGE dead ponderosa standing smack in the middle of our usual gathering spot. The thing was somewhere around 28-30" diameter at the base. I had my little chainsaw with the 14" bar, so it was going to be interesting getting the tree to the ground.

I decided I'd try a 3 step approach, first cutting a large wedge from one side of the tree, then make two diagonal cuts from the opposite side of the tree downward to meet the wedge. That would allow me to cut down a tree larger than the bar on my saw.

I set to work, and after a few minutes I extracted the wedge. My wife was frantically waving her arms at me from up the hill. I stopped the saw, took out my earplugs and asked her what was up.

Because she still had her earplugs in, she yells out, unnecessarily loud, "Hey - Do you need a herring?"

The Wind Cries Hortense

Certain names must just be more poetic than others. There are a lot of songs with names in them, but there are some names that just get neglected. I can think of at least 3 Valerie songs. There are a couple of Glorias, a Veronica, a gazillion Marys, an Allison, heck, Tori Amos even managed to fit Lydia into a tune.

Bah. Just imagine how cool it would've been for Them to record "Blanche" instead of "Gloria."

"B-L-A-N-C-H-E
Blaaaaaaaaaaannnnnche"

No?

8/01

In August of 2001, I had a rare weekend off and my brother came to visit us. We had a great time. We played some pool. He took full advantage of our cable internet connection's downloading capability. C wowed him by counting to twenty. He wowed us with his spot-on Jerry Lewis impression. We drove up the mountain with the top down and walked around the waterfall. We went to Dairy Queen, where he had a 32 ounce Mountain Dew float (yeah, ewwwwwww.). We had a lot of laughs.

Sunday evening, he grabbed a cup of coffee, folded himself into his green Saab and drove back to Laramie. It was the last time I'd ever see him.

Goofy Little Geek

My brother was nine years younger than me. You would think that as a consequence of the age difference, we wouldn't have identified with one another all that well. I suppose that was true for a few years. He was, however, a very interesting person and his sense of humor was extraordinarily well-developed for his age.

Some of the funniest things I've ever seen were the art projects he would bring home from kindergarten and first grade. Granted, the art was not all that spectacular, even by kindergarten standards, but the titles...Oh, the titles. Standouts included "Smashed Fly on a Screen Door" and "The Argyle Bear Sat Down in the Water" (complete with cartoon dialogue bubble coming from the bear's mouth reading "Ahhhhh") - obviously dictated to the teacher and written in her handwriting. I'd give anything to know what was going through her mind while she wrote those things.

Up until he was 12 years old or so, he was very small. My parents took him to the doctor for growth evaluations. The doctors took measurements and x-rays and came to the conclusion that nothing was wrong. They estimated that eventually he would grow to be about 5'8". As it would happen, their estimate was a tad off.

He was only 9 years old when I left for college. At the time, he was still a quiet, skinny little geek kid with unruly blonde hair and a very strange sense of humor. Circumstances being what they were, I really didn't see that much of him for the next few years. I went to school, getting married when he was a shade less than 14 years old.

That year, he grew. He grew a lot - roughly 6 inches...in a year. It was awkward and painful for him. Growing that much that fast has a lot of consequences, and those who've experienced them know that growing pains are a very real phenomenon. Up until that point, he had been a good runner. In middle school track, he was always one of the top distance runners. After the growth, it was very painful for him to run at all. I went to one of his cross country races when he was a freshman in high school. He finished second to last. Afterward, he said that his only goal was to "stay ahead of the fat kid."

Later in the next year, my wife and I moved to southeastern Colorado - nearly 10 hours away. The 10 hour distance from our families was good for us in many ways, but the town itself was not particularly exciting. It was a good place to get a start on a career, but after a couple of years we decided that we needed to get back closer to home. We moved back to Casper, Wyoming in 1998. This would be one of the best decisions we ever made.

During the time we were gone, my brother continued to grow. He stood about 6'4" when we moved back to Casper. At the time, he was a junior in high school. Athletically, he had started to feel a bit more comfortable in his new frame. He had continued to run track and cross country even though he struggled. He was determined to get back into the swing of things.

Because we were closer, we were able to attend quite a few of his races. I ran track and cross country while I was in school, and it was pleasant to be back in that environment. By the time my brother was a senior, he had regained his form as a runner. He did relatively well in cross country. That track season, it became evident that his strong race was the mile. As the season progressed, he got faster and faster. By the conference meet, he had a shot at setting the school record. As luck would have it, competition was especially tough in the mile that year. He ended up running a 4:27.59 in the 1600 meters, enough for third place in the state, and enough for a school record that still stands seven years later.

As he approached adulthood, he and I had a lot more in common. We both obsessed over music, often trading tapes, discs and files back and forth. When he went off to college, he came to our house occasionally on weekends to goof around, shoot pool, and trade music.

He was also obsessive about schoolwork. He carried a 4.0 GPA through high school. During his college time, things remained about the same. He chose to major in civil engineering and did very well at it. He also competed out for the University of Wyoming track and cross country teams.

Runners are an odd breed. Cross country teams are usually very close-knit groups of friends. The personalities of folks who choose to put themselves through that special kind of hell usually mesh very well and the social aspect of the sport is no small part of its appeal. It was no different with my brother. He was close to his fellow runners. Some were his roommates and best friends. Given that my brother was extraordinarily shy, this socializing was a good thing. My parents encouraged him to occasionally get out and do fun things as well as studying.

9/11/01

My day started like any other day, I suppose. I'm a very early riser, so I was up well before the sun came up. I guzzled some coffee and got ready to go to work at the lab. As was my habit, I flipped on CNN Headline News with the volume turned all the way down so as to not wake the rest of the house.

I turned the sound on after just a few seconds. The scene on television was baffling and scary. A plane had actually run into the World Trade Center. We all know the story.

What struck me most at the time was the realization of how disconnected the people reporting the news were. The ones providing the information were possibly even more confused than the ones receiving it. I watched the live video of the second plane hitting the South Tower. I could see the North Tower smoldering away as the second plane hit. The reporters thought it was a replay of the first plane for several minutes.

Even before the towers collapsed, the effects were rippling to my little town nearly 2000 miles away. When I left for work, sirens were blaring everywhere. Very, very few cars were on the streets.

The secretary at the lab brought in a small portable black and white television, and we spent most of the workday watching it. Like the rest of the country, I was shocked, confused, rattled. It was awful to think about the scope of the attack, and the lives lost.

I had no idea at the time how much the events of that day would indirectly change my life forever.