It would seem that this version does.  In words of my late and almost sainted mother, “This is a good thing.”

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We’re going to try and correct that on this, a “day off.”
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Image by sgtret via Flickr

If the blog entries have been sparse and few between, we are going to pull the cancer card.
Starting with the discovery of a lump in the neck the day before thanksgiving and up to last week I have gone through a roller coaster of emotions. “Could be cancer, could be something else.” This was the phrase that put a damper on getting treatment started.  The next was “Could be lymphoma, could be carcinoma.”

Where we are now is it could be only aggressive or it could be aggressive combined with slow growing.  To determine that a sample of the bone in my hip needs to be taken tomorrow. 

The chemotherapy begins on Thursday.  We’re expecting blizzard like conditions on Wednesday.  My son was born during a blizzard, so I will take that as a good sign.

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Image via Wikipedia

As I recall the 1960’s, they took forever.  Starting with Eisenhower still President and ending with his VP, Nixon as the same, everything in between seemed so full of moment, as narrated by …

Image by sgtret via Flickr

It isn’t quite winter yet. That begins tomorrow at 17:47 UTC. (That’s 5:47 PM in London.)

However, it would appear Winter decided to send a calling card prior to arriving. I look out the second story window of my office down onto the driveway where my car should be parked and see a pile of snow with an antennae protruding from it like a sapling freshly broken from the soil.…

Note: Cross posted from SquareSpace.

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Image by sgtret via Flickr

In my youth I had an image of where I would be so many decades later, meaning at my age now.  I saw myself sitting in a high backed easy chair, by a fire, across from the missus, reading a good book.…

If you are a parent, you probably have read the children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. 

We need to replace a damaged front door, frame and all.  For that purpose we rented a dumpster.  The door was fixed in a few days but we have the dumpster until Monday. …

Image via Wikipedia

This is the day we remember those who have left us over the past year.

We have Memorial Day and Veterans Day and Pearl Harbor Day and September 11 to remember the monumental tragedies of war and terror. Today we remember the people around us, who lived and died living what some call the normal life.

We visited Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts yesterday.  There are monuments to that same Pearl Harbor Day, to the Cuban Missile Crisis and to September 11th as well. 

What I found most touching were the looped videos being played at each station showing interviews of those who once sat in the same chair when the ships were in harms way.

Whether these people are alive now or dead, these videos serve as their ghosts. 

They don’t speak of heroism, but of their daily attempt to to live normal lives while on a ship where over two thousand men slept stacked deck to overhead and side by side with a volume of explosive death whose job it was for them to deliver to other people who too were attempting to maintain their normal lives living on similar vessels or crunched into lava tunnels defending islands they were commanded to steal only a few years earlier.

When we visited the Alamo, as we walked around the quite church surrounded by highways and warehouses; we saw the room where Jim Bowie was bayoneted. I wondered then how a modern war interview with combatants from both sides would have played. Did the Mexicans see this as a pursuit of terrorists from another country? Did the Texicans see this as their struggle to break free from a greater military power determined to crush the spirit of freedom they so recently won from what they saw as another dictatorial foreign invader?

What would videos of the normal people on both sides, thrust into this short usurpation/revolution say? Would they complain of the close quarters, the long walks, the noise of the cannon, the poor cooking skills on both sides?

Then I think of a the forlorn picture of a Pakistani musician in Boston.com’s recent Big Picture spread of the current conflict.  When you look at that sad and confused face, was he thinking of lines of battle, strategy for the supremacy of one mode of living over another?  Or was he thinking of the seven children that he needs to feed, of the instruments he needed to earn a living left behind, of the gigs he would miss?

While all of this continues, I hope we can still maintain this illusion of living normal lives.  It is the only way to survive.

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When I write a blog entry I never expect anyone to read it.  That is why it was a total shock to find one I had recently written while in a philosophical mood on Belltowernews.com.

It was seen by me as mostly an historical observation.  The almost instant remarks referring to me as a person of opposite political opinion of the commenter but using words that require the vocabulary of a school yard bully were a surprise to say the least.

We have a universal policy of not posting comments that relay on profanity to support their opinion. We will never hesitate to post any comment written cohesively & without commercial intent.

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