My birthday

Today, I am 64 years old. When I was much younger, I figured that by the time I got to this age I'd be ready for retirement and would be having a hard time getting around. But as I've aged, my view of aging has changed (I'd like to say it's matured) into the realization that age really is just a number. In a lot of ways, I feel better now than I did 10 years ago! Of course, there are other ways that I feel and look worse than 10 years ago but you can't have everything.

I'm not ready to retire yet. In fact, I love my job and the people I work with. Just this week, we had our yearly job performance reviews and I got the highest rating I've gotten in many years. They are really happy with the work I'm doing and I'm happy to be here. It helps that my job is not a physical job because I would probably have a hard time keeping that up at this age. Although, if I did have a physically active job and was at it every day, I'd probably be in better shape than I am now. But I would also have a greater chance of hurting myself. But with my software engineering job, as long as I can think clearly and continue to enter programs for the computer and write up reports about what I'm doing, I could do this job forever.

Anyway, my hope is that everyone could be as happy with their life as I am with mine.Today's daily devotional from our church (Cape Cod Church, here's a link to the page which is updated six times a week) has a message that is appropriate and includes this encouraging verse.

Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again—rejoice! Let everyone see that you are considerate in all you do. Remember, the Lord is coming soon.

Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:4-7 NLT

Again, I hope to get back into a rhythm of writing more posts for this blog. That brings me great joy, too.

Walking and writing

My blog posts have certainly dropped off again. I think the reason is that, with all the snow we have and with how cold it has been been, I have not been walking, either. I'm not sure the two things are interrelated but it certainly seems suspicious.

Anyway, I may take a short walk in the woods at lunch today to see what shape the paths are in. I'll certainly get a lot of exercise walking in the deep snow. It will be an adventure.


[Update - after lunch]

The woods are lovely, not so dark but deep

Well, the snow is still very deep out in the woods. I made it about 30 yards along the trail and gave up. The picture at the right (just click on it to see it full sized) shows the path I would have liked to take but I was exhausted just to get to this point. I was breathing hard and it was cold. Sweating in the cold is not a good thing. You can get colder mightly quickly after that.

So, I stopped long enough to get my camera out and snap these pictures. My hands were pretty cold in the short time it took me to take this picture and the next one.

My steps were deep, too

The next picture may be hard to place. It's a picture of my foot about 18 inches into the snow.The snow came up to about my knee. So, taking each step was difficult and keeping my balance was not easy either. You never know what is below the snow and it's easy to twist an ankle if you're not lucky.

So, right after taking these two pictures, packing up my camera and tucking it back into my coat and putting my gloves back on, I headed out the way I came. I hoped it would be easier as I tried to use the steps I'd already made in the snow but even that was much trickier than I'd thought. It was good to get back in the the warm, dry office.

Pluto Discovery Day

Two views of Pluto and its moon Charon

Right now, a 1,000 pound spacecraft is streaking toward Pluto at about 30,000 miles per hour relative to Pluto itself. The New Horizons spacecraft was traveling as fast as 51,000 miles per hour (relative to the Sun) after it got a gravity boost by passing close to Jupiter. In July, it will make it closest approach of Pluto and our knowledge of this mysterious body will expand more in the approach and close encounter than it has in all the years before.

It was on this day in 1930 that Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto (although it wasn't called by that name until March 24 from a suggestion by 11-year old Venetia Birney of Great Britain). Mr. Tombaugh was the first American to discover a planet (at least it was considered a planet then). I wonder if that was part of the motive for the International Astronomical Union to demote Pluto from being a full-fledged planet?

There are a wide range of instruments aboard the spacecraft and you can find all sorts of other interesting facts about the spacecraft and Pluto on the New Horizons webpage here. The pictures above, although grainy and not very distinct, were taken by New Horizons when it was about 125 million miles from Pluto. So, it's understandable that they are not the best views we have of Pluto and Charon. Don't worry - the pictures will get better!

Eight years later

About eight years ago, I wrote about playing for a Valentine's Day dance. It was the last time I played at that yearly dance. But this week, I did it again. Here's the link to the write-up about that dance eight years ago. I'm no less neurotic now than I was then but they needed a keyboard player. The trouble is, I haven't been playing as much as I would have liked. I wrote about getting a new, 88-key keyboard about this time last year (here the link to that post) and I really did have high hopes that I'd be playing a lot more. Then the rest of 2014 intervened. I keep promising to write about the trials of last year but I'm not quite ready to write it all down yet.

I didn't take my new keyboard because it' not set up to plug into an amplifier and its own built-in amplifier and speakers aren't loud enough for something like this. So, I took my old, reliable Korg DS-8 synthesizer (that's not mine in the picture but it's still a picture of some one's DS-8). My amplifiers still don't work (I hope to get them fixed some day) but they other guys said I could plug into one their amps.

Anyway, it was a big step to play for the Valentine's Day dance this year. The guys I played with were better than ever and it's an honor to get to play with them. They are real musicians and performers. I learn a lot just by sitting in with them. But I am a terrible live musician and especially when there is no written music. Not even lead sheets (with the melody and chords) like you'd find in a fake book. What happens is that one of the guitarists will mention a song and start playing. If I know it, it helps but often they'd forget to say what key the song was to be performed in. So, it took me most of each song to figure out the key and then the rest of the song to figure out the chord progressions to play. For most of the songs, I just figured out what I should play by the last line of music. But it was still fun.

But the very best part is seeing the smiles on the faces and the dancing of the kids at the party. You see, they are all special needs kids. This is a big deal to them. They all look forward to this dance. To them, we make up a terrific band. Not only that but we get to make our own ice creme sundae and spend some time talking with the kids. It's usually about the things they like to do and what they did that day. And they are so excited! Why do I have any right to be neurotic? Because, as Popeye would say, "I am what I am and that's all what I am." It's doing things like playing for this dance that put the neurosis behind me for a while.

A Big Snow (for Cape Cod)

The big storm that was forecast for yesterday and today hit right on schedule and for Eastern Massachusetts, it seems like the weather forecasters were right on the money. We got a lot of snow and a lot of wind. That combination makes a blizzard and no one who knew it was coming wanted to be out in it. It snowed all night and the wind blew it around with gusts of up to 58 mph. It was supposed to stop snowing around noon but it didn't. I took these pictures around 10 AM.

It was hard to walk around in our yard. There were a few low places that the wind scoured out but those places didn't go where I wanted to go and there weren't that many of them. My guess is that we got about 18 - 24 inches. It's hard to be sure because there were drifts well over 48 inches high and bare places with barely a few inches. I know people in other parts of the country and Canada would laugh at our inability to deal with this amount of snow but we're just not used to it. Plus, this winter has seen particularly little snow so far. So, this was a shock. In the picture to the left, you can see how little snow is on the cars and how much has drifted up around them. But it's not all drifts because it's about that deep over most of our yard.

This next picture shows the drift in front of (and on top of) my mother-in-law's part of the house. She won't be using her front door. The last picture shows our front porch and how the snow drifted up in front of the porch higher than the porch itself. My son and I started to dig out the driveway and got within a few feet of the road when the wind and cold got to us.

We've come in to warm up a bit but I wonder if we're going to go out again tonight. It's getting dark and the snow is still coming. The wind has died down but there are still gusts once in a while. My office was closed today. It was nice not to have to feel guilty about not going in or rushing to try to get there. But work is on for tomorrow and I may be taking vacation time to do some more shoveling. We'll see.

Just click on the pictures to see them full size.

[Update: The reports on TV news say our town got 24-25 inches of snow]

A little mystery is solved

Often, when I'm talking with people, they will say, "How do you see out of those glasses?" Then, I'll usually clean my glasses and be amazed at how much better I can see. I like clean glasses as much as the next guy but they get dirty so slowly that I don't notice it. Of course, what I should do is just clean my glasses regularly. But I don't do that. I should. I will work on that.

But the way I've been handling it is to be very careful when handling my glasses. I never touch the lenses when I'm putting them on or taking them off. I carefully put them up on a shelf above our bed when I go to sleep at night. So, once I clean them, they shouldn't be getting dirty. I know that if I'm outside in the rain or in a dusty environment, they are going to get dirty and I'll need to clean them (after being informed about it). But why should I have to clean them that often?

Well, this morning I realized what is happening. When I woke up this morning, our cat was crying and he wouldn't stop. I was afraid he'd wake the kids (my wife and I were already roused by the meows) so I wanted to get up quickly and I grabbed for my glasses. It was dark and I couldn't see them so it took a few grabs before I got a handle on them. And then it hit me. The lenses now had my fingerprints all over them! The oil from my fingers was now going to start collecting dust from the air. That's how my glasses get so dirty so fast. It was obvious this morning but now I realized that every morning I search around for my glasses and touch the lenses with my fingers. How could I have been so blind?

So, there it is. I've now decided that I must clean my glasses every morning. Whether I think they need it or not. Because whether I remember it or not, I've touched them with my fingers just about every morning.

A parable come to life

I heard a story on the radio this morning about a non-profit hospital that is being investigated because it is suing some of its poorest patients. This is happening around the country and it involves hundreds of patients but the story concentrated on one family. In this case, the family had a low enough income that they should have been eligible for free medical care under the hospital's own charity guidelines. But instead, the hospital has had the family's pay docked for 10 years and they still owed $25,000.

Senator Grassley of Iowa has been working for years to make hospitals accountable for the tax breaks they receive as non-profits and he also made sure that language in the Affordable Care Act (sometimes called Obamacare) got hospitals to provide more charitable care. By the way, Senator Grassley is a Republican - there is room for both parties to work together for the common good). From the NPR story,

Grassley says the health care law may need to be strengthened in order to force nonprofit hospitals to offer financial assistance to poor patients. "If they don't get the message now, we'll have to work towards getting the ideal language in the legislation," Grassley told NPR and ProPublica.

Non-profit hospitals have been offered a gift of not having to pay federal income tax or local property tax. Yet some of them turn around and refuse to help those who owe them. This reminds me of one of Jesus' parable as told in Matthew 18. It's sometimes referred to as The Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor.

“Therefore, the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. He couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold—along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned—to pay the debt.

“But the man fell down before his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I will pay it all.’ Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt.
“But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment.

“His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it,’ he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full.

“When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’" Matthew 18:23-33 NLT

It's not exactly the same, of course. In the parable, Jesus is explaining how we have been forgiven so much and that we should, in turn, forgive those people in our lives who have done things to us. If we can't forgive them, we are no better than the unforgiving servant in the parable. But the similarity is the blindness of the hospital that is similar to the blindness of the unforgiving servant. We must be careful, though, to not look for revenge but we cannot just let it go, either. We must work to correct injustice and stop the Unforgiving Debtors of the world to continue their selfish behavior. Hats off to Senator Grassley for his attention to this.