Attentive 2 Design

2012-02-05T07:58:00.000-05:00

old softener & filter

always a battle to change the filter

new improved setup

Time to start blogging again and no better time than to document a whole day spent installing a brand new water softener and filter in the garage. My initial plan was to get up early and to finish everything in a couple of hours way before lunch time. That was a little bit too optimistic to say the least.

I never intended to be a plumber on Saturday, but all week long our water has been tasting worse with each passing day. When I shaved each morning, the hot water in the bathroom sink was very yellow and taking a shower was a smelly affair. I ever received complaints that white clothes were turning yellow, so yesterday I decided to take action.

Friday night I removed all of the salt from the old water softener and turned on the bypass valve so it was not being used at all. I then took photos to show the plumbers at the local Home Depot what I needed to replace and to get an idea of the total cost involved.

Saturday morning I returned to Home Depot at 7am ready for action and my list of what I needed. On arriving I got my first indication that my day would not be smooth. There was no plumber at the store and no expected arrival time of one. I found great help so tried to remember what the plumber told me the night before. Five trips and 28 driving miles later I had everything I needed - thankfully Home Depot is close by!

One of my goals was to make changing the water filter easier while replacement the broken water softener. Also pipes coming out of the moulding seemed like a poor idea so that needed some redesign. I did not want to get too radical so I bought the newest models of the same equipment so the installation would good smoothly. I would probably be still working on it if I didn't make that wise choice.

Today in looking at my handy work, it just does not look like a job that would take 10 hours, but clearly I am not a plumber and just an amateur. I really don't want it to be a hobby either but if I have to do it I will.

Jess' Painting of her best friend

2011-07-17T13:09:00.001-04:00

Jess' Ocean Painting

2011-07-04T17:35:00.000-04:00

Jess' Ocean Painting that she just finished today:

more drawings by Jess

2011-06-07T20:02:00.001-04:00

These are the latest set of drawings by my daughter from her 9th grade Art class.

Salt Lake City

2011-05-24T10:51:00.000-04:00

I had a business trip to Salt Lake City and since I will probably never return there I explored around the city in my extra time. It was surprised at the snow capped mountains visible around the city in the month of May. I took my life in my hands and ventured around Mormon Temple square. Kind of odd to see tons of 20 year old girls proselytizing every one who signed up for a personal "free" tour. Also odd to see tons of people getting married. I stopped to ask a camera man, who also tried to convert me, about why so many women were dressed in wedding gowns. He said one wedding every 15 minutes starting in the month of May. I must say that the Mormons do build impressive buildings. You must be a Mormon to go into the Salt Lake Temple but all other buildings were open to the public. The last few photos I took from the airplane as I had a great view of the mountains surrounding Salt Lake City from the air as it was the only day without any clouds.

San Francisco trip

2011-05-24T10:20:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since I posted anything to my blog. At the end of April we all went out to see my son graduate from Ex'pression College with a B.Sc. in Audio Engineering. These are the best photos we took of the trip:

http://50yearadventure.com/SanFrancisco/

These are my favorite family shots:

Jess' pencil drawings

2010-12-20T18:04:00.001-05:00

Somehow all of the sudden our daughter got the drawing bug out of nowhere. Pretty amazing stuff for going from little miss crafts to a young budding artist.

Jess' school project art work

2010-12-02T18:46:00.000-05:00

For Earth Science homework this week, my daughter had to make bumper stickers for the four major Geologic Eras. The following is the results:

Duke Sarcoma walk/run

2010-11-20T07:44:00.000-05:00

This year I attended a Walk/Run for Sarcoma at Duke. I went with my friend David Ostiguy. In the same event last year, David was the special speaker and this is what he said as he gave me his speech afterwards:

Six years ago, I was diagnosed with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma in my right hand. My wife and I were 26 years old and we had only been married for 11 months. We were cancer virgins. From the instant we were told I had cancer, I remember feeling absolutely numb. It was not until my first chemotherapy treatment that I started to feel again. While walking the halls of Duke University Hospital during that treatment, I remember feeling pretty good and thinking to myself maybe 10 months of chemo would not be so bad and we would soon be able to put this cancer thing behind us in no time. Boy, was I wrong! Soon afterwards, I was back in my hospital room throwing up in front of my wife for the first time, and it would not be the last.

Fast forward six years to today, through appointments, scans, recurrences, second opinions, surgeries, amputations, chemo, radiation, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, infections, fevers, hair loss, transfusions, medications, joy, laughter, sadness, anger, frustration, tears, prayers, birthdays, anniversaries, births, deaths, and the love and support from family, friends, co-workers, doctors and nurses, I would do it all over again if given the choice.

I have learned that I have the strength, resolve, and patience to survive one of the more serious and adverse situations one can face in life. Secondly, I have learned compassion and that being able to help others through their own adversities is so worthwhile. Finally, I have learned that sarcoma and I share a common trait: we both know no limits.

what is a friend

2010-11-20T07:41:00.000-05:00

It has been a very long time since I wrote anything but I think it is time to start again. Yesterday I spoke at one of my best friend's memorial service, who died just one week ago. I wanted to include what I said:

This is going to be quite difficult for me to do but I need to do it as an honor to a true friend and for his wife Leilani. I must read this script to try to maintain my composure so I can finish it all. I would like to start and end with two Bible verses that sum up how I feel.

Proverbs 18:24
MSG - Friends come and friends go, but a true friend sticks by you like family.
TNIV - One who had unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

I first met David ten years ago at work but did not know him personally. Almost four years ago our paths crossed again. I used to run at lunch for a work break and on my way thru the cafeteria I would see David and Bryan Hendricks eating - most times with other people from their team. Occasionally I would stop by to talk to Bryan and as time went along I started sitting down with them both to talk and watch them eat while I tried to cool down. Bryan used to be my boss at the same company where I met David so we all had a history together which was the original connection. Over many months of talking over lunch I got to know David better. At first I felt sorry for him but I soon realized he did not need my sympathy. I found out that he too was a runner and that was our second connection. Over time I came to understand that he could do more with one arm than some people do with both. At lunch we talked about football, music, biking, running and just about everything but work. After a year of talking over occasional lunches the three of us became good friends who could talk about anything together except we avoided talking about cancer related subjects. I will always remember the day he got back to work after his last amputation as he was the same David after the whole ordeal and we continued laughing and have a great time during our lunch conversations. He never wanted to draw attention to himself and his own problems.

Around three years ago I was contemplating switching groups to work on something completely different and more interesting. David and I came up with a brilliant idea to work together and tried to find a group that needed us both. We did the same kind of work and both needed a new challenge and we knew together we could do anything. After switching, the first year was great as we daily bounced ideas off each other as we learned together. Several times a day we went into each other's office to share in our new discoveries. We constantly sent messages to each other about new things we learned. Up to this point after being around David for two years, I learned that building a friendship takes time and a willingness to share anything and everything that is going on in each other’s lives. In many ways David was like another son to me but in most ways just a friend who I always looked forward to talking to. I especially liked Monday mornings as that was the time we caught up on what had happened during the weekend to each other. Some people dread Mondays but for me it was time to catch up on what David had done and tell him what had happened around our house. Somewhere along the line we crossed over and started talking about sarcoma as I wanted to learn more about it since I was clearly very ignorant on that subject. Many of the terms were impossible for me to say or remember no matter how many times David told me about it. That is when our close friendship began.

These are the things I remember about David:

The day he received his special prosthetic arm so he could ride his bike again
The day he got back from Atlanta where he met tons of people who had also lost limbs as he was so excited to see so many people like him
The day he decided to take a cross country driving trip with a friend he met at Duke
The day I learned his brother was in the military like my son
The day he bought an iPhone
The day at lunch when he explained to me how icing in hockey works using the Hurricanes as an illustration
The day he got back after seeing Rush with his life long NY friends
The day he told me that my kids should listen to Rush as they did not do drugs and were not alcoholics like most bands did
The day he decided to quit wearing his prosthetic arm to work as it was very freeing for him
The day he got back and told me about his speech at his first Duke Sarcoma event
The many times he told me of the amazingly great people he had met because of sarcoma most of which were those who took loving care of him at Duke
The day when we talked about our separate trips to Stone Mountain and how we both thought it was such a great place
The day he told me that I needed to take my family to Letchworth State Park in NY as he had great memories of camping there as a kid
The day just one year ago when he told me he had to quit running because of his back
The day shortly after that when he had trouble leaving the cafeteria and I drove him in the TTA van
That same day when I got to drive his car as one of the privileged few but unfortunately I was driving him to Duke
That same day at Duke when in unbelievable pain telling me not to mind if he said something bad
The day when we walked together at my first Duke Sarcoma event
The day he got back from attending Bonnaroo and was so tired but told me every detail about the fun he had with his friends
The day we looked up the drug Fentanyl and read about it together
The day when we talked about the stages of jaundice together
The same day when I told him he looked yellow and he got upset at me
The day I talked to him after he and Leilani returned from Grove Park Inn as he loved the mountains
The day he told me he was ready to go to heaven as he was tired
Every minute of the last two visits when Bryan and I saw him at home

In the time I was around David I only heard him complain a couple of times, which is really unbelievable considering everything he and Leilani endured together. What started out as small talk in passing, developed into a relationship of sharing in life's ups and downs. I would do it all over again even knowing the ending. One of the last things I remember David telling me was that some people had told him that he was an inspiration to them and that he hoped that was somehow true. One of the most unusual experiences of my life was to see David at work for the last three weeks before he left. He came every day as to not let down the team and to try to finish what he was working on. He repeatedly apologized to me as I had to take over what he was working on and finish it. That was just a short four weeks ago. Today is sad for me as I realize I have lost a friend who I will not see again on this earth but I long for the day when I will see him completely well in heaven. I want to end with the words of Jesus, which in no way apply fully to me, but sums up what love is really about.

John 15:12-14
This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you.
The is the very best way to love. Put your life on the line for your friends.
You are my friends when you do the things I command you.

creative inspiration

2010-03-06T18:18:00.000-05:00

Someone posted these two web sites today:

1) http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/11/24/69-sexy-portfolio-designs-to-inspire-you/

2) http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/creative-designer-resume-curriculum-vitae/

After looking at most of the web sites, I like these the best:

http://www.floridaflourish.com
http://www.atomiccartoons.com
http://www.fat-man-collective.com
http://bluepixel.net
http://bluepixel.net/whatwedo/

These resumes are a work of art and should cost money to have them in your hands:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paumorgan/4028700199/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17687233@N03/3587644769/
http://itudor.deviantart.com/art/CV-Tudor-Deleanu-109339727
http://verine.deviantart.com/art/CV-133232646
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bulooji/3048285702/
http://heeeeman.deviantart.com/art/Personal-Resume-draft-137853267
http://dizzia.deviantart.com/art/Curriculum-Vitae-PDF-69050981
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7372907@N07/3191558047/

This is probably the best resume I will ever see:

http://theportfolio.ofmichaelanderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/resume-infographic.jpg

mughals

2010-03-06T11:10:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading my 4th William Dalrymple book called "White Mughals". It was on a side of India I had never heard of before. It was like reading the background behind every Bollywood movie we had seen in the last few years. Now I understand where they all came from - the 18th century Indian lives of the wild and crazy British age. There were some pretty wild characters he found in doing his research for this book. I especially like one of the photos in his book of a Scottish man who had a salwar kameez made out of tartan material and even had a turban made of the same cloth. Such interesting British people who mixed with the native people of India. Most of them feel in love for the Mughal woman and some even had harems. Some dressed like the Mughal royalty they interacted with. This quote sums up the whole book on page 7:

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces and transforms them

On page 366 is the summary of the Mughal woman covered in the whole book:

Those are the final words we hear of Khair un-Nissa, the Most Excellent of Women, beloved wife of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, and Henry Russel's rejected lover. She had lived the saddest of lives. At a time, and in a society, when women had few options and choices, and little control over their lives. Khair had defied convention, threatened suicide and risked everything to be with the man she had eventually succeeded in marrying, even though he was from a different culture, a different race, and, initially, from a different religion. He love affair had torn her family apart and brought her, her mother, her grandmother and her husband to the brink of destruction. Then, just when it seemed that she had, against all odds, finally succeeded in realising her dream, both her husband and her children were taken from her, for ever, and in her widowhood she was first disgraced, then banished, and finally rejected. When she died - this fiery, passionate, beautiful woman - it was so much from a broken heart, from neglect, and sorrow, as from any apparent physical cause.

snowy winter

2010-02-14T08:26:00.000-05:00

So far this winter we have had two snows in the last two weeks. The first one was really a layer of ice with some snow on top followed by more ice. Not a very nice snow for playing in or making snow men. On Friday night it was a perfect snow. Yesterday morning my wife and daughter were the first to go outside and tried to make a snow man. Then Jake and I went out to finish off the job. We rolled what we thought were huge balls of snow by packing them by hand. Jake went into the front yard and created a heavy duty ice ball. He needed help in lifting it and moving it across the driveway to make it even larger. I then heard a cry for help only to find him exhausted leaning on the snow ball on the side of the house. I rolled it the rest of the way into the back yard and that ice ball became the base for our snowman. While he was working on his ice ball, I had made threes large balls made mostly of compacted snow. It took us a while to made them flat on top so we could stack them on each other. We packed icy snow around the gaps where the snow balls met. My daughter objected to us using four snow balls and also the size of them. We added a stick for one arm and I took a photo to send to my one armed friend as a tribute snowman to him. As soon as we came inside glowing over our handiwork, my daughter and Andrew took over on what we thought was a finished product. We spent over an hour on our snowman. Two hours later they were finished with the amazing Fuquay Varina snowman. This morning as I wrote this blog I saw a bright smiling face looking at me through the window. I had to asked about the buttons and the nose, to which Andrew told me the red nose was a lawn croquet ball and the three black buttons are actually office chair coasters he found in the garage!

Stones into Schools

2010-01-17T12:43:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson, who is also the author of the wildly popular book Three Cups of Tea. Here are some memorable quotes from this book that I really like:

pg 13
If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.

pg 17
The first cup of tea you share with us, you are a stranger. The second cup, you are a friend. But with the third cup, you become family - and for our families we are willing to do anything, even die.

pg 19
Anything truly important is worth doing very, very slowly.

pg 36
When ordinary human beings perform extraordinary acts of generosity, endurance, or compassion, we are all made richer by their example

pg 191
When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

He has also publisher an image gallery that is very interesting and a full report on the research for this book which also includes more photos.

week of books

2010-01-03T20:00:00.000-05:00

I did not really know what the week would hold when I started my Christmas week off from work.

These are the books I read this week:

The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Lipika by Rabindranath Tagore
The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks

I have already commented on the first two in previous blog posts so I will not speak of them again. I was actually rereading both the Leo Tolstoy and Rabindranath Tagore books since they are my two favorite authors of all time. It is also interesting that they actually knew each other. I have heard about Nicholas Sparks as he lives near us in the eastern part of NC and I have watched a couple of movies based on his novels which were very nice. I read his book today from start to finish and found it very interesting reading and I would like to read more of his books. His book was very easy to read and entertaining, but cannot compare with Tolstoy and Tagore who both have amazing talents to transport me into the story's scene with their wonderful way with words. My goal for the year is to read one of Tolstoy's major novels, either War and Peace or Anne Karina.

These are excerpts from Rabindranath Tagore's Lipika that I really liked:

pg 3 "a cloudy day"

Man has crossed the seas, he has climbed the mountains, he has snatched precious rubies and pearls delving into the palaces of the oceans, but what is innermost in man's heart nan has never been able to settle up with another to its finality

pg 20 "just a glance"

The power of the king, the wealth of the rich are built up on this earth to die. But it is not a single drop of nectar in one's tears which will make that moment's glance live through eternity.

pg 30 "the story-telling"

God has created man in the world of associations, therefore, he is not made of valid facts or of theories. In spite of all the best intentions no well-wisher has yet been able to lure man's mind away from this reality. Even though in desperation he tries to bring about a treaty between his moral teaching and fairy-tales, but fails to harmonize them owing to their innate antipathy. So that the stories come to an abrupt end, the moral teaching also loses its grip , and there is the accumulated rubbish.

pg 88 "the aspiration"

The Madhavi creeper with its rustling dry leaves becomes all joyous at the first touch of the south wind in spring time. Likewise the wind from a garden of paradise came to sweep over a girl who gathered twigs and a gradual awakening of an exquisite wistfulness made her whole being vibrate with a throbbing ache. All her thoughts began to wander about like bees straying from their hives, having sensed some unknown honey flavors.

pg 104 "the life and mind"

The waves of the sea are the surface layer of the sea. By raising a din they confuse the facts of the sea's deep-trodden base where lies the earth's great womb. When the waves quieten down, in that unbroken harmony between what is seen and what is not seen, what is deep-bottom and what is the top facade, the sea reigns in supreme composure.

In the same way the minute I returned from the outward efforts of my life, I found stability in the heart's inner most depth which is the primary playground of the universe.

pg 111 "the life and mind"

The tune of life sketches from one key-note to another claiming such a pitch that one does not know where its limit is to be.

diary of Anne Frank

2009-12-29T11:55:00.000-05:00

Today I finished reading the American version of Anne Frank's story called The Diary of a Young Woman. I read the book and definitely had questions about the authenticity while reading it. I found several critical documents have been written about it. I found one book available on Good Books by searching for The diary of Anne Frank: the revised critical edition By Anne Frank, H. J. J. Hardy, David Barnouw, Gerrold van der Stroom. One of the leading men who tried to critically review the diary was The Diary of Anne Frank: Is it Genuine? by Robert Faurisson. I found another article that commented on his article at http://www.holocaust-history.org/anne-frank/. It seems like this could be a life long project to find out if the diary was real, so I will leave it at that as I need my life for other things.

I liked the following parts:

page 171
Her counsel when one feels melancholy is: 'Think of all of the misery in the world and be thankful that you are not sharing in it!' My advice is "Go outside, to the fields, enjoy nature and the sunshine, go out and try to recapture happiness in yourself and in God. Think of all the beauty that's still left in and around you and be happy" ... And whoever is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery.

page 223
Why should millions be spent daily on war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or poor people? Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world?

page 260
"All children must look after their own upbringing." Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

page 263
"For in its innermost depths youth is lonelier than old age." ... Older people have formed their opinions about everything, and don't waver before they act. It's twice as hard for us young ones to hold our ground, and maintain our opinions, in a time when all ideals are being shattered and destroyed, when people are showing their worst side, and do not know whether to believe in truth and right and God.

The measure of a man

2009-12-28T11:01:00.000-05:00

Late last week, I heard Sidney Poitier speaking at a local college as broadcast on an NPR broadcast called The Story which is hosted by Dick Gordon. Up until then I had no desire to read about his life, but after listening to parts of his speech I had a great desire to read his biography named The Measure of a Man. I finished reading the book this morning and these are some quotes that I liked:

page 168
It often takes a near-death experience like ours to make us realize how simple life is, how few the essentials really are. We love; we work; we raise our families. Those are the areas of significance in our individual lives. And love and work and family are our legacy we leave behind when our little moment in the sun is gone.

page 176
The fact is you can't do that kind of parenting if your values aren't clear to you in terms of your own life. You can't be passing on to your kids a strong foundation if you don't have one yourself - because whatever foundation you do or don't have yourself that's what you're going to pass on. And when we pass on something that doesn't serve our children, we have to be responsible for that.

page 181
The measure of a man is how ell he provides for his children.

page 243
We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.

our son the cook

2009-12-25T06:50:00.001-05:00

For our family Thanksgiving meal this year our middle son used these recipes:

Ham with Gingersnap crust
Ruth Chris' Sweet Potato Casserole
Pineapple upside down cheese cake

Most recently he experimented on us and made this yummy food:

Honey Brined Turkey

International food for Christmas

2009-12-25T06:36:00.000-05:00

Four years ago we decided to start a new family tradition of allowing our middle son to choose where he wants to eat when we go out for his Christmas Eve birthday. It is sometimes difficult to find a place open on Christmas Eve, but since he likes trying different international food, that makes it easier actually. Many years ago we were visiting my mother in Tucson for Christmas and we could only find a single restaurant open. It was a Mexican food and that started the idea I think. Four years ago when living in San Antonio, Texas he came up with a great idea of eating Thai food. My coworkers pointed us to what many considered the best Thai food in the city. It was definitely a treat to take all of the family to that place. After returning to North Carolina the following year, our son decided he wanted to try Sushi. He knew it was not my favorite so he found a place that served both Thai and Sushi. Last year was difficult as we called so many places that he wanted to try but they were all closed. We found some other interesting places but they were too expensive like the "Melting Pot" which serves only fondu. So we decided on Greek food, which was a great choice. This year we went for Thai food again and it was wonderful. Who knows what next year will hold? At least we decided not to get ice cream cake this year as we have not had much success with those in the last few years. The photo on the right is the straw covers from our Thai ice tea which were mysteriously formed in beautiful rose shapes. The rice served for our curry dishes was also interesting as one was the shape of a teddy bear and the other one was a fish. Such a great place to eat. It was called Sawasdee.

local prisoner

2009-12-10T20:07:00.000-05:00

As we have experienced in our family - problems never go away if you ignore them. I read in the paper today that a local man was sentenced to six years in jail for child pornography. It reminded me of a web site I found when I discovered one of our teenage boys looking at pornography at our home:

http://xxxchurch.com

Here is a link to his story:

http://www.covenanteyes.com/blog/2009/09/14/testimony-i-am-facing-8-years-in-prison-for-child-pornography

Here is the blog he is maintaining:

http://www.fromshame2grace.com

I really like the steps in this article:

http://porntopurity.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/are-you-a-step-away-from-child-pornography

1. His slide into pornography was gradual – Nothing happened overnight. David’s porn habit grew slowly over a period of many years.

2. His slide was progressive – It started with his father’s Penthouse, chatrooms then trading pictures. David’s behaviors got worse over time. It also took more to get his “fix”. And it took more and more of his time. The things that once seemed repulsive actually became exciting.

3. Many secrets were hidden - Porn grows in the dark, and feeds on a secretive life.

4. He was successful on the outside, yet decaying on the inside.

5. He is a regular guy, just like you and me, that slid in a horrible direction – This is the scary thing. Many of us have similar stories. We allow porn in our life thinking it’s not harmful. Thinking we can control it. All along, our lust is really controlling us.

Let's create a movie II

2009-11-23T19:34:00.000-05:00

Last January after creating a movie using Windows Vista I documented it in a blog entry. This weekend before going to my wife's parents for an early Thanksgiving get together, I again created a movie but this time using my Apple MacBook. I already had digital photos that my kids took during their Princess Cruise to Scandinavia on my Mac laptop. When they got home from teh cruise, I hooked up our Canon Powershot A590 to my son's iMac and transferred all 560+ photos. I then sat down at the computer with my wife and came up with 75 of the photos she thought represented the whole trip. I burnt a CD of these photos to send to her sister. Before sending her the CD, I put it in my MacBook and created an iPhoto library for all of the cruise photos. On Saturday morning at 10 am I decided it would be nice to create a movie of these photos so we could watch them on their TV instead of huddling around my laptop to watch them. Plus they would have the DVD and could watch it whenever they wanted or to show their friends. I have never created a movie on my laptop nor used iMovie or iDVD.

The first thing I did was drag all of the cruise photos from iPhoto into iMovie. I then noticed the project had a default name so I changed it to "Princess Scandinavian Cruise 2009". I then thought it would be nice to change the way to movie looked so I went in the "Project Properties" and found six themes available with the default being a theme of "None". I tried the "Photo Album" theme which mean the project had to be rebuilt. Then I tried the "Bulletin Board" theme and waited for the project to be rebuilt before trying it. Then I tried the "Comic Book" theme and liked how that looked. By selecting this theme it automatically created nice transitions between the photo frames which I really liked. Then I thought I need to create a nice title page. I then found that I could add a dynamic map to that page. When I added the map I saw it had a default origin of San Francisco. When I double clicked on it, I found I could add my own origin and destination. I add JKF in NYC as origin since that is where they took off from. I added Copenhagen, Denmark as the destination since that was where they landed. I had a screen shot of their route while on the ship that I got from the Princess Cruise web site which I then added as the second title page. Then I saw that iMovie had automatically created a page that started with the words "Directed by Rick Evans". Now that was really nice touch. When I played the movie I saw the title page still had the default project name before I changed it. I tried changing the theme and that did not regenerate the title page as I expected. Then I thought I would try to double click on the title page and sure enough it let me change the title directly. I looked up at the clock and only 15 minutes had passed, which was also nice. Then I thought I have enough time to get a little creative with the end of the movie. I moved the "Directed by" page to the end and added a new credits page. There were so many formats that I tried a couple different ones. Then I added a nice underwater reflection behind the credits. When I played the movie the credits went way to fast, so I extended the length of the underwater reflection and then extended the credits to match. I then played the whole movie and showed it to my daughter, who approved.

I then tried the "Export" option from the menu and found iMovie creates Internet style movies for YouTube and Internet style sites. When in the "Share" menu I saw a "DVD" menu item and clicked on it. Then I waited and saw that iMovie was automatically transferring the files to iDVD, which I was not sure that I had or not. When I looked up at the clock it was 30 minutes since I started working on the movie and when it appeared in iDVD. It had even picked a nice 3D rotating animation for the initial DVD menu with my project title showing up in the menu and random photos being displayed on the rotating cylinder. Now that was simple and easy. With almost no effort I was ready to create a DVD and all I had to do was find a physical DVD to write it to. That was so easy it was embarrassing as within 40 minutes I had a very nice DVD. When we showed up during the weekend even though it was only 5 minutes long every one was happy with it.

I must say that it was very easy to create a very good looking movie with little effort.

birds in India

2009-11-20T17:13:00.000-05:00

I have been searching this afternoon on the internet trying to find the amazing birds I saw in India and I think I finally found it:

http://www.pbase.com/ingotkfr/blackcapped_kingfisher
http://www.pbase.com/cajuca/bc_kingfisher

I saw this bird in two different parts of India. Once as I was talking a bucket bath in the Pipli Boy's Home in Orissa. By the time I dried off and got my camera it had flow away as it was sitting on an electric line visible from the second floor window.

The second time I saw it was when we were walking along the Ganges. I tried to get close enough with my disposable camera to take a good photo and it flew away.

What an amazing bird.

JAlbum Camelot

2009-11-19T07:34:00.000-05:00

I played around with the new Beta version of JAlbum called Camelot which is all on-line. I created a photo album of the best photos from my India trip:

Best of 2009 India trip

The only thing I found a bit strange the first time I used Camelot was that I wanted to re-order the photos on the page where I added them to the photo album as well as add comments. I found out later that I could reorganize them and add comments after uploading them. I found the overall experience very nice. It will be good when I don't have to download JAlbum to my Mac to build a photo album. However, I think Camelot will not work for me as it appears I am close to running out of space. I post my albums to my public web site currently instead of using JAlbum free account. Very impressive for a beta product!

NC state parking

2009-11-19T06:21:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday I managed to get the boys up out of bed at 9am and we were on the road by 10pm heading west on I-40. The goal was to spend the day in Hanging Rock State Park. I have wanted to go there ever since we first moved to NC many years ago. I read about it in the local newspaper in a Sunday morning newspaper travel special. For some reason we never made it there until now. I decided I needed a special event on the day before I turned 50 years old. Two months ago we were close to making it as we went to Stone Mountain State Park with hopes in also making it to Hanging Rock but that did not happen. After five hours hiking in Stone Mountain we just did not have the energy to go to Hanging Rock even though it was only 30 minutes away.

This time we had my son's GPS to help guide us to the state park. The route was not obvious at all and not the way I would have picked. I had driven on Highway 52 a couple of times which goes right by Pilot Mountain State Park and I saw signs for Hanging Rock right next to it. I was kind of surprised at the circuitous route the GPS suggested. It took us right to the main gate which was quite far from Highway 52. In fact we never saw Pilot Mountain while up on the Hanging Rock so it was much farther than I thought. We even spoke of going to Pilot Mountain afterwards and saw a glimpse of it as we drove a different way out of the park.

It was worth every minute of the 3 hour drive to get there as I enjoying climbing up the steep trail to the Hanging Rock. We also followed the park map and visited all of the waterfalls on the park grounds. We hiked around five miles all together. The weather was absolutely perfect for such a day's activities. I took along our digital camera as I have become quite addicted to since I used it so freely in India. As long as it is set to "auto" I am good. While in India because I took it in and out of my backpack frequently, I found the dial was often changed to some other setting which ended up taking a horrible photo. I do not pretend to be a photographer, but that "auto" setting was made for me. We were all pleasantly surprised to find many photographic moments around the waterfalls, which was an added bonus.

These are the photos from that trip:

http://50yearadventure.com/HangingRockStatePark/

travel in India

2009-11-14T08:39:00.000-05:00

During the last week of October and the first week of November I went to India to travel with a friend, this is a summary of the transportation I took:

14,000 miles by AIR took 30 hours
3,000 miles by TRAIN took 75 hours
100 miles by CAR took 4 hours
30 miles by BUS took 2 hours
30 miles by FOOT took 18 hours
and who knows how many hours in auto-rickshaws?

by AIR : Newwark, NJ ➤ Delhi (3660 miles in 14 hours)
by TRAIN : Delhi ➤ Amritsar (278 miles in 8 hours)
by CAR : Amritsar ➤ Gurdaspur (43 miles in 2 hours)
by CAR : Gurdaspur ➤ Amritsar (43 miles in 2 hours)
by TRAIN : Amritsar ➤ Delhi (278 miles in 6 hours)
by TRAIN : Delhi ➤ Bhubaneswar (1070 miles in 24 hours)
by CAR : Bhubaneswar ➤ Pipli (12 miles in 1 hour)
by CAR : Pipli ➤ Bhubaneswar (12 miles in 1 hour)
by TRAIN : Bhubaneswar ➤ Kolkata (273 miles in 7 hours)
by TRAIN : Kolkata ➤ Varanasi (472 miles in 14 hours)
by FOOT : Varanasi ➤ Saidpur (30 miles in 18 hours walking the Ganges)
by BUS : Saidpur ➤ Varanasi (30 miles in 2 hours)
by TRAIN : Varanasi ➤ Delhi (471 miles in 12 hours)

scare me?

2009-10-26T09:53:00.000-04:00

I just don't understand why someone would want to scare themselves on purpose. Why do kids like to be scared? I am not sure. Our two sons who are still living at home with us decided this weekend that they needed a good scare, so they drove an hour and a half to Greensboro to see Woods of Terror. One of them won free tickets somehow so at least they did not pay $25 each for such a thing. I heard three versions of the same night of terror. Our daughter talked to them when they got back so that was the first version we heard. Then I had to discuss it with our oldest son to see how he described it. Then I talked to my youngest son to hear his version. Somehow they enjoyed getting scared out of their wits. For me I think I would have died of a heart attack from the fright that they described. I really don't think it is good for me health and so I will use that excuse from now on.

While talking to my youngest son I found out why he has not been able to sleep at night the last four days. He watched a movie on the internet called Paranormal Activity. He said he watched it in bed on his laptop with headphones and has yet to be able to sleep at night. I heard him a couple of times this week running down the hall and then slamming the door to his room in the middle of the night. That certainly does not sound like a healthy affect to have on a person. Anything that makes you that fearful is definitely not a good thing. My son told me it was about demons. Also sounds like yet another reason not to see it. Now I understand why it is so scary for him. If you believe their is another spiritual world, then this is probably not the best film to see. The problem is that demons and angels both exist but neither of them should be our focus or concern. Jesus is here to protect us and keep us safe not to give us a spirit of fear. We should strive to help our fellow man not fear what we cannot see. If our fear keeps us from helping others, then I am 100% sure that is not something that GOD has sent to encourage us. I am not into calling things demonic but I would call this movie a scary distraction from what we should be doing with our lives.

cricketering

2009-10-25T07:02:00.000-04:00

This weekend was the annual AID cricket tournament and it was the third straight event I participated. UNC was again chosen as the location for the event but because of the anticipated rain only 28 teams signed up instead of the normal 36. I was on the Cary Chargers team again this year but only three of us were from the team the previous year. We also had the same result as we lost all three of our games. This year we allowed a couple of the teenage sons of the fathers to play since we did not have enough people for the eight on a side games. As always I had fun hanging out with my new found Gujarati teammates, who are the same people I play cricket with on Sunday mornings. The nice thing about the AID tournament is that you have a lot of free time just sitting around. This is the best part for me as I love talking to my teammates, in English of course, since I know very little of the Gujarati language. As usual it is all about families so letting the kids play with us just makes the time all special for the parents. It rained on and off all morning long so it was not the best weather for playing cricket. I must say that I am not a fan of playing in the rain. I have a habit now of not being able to do well at batting and bowling in the same game on any given day. Yesterday was a good bowling day as I was able to get many of the opposing runners out, but my hitting was horrible. I just try to enjoy each day as I do not know how much longer I will be able to play cricket at this level. The main AID web site is http://durham.aidindia.org/cricket. I found the photos of the day's activities at http://picasaweb.google.com/aidrtpevents/AIDCricketCup09.

I met my co-workers as they arrived as they are on the serious cricket team of which I am not an invited member. It always seems that I get to see an interesting side of Indians when I play cricket. A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday morning as I arrived to play cricket at our normal location, I met my team members who said they had been kicked off the field because of a tournament. We then found a nearby field and started to play. Less than thirty minutes later the same Indian fellows showed up and said they needed the play on their normal field, which we were on. I was pretty angry as I could see what was happening. Their normal field had a little league baseball mound on it and so they had decided to take over our field instead that day. As they got settled into their game, the local town's grounds keepers came and said our normal field was reserved for a softball tournament. They had been forced to move to decided to reclaim their normal field. Since we were only four adults and five children, they realized we were just playing around and they needed the field more than we did. They told us they would help carry our wickets to the small field next to us if we would move. I was so sorry that they were taking advantage of us, but I did not want to make a scene and suggested we move.

Yesterday it got a bit more ugly in our second game. We were playing the UNC student team and it was very close. We bowled first and we all did very well and held them to 28 runs. When we battled, the adults all started and slowly we got out until only the young teenagers when left. Only the next to last ball, the UNC team overthrew the wicket keeper and we scored a run to tie. A great argument ensued with the whole UNC team charging the field to object to the umpire's call. I never feel comfortable in these situations as it is just a game for me and I don't understand the rules well enough to know who is correct, so I just watched from the sidelines. The captain of the UNC team was already unhappy with me as he claimed I got in his way when he was sure he could have gotten me out. The whole time I batted he complained to the umpire about me. In this case since teenagers were batting and clearly they were not as good as the UNC students, somehow the UNC team convinced the umpire that the run was not allowed. We ended up not getting another run and tied the game. One of the teenagers who was batting for our team was so upset by it that he started crying. To me that is the saddest part as someone forgot that winning a game was never more important that people and their feelings. In the heat of the moment it is easy to forget as I had done the same when I was that age, but it just reminded me that in my old age maybe I had become wiser somehow.

To end the day, on returning home I got lost just as I had the year before. For 30 minutes I wandered around lost only to find myself back to the same place I started. This time since it was raining and cloudy I could not use the sun to determine which direction I should be going in. I don't what excuse I had for last year. Driving around UNC is just very confusing to me. During the drive I was listening to "This American Life" on National Public Radio. I had heard about the show before but had never had a chance to listen to it. I had also heard the radio show was at times very liberal so I did not expect too much. Yesterday's show was about people following their conscience or ignoring it - some people say they have an angel on one shoulder and a demon on the other. There was three parts to the show. The first part was on a church in Texas who each October run what they call Hell House where they try to scare children into following Jesus. The second part was on the film called Devil's Playground about the Amish Rumspringa where teenagers are allowed to choose whether they want to abide by Amish traditions or not. The third part was about a man who denied to he committed murder until he got too drunk and confessed it to the police unknowingly. He said every day that he heard a voice telling him how worthless he was and could never be forgiven and at other times he just wanted to pay his time for what he did and then get out and start over again. For someone who claims he is an atheist, I thought the show was very well done and did not put Christianity in a really bad light which is what I was expecting him to do. I definitely learned something by getting lost!

This photo is of my friends at work who had a second place finish this year:

audio files

2009-10-20T20:54:00.000-04:00

I have been helping a friend with audio files posted to a web server. First of all, we had to enable streaming audio as an option on our existing web server. Then I had to figure out the best way to stream a multiple day conference. I started out creating a Adobe Flex project which resulted in the Flash file being uploaded to the web server. It was pretty simple as I have been using Flex at work for more than one and half years and found the Adobe Flex Sound help page very useful. After finishing the simple interface with Flex I wanted to try other things. I found a very simple M3U file format that iTunes uses to load a playlist. The only problem for us was that the MP3 audio files were behind a password protected folder, so that did not work as iTunes never asked for a username and password to access the folders behind HTTPS. I then found an open source project that plays a series of audio files by configuring an XSPF formatted file. The last task that I tried was to create a podcast. I did not really know what a podcast was except I had listened to them in iTunes. I found a great Apple document explaining how to create a podcast without using a special tool. I found out that a podcast is really just an XML file that stores content in an RSS feed format. I was very easy to create an RSS feed using Apple's podcast specification document. I have since learned that you can do the same thing in Apple's Garage Band, but at least I understand what a podcast really is.

Today I had the latest new task of learning how to edit an existing MP3 file. We needed to remove the first 12 minutes from an MP3 file that was 49 minutes long. I asked my son how to edit them and he informed me that Apple's GarageBand would do it. Today within 15 minutes I had to file loaded into GarageBand and with a little help from my son, I had the MP3 edited and posted on the web server. Just another example of how Apple makes a simple task simple instead of over complicating and making it way too difficult.

trip down memory lane

2009-10-18T18:02:00.000-04:00

Today I drove with my two youngest sons around town looking for BMX grips. We went back to a store we had frequented so many times in buying skateboards and accessories like shoes called Endless Grind. The bike store above it was closed so we had to find other bike stores in the area. Since we did not have my son's GPS, I had to rely on my unusually super sense of direction to navigate the area. My middle son told me that his electronic generation was too dependent and had lost sense of direction. That was true in more than one way! It was interesting to think back to being in that very same store ten years ago with much younger little boys. In roaming around the area we finally ended up in Sk8-Cary Skate Park. We actually went there when they first opened in 2001 as the three oldest boys all skateboarded. It just so happened that today they were having a BMX competition with some locals and professionals. It was very cold but we stayed and watched the first round since we were shopping for BMX equipment anyway. It brought back memories from the past and we made new memories all at the same time!

lessons in life

2009-10-08T14:35:00.000-04:00

This has been an interesting few weeks as of late.

This week has not been the high point in my life. I have been learning Squash during lunch breaks the last month. This week, in my eagerness to learn from multiple people's different styles and suggestions, I played too long and somehow hurt my back. Not the best timing since I am due to leave for India in a couple of weeks. I did manage to get my 50 Year Adventure web site up and running while resting with a heating pad on my back. I decided to use Host Monster to host my book web site. I also moved my Attentive 2 Design web site there also, since I can host as many domains as I want for a flat $5.95/month. I was already using it for another private NGO web site that I help maintain. That is the good news that happened while having a pain in my back.

Today I finished reading King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema by Anupama Chopra. My wife and I saw it in the reduced section at Barnes & Nobles a couple of weeks ago. The first chapter alone is worth buying the book as it explains what Bollywood is all about. It tells a story about how a man in rural Georgia won the lottery when he got to go up on stage with SRK when he came to Atlanta. What a great story!

A couple of weeks ago I attended a high school reunion in Virginia. My wife and I stayed with my sister, who we seldom get to see. We had a great time talking with her at night and on Sunday morning after the reunion on Saturday afternoon. I attended my 20th high school reunion but this one was the 31st and was much better. I really wanted to talk to as many people as I could since I had just finished my memoirs and the memories were still clear. Most of the people I attended school with from kindergarten to high school were present so I had fun catching up with them. My wife wanted to know why it seemed like everyone of them had been my girlfriend at one point in time - I guess that is life in rural Virginia! I found it interesting that my close friends from high school had little in common with me now, but I had a deep bond with those I grew up with in Churchville. It seemed like I had grown wild, changed a lot and then came back to where they had never left. Most of them were so dependable that I would trust my life in their hands. How that is what I call a true friend.

One of my childhood friends who lived behind me told me about the man who he bought sheep from to raise on his farm. He had only one leg and I cannot remember how he lost it. He had a huge sheep farm which he worked on himself. He was also quite wealthy and traveled all over the world hunting wild game. He had two large single story houses just to hold the mounted game he had killed. He never let his disability get in his way. My childhood friend looked to his two boys and said "Remember that the only limits we have are those we place on ourselves". What a great profound statement stated so eloquently from such a simple person who I am glad to still call a friend. Some days I think I try too hard and think too much and I greatly admire such a person very much.

sleepless night

2009-09-13T04:53:00.000-04:00

I am really unsure what happened last night. I have been waking up at 3 am for many nights now. Last weekend I did not feel very good so I took a 2 hour nap on both Saturday and Sunday. Yesterday I took another 2 hour nap and that energized me to finally finishing editing my book around 3 pm. I then raced around the yard finishing the mowing in a record time of around 1 & 1/2 hours. Today I will have to go back over it and collect the extra grass clipping spread all over the yard, but at least it is cut! Last night my middle son and I went out to eat Indian food at Udapi. I have no idea what happened but after chatting with my son in California for a while about his MacBook "x" battery problems, I finally told him around 9:30 pm that I was tired and needed to go to bed. I am not sure I ever really feel asleep last night and finally at 4 am gave up and got out of bed. Maybe it had to do with my wife and two youngest kids returning home this evening. I have no idea but will definitely be taking a nap this afternoon after my Sunday morning cricket match.

These are some of the things I kept thinking about last night:

1) I really like this thought provoking comment about the Taj Mahal in India: "The typical was used to create the outstanding"

2) Somehow this thought kept coming up "I firmly believe that each of us has a unique reason to be alive, part of our pilgrimage on earth is to find it."

3) I have talked more with my middle son while my wife and other kids have been gone than we have ever talked in his whole life, which is a great thing. We were talking about what makes a skilled laborer when we thought that my oldest son, who is a wonderful artist when the urge hits him, would be a great tattoo artist since he has been getting many tattoos lately.

4) somehow I thought of this list of sports activities I have done in the last year at work either at lunch or after work:

Cricket, Volleyball, Wallyball, Racquetball, Sqash, and Tennis

In the past I have also played the following at work:

Basketball and Flag Football

The only sport I want to try one day at work is:

Ultimate Frisbee

Stone Mountain

2009-09-07T19:48:00.000-04:00

While my wife and two younger kids are having fun on a Princess Cruise to Scandinavia, my middle son and I decided to go hiking. I have always wanted to visit Hanging Rock State Park or at least hike up Pilot Mountain State Park next to it. Yet again I did not go to one of these as we decided to visit Stone Mountain State Park instead as we heard it had some waterfalls. Once on the park trails it reminded us both of the area where we last saw waterfalls earlier in the summer. Just when we were getting tired we decided we had to see the actual Stone Mountain while in the park. When we reached the grassy open field to see it we did not to expect such a huge granite rock mountain. As we looked closer we saw people at the top and some tiny little people climbing up the side. We went to the very bottom of the rock face and saw ropes that people were using to go up the 600 ft rock face. When I looked at the park map, I saw there was a trail that crossed the top of the mountain. Since we had to backtrack to get back to the car I suggested we try the trail so we get on top of the huge rock. The trail map said it was a strenuous climb but all we saw was a series of never ending steps. The more we walked up the steps the harder it became until we had to stop a couple of times to rest. It was all worth it when we reached the top as we had a full view of the Blue Ridge Mountains in all directions. I wanted to stay on the 2305 ft mountain top forever and just soak in the beauty that GOD created. We did not have a camera or else I would have taken a whole roll from that point. I did not find any posted on the internet either that fully captured the scene. I included a couple that I did find. I need to move back into the mountains and forget the city life.

photos of kids

2009-08-18T19:02:00.000-04:00

photos for book

2009-08-11T06:38:00.001-04:00

book photos

785 miles later

2009-07-05T19:54:00.001-04:00

For the long 4th of July weekend we decided to take a trip to the western part of NC to visit waterfalls that we did not see in our last waterfall trip two years ago. It was a five hour drive for the three of us as we decided it would be a guy only trip. We finally reached our first destination at 3pm. The last time we had reached Panthertown Valley it had started raining on us as we got out of our car and after a short walk we gave up and returned to our vehicle. We were determined to actually see waterfalls in this park and we found around ten vehicles parked on the dirt road to the main trail. We reached Schoolhouse Falls after a long walk and there was another family in the water with the father and grandfather fishing below the falls. It was only after talking to him and showing him the map we had did we realize where we were in the park. He told us where to go to see Warden Falls as it would be possible to reach that and have plenty of time to return. The hike was pretty steep in places and when we reached the falls there was camping equipment scattered all over the area around the base of the falls but no one was around. We decided to go in the water since we were pretty hot. After swimming across the pool we walked up the side of the falls and found the moss under the water really think and spongy which was so nice on our tired toes. We also noticed how soft our skin felt and I could see mica and fool's gold particles all in the water and the sand around the falls. I tried sliding down the lowest part of the falls and bruised my tail bone, but it was a great remote place to relax and enjoy the beauty around us.

Once we got back to the car after the long walk back we decided to see one more group of waterfalls before nightfall on the way back to Brevard, NC. We decided to take a short sidetrack to see the French Broad river where there was a group of rapids around the Cathedral Falls. We had written down directions before leaving as otherwise we would have never found them. We were the only car at the small gravel pull off on Highway 215. There are a series of falls right next to the road with a small dirt path leading to all of the falls. Our favorite was called Bird Rock Falls and we stayed as long as we could climbing around the rocks going down the river. After a full day we headed back to Brevard and found out that both of the hotels were completely full, but the person in the Hampton Inn told me they had rooms in the Etowah Country Club and gave me directions on how to reach it in the dark as it was around 9:30pm. We decided to eat at the Brevard Pizza Hut, which was the very same place we ate the last time we were in this area after learning that the hotels were full. When we reached the country club they had plenty of rooms and so we settled in for the night. In the morning as looked out the front door of the hotel room I saw the two golf green style croquet fields in front of me. I did not even know such things existed in the USA! The night before one of my sons had walked on it and thought it was spongy astroturf.

It was a tough decision the second day on where we should do. One of my sons wanted to go to Sliding Rock, but when we got up and felt how cool the air was outside we talked ourselves out of that morning cold shock. We decided to eat at the Huddle House for breakfast and then head to Gorges State Park which was west of Panthertown Valley. The hike was not as remote as the one the day before to Warden Falls, but it did seem to go forever. We saw several people walking back on the trail even though it was 10am. No one else was going in the same direction so we began to wonder if we were going on the right path, but there was only one path and we kept going. A couple hundred feet on the top of a ridge I asked the people coming down if we were close and they said we were. When we saw Rainbow Falls from the railed overlook we were all amazed. It was the most spectacular waterfall we had ever seen up close. We crawled down the rough dirt path to the bottom of the waterfalls and decided we should get in and go for a swim. The water was quite cold but the boys went in first. After they both got in and started swimming, I dove in from a near rock and swam over to the cliff. It was cold but not unbearable. We stayed for a long time to enjoy the cold water and marvel at the falls. It was hard leaving but there other falls in the area we wanted to see. It turned out that both were disappointing. We actually stopped in the parking lot for Whitewater Falls but we were too tired to make the walk even though I tried to force the boys out of the car to see it. On the way back home we stopped to see Looking Glass Falls right outside Brevard as we had seen it before. The problem with that waterfall is that it is so easy to get to that it is always crowded. That ended our 4th of July waterfall adventure trip for the summer of 2009.

sunset beach vacation

2009-06-21T12:20:00.000-04:00

Photos from our yearly family vacation to the beach:

Sunset Beach

high school graduation

2009-06-21T11:56:00.001-04:00

Probably the only public high school graduation we will ever witness happened last weekend. Our oldest son quit school and eventually got his GED. Our next to oldest son graduated high school by finishing his last two years using an internet high school called CompuHigh. We received our youngest son's diploma from PennFoster yesterday in the mail. So our middle son will definitely be the only son to graduate from public high school. Today we finalized his community college registration by paying for his first semester this fall at WakeTech, which is a local community college. His older brother also attended that same college for one year and that was also how I started my university career. We tried to enjoy every moment of the graduation realizing it may be our last. There are rumblings around the house that our daughter may try finishing high school on line as well.

The graduation was held in the new Raleigh Convention Center as there was over 400 students graduating, so with parents and family the ceremonies were too large for the high school auditorium. The whole process took almost three hours as we had to arrive early and then getting out was not the easiest thing once we got everyone to the car. The man in the front left hand side of the stage is the mayor of the town where we live in this photo:

customizing Mac login screen

2009-06-04T18:45:00.000-04:00

I found the following web site has hints on how to customize all kinds of things on my Mac:

# http://www.macyourself.com/2009/03/11/mac-login-window-tricks-part-4-change-default-background-image/
# DEFAULT - sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture /Users/javaswinger/nepal.jpg

# http://www.macyourself.com/2009/03/06/mac-login-window-tricks-part-2-add-a-custom-welcome-message/
# DEFAULT - sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText "Welcome to Dharma & MacBook world"

# http://www.macyourself.com/2009/03/05/mac-login-window-tricks-part-1-unleash-hidden-system-information/
# use any of the following:
# HostName, SystemVersion, SystemBuild, SerialNumber, IPAddress, DSStatus, Time
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo Time

Septoplasty

2009-05-30T06:25:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a different kind of a day from the normal grind. We all got up at the same time except my wife who woke up 30 minutes early. Since it was senior day for our son who was graduating from public high school, he decided to drive himself to school for the first time ever. They let the seniors out of school early after lunch and I told him we would not be home early to pick him up. We left the house a bit earlier than we expected and arrived at the hospital 30 minutes before the scheduled time of 8:30am. My wife was due to have her septoplasty at 10am and we began the waiting game. I took me Apple MacBook so I could spend the time either writing my book or learning Hindi. When we sat down in the general waiting area, I tried to see what wireless networks were available. There were two secure and one open wireless and so I was all set with internet access to learn some Hindi using Live Mocha. My wife was a bit nervous so it helped that I was not trying to talk to her but acted as if it was a normal situation. She had been given a paper that had her number on it and periodically an announcement was made but the numbers seemed to be totally random and unrelated numbers to the others we heard being called out. Finally she heard her number and after just a couple of minutes the initial insurance forms were complete. We then moved to the other side of the general waiting area at the front of the hospital. It was more like a huge room decorated like a high end hotel waiting area as the chairs were very nice to sit in. I know my wife did not notice such things, but I was in that area for the next six hours! At the desk on the other side of the room at the entrance to the surgery rooms, we were given a buzzing handheld device like is done at restaurants to notify you when your table is ready. It buzzed many times throughout the hours to tell us we were needed for certain events. It was just a great experience overall to make the best of place where no one wants to be. The deviated septum was fixed without any complications and we arrived home before 3pm. Our daughter was waiting to help in what ever way possible, so that was a pleasant but expected surprise for my wife, who needed the attention and help through the rest of the day. She had to sleep in a reclining chair all last night but they gave her really strong medicine to knock her out. I have to go find out how she feels...

Indian elections

2009-05-25T08:53:00.000-04:00

Someone at work found these photos and posted the link on the India mailing list:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/05/indias_massive_general_electio.html

mother's day 2009

2009-05-10T20:41:00.000-04:00

This was waiting for us when we came home from my wife's parents house on Mother's Day:

Lazy afternoon on Mother's Day as the kids were checking out the Princess cruise details for this fall:

series on breakdowns

2009-05-09T18:10:00.000-04:00

The past week was just a series of things breaking down around our house. First our clothes dryer stopping working. I cannot recall the exact date when we fixed it previously, but it was within a few months of the last time we had it repaired. Our house has the worst possible location for a laundry area. I dare not call it a laundry room as it is more like a laundry closet. The problem is that the washer and dryer barely squeeze into the closet. The last time we had problems with the dryer, we shopped around for new ones and none of the ones that are made currently will fit into the closet, so we are forced to repair the ones we have. Soon after our dryer decided to stop functioning, our refrigerator started making scary sounds. It was like a slowly accelerating engine that would then deaccelerate. Up and down it would go all day long. It was especially obvious in the morning when I woke up as it was the only sound in the whole house. Fortunately, we have a really great appliance company near our house who helped us before. For under $200, he was able to fix them both.

Soon after buying our son a car, we heard a sound company from the back end of the car. I called my trusty mechanic to check it out. Both my wife and son complained about the brakes so I had him check those at the same time. Turned out that the brakes all needed changing and the noise was pretty harmless and should some day be fixed when our son gets a job and has money to fix it. At least the brakes are good, which is important for a new young driver!

The last thing to cause trouble was our Windows Vista laptop. For months the family account has had mysterious screens show up when you logged on. I tried downloading a couple of tools from a company called "PC Tools", hoping they would find this virus and kill it. I have Norton Antivirus on this laptop but I just thought I should try something else. After buying a couple of their tools, I was no better off than when I started. In fact a couple of days ago my youngest son informed me when I got home from work that the laptop was frozen. The new tools were complaining about the Windows Defender was running and it could not be running at the same time as these tools. It took me an around an hour to stop Windows Defender. Then the next day that same son told me that a third window was popping up when he logged on. It was in fact getting worse by the day. I had tried to update these tools and it hung the tool and the laptop. This morning I finally removed all of their tools and had to delete our family account and create a new one. For now all is back to normal. In my frustration last night with all of our computers, I decided to buy a new iMac for the family and a new MacBook for myself. I tried Windows for a couple of years and that was all I could take. I am back to an all Apple home again, like the good old days, 10 years ago when I had nothing but Apple machines. It is just not worth the struggle and fighting to have Windows any more.

rollercoaster of life

2009-04-19T09:01:00.000-04:00

The past couple of days was quite the up and down affair. At work I had lunch with a man who had lived in the Middle East and we had a great time talking about our past experiences. He had also lived in Houston and his wife helped him decide it was time to leave just like my wife had helped me. After getting back to work, I had a meeting with a screaming woman who obviously hates me for some odd reason. The most unprofessional immature meeting I have ever encountered. Within a few minutes I went from feeling great to feeling awful. After taking 30 minutes of abuse, I got up and walked out of the conference room. I felt so bad that I had to take a sick day on Friday to recover. I guess she won in accomplishing what she intended to do and that was to make me feel really bad.

Yesterday, we bought my son a car and then on the way home we stopped by to see a local car show of hot rods. We had a good time as all of the boys at one time had enjoyed looking at cars. My son commented that now he understood what a really fine automobile looked like. After eating supper at home and sitting down to watch our latest Indian movie, our daughter entered the room and said one of her classmates had killed himself by a rope on a tree in their backyard. How horrible is that for a 14 year old to have to deal with. From happiness to horror in just a couple of hours. Such is the rollercoaster of life.

car shopping

2009-04-19T08:14:00.000-04:00

There just is nothing worse for me than shopping for cars. I don't mind bargaining as that part is kind of fun but the vulture like car salesmen scare me with their forceful mannerisms. This weekend we were trying to find a car for our middle son, who is the latest in the succession of boys to have cars in our family. Like our next to oldest, I let him search the web to find cars he likes as he knew the amount that he had to spend and what he wanted to get. In these economically troubling days, small dependable cars are a bit hard to find as the days of the gas burning SUVs is on the downturn and people want just the car my son is looking for. He wanted a small car with good gas mileage and finally found one in north Raleigh last weekend that he wanted to see. He has been searching for the last couple of months but had to pass his final road test to get his unrestricted driver's license first before a car could be considered. That extra time was good as it enabled him to figure out what kind of car he really wanted. We test drove several cars so he got a feeling of what he liked also. Yesterday was the big day when he drove with his other two siblings and myself to see this car. It was a beautiful sunny day, which I tried to convince everyone that it would be a great day for hiking, but I got overruled as car shopping got a higher priority. The whole affair was fairly painless as the small used car dealer where the car was located had just bought this car at an auction and was happy to sell it to us. I bargained a little and before we knew it we had a car. We pick it up today as I did not have enough money with me and our son did not feel comfortable driving it by himself for the 30 minutes to our home through downtown Raleigh. Today we have yet another Hyundai in our family.

Car shopping brings back memories of past events with the other kids. Our next to oldest did his own searching for months and we bought his car at the local flea market since that is where the owner met us for the exchange of money for the car. He as so happy when he got home with his car, and yet just after a couple of months he accidentally ran into the post at a local gas station when his flip flop caught on the gas pedal. That resulted in a very nice "V" in the front of his car. His gray car became two shades of red as he found a bumper and hood at junk yard near our house. Then as he was driving home the hood flew back and smashed the windshield as the hood was not latched properly, so yet another car repair. The most amazing thing ever is that this car made it all the way across the USA as my son drove it with his best friend in a cross country road trip. Recently the car stopped working and may have met it's very end. Hopefully this latest car to enter our family will not be inflicted with such car abuse.

Then our oldest son was in such a hurry to buy a car in San Antonio that he quickly found a car and bought it in one week. The used car dealer was not a very reputable one and basically ripped us off. The good news is because we were buying a Honda from him, so the car could take much abuse and still keep going. He failed to tell us the radiator had a leak in it and since it was 100% plastic, it could not be repaired. The brakes were pretty much shot as well. In my son's frantic desperation, we had a car but just barely. Once we made a couple of expensive repairs, he decided to drive all the way back to North Carolina in a non-stop 22 hour driving spree. Eventually when he lost his driver's license, we sold the car to someone else by advertising with a for sale sign as it sat in the nearby WalMart parking lot. The car was in pretty bad shape but still with over 200,000 miles on the odometer, someone bought the Honda Accord for the good gas mileage. May our son's car make it that far as it has a little over 100,000 on it now.

spring break

2009-04-12T06:46:00.000-04:00

This week was not just another week, but it was spring break, which meant our son came home from Emeryville, CA. It started out bad as he was supposed to be here last Friday but when his flight was canceled due to bad weather in NYC, it actually took him 36 hours to reach our house. He left this morning and hopefully will have a better experience getting back to school as this time he is going through Dallas, TX. However, I just checked the weather and the only place in the country that has bad weather is a region around Dallas! That is really pretty amazing as it was the same story when he tried to go through NYC last week.

My daughter was really hoping that this week would be better than the last time her oldest brother came and she was very disappointed in the lack of time she got to see him. This time was much better as this brother was around more and actually let her use his nice Apple laptop the last couple of days and even took her to the beach with him. Actually all of the kids went together to see my wife's parents in Wilmington and spent the night on Thursday night. It was the first time in over 20+ years that we were in the house without children. It is interesting how much of our lives revolve around our children as it was odd not hearing around the house that evening. Other than the beach trip they did not do anything special but just hung around each other. On the first day he was in the house they were all sitting on our middle son's bed talking, which unfortunately I did not get a photo of scene as it was a classic. Last night we went out to eat together at a local Japanese steak house in Fuquay and the food was really excellent and evening was entertaining as the cook prepared the food in front of us and definitely amused us.

The final event of the evening was the family bonfire as my middle son had been preparing a perfectly stacked pile of wood all week long, for the final evening together. The photo I took came out really cool as it looks like a fire breathing dragon coming up out of the midst of the fire pit. It was a relaxing memorable week, of which I am sure we will hear memories discussed around the dinner table in the weeks to come.

odd week

2009-04-04T11:14:00.000-04:00

After ten days of not feeling well, I finally recovered enough to say I was over the recent nasty sickness. Even though I was at work for the first couple of days this week, it seemed like everything I touched went wrong. Maybe it was the sickness looming over me and maybe my mind was not clear enough for intensive work conditions. Whatever it was, I was not very encouraged by my slow progress on my tasks at hand. Just about when I was ready to give up all hope, I finally found a way to fix the bugs I was slaving away on all week. It has happened to me several times in my long career in software development.

In addition several other things happened yesterday of note. At lunch a friend of mine, who is a mechanic, showed up at our house to fix my car, which had a check engine light on for the last several weeks. The Nissan dealer told him it would be six hours minimum as the manifold would have to be removed in a long timely process. Being the experienced mechanic he knew to try other things first. He found and fixed the problem without the labor intensive procedures the dealer had suggested. The best thing of all was that the charge was half of what he originally estimated, which had to be at least half of what the dealer would have charged me.

Then when our kids got home from school, I was appointed to take my son to get his drivers license. Seeing that he had hardly driven, the end result was predictable as he failed the driving test. The people at the license office were not very friendly and were definitely intimidating, which definitely did not help matters at all. There crabiness never prevented a single accident or drunk driving teenager death and yet for some reason they spread their unhappiness to all who entered attempting to get a new license.

To top off the day, our son was to arrive from California, but his flight was canceled due to bad weather in NYC. He missed all of the flights for the evening and at the minute we are still waiting to see if he makes it on the next flight as a stand-by passenger. A typical end to a most unusual week.

resident evil

2009-03-26T18:14:00.000-04:00

As my boys play the new Resident Evil #7 game, I have been laying around battling the evil bugs that have taken up residence in my body. Soon after reaching work on Monday I started feeling bad with my throat hurting and my head throbbing. I went to the company health clinic, but they did not help much. On Monday night my throat felt like I drank gasoline and threw a light match in my mouth. I did not get much sleep that night. The next day my head felt like someone was hitting it with hammers. My chest felt like a NFL lineman was sitting on my chest. In the afternoon I could not take it any more and went to our local family doctor. She had mercy on me and gave me antibiotics. By the time it turned dust my throat was on fire again. I tried gargling salt water, cough drops, some magic mouthwash stuff and nothing really helped. On Wednesday night I started cough uncontrollably. I moved into our guest room so my wife could actually get some sleep even though I had little hope of getting any myself. As the night progressed my whole body started hurting. My neck, my back and then my kidneys. When I got up in the morning I could only hope the medicine would start working so I could feel better. Finally after a morning nap I started to feel slightly better. Who knows when the evil residents will decide to leave, but I can hope that occurs sometime tonight.

Aradhna in Raleigh NC

2009-03-23T19:47:00.000-04:00

For the last several months I have been planning on Aradhna coming for a visit to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle in NC. I ran an ad in the local Indian magazine called Saathee for the last three months. I ran the same ad in the local Indian movie theater called Galaxy Cinema. For the last couple of weeks before the event, the same as was run on Nazar TV, which shows Bollywood videos from 3-4pm each Sunday afternoon. Lastly, the NC State radio station has Indian music from 10-noon each Sunday morning on WKNC for a program called Geet Bazaar so they announced the Aradhna concert also. It took work and money to do this. So on Sunday night five days before the concert, I get a call from the president of the Hindu temple telling me I could not have the concert at the temple which was where all of the ads listed as the location of the event. So I have to make a mad rush to find another place in less than a week. It was very stressful to say the least. I felt like I wasted my time and money and energy. We finally decided to have the concert in the same location for both Friday and Saturday night on the NC State campus in the middle of the graduate housing buildings. I invited all of my Indian friends to the new location and was very disappointed when not a single friend of my showed up. On Saturday morning, the Aradhna tabla player told me the house would be packed for the second night and it was hard for me to believe it after the sparse crowd the first night. Sure enough the crowd kept picking up as time went along and before I knew it the whole room was full. That was a great feeling although quite different from my disappointment the night before. Because the crowd was excited, the band fed off the energy and the performance was special in many ways. On Sunday morning, I drove two of the band members to WKNC radio studios to meet Afroz Taz and John Caldwell as both of them had been in India and had not responded to my emails. I was beginning to panic that yet another planned event was going to backfire. We decided to drive to the studio and just show up. Thankfully, Afroz was there waiting for us. They had a short but great 10 minute session and sang parts of two songs. On Sunday afternoon we had several friends over to meet the band at our house. Our kids were so happy to attempt to play Chris' sitar and then play Rock Band with them. A sad start but a strong finish.

Andrew's drawings

2009-03-23T19:31:00.000-04:00

Latest award winning drawings by our middle son, Andrew. It is a shame to be so good and not enjoy doing it. This weekend, I actually heard hints that he wanted to go to art school one day. That is the problem with being a teenager, you are trying to discover what you want to do with your life.

relaxing weekend

2009-03-09T20:10:00.001-04:00

Friday was one of the worst days I have had at work in a long time. It seemed like everything I touched failed to work correctly. I tried to fix one problem and and would cause another. My co-worker was on vacation and obviously could not provide me with the wisdom I needed to solve the many problems I was causing. I was very frustrated by the time I got home. Plus I was running out of options in finding an audio engineer for the upcoming Aradhna concert. At least when I got home and checked my personal email account, I found a couple of people offered to help with the sound, so by the end of the day I had good news to make me feel better about my bad day at work.

Just last weekend it was snowing and was under 20 degrees, but this weekend the temperatures rose to 80 degrees. That was quite the 60 degree temperature difference in just a few days time. That meant it was time to get outside and mess around. I cleaned up the garage to celebrate the warm weather and then washed both of our vehicles. Not too exciting, but then the big event came on Sunday afternoon. I finally took the time to mount the painting of the children on our living room ceiling. We put it on a wall so the kids would not have to see it all of the time but my wife and I could look at it as often as we wanted to. Since it is so large we did not want it to be in our faces all of the time. It looks very nice up around 10 feet from the floor on the wall I filled in. I took a photo of the painting on the wall with our new $17 Logitech webcam which we used to talk using Skype with our son in Korea last night.

This is the meaning of the words on the painting:

Prema milana ko nai-na tarase
The eyes long to be united in love
Ghaayala mana tori nagari aawata
Wounded hearts come to your city
Saba eka chana mei swaagata paawata
All, in an instant, find welcome

Google Chrome vs. Safari 4

2009-03-05T20:02:00.000-05:00

I have been using Google Chrome at home and at work since it was released. Today I tried using Safari 4 for the first time. I really like the Google Chrome "most visited" page as I can see what the page looked like last time I visited it. Plus it remembers the most frequently visited pages. The challenge in Safari 4 was customizing their "top sites" to have the same site I had in Google Chrome. It was definitely hard but I finally accomplished it. Two of the web sites I added will not generate previews, one of them being Bank of America's site, which I find really odd. CSS 3 is the secret behind both of these web browsers. Webkit is used in both of these web browsers as well as used within Flex/AIR. The thing I have always liked about Safari is the built-in RSS reader available in the menu bar. Nice to see iTunes CoverFlow being used for Bookmarks. At least they have a new style carousel for the "top sites" page that just looks too cool. You can make a tab become a separate window but I could not find a way to re-attach it. I find Google Chrome annoying on how easy it is to make a tab become an extra window but at least they have an easy way to just drag the window back as a tab. Somehow several times a day accidentally detach a Google Chrome tab as a new window. I am glad I don't have this problem with Safari 4. I have had Safari installed on Windows for a long time but only used it to double check browser compatibility as I found the fonts looked really odd on Windows. I found the CSS checker interesting as it shows how lacking IE and Firefox are and how far they have yet to go to catch up. For now I am a Safari 4 convert.

Kwangju, South Korea

2009-02-28T13:38:00.000-05:00

This is a blog about the place in South Korea where my wife grew up. Her maiden name is Dietrick:

Kwangju, South Korea

This is the house where my wife grew up:

Valentine's weekend

2009-02-15T18:44:00.000-05:00

The last two days seemed like a long weekend, but in this case it was a good thing. At lunch time yesterday as I was talking to a friend I have known for almost 30 years, the mail woman rang the doorbell. I initially ignored her as I was on the phone and I thought someone else would get the door. Then she knock on the door leading to the garage in desperation. I walked out the front door and found her in the garage. She said I had to sign so she was determined to find me. She had the painting of the family as it arrived from India on Valentine's Day! I handed it to my wife and on opening it we noticed the painted was folded and had creases in it, which was the only thing wrong with it. Everyone had to make comments about it as they all saw the canvas laying on the floor. This morning I searched on the web to figure out how to re-stretch the oil painting to fix the creases. I found a useful video by artist Michael Bell which was on this wikiHow site. I found a couple of sites that sold canvas stretchers, which are really specialized pieces of wood. Then I found this site that explains how to make your own. My middle son and I followed these and now we have a stretched canvas, which is still creased, but at least it is mounted properly.

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I went to see Billu Barber for our anniversary entertainment. Since it had Shah Rukh Khan, we expected to be entertained. We have recently had no such things happening as we watched rental Indian movies. The new ones coming out are just not that good. This one on the other hand had us laughing like crazy near the middle and crying at the end only like King Khan can do. Plus it had a a couple of great points. Billu was very poor and felt ashamed to bother the famous movie star who was his childhood friend. Everyone else wanted to take advantage of them both. Billu's family had to decide if it really matter whether they met the famous movie star when they would always have their father. As usual I would much rather see a movie with a point than just be entertained. I feel like I did not waste my time every time we leave the Indian movie theater. I cannot say the same for other movies.

Aradhna @ Raleigh

2009-02-11T05:52:00.001-05:00

book moved

2009-02-08T12:24:00.001-05:00

This blog uses Blogger, so I decided today to use WordPress for my book blog: 50 year adventure

full Army day

2009-02-08T03:54:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was an interesting day. It was not good and it was not bad, just interesting. I seldom get angry, but that is how I started my day off. On the final day before our oldest son was to leave for South Korea with the Army, at 9am I was wondering why he was not home. The week since we brought him back from Ft. Jackson in Columbia, SC was not the best of weeks. When we arrived after lunch last Thursday, he was home only until the evening when he newly acquired "girlfriend" picked him up in front of our house. She did not come in but parked by the mailbox out of view of the front of the house and call him by cell phone to come out to leave. On Saturday he returned to our house for a little over an hour before he took off again with the same girl for East Carolina University (ECU), where she attends. He returned home on Tuesday afternoon and said a hand full of words all day long to his mother and only mumbled a couple of words to me that evening. He looked and acted exhausted. He packed all day Wednesday and on Thursday night left again with the same girl. We hardly saw him all week and when we did he was not happy at all. His siblings also wondered where he was as they wanted to see him. My wife drove all the way to pick him up on Friday night but he said he wanted to say longer. Last that night he called us to say he had a great meal with his girl friend and her parents, which was not what my wife wanted to hear. I don't know what we expected but it was not that kind of week with our son before he left for South Korea. So when he called at 9:30am yesterday wanting a ride because his friends would not bring him home, that did not make me feel all warm and fuzzy. When we reached the apartment where he was staying with his long time bud, I decided it was time to get angry, which is something I almost never do. Probably not the best time to do so, but I had to preach to him the importance of family over supposed "friends". Who is there for him when he needs help or money? Family not his friends. Who picks him up all of the time when he don't feel like it? Family not his friends. Who forgives him always? Family. After ranting for 30 minutes I have no idea if any of it sank in. What I really didn't like was that this was the same thing we had been doing for years with him and the change I thought I had seen when he first joined the Army was gone and he had reverted to bad habits in a moments notice. Am I perfect? No. Is my wife perfect? No. That had nothing to do with it.

By the time we got home I felt emotionally exhausted and we all let him pack and get ready instead of spending time with him. My wife did not tell him that her parents had canceled their trip to our house to take him out to eat the day before and had considered driving up yesterday. They were excited as he was being stationed in the country they spent 25 years of their life. At 1pm when he asked me to help him start and file his taxes, what did I do? Because he is part of our family, of course I helped him. We sat down and completed his taxes using TurboTax in around 1 and 1/2 hours. We left the house at 3pm with hugs from his siblings. He wanted one last Cook Out hamburger, so we stopped along the way. As we drove out of the parking lot, he looked in the bag and found they gave him a BLT instead. It is hard getting in and out of that location, but he drove around and went back into the slowest line - of course. It was 3:45pm and I was getting a bit worried about the flight which was to take off in our hour. Since it was Saturday I did not have to think about heavy traffic, so I drove as fast as I could and we parked in the nearly vacant lot to the new terminal at RDU. At 4pm we were at the ticket counter with a very helpful woman as there was no line at all. Since we were the parents of our military son, we got special passes to go through security to wait with him at the gate. After 20 minutes he boarded and we were off. It was more of a relief than a tear jerking affair, which is not the way we envisioned our parting. He was after all leaving to go to the place where his mother and my wife grew up her whole life. My wife stayed up late thinking he would call her from LA airport before taking off in Korean Air, but the call never came. I was just glad to go to bed as I was tired from our emotional day. It did not help that our youngest son woke me up at 3am, but that is a whole different story not worth talking about.

A.I.T.

2009-01-29T17:13:00.000-05:00

A.I.T. stands for Advanced Individual Training. Our oldest son graduated from his heavy vehicle mechanic A.I.T. this morning. We once again read and heard about the Army Ethos:


    I will always place the mission first
    I will never accept defeat
    I will never quit
    I will never leave a fallen comrade

We watched this film on the Army Ethos.

I like these four values as I could apply them to work or our family. How about saying "I will always place my family first"? Or how about "I will never leave a fallen family member"? How about "I will always place others first before myself"? Wow, that sounds like a Bible verse. The more I hear about the Army values, I like them. Of course no one is perfect now are any of the graduates today able to achieve all of the Army creed, but it certainly is a worthy goal.

Maybe if they hear them enough they will believe them.
Does hearing them all of the time make them true?

Yet another day of driving four hours home so for me plenty of time to think about these things. Of course today was a whole lot better than yesterday when we parked on I-95 north of Fayetteville for around an hour and a half waiting for a wreck to be cleaned off the interstate. We actually turned off the vehicle as we were at a complete stand still for that long. After driving again we pulled off the road to got the Burger King and I took over driving and when I got back on I went the wrong direction, so we lost twenty miles going north instead of south. We finally arrived at 11pm and we were all tired. We got the graduation ceremonies early at 8am and true to the Army motto of "hurry up and wait", that is what we did for an hour. By the time we got into the chapel, we discovered the batteries were dead on our camera. Fortunately, the woman sitting next to us kindly took photos of Nathan for us and said she would send them to us.

Nathan @ AIT graduation

snow

2009-01-21T16:54:00.000-05:00

Not only did Obama become the 44th president yesterday, but it snowed over five inches at our house. Because of the snow I was able to watch the first presidental inauguration that I ever remember watching. There certainly was a lot of hype over it this year, so it was nice to watch on the TV from our living room. It would not have been fun in any way to be among the two million people in person. To see the event which was only five hours north of us when we were snowed in was interesting. It looked cold but it was sunning and bright for the big day, which was nice for them. It was many years since we all as a family had a snow day of this magnitude. I found a weather web site that shows all of the recent snows in the Raleigh NC area. We were in Apex NC for the January 2000 snow and our young kids loved every minute of the 20" snow fall. There was a very large hill outside our subdivision leading down to Highway 55, so I walked the boys down and we slid on cardboard boxes for sleds. There was no one on the road so we had snow fun for a long time. The next month we moved to Fuquay Varina and in 2002 was the next big snow. We had a long sloping hill behind our house going down to Johnson Pond below. We bought two red plastic snow boards that provided endless entertainment that year. Previously we built a quarter pipe skateboard ramp and the boys moved that to the top of the hill to launch them even faster down the hill. We were in San Antonio TX for the 2004 snow in this area, so the snow yesterday was our first since 2002. We had no hill this year, so we walked back into the woods behind our house to see the amazing underbrush and trees full of snow. Today was the second day the kids were out of school so they built a snow man to have fun. We have some really nice icicles hanging from the gutters at the back of our house which have grown even longer today. I guess this is what happens when you don't see snow or ice very often as the little things amuse us.

snow 2009

Famly Painting

2009-01-11T19:04:00.001-05:00

For my wife's birthday this year, I had a movie poster artist in India paint the children through a friend of mine who is living in India. This is the resulting painting which is 6 ft x 4ft.

crazy day

2008-12-31T05:27:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a perfect illustration of a day that thankfully does not happen very often, but when it does you are glad it is over by the end of the day. I woke up at 5:20 AM to a sound in the kitchen below us. When I reached downstairs I saw my oldest son finishing off his cooking of eggs for breakfast and was sitting down to eat them. He told me he wanted to get back to his Army schedule. I went back upstairs and fell back asleep. I got up at 7:30 and started working on my autobiography, which continued all morning long. I am now writing about my experiences while in Belgium before I went to India. My writing has slowed down the past couple of days as I kept a detailed journal while in Belgium, so I am trying to summarize a few stories from my journal instead of writing from memory or duplicating my journal. My oldest son decided to go back to sleep so besides my wife I did not see any children all morning long.

For a couple of days our refrigerator was not working properly. The freezer part was as cold as the non-freezer part normally should be. We took it as an opportunity to clean the inside of the refrigerator and threw about half of the contents away. The very first thing on Monday, I called M & H Appliance which had helped us in the past with our dryer. The technician finally showed up yesterday around noon. He took off the inside wall of the freezer to reveal the coils which were completely covered with ice crystals. He got out his trusty commercial hair dryer and after fifteen minutes had the coils completely deiced. He popped off the heater part under the coils and found it was broken. Since he had a spare part in his truck, we had a working refrigerator in under an hour and it only cost me $150.

Then the children all started waking up around noon. Our oldest came down and complained about his throat being sore and his ear hurting. He asked me what he should do about it. Then after my great advice of taking proper rest with plenty of fluids, he wanted to know where his mother was as he wanted a ride to his friends to celebrate New Years's Day. He repeated the same set of questions about his sickness and needing a ride, which to both of us parents were mutually exclusive requests. Kids.

Then I get a call from a friend of one of our sons who was suspecting pot smoking and wanted to know if we suspected the same thing. Of course you want to believe the best of your kids but having lived through many teenagers, we knew that could hazardous to our mental health to completely trust teenagers in this day and time. I went to search the music shed for a missing cell phone and I found a glass bong hidden in one of the guitar amps! My day was not getting better over time. When I approached one of my other son's about it as I told him I was going to break it, he told me not to as it was his friend's. Kids.

On Monday I had taken my middle son to get his driver's license as he had lost it due to his poor grades in school. That is a good thing about the North Carolina under eighteen driver policies that if you fail any classes in school you loose your driver privileges. As a parent you don't have to argue with your children, it is the law. Well your kids can still argue of course, but we have the written law in our favor. We went to the local DMV and found out that to get your driver's license you have to have proof of insurance. I called our car insurance and of course they took him of our policy since he lost his license. I had him reinstated so we could get his license only to learn that by doing so he double our existing cost of car insurance by $100 per month. My wife and I decided that he would have to pay for that in order to get his license. Without a job he cannot pay for it. Without a license it may be hard to get a job. Round and round it goes. Then I told my son all of this and he said he needed a cell phone before he could get a job to pay his part of the insurance in order to get his driver's license. At least he had Christmas money to pay for his own cell phone. Kids.

The only good news for the day was that during this week for the first time in many years all of the kids have been in our bonus room playing Guitar Hero, Rock Band and lifting weights together. It was a shock to see them all together, but definitely a good thing. SO they can enjoy each other after all.

My wife and I ended the day trying to watch an Indian movie that was pretty bad so we shut of the movie after thirty minutes and called it a day. Life in the fast lane with kids can be tiring!

18th Greek birthday

2008-12-25T08:09:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was our middle son's 18th birthday. We try to eat out so my wife does not have to cook a special meal for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We have eaten in several different places. One year while in Arizona visiting my mother in Tucson, we searched everywhere to find some place open where we could eat. We finally found an authentic Mexican restaurant that was open and enjoyed the food a lot. One year while in San Antonio we ate at the best Thai restaurant in the whole city. It is the best Thai food I have ever eaten. This year, our son wanted to eat traditional southern cooking, but we could not find a place that was open. We decided at the last minute to eat Greek food. I had heard people at work talk about two of the best Greek places to eat. The one closest to work was not open so we picked the other one. We were a bit sceptical when we arrived at the restaurant as no one else was there, but we were early since we wanted to attend the Christmas Eve service at church later in the evening. It was fun eating something none of us had had in an authentic restaurant. We topped off the meal with one of the best desserts any of us had eaten, which was a raspberry cream cake. It came with a single candle on it. The name of the place was Mythos Mediterranian Bistro.

Aradhna in Raleigh NC

2008-12-24T05:54:00.001-05:00

love & movies

2008-12-21T07:43:00.000-05:00

In the past week we have watched two Indian movies. Last night we saw Rab ne bana di Jodi. I have been looking forward to seeing it since my birthday in the middle of November. On that day we were in the shop where we rent Indian movies for home viewing. The $1 rental fee for each movie has to be the best entertainment value of anything you can possibly do for that amount of money. On the end of the counter was a holographic poster for the movie was saw last night. It was advertising the soundtrack for the movie. I asked the owner if I could have it and of course he gave it to me, since we are friends. The next day I put the poster on my office door at work. I typically don't close my door as I want people to feel free to come in and see me at any time, but for the last month I have closed my door so everyone walking by could be amazed at my poster. If move your head slowly side to side you can see the actor and actress change from traditional dress to modern bollywood style clothes. I was wondering as we waited for the movie to begin if I would have to remove the poster from my door, which would have to happen if the movie was bad. We were not disappointed as the movie was great. That is why I love Indian movies as there is always a clear point and both love and GOD has to be mentioned. I have to add this movie to my favorite list near the top. The other thing I wish I had done over the last few years was to record all of my favorite quotes from the movies we had watched.

The movie we watched last week was Slum Dog Millionaire. It was about love as well but the movie was actually rated "R" because of some of the violent content that was not appropriate for children. For me this was about the "real" India and not the fairy tell world of Bollywood that sometimes illustrates the ideal that people can hold onto in order to escape from this "real" world. Plus I got to see Mumbai and India like I remember it. I like movies that show choices we all have to make and the results of those choices. Some choose a dark path and reap what they sow. Others want to choose the right path that actually helps people, but sometimes it is just too hard to do. Even though both of these movies had love as the foundation, they were very different in content. The best thing I like about watching Indian movies is that it makes me think about my life and what is important as well as talk to my wife about what love really means.

food in Army

2008-12-21T07:32:00.000-05:00

On the first night that our oldest son was home for the Christmas holidays, my wife fixed meat pot pie, which was always our son's favorite. I was really very tasty and nearly perfect in every way. As we sat at the table, he asked if this was all we were having. This was kind of odd since we have always eaten like this with simple but nutritious meals. Last year at this time, when he came home, he was starving from living on his own and a home cooked meal was all he dreamed about. So I asked him why he spoke like this about his mother's wonderful cooking and what the food was like in the Army. He told us of their multiple course meals three times a day. There were many varieties of everything to choose from at every meal. He did not overeat but always looked forward to each meal and made the decision at that time as to what he fill his plate with. He was select a meat, a couple of vegetable sides, always dessert. He was describing a super buffet selection for every meal. No wonder our single dish meal was a bit too simple for him.

finals week

2008-12-17T06:07:00.000-05:00

This week has been the week of finals.

I finally finished my Hindi class after almost two years of studying and attending weekly classes with a co-worker who taught the class using Rupert Snell's book called "Teach Yourself Hindi". Now I can read and write the Devanagari script used for Hindi. This next year I want to practice my talking skills, which means I need to start working on extending my vocabulary also.

I finally completed the season in the competitive volleyball league at work during lunch time. We lost the very last game in the finals to come in second place. It was fun playing with such great volleyball players and I learned a lot and am now a better player because of it. That is true in most sports, in that if you play with people better than you then you will improve over time. Every time I enjoyed watching my teammates set the ball perfectly and then watch as one of the other players would spike it with so much power. It is just fun to watch good people play.

This is my final week of work for 2008. The company I work for closes their office the last week of December, which really means every one gets an extra week of vacation every year, which is very nice! I plan on finishing the first section of my new book and hopefully finish all of the sections up until I went to India. I need to find the journals that I kept during that time and review them to figure out what I need to say. That was the most important time of my life so it may be hard to condense it down to something reasonable - it may be a book in itself!

van pool

2008-12-11T18:43:00.000-05:00

Several years ago I started carpooling when a neighbor invited me to join an existing carpool. Because all three of us lived in the same small community, it was very easy and convenient to share a ride. After riding for two months, I left the company that I worked for to pursue other opportunities in another state.

When I returned to that same company, I had forgotten about that first carpool. But after I bumped into the same person later in the building where I work, we decided to start carpooling again - just the two of us. This time I was motivated more by the price of gas and the rising cost of my auto maintenance bills. After I had commuted to work alone for over a year, it was getting boring, even though I listened to all kinds of music, occasional audio books, or language-learning lessons. I thought I’d miss these if I started riding with someone else, but I was willing to give it up to save money on gas. Because I was an early-morning person, finding a parking spot at my building at work wasn’t a problem. But it crossed my mind that I might have to walk further each day if I arrived at work later! Another motivating factor: I had worked for the Saudi Arabian national oil company for a couple of years. Seeing money flow freely from the U.S. to the Middle East due to our oil dependency just seemed so unnecessary. I had seen first-hand the amazing wealth it was creating, so I thought I could do my small part by joining a carpool and maybe one day helping others do it too.

Once we started carpooling, we found others interested in joining us who had carpooled previously. Through word of mouth, we found a few more people each month. Initially, some rode only a few times each week, while the rest of us faithfully rode to and from work every day.

An early concern we each had was how to run errands during the week at lunch when we each drove only about one day a week. This required a bit of advance planning because we had to condense everything into a single day. But within a month after deciding to alternate driving, we had a good working system. Anyone having to stay late or go in early simply didn’t carpool. Anyone needing to drive on a certain day to service her or his car or to see the doctor simply volunteered to be the designated driver. To be fair, we devised a simple spreadsheet to record drivers and riders each day and week. Each day on the way home we’d talk and determine who wasn’t riding and who would drive the next day. After a couple of months of alternating drivers during the week, I was driving only once a week. So, instead of spending $65 per week on gas, I was now paying only $65 per month. My only challenge was convincing my wife to get up 30 minutes earlier to take our kids to school, which used to be my daily duty and privilege.

From the very start we considered getting a Triangle Transit Authority (TTA) van because that would mean even less car maintenance for each driver. Many months later, we had more people than would fit into a single vehicle. As the number of people increased, it became harder to balance and maintain fair driving arrangements. But as it turned out, that was actually a nice problem to have. Once we reached six regular carpoolers, we figured it should be pretty simple to find more riders. We had all seen the benefits of ride-sharing, so it seemed obvious that others would jump at the chance to save money on gas. Because TTA paid for all gas and maintenance, we need only to find enough riders to fill a 12-passenger van. The more who joined, the lower our individual cost. We posted flyers in break rooms at work to get the word out about our vanpool and asked those we knew who lived along our route if they’d like to join. At that point a fellow carpooler showed me how to create a list of company employees who lived nearby by using a utility to locate people by town name. Using this, I could find potential riders who lived as far from work as I did who might want to join us. As a result of our efforts, we now have nine people in our vanpool, and we thought this article might entice others to start their own carpools.

Some of the real benefits I have seen can be understood from something that happened to me early on. After entering my car one rainy afternoon, I found I couldn’t start my car. I didn’t have a cell phone, but my fellow carpooler did, so he called security at work. Literally, within minutes, security arrived and jump-started my car so that we could pick up other riders at other buildings at work. Not only did I find a new friend to help me in a time of need, I never knew that security could do such things. Now that we have our preferred vanpool parking spot at our building, I never worry about my car not starting. I also have plenty of new friends on whom I know I can count when I need them. My 30-45 minute commute now goes by so quickly every day as we talk about each other's life experiences and learn all kinds of things in general. I think one of the best lessons I’ve learned is how kind and considerate people are at work, which is not something I can say about other places I’ve worked. Instead of being totally immersed in my current project and the technical abilities of those I work with, from our rides together to and from work I’ve learned that people have lived though and survived personal experiences similar to mine. I feel like I learn something new every ride, so that’s pretty good too. After seven months of ride-sharing, I now miss the days that I don’t vanpool.

Rajastan

2008-12-07T10:48:00.000-05:00

There is something that is alluring about Rajastan. I have driven through most of that state in northern India. On the surface it is just one big dry hot desert, which is very dusty. Even after 30 years I can still remember things about it as it is so unique in all of India. I recall driving through the villages and you could easily tell when you have left one and entered another. In one village all of the men would be wearing yellow turbans, in the next they would all be wearing bring red ones and in the next they would be wearing green. The buildings everywhere matched the drab yellow brown sand with few trees in sight, but then you would see the women wearing the most bright colored saris and the men with their colored turbans. An occasional camel would be seen pulling a two wheeled cart. Every now and then you would see an amazing castle on a rocky hill that is centuries old. The hills are nothing more than huge boulders. I have spent the night with friends in the pink city of Jaipur and the blue city of Jodhpur. Driven past the Jal Mahal outside Jaipur, the Mehrangarh Fort on the hill outside of Jodhpur and the Taj Lake Palace on a lake outside Udaipur. So many fascinating and enchanting places to see, so it is no wonder that foreign tourists want to go there.

That is not want I had originally intended to write about today, but the origin of my thoughts was a movie was saw last night called Nanhe Jaisalmer. I have been watching Indian movies since we lived in Saudi in the late '80s, where the local Qatar TV station showed the weekly Thursday night Indian movie. Since the weekend was Thursday and Friday, this was the equivalent on our Saturday night, so I stayed up late watching the movie which ended around midnight. Now we rent Indian movies at a local Indian store. In all of those years and the unknown number of movies I have seen, it still amazes me at now uplifting they are and a true learning experience for me. Of course it really helps that I have lived to see many of the places in India where they shoot the films, but still the culture is so fascinating to me that I learn something new about the culture with every movie I see. I enjoyed the music in "Nanhe" and there were so many wonderful one liners. Just a great family movie with a good story and wholesome point. Who can complain about that?

Army II

2008-12-03T05:53:00.000-05:00

Since our son could not leave the Army base without us signing him out, we ventured back to South Carolina for our Thanksgiving break this year. On the first night we stayed at a very nice Homewood Suites Hotel on the west side of Columbia. It was a pretty long drive from the Army base which was on the east side of Columbia, but it was a much nicer part of town to be staying in. Our son wanted to shop for civilian clothes, so we found a mall on the northwest part of Columbia where we joined the masses of people shopping on Black Friday. I have no idea about the rest of the county, but at this mall on this day it was wall to wall people. So many people, in fact, it was hard to get around inside the mall in some places. The mall was very nice and fairly new and our son quickly found a store called Buckle that willingly took his $200 and gave him little in return. I have never enjoyed shopping and the only good thing this time was that I did not have to spend money. We even went into the really high end store Abercrombie & Finch just for looking around as we suffered from sticker shock and quickly left, besides the fact that the store was so dark you could hardly see the prices and the music so loud you could not hear yourself think.

On the second night, we went back to the location where we stayed the last time for his boot camp graduation ceremonies. It is right next to the Army base, but the area is not very nice. When we got to the hotel, our son told us that his sergeant told them to all stay away from the Waffle House next to our hotel. That was odd orders, but then we heard the details on why this was so. Apparently the Army had tracked found the location where some of the soldiers had bought cocaine and it was at this very same Waffle House. We have eaten in one of them and decided not to make this a first time for us!

On the last day in Columbia we had a mission to find a phone that could be used no matter where he would be stationed. He is listed as going to South Korea, but we learned that it could change many times between now and when he ships out on March 1st. For South Korea and Japan they use very high frequencies, so basically the only phones that would work with local service in those countries are the high end PDA phones. The Apple iPhone will not work there on local service, but he really liked the touch screen phones in the AT&T store. After playing with every phone in the store for over an hour, he finally found a phone he liked, but it turned out to be one that would not work in Asia. He finally decided on the LG Incite 3g phone. He enjoyed playing with it the rest of the day, in taking photos of everything and finding wireless networks and chatting. Sounds like a mobile computer to me!

family and food

2008-11-28T06:41:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the first time we have not had our whole family together for our traditional Thanksgiving Day meal. Our oldest son could not get off the Army base so we are going down there to see him today. For the last week we had hoped he would be able to come home, but on Tuesday night we learned that no one was able to leave. Our next to oldest son is in California and everyone left in the house talked to him by phone yesterday. He was going to try to have a meal with those in the school who remained, one from Pennsylvania and one from Michigan. He is so out-going that life is an adventure for him, of which this is yet another one.

This year we decided to deep fry a turkey. We first tried doing it ourselves two years ago and it was the best turkey we ever had. It is messy and a bit expensive but the oldest son in house suggested we do it again. Last time we followed Alton Brown's recipe and it worked out for us. It is really very easy to do as it just takes some patience. We even followed his directions on how to build a turkey derrick. But this time the turkey derrick did not fly as my son told me "that is for 60 year olds". I guess after being two years older he had not gained wisdom but had become more daring. All went well without the turkey derrick as we did not have any exploding turkeys to report or old burns. We have read stories of people trying to deep fry turkeys that were still frozen and they shoot out of the fryer, literally exploding. This year after the 35 minute frying had been completed, we decided to do a couple of tests after turning off the propane flames. We threw a frozen chicken nugget in the 350 degree peanut oil. When it did not shoot out, we tried throwing in a frozen bread biscuit. The chicken nugget and biscuit popped up to the top of the oil after a couple of minutes. When we still did not get the affect, we threw in 5 ice cubes. Suddenly things got really interesting. Previously the oil surface was quite calm but now it starting bubbling profusely. So ice definitely is a bad idea with hot boiling oil. Our last experiment was putting in ice cream as we had heard that at the NC State Fair they offer fried ice cream. Apparently there is a science in getting that to work as throwing it n just made the ice cream melt right away. This sounds like we wasted a lot of time playing around, but after removing the turkey from the hot oil, you have to let it sit for 30 minutes to finish cooking and that is when we messed around with the oil.

A final word about our meal. In the morning my wife spent hours preparing the food. She did comment that it did seem odd to spend so much time on food that is finished off in minutes. I told her that some people actually enjoy the act of cooking in itself. I just like how our family gets together around the table and sits and talks. Something that is not natural for teenagers! My wife took hours to make from scratch the following foods : bread stuffing, cream corn, sweet potatoes, cranberry relish, baked apples, pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie. What a wonderful cook I married. All of that and she did not feel very good as she had a cold. It never fails to amaze me how she can cook when not feeling good and it always tastes perfect.

Mumbai mess

2008-11-28T06:03:00.000-05:00

Having watched hours of news coverage on the Mumbai 9/11 terrorist attacks in the past couple of days, it is so sad to see how a few crazy people can cause such pain and grief. I don't like my idealist view of India being manipulated by people with no brains. We recently watched several Bollywood movies on terrorists in India as it is a hot topic even before this disaster. I still think the best way to deal with such horrible situations is to not allow terrorists to force us to change our lives as that makes them win.

stationed in South Korea

2008-11-23T12:35:00.000-05:00

We found out this morning that our oldest son will be stationed in north of Seoul, South Korea for his first year after his training completes in January, 2009. This is really interesting news since my wife grew up her whole life in South Korea! We would have never imagined that our son would go there to live. Here are some links to Dongducheon, South Korea for Camp Casey, where he will be living:

Map of Army bases in South Korea
Map of Army bases near Camp Casey
West map of Camp Casey
East map of Camp Casey
Bridge outside Camp Casey
Weather at Camp Caasey
Map of Dongducheon
Details on the area
Subway to Seoul

wallyball

2008-11-22T14:54:00.000-05:00

Yesterday during lunch I ventured into the exciting world of wallyball. That sounds very close to volleyball when you speak it in public conversation. I had heard about it for several years and finally found someone who would let me play. We played two-on-two inside a racquetball court with the next tied to the walls at the half way point within the court. At first I had no idea what to expect after I had the rules explained to me. Besides the fact that a racquetball court echoes like crazy, I was not sure I heard the rules correctly. Once we started playing it was pretty obvious how I should be playing, but it was another thing all together on how to actually do it. The ball has a rubber outside and is slightly smaller than a volleyball and bounces like a huge racquetball. I quickly learned that I should not try to block shots at the net as that left the court wide open for my teammate, which was too large an area to cover for one person. It was hard hitting the ball just right so it bounced off our opponent's side walls but not our opponent's back wall. This was especially true of serving. The surprising thing to me was how quickly I was sweating and I got a great work out. This is an interesting video that shows how the best people play wallyball.

what "Knopp" means to me

2008-11-19T18:29:00.000-05:00

Some events in your life are memorable for a very long time and some you want to forget as soon as they happen. For me, the recent passing away of the patriarch of the Knopp family helped bring back so many wonderful memories. I can honestly say that my whole life would not be what it is today without knowing the Knopp family.

My life was a constant downward spiral for many years after my parents got divorced at my young ripe age of 14. When I had no where else to turn, I forced myself on a couple who attended church at the Knopp's house. At the lowest point of my life, I decided to take a chance and attend the Knopp home church. I had very long hair, which for me was definitely a sign of rebellion that I wanted to portrait to others. I had no idea what to wear to their church or whether I would be accepted with my long hair, but I was desperate enough to try and see what happened. I mainly went because I had just finished reading a book by Haralan Popov and he was speaking at the church that day. The primary reason Popov appealed to me was I had recently read The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski and was fascinated with how communism destroyed people. It is interesting how events just seem ordained to happen sometimes. It felt pretty strange attending a church in someone's home and even more odd that I did not know them at all, but desperate times lead to desperate measures. That very afternoon I decided that the way I was running my life was not working out very good for me and that I needed divine intervention. I really had nothing to loose as I was pretty miserable, so I was willing to take a chance. It is the best decision I have ever made and it changed my life forever. For me it was a miracle.

For that entire summer I attended church either at the Knopp's or with my mother. I quickly felt like the Knopps were a family I had always wanted to have but never had. I remember eating lunch at the Knopp home on several Sundays and observing the family interactions. People were always more important than possessions or time. It seemed like I could stay as long as I needed to - just like a home. Before I left to go at VaTech I had a bond that is hard for me to put into words with my adopted Knopp family. To be accepted for who you are instead of what comes out of your mouth or what you look like is such a great thing. I had no reason to be loved by this family as I had nothing useful to offer them. Sounds like the definition of true love to me. After completing my first full year at VaTech, I wanted to actually do something with my life to help others instead of how I had lived my first 20 years only for myself. The Knopps helped support me the whole two years I was in India, which is yet another reason I am eternally grateful.

When I returned from India, I had no idea where I would stay upon returning to VaTech. Yet again the Knopps came to my rescue. At VaTech, I roomed with two of the Knopp sons where we shared an apartment together. I could not have asked for better roommates as we had a great time together. We had a common hobby in playing basketball and we spent many fun hours every week enjoying ourselves and getting exercise. I met my wife to-be early in that school year and when we secretly got married in February, my perfect roommates graciously allowed us to live with them temporarily. They also helped force us to find our own place to live, which was the best advice they could have given us.

The best memory I have of Papa Knopp was on a visit to their home after we got married. Over lunch I asked Papa what his secret was to raising such great children as I needed advice before we had our own kids. He looked at me and said it was the only the grace of GOD. At the time I was really disappointed as I wanted "the" secret. After having five children and two of them already gone from our house, I fully understand what he meant. Some people who seem to have it all together have all kinds of problems with their kids. Other who have terrible families, somehow the kids rise above the horrible conditions and make something out of their lives for the good of others.

The second best memory I have of Papa Knopp was told by his sons, my college roommates. When I asked them what they thought made him a great father, they told me of a time when Papa lost his temper as the nine sons were getting a bit wild on a long road trip. He pulled over the car and apologized to them all immediately afterwards. Just two weeks ago when I talked to Papa Knopp one final time, he told me that so many good things had happened in his home but he could only attribute it to him being a willing servant and nothing more.

The most lasting impression I have of the Knopp family is how every time I visit their home I feel more encouraged upon leaving than when I arrived. Some people become old and crusty with age, but Mama and Papa just seemed to get better over time. I have to attribute it to their positive attitude of finding the good things that GOD has done for us. If only I could do the same.

Tribute to Papa Knopp: http://sites.google.com/site/papaknopp/

Josh Hamilton

2008-11-16T17:09:00.000-05:00

Last night my wife and I went to see Josh Hamilton and his wife speak at Hope Community Church. It was really more like an interview than him speaking the whole time. He was not feeling well so his wife spoke more than half of the time. It was pretty amazing to hear of his wife standing behind him through all of his drug addiction problems, which he finally overcame two years ago. My wife bought me his autobiography Beyond Belief: Finding the Strength to Come Back. I opened it at 10am this morning and read it straight through, until I finished it at 4pm this afternoon. Having read a couple of books by ex-drug addicts, I must say that this is my favorite one. It is one thing to overcome addictions and it is another to thrive and do something useful with your life.

I am not really a huge fan of baseball as it was my least favorite sport when I was growing up. In my first job out of college, my best friend was a huge Houston Astros fan, so I would often watch games with him when they were on TV. Other than that I seldom watch baseball on TV now or even read about it in the newspaper. A couple of years ago when the Astros made it to the playoffs, I watched with my youngest son just for old times sake. The real reason I wanted to go see Josh Hamilton was that I had read parts of his story in the local newspaper. Also one of his early little league coaches worked with me by testing the code I wrote for work purposes. He would tell me stories of Josh's greatness as he saw him in his youth. Another reason to see him was that I had heard he had fallen for a drug addiction for many years and finally gotten out of it the last couple of years. During lunch at work one day, I heard about his great home run derby feat during all star weekend this year, so it was a great transformation that had taken place.

family matters

2008-11-09T19:18:00.000-05:00

We saw an Indian movie that we really liked last night called Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, which means "Sometimes happy, sometimes sad". It is about how a family interacts with each other. A son obeying his parents and when he does not, how the consequences affect everyone for many years. His father setup a marriage for him and he decided to follow his feelings of love for a "common" woman that broke up the family. Such great family values that apply half way around the world to our family. It never ceases to amaze me how such a different culture has so many applicable wonderful traits that are valuable for us as a family. I don't even have to try hard to favor Indian culture as it just comes naturally somehow to a Virginia country boy like me.

diwali #2

2008-11-08T10:36:00.000-05:00

Last night we attended our company wide Diwali festivities at the local Hindu temple. In past years it was held in the temple hall, but this year because of a scheduling conflict it was held in the main hall that could hold at least 1000 people. The sound system was absolutely amazing and the Indian music sounded wonderful. The event started at 6:30pm and we arrived early at 6:20pm. For all of the times I have been in India and knew better, still for some odd reason I forgot Indian Standard Time. When we got there, a good friend of mine who was the master of ceremonies for the evening was the only one there! At least I got to talk to him for a good 20 minutes as we are always too busy at work for a relaxing conversation like that. At 7:15pm there was but a hand full of people present, a couple of them I knew so there was plenty of time to talk. This event for me is all about talking to friends from work, some of which I never get the chance to talk to about non-work related things. Two of the people I talked to are in my own group and I seldom get any time to talk to them. That is sad, but I took advantage of the time last night and had a great time.

teenager notice

2008-11-08T10:24:00.000-05:00

TEENAGERS!
Are you tired of being harassed by your parents?
ACT NOW!

Move out,
get a paid job,
& pay your own way
while you still know everything!

it's all about family

2008-11-04T15:46:00.000-05:00

This has been one constant driving trip for me this weekend. First we all drove to Columbia, SC as a family and then I drove to Dayton, VA to pick up my mother who was visiting my sister. On the way to Dayton I stopped in Staunton, VA to see the family of my roommates from the good old days at VaTech. Driving through the orange colored Blue Ridge mountains, I wondered if anyone would be home at the Knopps or if anyone would remember me. I feel like they are my family for many reasons. There are nine boys in the family and two of them were my roommates. These roommates saw my wife and I get married and helped us so much those first three months. We had so much in common as we loved to play basketball for hours at the VaTech gym and at home when we were together in Staunton. They were the rock strong family when my family was falling apart at the cracks. When I needed support, they were always there for me. With Mama Knopp close to 89 and Papa Knopp close to 95 and it is hard to tell how much longer they will grace the earth with their presence. I mean "grace" as that is the absolutely best word for them. You just want to be around them in hopes that something will rub off! Mama's body may be falling apart but her mind is simply amazing. If I had just half of her memory at 70 I would be a happy camper. Lastly, it is not that the whole family of 9 boys, 20+ grandchildren, 20+ great-grandchildren are perfect, it is how they are constantly learning how to be more like Jesus Christ as a family. Simply amazing to me.

On my way up the Shenadoah valley to see my sister, I saw the Mennonite region of Virgina as that is where my sister lives. Huge dairy farms with black horse and buggy's outside each home with some homes having many bicycles park along the barns. You could see horse dung on the road as I weaved along the curvy country road. Occasionally I would see someone on a bicycle. These are not racing bikes but simple bicycles with baskets on both sides of the back to hold groceries. As a kid I could remember going through the country side around Harrisonburg and seeing the mennonite people, so I got used to seeing them, but after many years it was odd but brought back good memories.

On the way back home with my mother, we stopped to see a childhood friend of hers who had been her playmate since being in the same crib. She had just turned 80 and mom wanted to see her. That is amazing to see someone remain friends for 80 years. They did not dwell so much on the past as just wanted to talk about each other's family and what was going on now. They had both been through much adversity and had the battle wounds to show for it, but knew they would be friends to the end of their life on earth.

On the 5 hour drive home, one of the conversations between my mother and I was about her brother Claude, since he had served in the military for 30 years. He had joined the Marines when he was 16 years old and served in WWII, Korean War and Vietnam. He retired after 30 years of service, most of the latter years as a chef for officers. I remember visiting him many times as I liked to spend the night with them and eat some of the best food that ever entered my stomach. He smoked like crazy and drank tons as well, but was the nicest uncle I could ask for. The last time I saw him, he was on the verge dying of cancer and was really a skeleton with skin draped over his bones. It was a very sad time for me. I remember going to his funeral and crying for a very long time. It is the only funeral I have attended so far.

proud Army parents

2008-11-01T09:45:00.000-04:00

It certainly was an emotional two days watching our boy become a man. Maybe he should have become a man sooner or learned lessons the easy way, but for now all we can say is that we are proud parents of our new man. Sometimes it is just too hard to put into words how we feel and this is just such a case. We told him how proud we were of him and he said that we were not as proud of him as he was of himself. He said he did things he never imagined he was capable of completing. His master drill sergeant told him they could quit any time and the final night before his graduation, he told them he was on a mission to make someone not graduate. One of the fellows completed his physical training on the morning of family day (our son told us this fellow's first two mile run on entering camp was in 29 minutes and he had to complete it in 16 minutes to graduate) and if he had not completed it he would have not graduated and would have had to tell his parents to not come. He did graduate by the way! There were people from all over the USA there to see this manly sons. I knew almost nothing about the military when we went to Columbia, SC this weekend. I dislike war and cannot imagine having to kill someone, but I have to say that having seen my son turn into a man was the highlight of my life as a father so far. I really like the Army values and creed as they are great values for anyone to have. The regiment commander read these out loud at the graduation ceremonies and all 460 of the graduates yelled the creed in unison at the end before parading off the field - also quite and emotional experience. Our son is part of the 165th infantry brigade, 3rd battalion, 34th infantry regiment, company "B". The regiment is called "Rock Force" and his company is called the "Hell Hounds".

Army Values

Loyalty - Bear true faith and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, the Army, your unit, and other Soldiers
Duty - Fulfill your obligations
Respect - Treat people as they should be treated
Selfless Service - Put the welfare of the nation, the Army, and your subordinates before your own
Honor - Live up to all of the Army values
Integrity - Do what's right, legally and morally
Personal Courage - Face fear, danger, or adversity (Physical or Moral)

The Soldier's Creed

I am an American Soldier.
I am a Warrior and a member of a team.
I serve the people of the United States and live the Army Values.
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough,
trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.
I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional.
I stand ready to deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of
the United States of America in close combat.
I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.

I am an American Soldier.

Army

2008-10-30T15:24:00.000-04:00

So last night we left our home to spend the night in Columbia, SC so we could get up bright and early to attend the family day presentation at 9am this morning. We got there early to avoid the traffic, but just as we arrived at the Fort Jackson exit we could see a huge accident on the other side of the freeway. We found the Hilton field where the event started and I was not able to sit on the metal bleachers as they were so cold and I decided to stand. We got there at 8am as it was to begin at 9am. At 8:30 they announced that due to the accident they would start at 9:30 instead. At 9:30 they announced it would start at 10am and that there was a fatality and 6 cars involved in the accident. As the sun rose it did get warm enough to actually sit on the bench finally. After a couple of people spoke to open the festivities, we started clapping as we were prompted to do. There were around 15 colored smoke bombs set off in the woods across from the stands. Then all of the sudden all of the soldiers ran across the field into position on the field in front of the stands. We sat in front of the "B" company which was the platoon our son was a part of. It was pretty emotional for my wife and I so of course we had to cry, even though we could not even figure out which one was our son. We were all dismissed and allowed to go onto the field to find our son. Quite the emotional experience as it had been 10 weeks since he left the house a boy and today we saw a man in front of us!

Some of the things we heard from talking to him are:

He craved M&Ms, ice cream and Starbucks coffee

First cup of coffee was really special for him

Listening to his iPod was the highlight of his day

He bought a cross to wear

Toughest thing for him was dealing with people - he hated every one in his platoon and it was mutual for everyone

Second hardest thing was camping for seven days in cold

Third hardest thing was crawling in huge field with 1000's of soldiers while live fire was being shot over his head

Fourth hardest thing was having to go through gas mask tests

Fifth hardest thing was to throw live grenades

He appreciates the small things in life a whole lot more now

Some other interesting tidbits of his life over the past couple of months. Out of the 52 total people in his platoon, 12 are women. When he left our house he could not run 100 yards without getting winded and having to stop for breath as he smoked heavily for many years. For his physical training, he was able to run two miles in 13:40, which is totally amazing to me - I am not sure I could run two miles that fast! The longest march they did was 12 miles in 3 hours with 85 pound backpacks. Training constantly changes every time they do boot camp. Now the drill sargents are not allow to hit or touch new recruits and cannot get up into their face except for specific reasons. If you fight you get sent off the base for good. If you disobey orders three times for the same thing you go home. Of the 512 people who started only 460 finished and are graduating tomorrow. Our son is so glad he has completed the boot camp and admitted this evening that he is so much better off for doing so. He also told us he felt strange being among civilians, not marching in a line, and talking about common things.

cricket tournament

2008-10-18T14:23:00.000-04:00

Today was the end of the cricket season for me as I play all summer long to get ready for the local annual AID cricket tournament. This year I was on a different team from last year. Two of the same players from last years's team were on this year's team but all of the other were new. I found out this morning that all of them but one were from Gujarat. My Hindi lessons don't do much good in that situation I am afraid. We had fun playing cricket and talking on the side lines in between and during games. We lost pretty bad, but it was not about winning for us. Last year I got involved as my previous team got very serious during play and I definitely did not want to do that again. I bowled the last game today and that was definitely fun as two of their best hitters hit balls that were caught in the field and thus were out of the game. In that same game when I batted I stayed in longer than I normally do and actually go a hold of one ball and hit it over the fence into the field next to ours for a 6. It was good to end on that note as I got to know more Indians that I enjoy being around and having fun playing cricket.

These are photos from the AID cricket tournament. There are a couple of them of our team members:

Diwali

2008-10-11T19:00:00.000-04:00

Today was the local Diwali Festival. We have attended this celebration around many times previously. In the past few years our daughter accompanied us, but this year my wife and I went by ourselves as are not cool any more I suppose. At the Diwali last year, our oldest son went with us also as he had just moved into his own house down the road from where they have the festival. What a difference a year makes as that was the beginning of all kinds of trouble for us. This year he is nearly at the end of his Army boot camp and a totally different person from last year, which is a great thing.

For me, this year was the best Diwali ever as we met and talked to several Indian friends the five hours we were there. We went early so we could see the younger kids dance as they are he cutest things ever in their Indian saris. I talked to a co-worker who designed all of the backdrops for the stage and the main logo when we first arrived. I had been wanting to talk to him outside of work for some time. Of course I had to stop by and see the man who we rent all of our Indian videos from as he always recognizes me. It was not that hard in past Diwali ceremonies, but this year there seemed to be many more white faces in the crowd. Next I met the husband of a co-worker who I had met last year at a company Diwali party. As I was talking to him I spotted a next door neighbor of ours when we first moved to this area. I watched where he sat with his wife and without being too rude, quickly went over and started talking to him. We saw him a couple of years ago with his family at another local Indian event but had not seen him since. Right as we were leaving I saw another co-worker who I play cricket with and of course had to stop and talk to him for an extended period of time. For me this is a perfect way to spend an afternoon, talking with Indian friends and getting to know them better. Makes me want to go back to India!

best 3D Flash sites

2008-10-08T17:42:00.000-04:00

While I am working on lists, I have to give my top 10 list of 3D graphics sites I have seen:

eco da zoo

Roxik Max2007

Roxik toy

Barcinski-JeanJean

Fat Man Collective

Cheatham Lane

Lamberta

Cristof Echard

Orange 8

Mr. Doob depth-of-field

sports day

2008-10-08T17:34:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was one of the most athletic days of my life. I played volleyball on my company team during lunch and since we lost the match and I did not do very good, I decided to go for a 3 mile run to "cool" off. When I got home my youngest son wanted to play tennis so we took off for the courts and played for over an hour. On arriving at the tennis court, he noticed the Indian cricket equipment I had in my trunk, so I had to show him how to play after we finished playing tennis. I decided to take off today and not do any exercise as my old body needed a break.

favorite Indian movies

2008-10-08T17:24:00.000-04:00

This is the list of my wife and my favorite Indian movies that we have watched over the last couple of years. I still think watching Indian movies are the cheapest and best forms of entertainment on the planet today. We can rent these at the local Indian movie store for $1 each.

Taara Zameen Par
Vivah
Jodhaa Akbar
Bride and Prejudice
Black
Provoked
Eklavya
Guru
Bend it like Beckham
Chak ed India
Dor
Paheli
Veer Zaara
Iqbal
Lagaan
Pinjar
Hum Tumhara Hain Sanam
Swades
Dil se
Pardes
Hum Dil de Chuke Sanam
Fanaa
Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenge
Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham
Nanhe Jaisalmer
Rab ne bana di Jodi

A really good set of links on Indian movies can be found here: Highest Grossing Bollwood movies

beach

2008-09-28T09:28:00.000-04:00

It seems like an odd time of the year to go to the beach since it is almost October, but the water temperature was very pleasant yesterday. The two youngest children went with us to attend their mother's sister's birthday party at their grandmother's which is at the beach. That sounds much more complicated than it really is. The kids and I went to the beach yesterday afternoon as it was a perfect day for such activity. When we reached the crest of the sand dunes and looked at the Atlantic ocean, we saw some very large waves. Of course my youngest son was very excited to see such huge waves as he had never seen waves of this size in person. My daughter was a bit apprehensive at the size of the waves. I stood on the sandy shore watching them for around 15 minutes before they came out of the water and insisted I come in with them. I don't recall the last time I had been in the ocean with waves that were way over my head. I think most of the waves had to be over 8' tall. With the powerful rip currents and undertow we lasted 30 minutes before calling it a day. The fight with the waves was a loosing battle. I tried body surfing a couple of times and that was a huge mistake as the waves were so strong that they just tossed me around flipping me over and over several times. The deciding factor on us leaving, beside the fact that we were tired from the fights with the waves, was that my daughter had a huge wave hit her, flipping her several times and making her sea sick. She says she blacked out and felt pretty sick, so we called it a day. Although on leaving my son said he hoped the waves were still big today as he wanted to go back. When we got back to his grand mother's house, we heard that the huge waves were being caused by a tropical depression in the Atlantic ocean. I was kind of wandering why so much of the beach sand had been eroded as it was the very same place my wife and I had been a month ago and yet the beach looked very narrow with a small cliff going down into the water.

virus

2008-09-24T20:50:00.000-04:00

Although my middle son had a virus the last couple of days and still does not feel well, a much worse kind of Trojan virus landed on our Windows Vista laptop. It just makes me want to throw it away and get an Apple MacBook. We just don't have the money to buy a new one since most of our money went with my next to oldest son to school in California. I just upgraded my Norton Anti-Virus two weekends ago and somehow it got on the laptop anyway. What made it even more painful was that Norton could not remove it. I clicked the "Get Help" button and put into an on-line chat program. From there, the Norton support person was able to take control of our laptop from who knows where. He deleted all of the temporary files and then rebooted my laptop. When the laptop came back up, it then reconnected him using chat to my computer. Then the virus attached itself to a movie I had made with Window Movie Maker, which I found and deleted it. Then after two more reboots, the virus was gone. I had several tracking cookies that also were deleted that had been plaguing me for a while also. In all I lost two hours of my day dealing with a virus I have no idea how it got on the laptop.

tennis and cricket

2008-09-24T20:26:00.000-04:00

The title for this blog entry is a play on words.

Since my oldest son left for the Army all tennis activity has stopped. This weekend all of the sudden my daughter and youngest son and I started playing table tennis again. When we lived in San Antonio we bought a cheap set of paddles and a foam and plastic net. We lost most of the pieces so we temporarily put a piece of wood molding through the foam holders to make a net. We used the dining room table with the extra leaf and even though the corners are rounded we still have fun. It has been over two years since any of us have played but we picked it up quickly again. Of course I have the advantage of having wasted many hours while at VaTech playing table tennis with my best Indian friend. Then when my wife and I met and eventually got married we were either playing tennis or table tennis daily. All of those hours of practice have come back to help me beat my son constantly.

Every Sunday recently I have been practicing my bowling skills in cricket with my Indian friends. Last year I learned how to bat and this summer I am learning how to bowl. Maybe next year I will be able to do both in the same game. Not that I will be anywhere close to doing it the correct Indian way as I spent too many years playing baseball and softball to unlearn those skills. That is not actually the cricket I meant in the title. This morning when I woke up and went downstairs I heard a very loud chirping noise from behind the refrigerator. I hit the refrigerator a couple of time and it stopped but always resumed. I then rolled it out and the noise stopped immediately. I sprayed insect killer around the back wall and the noise stopped, so I went to work thinking the job was over. When I got home from work in the evening the noisy cricket was again rubbing his legs behind the refrigerator. After a rousing game of table tennis my youngest son helped me search underneath the refrigerator and still no noisy cricket was found. I caulked around the back wall where I sprayed in the morning and had finally given up. I took off the back and front of the refrigerator looking for Mr. cricket and was putting the back on, when right on the floor in front of me was a green cricket! The cricket did not survive, but now we have peace and quiet in the kitchen. No more cricket until Sunday when I play my next match.

volleyball

2008-09-17T06:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I participated in my first volleyball game in the competitive league at work and had so much fun. Of course is helps when you are on a really good team. Two people are really great setters and make it easy for me to spike the ball. Two of the other people on the team are great at spiking and in general excellent players. Most points I just enjoy watching them make great shots. It is more fun for me than playing basketball or football as it is not a contact sport! It seems like I get injured when colliding with others is involved, so this is a safe sport for me that can enjoy and get exercise. Of course today I have to return to running as I cannot give that up and on Sundays I have to play cricket.

internet connection

2008-09-17T05:58:00.000-04:00

So my next to oldest son calls last night and wants me to help him find a way to get internet in his apartment. The first task at hand was finding any place close to him where he could get free internet access. He tried Starbucks since they are every where in that part of the land, but they only provide it if you buy something. That is also a mini story as he tried to buy something and his debit card was rejected, but more on that later. Since we have wonderful internet access, I quickly used Google Chrome to search for "wireless hotspots emeryville ca" and 3rd link had exactly what I was looking for wi-fihotspotlist.com. It showed that a Borders bookstore was right around the corner from his apartment and they had free wifi. He mentioned that a couple of people used ComCast in their apartments, so I went to their web site which he went off to Borders. The ComCast web site looks nice and clean and I quickly found the selections available. All was well until I hit the last step, except it was odd that I was never asked for a credit card or any form of payment. I was put into an on-line chat program for the final step. It did not work as I needed a new version of Java to support the chat plug-in on Vista. The download itself took several minutes and then I had to refresh the browser twice and finally I saw I was next in line for a chat person to talk to me. Once she arrived at the chat window she asked me to re-confirm what I entered and the last 4 digits of social security number to verify something or the other. Then the selections I had made we for existing customers, so everything changed when she found out this was a brand new service. Pretty good prices as just for internet access was $25 initial fee and then $25 a month for the first 6 months, for service that is slightly faster than Time Warner, which is what we use here. At the last step she gives me the account number and order number. I try to copy-n-paste it from the chat window but it does not support any type of selections. I asked her to email it to me and she said she was not allowed. So I wrote down the information and then emailed it to my son. The whole process started off nicely, but was a bit rough at the end. At least no up-front payment and no payment at install time, so that was a nice bonus.

road trip photos

2008-09-14T19:53:00.000-04:00

Photos from my son's road trip across the USA.

busy weekend

2008-09-14T17:17:00.000-04:00

Friday when I got home from work, my wife started mowing the yard. This means that I have to finish since it takes too long for her to complete the whole yard. No problem as I think of mowing as walking exercise.

Most of the remaining weekend was spent cleaning the garage and fixing stuff around the house. My day started off removing the downstairs toilet as one of my next to oldest son's friend's dropped his cell phone into the toilet and flushed the toilet thinking the phone would remain in the bowl. All his friends had fun trying to get the phone out by using a clothes hanger and finally after a couple of hours gave up. I was neglecting it hoping it would fix itself, which never happened. I removed the toilet and went to Home Depot to get a new one. Once I got home and took it out of the box, I saw the toilet was cracked, so I returned to Home Depot. Not a good start to my Saturday morning I must say. I got the next better model for $99 and with a little effort had the new one working. While feeling handy, I started working on the downstairs bathroom as the ceiling looked pretty bad. This is a mini story in itself as last year one of the kids broke the upstairs toilet by accident and the water leaked downstairs through the ceiling. I did not complete the ceiling repairs as I should have, so I spackled the ceiling and then repainted it.

The next task was to help my youngest son as he is switching rooms. He decided to paint the walls VaTech orange and maroon colors with two walls maroon and the other two orange. The clothes dresser, which used to be in the room, covered up my handy work, where I ran a TV cable from the adjoining room and left a hole in the wall. I had to repair that hole with drywall and spackling and then repaint it. For once I left the painting to other members in the family. Just as I finished my handy man tasks, I had to quickly clean up and be preentable.

It was time to attend a very good friend's graduation ceremony at the Dean Smith Center at UNC (my affectionately known as the Dean Dome). I remember watching so many Tar Heel basketball games when I was a kid, but have only once been on the UNC campus. To actually be inside the Dean Dome was like holy ground for a UNC graduate. They had photos of every UNC basketball team since the late 1970's in the area where you walk inside the dome. Inside the dome itself there were tons of jersey's hanging from the rafters as well as conference titles and championships.

Today I took some rest and walked with my wife and then took off to play cricket with some Indian friends. Last season I practiced my batting skills, but this year I am practicing my bowling skills. I had fun today as I really bowled well. Once I got home I had to finish working on the downstairs bathroom and take some stuff to the local thrift store in order the finish the garage cleaning ceremony. After so much activity I had to take the Sunday afternoon ritual nap to round out an active weekend.

road trip is over

2008-09-10T20:11:00.000-04:00

Well, it is official, the next to oldest son's road trip is over. He arrived in Emeryville today after seeing the beach in Morro Bay and then traveling up Highway 1 for a while and then looking all around San Francisco. Tomorrow he has his orientation at school and moves into his apartment.

Even though I was all the way across the USA, my day was pretty exciting in a bad way. My car has not been starting very well since Saturday and then today as I was leaving work my car would not start. Fortunately the person who was car pooling with me knew the number to call for our company's security desk. He showed up within a couple of minutes as he was just driving our way when he was paged. He jumped my car even though it was raining lightly. Instead of going home I stopped by my favorite mechanic. It turns out that my car had a good battery but the starter died. After a two hour wait, I finally made it home. Not exactly what I needed was an extra expense with the road trip, but better this happen to me than my son on his road trip!

road trip : almost there

2008-09-09T20:41:00.000-04:00

I talked to our road warrior son this evening and he has made it to Bakersfield, CA. They decided not to go to Roswell on the southern route and instead stayed on I-40 on the northern route. They stopped in Albuquerque for the night and then got up late before setting off to see Meteor Crater which I thought was a bit of a tourist trap when we saw it several years back. They spent several hours at the Grand Canyon, which on the other hand is worth every minute you spend marveling over the beauty and majestic of it all. They spent the night in Williams, AZ which is where we spent the night the last time we visited the canyon as it right on I-40 as you exit the park. They were running out of time so did not see my mother in Tucson, but instead continued to California. They want to see the beach and the large redwoods before our son's best friend leaves by airplane to return home on Thursday morning. The great road trip is coming to a close already...

road trip plus family life

2008-09-07T14:42:00.000-04:00

It is official, our next to oldest son has traveled half way across the USA. I talked to him this morning as he was at a rest stop in Amarillo, Texas. After stopping in Nashville, TN the first night and Fort Smith, Arkansas the second night, they now hope to reach Carlsbad, New Mexico this evening after passing through Roswell, NM. I convinced him to forget about the alien's tourist trap in Roswell and go Carlsbad Caves. Plus I told him to go to White Sands National Monument as these are places we have never visited as a family. Hopefully he will make the right decision. As I spoke to him on the phone while at the rest stop, he saw a road runner and was trying to get his friend to look at it. I think sights like these are helping him appreciate the life he has had as we have seen so many things as a family together. Once he arrives in Arizona, then the sight seeing will really begin as he is planning on seeing my mother in Tucson, then drive through Phoenix on the way to Flagstaff to see the Grand Canyon.

While holding down the fort at home, my daughter helped me paint his old room in our house and it is looking very nice indeed. This morning I took a break and played cricket with a couple of friends. On the way back home I stopped by a lake near our home and ran around it for some more physical activity. I visited Home Depot to get ceiling paint to touch up the mistakes we made yesterday and when I got out to my car it would not start. I called home twice but no one answered the phone, so I made an executive decision and went back into Home Depot to get a socket set. I took out my battery and in a Home Depot cart I took the battery to Wal-Mart which is in the same shopping center. They tested the battery and said it was fine. When I got back to my car I took a cloth I had in my car and cleaned the battery terminals and my car started. When I got home I used my battery cleaning tool and finished the job the right way. Hopefully I will have no problems tomorrow morning to go to work.

news from the Army and the road

2008-09-06T07:40:00.000-04:00

We received news from our oldest son from Ft. Jackson Army base yesterday. He is doing well, which is very encouraging for all of us. He says he is forced to wake up at 4am and goes to bed around 9pm each day. He actually gets off every Sunday, which is definitely surprising, but we don't know what that means exactly. He really looks forward to the evening meal as he says he likes the food a lot; also a bit shocking to me. He has learned to repel and use a gun so far. He likes learning new things and how you have to work as a team, giving him a sense of accomplishing something together. All in all this is great news.

We heard from next to oldest son last night as he made it to Nashville. I hope he doesn't want to stay and become a country singer! I remember stopping at the McDonald's next to the Grand Ole Opry on our trip back to NC, as it is quite hilly and nice in that part of Tennessee. His next stop should be on the western part of Arkansas in the Ozark Mountains. I don't ever remember going there, but I must have been there at least once.

let the adventure begin...

2008-09-05T06:04:00.000-04:00

So my next to oldest son left this morning at 5am sharp for his 3000 mile driving adventure to California to attend school. One of his best friends is going with him so that makes us feel a whole lot better than when he was talking to driving the whole way by himself. They are planning on sleeping in camp grounds all along the way. The last plan we heard, which is definitely subject to change, was for an over night visit in Nashville TN, Little Rock AR, somewhere in the heart of Texas, Flagstaff AZ (where they will make a side trip to see the Grand Canyon), Tucson AZ (to see my mother), then up through eastern CA so they can see Yosemite with a potential side trip through Las Vegas (which I suggested they didn't attempt). Sounds like a wonderfully exciting adventure for a 20 year old to take on a cross country road trip. Especially with a really god friend, who just so happens to have never been further west than the middle of North Carolina. Of course all of this depends on his car, which hopefully will make the journey without giving them problems. We had the whole car checked by my mechanic friend last week and he has extra oil and engine coolant in the car just in case. I emphatically told him that if he goes to Las Vegas just to see it, then he cannot go through Death Valley on the way to California. Just the name alone should scare him, but at 20 of course it does not.

As I was bidding him goodbye this morning, I realized that I was 20 when I went to Europe and then onto India where I spend two years on my grand adventure. Now I am beginning to understand how my mother felt...

raccoons

2008-08-31T09:54:00.000-04:00

This weekend my sister visited us and stayed in the local Holiday Inn Express. In the evening our two youngest kids wanted to swim in the hotel pool, so we went after it turned dark. As they were jumping around in the pool and having a good time under the glow of a big flood light, we noticed under the chairs at the opposite end of the pool there were three raccoons entering through the fence. For a couple of minutes they huddled in the darkness, but they got brave and came out in the light. When they saw our kids, who were playing at that end of the pool about ten feet from them, they quickly went back under the lawn chairs. After a couple of minutes, they all went back through the fence, but that was not the end of them. One was the mother as she was larger in size and the two kits were about half her size. We did not see the mother any more on the cement area around the pool as she stayed on the other side of the fence. The two kits then came out to eat bugs that were flying around or crawling on the floor due to the flood light. They saw our children, but ignored them as they played with the bugs with their paws just like cats do. We watched in amazement for about 10-15 minutes as they were intent on bug feeding no matter who was taking over their normal space. After they got their fill in bugs they left through the fence and we left soon after that. That was kind of fun watching them, but it reminds me of another encounter we had with raccoons.

While living in San Antonio, we had a pool in our backyard. There was a huge farm behind us, so we often had wild animals come drink our crystal clear pool water. I often wondered if the animals liked the chlorine taste! We frequently had opossums come, which I learned really smell quite horrible. Sometimes we forgot and left our cat food plates right outside the back door, which was right next to the pool. The wild animals would come to clean the plates of left overs. One time we had an armadillo fall into our pool and could not get out. I got a call a work on that day as some days I would not check out the pool before going to work if it was still dark outside. One time we had a white stray cat come into the back yard and it started fighting with our cats and somehow fell into the pool. I had to fish it out the angry feline and then escort it out of the backyard without getting scratched. The most exciting event of all was one evening when we looked out towards the pool and saw a mother raccoon with three small baby kits. What was so amusing about it was that they were in the hot tub peaking out over the edge at us! I guess they needed a bath, so at least they did not know how to turn on the hot tube bubbles or they might have gotten over heated. I wish we had a camera to take a photo of what we saw as three little raccoon heads staring at us from inside the hot tub was so cute. Those were the days...

B & B

2008-08-24T07:39:00.000-04:00

That title could be interpreted in many ways. It could mean Bed & Breakfast, or Balled & Burlap, but for this me now it means Beach & Basketball. Every time we go to see my wife's parents at their house near the beach we pass Kenansville as an exit off the interstate highway. For everyone else that means nothing, but for me it always reminds me of visiting them when they lived in that small rural eastern NC town. I played basketball every time we visited them as they opened up a local high school for free play on the weekends. I would show up as the only white guy to play and they would make fun of me until they saw me play as I was very fast on the court from my endless days of running. I would just blow right by them and then they would understand that I was not the typical slow white guy that knew and hated from rural NC. Oh the good old days. I would also meet a bunch of doctors who played at a local middle school and they were fun also but in a different way. They were pleasant to talk to and get to know while playing with them. After playing basketball for over 30 years I gave it up, but that story has already been shared. Now I run to keep fit like I did this morning. It was very nice out this morning as I ran to the sunrise. I would like to play basketball but at the company where I work I tried playing with a team and got hurt the first game. I tried playing in the company football league last year and got hurt they first game there as well. This year I am going to try volleyball, hoping for a different end result.

home repairs

2008-08-23T05:12:00.000-04:00

One of the nice things about having a home is that you have a yard and some land that you can call yours, or in our case we like to think it is ours but actually the bank owns it for us. One the other side is it means you have extra headaches when things break down.

Last weekend our upstairs A/C broke as the water pipe got clogged and when that happens an automatic switch turns off the A/C, which is a good thing as you don't want water running through your ceiling. I called my favorite repair man at Bar-Co mechanical, who happens to be a close friend who I can trust with my $200 that I handed over to him. While we were amusing ourselves at King's Dominion, he fixed our A/C for us so the house was back to the normal coolness when we returned. It always seems like something is in need of repair.

For the last three weeks we have done without a clothes dryer. The button to turn on the dryer did nothing at all. I searched on-line for a timer as that was the indication a bunch of self-repair web sites noted could be the problem. I bought a timer as I could not locate one locally. We waited for it to come and last weekend while we were away, my eldest son took it upon himself to try to install the new timer. When we got home, although we were glad to find a cool house, my bubble quickly burst when he told me he could not get the dryer back together. I was pretty angry as we had waited two weeks already for the timer and now it looked like I would have to call the local appliance repair man. After putting the dryer back together as best I could, I finally gave up and called M&H Appliance. They came out at the first of the week and told me the motor had failed and we had put the timer together correctly. At least we had one thing going for us. I then tried to locate a motor for our dryer. I called Maytag to find the part number, but they would not give it to me, even though I had just the week before called them to get the part number for the timer! I called a local parts distributer, who gladly gave me the part number even though I did not buy it from them. I searched the web and found a new one for $75, whereas from Maytag or locally the same part was $150. The motor arrived yesterday and was waiting for me as my wife announced when I got home. I think she was tired of taking the laundry to the nearby laundry mat every day! I called the man who had come to our house from M&H and he told me how to take the dryer apart to get to the motor, which was nice of him as I had paid him $50 to diagnose the problem, but this was free advice. After a couple of hours, a couple trips to Home Depot and my daughters help for a couple of hours, we got it back together and working by 8:30pm. I already have the next problem waiting for me.

As I crawled under the house to check on the dryer exhaust vent I saw water standing under the house. I wanted to finish the dryer so continued on that task, but after we were done I went back under the house. The downstairs A/C is leaking under the house, so I have to call Bar-Co back today and tell them I have a new emergency for them to take care for me.

Such things remind me of other long term problems we have suffered as home buyers:

1) When hurricane Fran hit this area in 1996, we lost our power for one week. That was not much fun as it was in the first week of September and it was pretty hot at the time. There was nothing we could do except wait for the power company to fix the electricity. After a week of being hot, we went to Greensboro for a night to get a good night's sleep in A/C.

2) We bought a new refrigerator when we switched to a larger house and then it failed within a couple of months. We called for a replacement and it took two weeks to get another one. We used a large cooler packed with ice instead of a refrigerator. They did give us $100 to buy a small refrigerator but that can only hold so much as it was the size most college dorm students use.

3) During the last drought in NC our large-bore shallow water well went dry. That was a pretty big deal, so I called a well driller and forked out $4500 to drill a 400 foot deep well. It only took a couple of days for him to complete the work.

4) Our heat pumps went bad in that same house and since they were 25 years old, there was no hope in repairing them. That little inconvenience cost me almost $10,000 as the whole heat and A/C systems for upstairs and downstairs had to be replaced. Although done quickly the lost of that much money hurt.

There are many, many more house repairs over the years, but those are all of the major ones I can think of that had a lasting impression on the family and myself.