Don't drink & drive

It is such a simple logical statement yet seems impossible for most teenagers to follow. To be totally fair it appears difficult for some adults to adhere to as well. This week I took my oldest son to court for his third alcohol related driving offense. I have to hope that it is finally sinking in that there are consequences of breaking this important law. This is the third trip to the court that is three hours away for us on this same matter. I thought the third time would be the end of it, but turns out that we have to return yet one more time with proof of his attendance in a local alcohol driving school. Not that they teach to you how to drive and drink but what happens when you do! Apparently you can take this class several times and it does not help as my son can attest. I think the hardest think to convey to teenagers is that their actions have consequences. What they do affects others. What they do can hurt themselves for a long time to come. When a teenager can hardly think about next week let along next year this is a problem. On the other hand, it sure is nice to be around them when their energy and enthusiasm it is used for good. Which brings me back to the current discussion. I am so thankful that I have yet to live through a tragedy related to my kids, so the offenses although bad indeed, have yet to cause physical injury to themselves or others. For this I am truly thankful. Weekly I see in the local newspaper teenagers who drive when drunk and kill someone. This is a tragedy that doesn't have to happen and yet does. So sad. For now my son has to live a whole year without a driver's license, so maybe it will sink in for him even though he is well beyond being a teenager. Better late than never.

MRI

I guess all of my exercise over the last four centuries has finally caught up with me. Last week I saw an orthopedic surgeon for my intense knee pain. I waited for around two hours to see the doctor and at first I thought I was being punished for being fifteen minutes late to my appointment, but alas all patients were being treating equally bad. Maybe I am spoiled with on-site health care at the place I currently work. Once the doctor came in to see me it was not a nice experience. He pushed on my knee quite forcefully, I guess to make sure where the pain was located, but I could have told him where if he had asked. Then he pushed on the front of my knee cap and that hurt just as much, but it never bothers me at all. He said that was common with runners to live with tendonitis and not know it. He also asked if I used to play basketball as he could feel a bone spur on my left knee cap as he pushed on it. I wanted to tell him to stop pushing on my knees, but at $139/hr I wanted to get my money's worth somehow. Actually I only had to pay $20 co-pay as the insurance will pay the rest.

This week I visited the Wake Radiology facility for an MRI to find out what kind of cartilage or tendon damage I had inflicted on myself. I had previously had an MRI when we lived in San Antonio as a first cousin of mine had a serious brain aneurysm and all immediate relatives were advised to have brain scans. It was kind of freaky as my whole body was inserted into a narrow tube. The initial paperwork said if you weighed over 300 pounds or were claustrophopic or had metal parts in your body an MRI was not in your future. I got the same notice this week! For the brain MRI there was a small 2"x2" window you could look out of directly up above your eyes, as if that was to help in any way. I just closed my eyes and thought happy thoughts to get through the 30 minute MRI. The end result was no brain aneurysm existed in my head, which is a good thing. I never saw the actual MRI scans or films. I did see the bill for the 30 minutes of extremely loud noise as it was $5000 of which I had to pay nothing as insurance covered the cost. This week I just had to stick my knee into the small tube and the same super loud magnetic rumble carried on for around thirty minutes. In the end I was handed the original MRI film scans and I have yet to see the bill.

The MRI output in my case was 6 x-ray films about 14"x20" in size, with each one containing around 20 snapshots of my right knee at different angles. I tried scanning them using our computer at home. After playing around with a couple of the scanned images using the GIMP image editor, I was only able to get one of them to have any visible contents. That is the one I posted with this blog entry even though it makes my knee look like a dinosaur bone! I will find out next week from my original orthopedic surgeon the prognosis. At least the MRI films look neat.

family art show

I have decided that today is art show day, so I have loaded 3 of the paintings laying around the house.

Sarah's painting:

Nathan's painting:

Andrew's painting:

art of being an artist

I must say that some of our kid's character traits can definitely be traced to their parents. Some good and some bad. One such gene that has been passed down by us is the gift of drawing. I remember winning my first city wide art contest when I was not yet a teenager. I always liked to draw things around me, but the painting that won me the first place prize was an abstract painting of what I thought racing cars was all about. I may even find a photo of that painting one day and post it. My mother picked up painting when she was 70 and is wonderful. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and likes to paint desert scenes. I need to take a photo and post one of them as well. Then my wife picked up painting when the kids were small. She just pulled out one of her first boat paintings from the back of a closet a couple of days ago. one of her boat paintings is hanging up in her parent's house in their living room. Sounds like I need to have an art show in my blog one day! Our oldest son is a artist as well but he has to be in the right mood in order to create, but when he does it is special. Which brings me to the reason for this post as our middle son has recently been doodling as he sits at the computer. I think he would have thrown them away if we had not captured his drawings and put them on the refrigerator door. I have scanned them in for your viewing pleasure, from the family of artists.

being flexible

At work this week, I moved to a new group where the development environment is Adobe Flex. It is a breath of fresh air for me. Today it all became fun when I had a bug in my code and could acutally set a breakpoint and debug the code. For the past several years this simple process was torture. Found a bug in JavaScript? Good luck on finding where it is. Bug in JSP code, have fun finding it. Will an interactive debugger help? I am sorry it should be easy but it is not. Even using IE developer toolbar or Firefox Firebug it just seems like too much work to find a little bug. The best thing about Flex is the UI components, but it is the small things in life that make being a developer enjoyable in the daily trenches.

For the last couple of weeks at home on my Mac, I have been learning Flex by completely rewriting my Attentive 2 Design personal web site in Flex. I covered some of the things that I had always wanted to do in DHTML but never was able to get them working in all browsers. A custom dialog with clickable content, drop shadows, show/hiding content on mouse events. I used Flex Builder 3which was a great Adobe decision by making it work within Eclipse, since that is the development IDE of choice for Java for many years. I am looking forward to having fun again after many years.

perfection vs. addiction

Is it possible to be perfect? How about close enough so you don't cause grief? How good is good enough? Does it matter if we cannot be perfect on this earth? Such big questions don't normally come up very often. For some odd reason I have been thinking about it lately.

At the same time I have been reading another book on drug addiction beautiful boy: a father's journey through his son's addiction by David Sheff. I must say that this book helps more than A Million Little Pieces by James Frey or The Heroin Diares by Nikki Sixx. Having lived a couple of years through our son abusing himself and drugs and the hell it caused, I must say as in everything there is always someone who has it worse than we do. Yesterday I asked my son if he ever did crystal methadone and he said no he did not but every one he knew in San Antonio did. Now that is just another reason we are happy that we left that stage of our lives behind and returned to NC. Maybe a couple of quotes from this book:

• We pretend that everything is all right. But we live with a time bomb. It is debilitating to be dependent on another's moods and decisions and actions. pg 228


• A using addict cannot trust his own brain - it lies, says 'You can have one drink, a joint, a single line, just one.' pg 261


• An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie about it. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you find it. Part of me is convinced that he actually believes that he will find it for you. pg 265


• If they don't die or do too much damage, there's a chance, always a chance. pg 272


• I said, I'm a drug addict and alcoholic. He shook his head. No, he said, that's how you've been treating your problem. What is your problem? Why are you here? pg 295


• Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. pg 302


• I want to open up and hear Nic and believe him, but I am unwilling to tear down the fragile dam that I have constructed to protect myself. I am afraid I'll be drowned. pg 303

There has to be a middle ground somewhere. Either way the mental institution is just a heart beat away if he try to attain perfection in ourselves or our kids.

kids and cards

It must have been the perfect weather with a cloudless sky and spring like temperatures that finally got all of the kids outside at the same time. I started washing my filthy car as it had not been bathed since last fall, mostly due to the water shortage in this region. Before I knew it my daughter came out to help me. By the time we moved onto my wife's van, I looked up and was shocked to see the boys watching us. Not that they were there to help but at least they were out of their rooms.

Later in the afternoon, my daughter and I played cards for the first time in a long time. We failed miserably to win any of our two-handed solitaire games, but as usual we enjoyed talking to each other about everything in general and nothing in specific. After several attempts we gave up and moved onto Uno. It is one of my daughter's favorite card games. She just likes to play and is not worried about who wins really.

Both of these events remind me of my childhood. I used to play all kinds of games with my mother but was a really bad loser. I still don't know why she played with me, but it must have been the word "love". I would get physically angry when I lost at any game as I was so competitive about everything I did. I played football, basketball and baseball in leagues, but I guess I brought that with me when playing games at home with family. Looking back that just seems so stupid of me. That was not the height of stupidity as I did many other such things that would rank much higher.

The other thing I remember is that it seemed like endless chores. On every other Saturday morning I dusting all of the furniture in the house - now today, who even knows what in the world that means? At least I had a sister who did it the other Saturdays. I chopped wood for our fireplace and sometimes did the same for a couple of elderly women in town. I mowed several lawns and at least got paid for doing them. I had to weed our nearly one acre garden. I had to wash the dishes every other night after supper. Most of these responsibilities increased when I became the official man of the house at 14 years old, after my parents divorced. That is when I got to paint the whole outside of the house, fix things that broke around the house and wash and wax the cars. Looking back I am glad I grew up on a small farm as I learned the definition of hard manual labor and responsibility, mostly from forced chores. I did not like the divorce as my family life was not pleasant in that regard and this one event single handily changed the course of my whole life for the worse. That is one of the reasons I am so determined to not let that happen my own kids.

So let the kids and car washing followed up by playing cards continue...