Live for today rings pretty true…

Health and other of life’s pitfalls shove their way into my consciousness. I’m thinking the idea of living for the here and now is not such a bad mantra, as Ellen and Reid found out in last week’s letter.

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March 18, 2013

Ellen/Reid: There is distressing news this morning in that my friend and fellow hiker Tom Bohr had a significant heart attack yesterday while running. He had to be revived by a runner who by sheer good fortune was passing by, and at this point we really don’t know the extent of things other than that Tom is in the hospital. My friend and pastor John Cleghorn called last night but I didn’t see or hear the call come in which irritates me to no end. Tom would be the last person you would ever suspect to have a heart attack. He was fit and trim, seemed to eat right, and was of low-key and low stress temperament. Reid, you never met Tom, but Ellen, you saw him hike like a monster in

Cook Lake in the Bridger Wilderness, Bridger-Teton National Forest, Wyoming, U.S. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

the Bridger Wilderness a couple of years ago, and now this. Tom was a good friend of mine and he was tireless in his 20-30 hours of work each week at Caldwell Presbyterian. I’m just glad he’s alive right now. I talked briefly to John this morning and his encouragement is to keep Tom in our prayers. Tom and I were to head out to the

Back to normal…

This was a weekend for varying members of the clan to hit the skies.

Reid landed Friday in Chicago after his extended work trip to London.  He’s already back in the swing of things.

Emma had her parents accompany her to Michigan and back.

Emma easily claims the Gold Medal for her knack of sleeping anywhere and everywhere – including a comfy spot on her dad’s lap on the trip home from Michigan.

She displayed the inherited trait of being able to sack out on a noisy plane and wake just in time to announce her presence to other passengers within 2 -3 rows of her.

Moreover, now that Reid is back stateside, we will resume the practice of tossing his weekly letter into the mail.

This brings our world back to normal.

Here is last week’s letter to the kids.

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August 6, 2012

Ellen/Reid: The ribs are feeling better day by day although the couch remains the most comfortable place to sleep.  I still feel like a doofus for allowing the slips to happen at all.  Tom thinks a change from heavy boots to more of a running/cross training shoe would help.  Could be.  All in all it could’ve been much worse.  We did see one rescue helicopter venture into the high country, and the destination appeared to be in the direction of a group of 20-some kids we learned about from their adult leaders.  We also read in the Jackson Hole paper about a woman from New York who suffered a compound fracture of the femur – ouch, ouch, ouch – near Lake Lozier (which we sped by save but a few minutes of fishing time) just before we went up top, although there was no real news about how they got her out.  An online search found nothing.  Now that would be real, excruciating pain.  My aches would have been like so many insect bites by comparison.  My golf has taken a hit while the ribs mend but I haven’t missed it a whole lot.  There’s plenty of time to get back in the swing of things down here, like 12 months a year.

So it is back to the daily grind.  That’s okay, I like what I do.  My mid-year review was last week and it was good.  It prodded me again to think about when to pull the plug, and if they will have me until I’m 65, that would be close enough to call it a ‘career’ – if such things still exist.  If you’re counting, that’s about two and a half more years of toil.  Of course, you’re only as good as your most recent week so even the best laid plans can go awry.  But that seems relatively feasible.

Sorry to bother you both with my back-and-forth nonsense about the iPad and MacBook Air.  No sooner had I signed the iPad sales slip at Target when a serious case of buyer’s remorse set in.  The Air seems a relatively good choice.  I leaned on Bob F., too, for his advice, and to sum up he said why get an iPad when the hand-held iPhone is so closely akin to it.  I like the way the Air handles and feels, and the operating system is probably a little more stabile.  Yet to be bought are the equivalents to MS Word.  I’ve got to keep the clunky Acer around for the church newsletter but that is probably the highest and best use for that contraption.  Ellen, the Air comes with Facetime, so keep little Emma within arm’s reach in case Gramps calls.

Reid, you have travel in your veins.  Barcelona?  How the heck does one get from London to Barcelona in the face of all that Olympic zaniness?  Good for you.  I’m envious that you just pull up stakes and go.  It takes some nards to do that when you’re by your lonesome.  What is the total count of nations you’ve visited?  11 by my rough tally, and that may be off a few.  Hey, when you are back stateside, look at the first opportunity to A) get your carcass down to Charlotte or, B) tell me when we should get up to Chicago so you can meet Felicia and vice versa.

Keep the Emma videos flowing to the Southeast, Ellen.  She looked so unhappy, but cute, on the way back from Cass Lake.  She’s a good sport to be in her car seat all the time, especially when she wants to stretch her legs and kick out the jams.  One thing about that sort of trip; you know you’re not childless anymore.  It probably seems as if you had to pack enough gear for a round-the-world-cruise.  Get used to it.

The Olympics have taken up some of the evening tube time although by confession, it seems pretty formulaic; gymnastics, swimming, basketball and the track events.  It gets pretty boring sometimes.  I’m a shoo-in for gold if/when it comes to lazing around on the couch while the rest of me mends.   Too bad I don’t get to go to London to collect my medal.

It’s almost time twice…

It’s almost time.  In fact, it’s almost time twice.

Almost time #1: Until Saturday, and in true guy fashion, the lower living room was strewn with every imaginable do-dad and gizmo for the trip to Wyoming; a new (and lighter) tent and new (and lighter) sleeping bag,

To answer your question, yes, everything fit into the pack (okay, maybe with some pushing and shoving). I’m ready to get this show on the road and hit the dusty trail.

minimal clothing, food, fuel and MSR stove and cookpots, collapsible plate and coffee cup, mosquito net, maps, boots, Tevas, and a few other sundry, lightweight items.  We shove off for Jackson, WY on Friday, July 20.

Almost time #2: Felicia and I head northwest to Minnesota to check in on Emma’s progress at 2+ months and see her folks.  She’s rapidly asserting her personality and no doubt she’ll find her grandpa all too pliable in her tiny hands.

This grandpa thing is still all too new and I’m not sure how to grandparent from afar.  Perhaps this week’s junket will help me figure it out.

From the look of Emma, she still has only two rules: #1) “What I say goes, and #2) See rule #1.” What’s also clear is she is firmly in the driver’s seat.  Perhaps this junket will help me figure that out.

Here is last week’s letter.  Reid is still in the U.K., so his copy went electronic late in the week.

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July 2, 2012

Ellen/Reid: We’ve been hammered by 100F+ heat the past few days.  Reminds you of what summer is really like in the Carolinas which is code for ‘not very enjoyable’.  The humidity is off the charts, too.  It’s just less than hospitable for humans.  My golf group slogged through a round on Saturday with people dropping like flies all over the place.  We had poor one guy taken off by ambulance for heat stroke.  The cart girl came up to us and asked if we knew this guy named Bill, because he needed help and was passed out on the next tee box.  He had crashed his cart and stumbled to the grass.  By the time we got there, the course superintendent had called 911 and help was on the way.  Not a very pretty sight.  It’s all about continued hydration.  I consumed nothing but water and got through in good shape.

Felicia’s daughter Suefan got in Saturday.  She’s a good kid and is about your age, Ellen.  She lives in Baltimore but she and her boyfriend, Ben, are moving back to Charlotte, hence her trip to look at something to rent.  We went to a sushi place Saturday night where, for the first time ever, I knowingly ate some tofu.  It wasn’t as bad as I assumed it to be.  It’s like a bean curd thing.  If you doctor it up (ours was fried) it is palatable.  The raw octopus was really good and so was the eel.  I would never seek out eel at the market let alone fish for them, but in a sushi place after a couple of cold ones and enough wasabi, and it’s not half bad.

Reid, I’ve been wondering how London is going.  What a time to be there: Wimbledon, Olympics, etc.  That is fortuitous in that regard.  There’s no way to get over there in time to see you, what with vacation semi-maxxed out and ticket prices being what they are in an Olympic year.  But there’s always Chicago when you return.  I tried to get Google Plus up and working but it was nothing short of a disaster on my iPhone.  I created the wrong email, couldn’t get the account deleted, etc.  So it’s still not working like it should.  And Ellen, someone told me you can’t do FaceTime from an iPhone to an iPad.  You both have to have to have the same device.  But to confirm that, I will go over to the Apple store tonight to hear that factoid straight from the horse’s mouth.

My trip to California was okay.  Incredible weather and the meetings were fine.  It’s just the return trip that set me back.  To save the bank a few hundred bucks, I took the red-eye back on Wednesday night/Thursday morning, and there is a reason those flights are mostly for younger people.  I hardly slept for lack of a comfortable position.  Left L.A. at midnight and got home about 10:30 a.m.  Was just fried the rest of the day.  Totally gassed, and that lingered into Friday.  No way will that ever be done again.  Traveling just isn’t as much fun as it used to be.

Enjoyed real, honest-to-goodness BLTs the past couple of days.  The little patio tomato plant on the front stoop has come through like a champ.  Its producing tennis ball sized fruit, and they’ve been mighty tasty.  There was an article in the paper about how taste has been bred out of store-bought plants (in the zeal to have eye-appealing red fruit with a long shelf life, most of the tasty sugars have been cut out by the plant chemists).  The commercial varieties are red, sure enough, but with the flavor and texture of cardboard.  It’ll be fun to see how Emma’s little garden is progressing, Ellen.  Can’t wait to get up there to see the little wonder (and you and Tim, too).

The Bridger group came over Friday night.  We didn’t plan much, just hung around and ate burgers and gabbed.  All my gear is laying out in the front room.  Trying to figure out how to take the pack as carry-on luggage since I’ve got two stops with a short layover between each.  Don’t want to risk the darn thing being lost.  In three weeks we’re on the trail, whether we’re ready or not.

Texting = de Quervain’s Syndrome…

The little nodule on Bob's wrist is a sign his knotted-up tendons have rebelled against his rampant use of phone technology.

My friend Bob in Des Moines goes under the knife soon for an entirely self-inflicted, and typically painful, ailment known as de Quervain’s Syndrome (aka washerwoman’s syndrome or mother’s wrist).  Basically, it’s a repetitive motion injury.  It was first identified in 1895 by a guy named Fritz, and Mr. de Quervain had no idea his observations would apply to more than scrubbing floors and lifting babies.

Seems Bob has texted way, way, way more than a wrist can handle.  Look up the textbook definition of repetitive motion injury and you’ll see Bob’s name.  Bob is a tech guy’s techie.  He knows his way around an iPhone better than anyone alive.  That includes the developers.  Just as the rest of us are trying to figure out how to direct dial, Bob pushes the boundaries of tech-knowledge.  In Coeur d’Alene he drove us nuts with continual and usually unsolicited demonstrations of “apps” that ranged from a circular rotating compass to guide our way if we got lost to a hand-held seismograph that recorded his heart beat or jolts when the SUV hit bumps in the road.  We rode Bob hard (the derision was good natured) about his addiction to technology.  Bob’s loss is the hand surgeon’s gain.

Let it be said that unless I begin to sit awkwardly at my laptop keyboard, I should manage to avoid de Quervain’s Syndrome or a similar overuse ailment.  I suppose correct posture and proper ergonomic design of a keyboard are a saving graces to letters.  Bob will recover soon enough to rejoin the ranks of texters, although I hope he’ll subscribe to whatever  “app” will make it easier on his thumbs.

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Here’s today’s letter to my mother.  A seven minute exercise from start to finish.  Things are improving for her medication-wise.  I hope this letter adds a minute or two of brightness to her day.

September 24, 2010

Mom: Officially it’s supposed to be fall right now but the weather guy says today will be another day in the 90s.  Your first frost can’t be far behind and we still worry about sun screen and tee shirts.  There are now drought conditions in some parts of the Carolinas.  I have a little drought situation in my own neck of the woods; the plants in my window boxes are goners since they had stopped flowering and I stopped watering them.  I’ll replant something in their place.

Was on the porch the other day when I noticed that my parsley plant was awfully scrawny and didn’t have many leaves.  On closer inspection, it was filled with a yellow and black banded caterpillar of some sort.  They had munched the plant to nearly nothing.  So I picked them off and squished them.  But in an idle moment I wondered what they were so I looked up North Carolina caterpillars on the Internet.  It seems these were destined to turn into Swallowtail butterflies, and here I’d just assassinated about 20 of them.  If I’d known that I would’ve let them live.  Incredibly, the background on the worms said they preferred plants in the parsley family.  Well, they found mine to their liking.

Was in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho last weekend with some friends from Des Moines.  These were guys I’ve known a long time, and it reminded me how I’ve not been able to see old friends for quite some time.  So it was good in that regard.  We played golf and had a great time eating and laughing (drinking wine a little bit, too).  We played a course where they had an island green you had to take a boat to reach.  The kicker was if you hit the green on your first shot you got a certificate.  I plunked my ball in the water the first day but got a certificate on the second day.  It wasn’t a gimmee in that it played about 165 yards both days.  Nice course, and it was in the mountains which I have missed.  Flew over some familiar mountains in Wyoming.  That was fun to see.

Ellen goes to Des Moines this weekend for some event.  Reid told me last night he wants a new computer but this time he’s going to build one.  How the heck do you build a computer?  He’s already got a jazzy laptop but he says that’s not powerful enough for all the stuff he wants to do.  Don’t ask me what he wants to do but he needs a mega-computer to do it.  Good for him.  He had a good review at his ad agency job this week.  That made his week.

Not much going on in these parts.  Probably take the bike out for a spin this weekend.  Likely will head to South Carolina for the day Saturday.  The forecast is for rain on Sunday which is sorely needed around here.  Of course, the big news is I leave for Grand Island in a couple of weeks and will see you very soon.  Just make sure the ice cream shops are still open, and I’m sure we’ll find a good joint for a burger and a beer.