Not much writing this year

This should have been my best blogging year ever. But, instead, it was the worst. Well, technically, with this post, this will be the second worst year for me. I only wrote four posts in 2017 and this will be my fifth post this year. But that's not much to be excited about.

There was so much to write about this year. Of course, the Covid-19 news was terrible but a lot of good things happened, too. I could have written a lot about my disagreement with most Evangelical Christians in their backing of the current President. I really feel they were deceived and gave the cause of Christ a black-eye with their answers to what he has done and said. But now that he has been voted out, there is no need to pile on. But if they continue to back up his terrible policies and his lies and deceptions, I may have to write about that.

But many people rose to the occasion and helped other people through these hard times. Many people looked around at what needed to be done and did it. Many people pivoted and changed their own lives to meet the needs of others. New businesses were started. People learned to do new things so they could help others. And many things just continued to go well. I could have written about the people who continued to work through the pandemic, like my son, in spite of the dangers of getting infected.

My son works as a veterinary assistant. Their office changed to not let the owners of the pets come into the office. The pet owners drove to the parking lot and then called into the office to let them know the pet was there. Then, my son and the other assistants would go out to the car to pick up the animal and bring it into the office and help during the appointment. Then, after the appointment, they would take the animal back out to the car. Unfortunately, many pet owners would not be wearing masks. My son had a couple of close calls and had to get tested two times. Fortunately, he tested negative both times. But the worry continues as the number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths continues to climb.

So, while the passing of the year 2020 will not put an end to this problem, it will lead to a new President who takes the pandemic seriously and will not be looking at national problems as ways to make him look better. He will be working to solve problems. That can only be good news. I am looking forward to the next year.

One other thing to look forward to in 2021 - I plan on retiring in March. After 33 years of working at this job, I'll be taking it easy. I look forward to that.

Life in Limbo

How can I not write anything about what we are going through right now? We are in the midst (or the beginning according to some people or near the end according to others or this isn't really happening to some others) of a world-wide outbreak of a virus named Covid-19 and it has altered how most of us live and work - and for some, die.

I have been working from home for the last two weeks and I have had a hard time adjusting. My workspace here is tiny (I'm in our old laundry room which was freed up when we moved the laundry stuff upstairs). I am not used to the distractions (different distractions from work). Finally, my interactions with my co-workers are now very different. I can't just walk over to someone's desk to ask them a question or offer help myself. It's taking a lot of effort to get anything done because I'm spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to work.

I had said earlier this year that I hadn't written in my blog for such a long time because of two things. I talked about one - my mother-in-law was slowly dying of dementia and other complications of a fall. But I never got around to talk about the other reason. That reason was (and continues to be) work related.

I am the sole person working on our company's largest software product. The reason is that this product is old (first started around 2002) and is slated to be replaced some time. But customers still use it (a lot!) and there is no replacement yet. But it was decided that I could handle this all myself because we have a number of new projects that need people working on them and since this is old software in "maintenance mode" (notice the parentheses), there is not much to do on it.

But there is a lot to do and it takes a lot of extra time that I don't list in my every two weeks time sheet. Why would I do that? Well, I didn't at first. I took every opportunity I could to let the world know how hard I was working and how I could use some help. But that got no results. Everyone was just too busy to help (except for some specific problems) and the company wasn't interested in hiring new people to work on an old, mature product If they were going to hire new people, they should work on newer projects that were the future for the company.

So, here I am. I put out two releases of the software in 2019 and I was working on releasing a third before the end of 2019. But then the hardware it was to support wasn't going to be ready. So, I waited around through the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays expecting any day to be told it was time to release. This went on through the New Year, too. And then through February. Finally, in March, 2020,I was told we had to release - RIGHT AWAY. And we did. On St. Patrick's Day, we released the latest version - with me (and most of the Engineering department) working from home. But despite how daunting that was, it did get released and I could finally relax, get back to my blog and other things I'd been neglecting. I was glad.

But then - it was decided we need to release another version right away to get something out quickly. So, I'm rushing to get this one item completed so we can do a quick release soon.

So, that was the second reason for my writing so little in 2019 and it's still a reason 2020 is starting out so slowly. Maybe I will write a bit about how we are coping with the virus outbreak and the Stay-at-Home directives we are all dealing with. Other people are doing such good writing about this that I won't be adding much. But I can tell about how this is affecting me and my family better than anyone else.

Holistic Thinking

A wholistic hole on Mars

 

I've known what Holistic means for a long time but for some reason it just struck me today that it is
misspelled. Here is one definition I found:

Philosophy
Characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

Medicine
Characterized by the treatment of the whole person, taking into account mental and social factors, rather than just the symptoms of a disease.
  
Definitions from: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/holistic

You can see where I'm going by the words I highlighted in the definition. Holistic should be spelled Wholistic. Even as I type that, Blogger says it is a misspelling. Well, it's not. Everyone is wrong but me. I'm sorry to break it to you, world, but I'm going to stand my ground on this one.

Now, if you are interested in studying the illnesses of people who work in coal mines or if your philosophy is covering deep subjects or you are wondering just how far down the Colorado River is when you're standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, you are welcome to use Holistic to name your studies. Otherwise, you need to be talking about Wholistic Medicine or a Wholistic Approach to combat global warming[corrected misspelling 07DEC2022].

The picture here is from NASA: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140309.html

Yes, I'm off to a bad start this year for writing in my blog. And this post is not going to encourage anyone to stick with me. But this is it, folks. This is how my mind works.

More about Angie

I was going to move on to the second reason why 2019 was a hard year for writing in my blog but I wanted to say a few more things about my mother-in-law, my wife and my children.

Angie had a great sense of humor. If you asked her how she slept the night before, she'd say, "Laying down." Whenever she was going through a tough time, she'd sing, "Why oh why did I ever leave Wyoming," even though she'd never lived there. She used to go to rock concerts with Cindy (her daughter - my wife) even though she didn't like the music much, just because Cindy have many close friends to go with her or friends with Cindy's taste in music.

I was so proud of my children. My son snag with me during the funeral mass at Angie's church. He has a wonderful voice and many people complimented his singing and he was asked a few times to join that churches choir. But he sings in our church's choir. He wasn't nervous at all. He loves to sing. As I mentioned before, and at the reception following the burial, "All Welshmen think they can sing. With that many people singing, there are bound to be a few really good singers stand out."

My daughter delivered the eulogy during the funeral mass. She wrote it her self and covered all the important and endearing things about her grandmother. She read it in a clear, firm voice. I could tell she was moved by the loss and by the service but she didn't falter.

Cindy was wonderful. She organized everything and lead us all through the tough time. She held her hurt and loss in so she could talk to everyone and renew old friendships. She loved her mother so much. She sacrificed her own wants and needs to make sure her mother was comfortable and being well cared for. She organized the nurses and other care givers. She made the room as comfortable as possible. She would never hear of letting her mother go to a nursing home. Angie spent her last years in the house she and her husband Ralph had build so long ago. She was a wonderful woman. We will miss her forever - at least until we meet again.

Why last year was hard

As I said in yesterday's post, there were many reasons why I didn't write more last year. But none of them should have kept me from writing at least a short note from time to time. But I'm going to list two reasons I used for not writing. In this post, I'll list the first, and hardest. My mother-in-law, Angeline (everyone called her Angie), was in declining health and it just gradually got worse until she passed away just before Thanksgiving last year. That's her picture at the right - before she started to show signs of the dementia that would take her life.

Angie was a wonderful mother, grandmother, wife and mother-in-law. She and I got along great. She was a big science fiction fan and we enjoyed watching The Day the Earth Stood Still every time it was on TV. She also liked The Twilight Zone and Star Trek. She preferred the original series even though her husband Ralph was a look-alike for Patrick Stewart of the second series. She didn't see the resemblance but everyone else did.

On the left is a picture of my wife Cindy with her mother. They were the best of friends and did everything together. In 2006, when I started this blog, we decided to move from our house that was about a mile away from Angie to build onto her house so we'd be there when she needed us. For most of that time, it was the other way around. She helped us. We enjoyed being with her because she was just fun to be with. She always had a funny answer and kept us going. 

But about four years ago, we noticed her getting forgetful. She started needing help with little things she'd always known how to do. Then she started to forget who some people were and then started forgetting that the house she was in was hers. She wanted to go home. We had to do more and more things for her but her pride sometimes got in the way. It was hard for her to admit that she forgot some things and that was the hardest part for us to deal with.

The picture to the right is Angie and her two grandchildren. We were used to her coming over to our part of the house to ask about things or to ask us to take her home. But then around Memorial Day last year, she was returning a dish and instead of putting it on the table, she bent over to put it on the floor. She lost her balance, fell down and hurt her arm. We called the ambulance and they took her to the hospital and they found she had a fracture in her arm. But instead of admitting her to look for further problems or to get her into a rehabilitation hospital to learn how to cope, they just sent her home with instructions to get a cane! That was the beginning of the end. She could hardly move and certainly couldn't learn to use a cane without instruction and practice. Cindy had already been sleeping in the room nearest Angie's house in case Angie needed her during the night but now, Cindy had to sleep in the room with her mother. Angie got worse quickly and seemed to lose all hope.

We had to get a hospital bed for her and got health aides to come in to help. Cindy was losing sleep and hope and it was terrible to see. In the last couple of weeks, after the visiting nurses warned us that the end was near, Cindy slept on a mattress next to her mother's bed and held her hand through the night. One night, Angie just stopped breathing. I thought Cindy would fall apart because of how close she was to her mother but there was too much to do. Cindy kept busy and still remains busy doing things in her mother's name or because she knows her mother would like that.

This house will never be the same. But we are all better because of Angie.

Surprise

I am still around. I haven't published a blog post since February 4 this year. There are many reasons I haven't written but there really is no good reason for not writing a blog post once in a while. It doesn't take that long and there are certainly a lot of things to write about and the list of subjects continues to grow. There are so many terrible, wonderful, funny and tragic things happening that just invite comment that I could write a post every day. But the writing itself is the hard part. I don't know when I realized that. I used to think that writing was easy but that is because I wasn't critically looking at my own writing. If there were words on the page, I would think that was writing. Coming up with ideas is easy. Getting on to Blogger to write is easy. But writing a coherent, interesting story is not easy. Even spelling is made easy with Blogger's automatic wavy-red-underline marking for suspected misspelled words gives you the most obvious corrections. I even misspelled "misspelled" the first time and corrected it with a click.

So, rather than wait for tomorrow to begin my New Year's Resolution of writing in my blog, I'm starting today with this post. It's neither coherent (which I also misspelled the first time) nor interesting but I can work on that. It's the old story - If you want to be a writer, write!

I am hoping to write more blog posts in 2020. It shouldn't be too hard to do better than this year. The first few posts could be about what happened in 2019 and why those things worked against my taking time to write blog posts. Also, I've seen some interesting movies, read some interesting books and learned many new things. My faith in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, continues to grow. The pastor of our church continues to give us encouragement in his sermons and teach us new things about taking the gifts we've been given and using them in our community and spreading the Good News.

One final note, I'm going to read through the Bible this year using The Bible Project daily reading reminders. Of course, you can just read straight through the Bible but the resources at The Bible Project offer other things like animations explaining the layout of each book and other background resources. It also ensures that you read a Psalm each day, along with the main reading for the day.

Here is wishing you a happy New Year ahead.

The phantom police car

In this earlier blog post, I said I would try to write down stories from my childhood so my children could see how I learned as I grew up. Nothing is worse for a child (or young adult or anyone for that matter) than to think they should have all the answers and abilities they will need in life at a young age. And I think we, as adults, often assume that children (and young adults or anyone) should be as experienced as we are at their young age. We must remember what it was like when we were young and making mistakes. And we need to let our children know that it is not the end of the world when they make a mistake. So, I am going to try to remember stories about when I was unsure of myself or found myself in a difficult situation. Then my children can benefit from my struggle and mistakes.

Now, all that being said, this is a story from my teenage years and is not going to be a great lesson to anyone. It's just a funny story and my kids enjoyed it when I told it to them.

I was in a drum and bugle corps and had some great friends in that group and we often got together to go see other drum corps and marching bands in competitions when we got a chance. So, one time when four of us were driving home from one of those shows, we found ourselves behind a bunch of cars going a lot slower than teenagers in a car want to go. The guy driving the car was the director of our drum corps and was older (in his twenties) than the two of us in the back seat. The other guy in the front of the car was an old friend of the corps director. They had gone to high school together and knew each other better than us. So, as our frustration grew at the slow drive, our two older companions looked at each other and said something like, "It's time." Apparently, they'd been in this situation before and had a plan they'd used before. To their credit, they didn't do anything dangerous like try to pass the three or four cars in front of us. They didn't do anything annoying like beep the horn or flash the high beams to get the cars to move. They were the kind of guys you could trust to do the right thing. But not necessarily, exactly, the lawful thing.

They rolled down their windows, stuck their heads out and made an amazingly accurate recreation of a police siren with their voices. It was loud and clear but the the two of us in the backseat had to wonder if it would really work. The "siren" kept going for a while with no response from the cars in front of us but then, improbably, we saw a turn signal go on and the car directly in front of us pulled over. When that happened, the second car in front must have thought, "Well, I don't see a police car or flashing lights but that guy behind me must have seen it so I'll pull over, too." And the ripple effect worked. All the cars in front of us pulled over, too. Our driver knew it would work and he was ready. Off we zoomed and I thought I was going to die - not from dangerous driving but from laughter.

Now, after telling my children this story, for the first time, I wondered how long those poor cars stayed off the road. Obviously there was no police car so how long did they wait before deciding that they'd been had? I hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.