Tag: personal (Page 4 of 10)

Testing Day

May 2, 2017 / DB

So yesterday was a fun day: I got to experience the joys of having my first colonoscopy. Yep, big time fun it was.

A few of you have already been through this rite of passage. For those who haven’t, fear not; this is not going to be a highly detailed account of what went down at the endoscopy center.

The reason I was going in a little early (white folks don’t generally need to get scoped before 50 if they don’t have a family history) is that I’ve been having some weird stomach issues for the past year and a half. The symptoms have changed over time, and often didn’t seem related to each other. But they’ve persisted long enough that I went in to see my regular doc and ask for her thoughts. She couldn’t think of any obvious causes or explanations for my issues, and thus sent me off for a scope to get a look inside. I was all for it. Most of you know it was colon cancer that killed my stepfather and I have no reservations about getting tested early.

The results were a mixed bag, but in the best possible way. Unfortunately the scope didn’t show anything in the area of my abdomen where I’ve been having pain. Which is both frustrating and encouraging. It could just be a diet issue, or I may need to do some other tests if the pain continues. They did find and remove a polyp the doc said could have become problematic down the road. So that’s good.

Colonoscopies are one of those procedures that we all seem to dread. I’m guessing they used to be a lot different than they are now. I was knocked out and a roughly five-hour stretch of Monday afternoon is a complete blank to me. There was no pain after. I slept for over nine hours last night and woke feeling crazy refreshed. I would say I still feel a little off today, but more from a combination of lingering effects of the sedatives and low blood sugar than from the procedure itself.

It was the prep that is tough, though. And even that wasn’t as bad as some suggested it would be. The hardest part for me was not eating any real food for 36 hours before the procedure. I’m not a good hungry person and I was getting pretty grumpy before I began the Gatorade and Mirolax cocktail part of the prep Sunday evening. I didn’t get much sleep Sunday as the Mirolax did its work. But, still, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

I had only been knocked out once before, when I was 18 and got my wisdom teeth removed. I have moments of semi-clear memories from after the procedure yesterday, but most of it is a complete fog. Apparently I told S the same story about one of the nurses living in the same neighborhood as several of our friends from St. P’s three different times. When I mentioned it again at dinner last night, even the girls laughed because S had told them I was repeating myself.

(Yeah, the girls laughed and laughed when I told them what I was going in for. “They’re putting a camera where?!?!”)

And then there was just a tiny bit of awkwardness because I met the doc doing the procedure at a social event a couple years ago. He had been enjoying the vodka at that event. I’m glad to say he was clearly sober yesterday. We have some mutual friends, and he and his wife have a lake house on the same lake as ours. We may get together over the summer when our mutual friends come to the lake. I sense an opportunity to compliment him on his boat/house/lake toys that I’ve now helped pay for.

Anyway, it’s all done now. I’m glad the results were good but wish I had a better idea of what was going on in my belly. For those of you who get to wait a few more years before you get scoped, I say don’t sweat it. If you follow the guidelines they give you ahead of time, it’s a piece of cake. And you’ll get to take a really good nap after!

Trivia Man

February 13, 2017 / DB

Once upon a time, not that long ago, I was known as the trivia guy. Where other people mastered law or medicine or sales, my mind was best suited to accumulating a nearly endless parade of useless if somewhat interesting facts about old pop culture, sports, and history.

Some might say I had a gift.

My reputation reached its zenith when I ran a daily trivia email list for something like three years. It kicked off when I got one of those “80s Trivia Question of the Day” calendars and shared each day’s tidbit with a few friends. That list of recipients grew and grew until I think I was sending it to something like 60 people a day. After year one, I kept it going with questions I came up with on my own. Keep in mind I was gainfully employed during this span. Fortunately, my boss said he was cool with it as long as he was on the list and I got my real work done.

Anyway, some of that gift faded as I grew older, memories went hazy, and fatherhood destroyed significant portions of my brain. I can still remember a lot of stupid shit, but not nearly at the same level of clarity as I used to.

All that is leading up to how we spent our Saturday night: at St. P’s annual trivia night. This was our third year participating. Year one I went in focused and excited and was quickly humbled. Questions were all over the place – why can’t they just ask for 80s movie quotes? – and I felt stupid before we got through round two. There was some bullshit question where they handed each group ten kinds of pasta noodles and we had to correctly identify them. How is that trivia?!?! Our team finished in the bottom quarter.

Year two I relaxed and decided to socialize and drink and not sweat the questions. I believe there was some turnover in who made the questions, because they felt significantly easier. Still, our group was middle of the pack and the night was more about fun than competing.

This year we added a couple new families. I was excited about one couple, as their three oldest kids are all the smartest in their classes, always landing on the class honors list. They’re both attorneys and can both talk about just about any subject, so I thought they would really help.

I’m not sure who decided how to split our group, but it ended up being husbands against wives. Not that it mattered all that much, since we generally find a way to split spouses, but that meant the ladies table had our medical expert, who often comes in handy for a question or two. Still, we had ten reasonably smart guys spanning a roughly 20 year age range: I liked our chances.

I’d love to give you a full, round-by-round breakdown of the contest but A) there were 85 questions over 3.5 hours and B) I was drinking all night. Memories are hazy.

What I do remember was we were in the zone all night. We aced the first section, missed just one on the second section, and then did shockingly well on the entertainment question.[1] Turns out when there are a collective 18 daughters from the group, you know a lot about High School Musical and Twilight! The first time they flashed the scores, we were one of four teams tied for first. The ladies were one point behind us.

We kept nailing category after category. Each group gets a mulligan to place on one question per round. We were consistently getting nine correct and placing our mulligan on the one miss. Scores went up again after the 6th round and we were all alone in first. Amazingly, for the second year in a row I was the only one at the table who could correctly answer two questions in the “Have You Been To Mass Lately?” section. Which is a misnomer because they’re more questions about the local Catholic schools and churches rather than mass itself, and the two I knew were both related to high school sports.

Anyway, we get through all 85 questions and are feeling pretty good about ourselves. Then again, we had been knocking back beers, mules, and drunken grapes for almost four hours; it was impossible not to feel good!

Finally the final scores flash and we were the big winners! We missed only five questions for the night. Second place? Our ladies! No collusion here of any kind, I can promise you! That was awfully fortuitous, though, as only the top two teams win prizes, and both prizes are rather fat gift cards to a local restaurant. So looks like the 20 of us will all be going out again in the near future.

Our attorney friend was by far the MVP. But it was nice to exercise that part of my mind that was once so powerful and contribute.

Long a category where the wives distance themselves from the husbands in the groups that are split by gender. ↩

In The Box

August 31, 2016 / DB

I was not looking forward to this week. Not because I had a medical exam on the calendar, or because I had to deal with some other uncomfortable, personal issue.

Nope, I drew the jury duty card for this week.

Luckily, while I had to report yesterday, my service was completed in about three hours and I was a free man before afternoon school pickup time. I was sweating it, though.

I got called for a criminal case at the county court. The case revolved around a seedy tale of crooked cops, the scourge of illegal drugs, justice denied, and the general decline of our modern society. Well, not exactly.

It was actually an obstruction of justice case against a fire fighter from a small community who was charged with removing drug paraphernalia from the scene of a car accident that involved a relative of his.

This was my first time actually having to go to the courthouse for jury duty in Indiana. I’ve been called at least three times before. Once I got excused after I sent a letter to the judge saying I was a stay-at-home dad with a three-month-old at home.[1] The other two times I recall, I called the night before and heard that my entire group had been dismissed. But this time I had to roll in by 8:15 Tuesday morning.[2]

The bailiff ran through the procedure for the morning. From our group of about 30, fourteen of us – selected in order by their random juror number – would get loaded into the jury box for voire dire. I was #18, so thought I was safe.

Not so fast, though!

Not every number was accounted for. Although I was #18, I was in fact the 14th juror on the panel. So I got to stroll into the courtroom and sit in the jury box, the final person in the second row of seven. I will admit, the chairs were amazingly comfortable! We got a lengthy address from the judge, who was a former judge in private practice and filling in due to a family emergency by the normal judge. This guy was hilarious and kept all of us at ease. He rambled on through his instructions and initial questions to us for about 40 minutes. Then both the prosecutor and defense attorneys got 20 minutes to ask us questions.

I had no idea how Indiana courts worked. Could they select any seven of us from the pool, or were we considered in order? I didn’t realize until the end that those of us at the back-end of the first 14 were not getting a lot of attention. I was asked three questions, while a couple folks in the first 10 got peppered with questions. I should have figured out what was up and relaxed a little, but I was sweating whether I would end up on the final jury the whole time.

After the question session, the judge asked for the attorneys’ lists of who they wanted to strike from the panel. Wow, was it tense in the jury box! Jurors 3, 5, 10, and 13 got the boot. The judge asked the front row to slide down two seats, then for the first two people in my row to join the front row. He asked the attorneys if they approved, they both nodded, and he announced that the first seven would serve as the jury.[3]

I was free! There is no relief like the relief of not making the final cut for jury duty!

My biggest relief was that, unlike most cases that this court hears, this was expected to be a three-day trial.[4] I think the pace was going to be slower than normal because of the substitute judge. I’m all for doing my public duty, but three days seemed like a lot. I have a Google news alert set to track the case, but haven’t seen any new stories come across today.

I celebrated my freedom by eating a huge burrito and having way more caffeine than normal to counter the headache that had been building all morning. And I said a quiet prayer of thanks to the jury gods for looking out for me.

Shocked that worked! ↩
I had jury duty in Kansas City once. We had to sit around for several hours, waiting for the judge to call us for selection. The bailiff kept coming in and telling us it would be soon. After about 4 hours we were dismissed and told we had drawn a murder case, but the sides had been working on, and finally agreed to, a plea deal. ↩
In Indiana if you’re called to serve, you get a two-year reprieve from future jury duty. One poor guy who made the final jury served as a juror in a very high profile case against a state elected official 26 months ago. ↩
“A three-hour tour…” ↩

Farewell to VHS

July 27, 2016 / DB

So after this month, no more VCRs will be produced. Wait, they were still making VCRs? I guess there are probably some folks out there with shelves full of movies – purchased or taped from TV, professional and personal – who were never interested in buying them all again in a digital format, or didn’t want to invest the time and effort to convert them to digital.

I know I still have some tapes stored in a cabinet in our basement. Some of those tapes hold great sentimental value, even if I haven’t watched them in 20 years or more. There is a single tape that holds the 1988 NCAA national championship game on it. After the game is a couple hours of post-game coverage from CBS, CNN, and local stations in Kansas City. And after that, I have random coverage of the parade to honor the newly crowned Kansas Jayhawks, speculation of whether Larry Brown would leave KU for UCLA, and other local sportscasts from that week. I think that tape is just about full. It would be fun to watch one more time.

But the video I’d most like to watch is one my buddy John N. and I made our junior year of high school. For our creative writing class we wrote and filmed a parody of the movie Colors, a dark, gritty look at the LA gang scene that starred Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. We loved that movie because it was probably one of the first mainstream feature films that embraced hip-hop culture. I’m not sure how well the movie has held up, but I bet I could listen to the soundtrack today and still love it.[1]

Anyway, we decided to make a suburban version of Colors, which we cleverly called Colours. Our version followed the major plot lines of the original, just dropped into our sleepy, Kansas City suburb. Instead of slinging rock, the drug of choice in our film was cherry Pez. We included a drive-by shooting and battles between the cops and gang members, only we used water guns rather than real weapons. There’s a dramatic scene in the real movie where, in the midst of a gun battle, the guns of a cop and gang member simultaneously jam as they aim at each other. They struggle to clear their weapons and reload so they can get the first shot off. We stole that scene too, but in our version the combatants ran out of water and had to dip their “water-type Uzis” in buckets to reload.

We filmed the whole thing in one afternoon following school. When one key “actor” failed to show, we sent a crew up to school to recruit someone who would shoot baskets for a few minutes then get blasted in a drive-by. So a sophomore none of us really knew had a bit part in this grand cinematic effort. We had parts of scenes get wiped out when our camera person forgot that her family’s video camera would back up 5 seconds each time she stopped filming.[2] But it ended up being pretty much what we wanted: funny and fun to do.

Looking back, I wonder how we didn’t get invitations for immediate entrance into the USC film school.

My favorite memory of Colours, though, came from our teacher. She had not seen the original movie, and in order to fairly grade our project, she thought she should. So she went to the theater with several viewings of our flick fresh in her mind. She told us later that people were staring at her in the theater because she was laughing out loud at appropriate times. She couldn’t help but think of our comedic take of certain scenes nor contain her laughter.

I believe we got A-’s.

I may need to find that tape and make sure it gets digitized before it’s too late.

I checked, it’s not on Spotify. I could only cobble together about half of the tracks from checking each artist. I bet I have it on cassette, though. ↩
WTF?!?! ↩

Looking For A Spark

June 30, 2016 / DB

This is year 13 of this site.[1] That’s kind of crazy. Over the past maybe year or so I have, for the first time ever, struggled to find things to write about. It’s not because I lack time. I have plenty of that. It’s not that I don’t want to write. That’s still something I feel compelled to do at times. And since I don’t enjoy phone conversations, this site has always been my way of staying in touch with friends who are scattered about the country. That remains a central goal of my writing.

I’ve found that what is missing is those little nuggets of inspirition. Some of that is because I don’t watch nearly as much TV as I used to. A pretty good chunk of my posts in the first 6–7 years of the site were based on things I saw on TV. I don’t have a little notebook full of silly/interesting tidbits I saw on TV anymore.

The bigger change, though, is my kids. Those of you who are parents know that your kids slowly do fewer delightful things as they get older. It’s not that they don’t still do interesting things. They absolutely do, sometimes even more amazing things than when they were little. But these moments come with greater gaps between then. I think it may be easier to share those infant/toddler moments than older moments, too. Everyone loves hearing about a baby rolling over for the first time, saying its first words, taking its first steps, etc. Sharing the brilliance of a fifth grade social studies project has a less universal resonance. Even with three kids, those little moments of must-share brilliance are less common.

I’ve been trying to come up with a way to prime the writing pump. The other night it finally struck me: rather than bundling the links I share into single posts I put up every couple of weeks, I need to use those linked stories as fuel to kick off my own writing.

So that’s my plan. I’ll be sharing links more often, with more of my own thoughts attached. Hopefully this gets me going again, and gives you more enjoyable things to read here more often.

As always, your attention is very much appreciated.

First post here. Shame on me for missing the anniversary. ↩

Election Days

May 2, 2016 / DB

A classic bait-and-switch subject line! You might think I’m about to drop some thoughts on the races for the Democratic and Republican nominations for president, as we are on the eve of the Indiana primary. You would be thinking wrong, though.

My interest in and passion for politics has been beaten up, brutalized, and nearly destroyed over the last eight years. Most of that is a result of the toxic political climate we live in, an era where it isn’t enough to disagree with someone and work to prevent their policies from being implemented. In fact, there has been very little debate based on pure policy in the Obama era. Rather, it’s an era where public demonization is standard. One where you don’t say, “This is bad policy, let’s try something different.” Instead you say, “Obama hates America. His policies are destroying America. And anyone that supports him hates America.” Etc.

Which means those folks have won, at least where I am concerned. I won’t get into political debates, I barely follow the news anymore, and I’ve disengaged almost completely. Which is the goal of the people who do nothing other than tear down rather than offer alternatives. They want people to either vote out of fear, or to remove themselves from the process. I hate that I’ve let them win, but I also find it easier to let them beat me out of the process.

Nope, this post isn’t about that at all. It’s about how I just won the first elected position of my life.

I am the new head of the kickball program at St. P’s.

This was not an office I sought, at least initially. I was kind of interested in joining the athletic commission, which also requires being voted-in. But a few of our kickball coaches approached me about filling the vacant coordinator role last week. I asked around, got a feel for the job, and decided, “What the hell?” I have two girls playing kickball already. And L will be playing the minute she’s eligible. I have no interest in coaching 13–20 screaming girls. The best way to support the program, beyond keeping score, is to take on the administrative role that guides it.

I heard there was another parent interested in the role, someone I know pretty well, who has coached before, and is almost universally beloved at St. P’s. If she wanted the job, I’d vote for her over me. But I also heard she had just thrown her name in because she was afraid no one else would. I contacted her last week and she confirmed she really didn’t want the job. She’d be happy to help me in any way, but she was more focused on her job and getting her two extremely athletic girls to all their games and practices.

I had just cooly eliminated my only competition for the job. The Clintons would be proud of me!

Anyway, last night was the meeting where new officers and coordinators were voted in. I got some ribbing from a couple dads I’m friendly with who coordinate other sports that I had “snuffed out” my competition. When kickball came up, I was introduced and the director said I was the only candidate, so the job was mine.

By acclamation, bitches!

The out-going coordinator handed me a couple tubs of extra jerseys that need to be recycled/donated, a couple bags of balls, and a promise to send me all the documents she has to help me do the job. She is hyper-organized, which will be good for me as she shares her records. She was also phenomenal at the job, which makes it tough to maintain her standard. I kind of have no idea what I’m getting into.

I know I have to send a lot of emails about getting girls registered, recruiting coaches, communicating with the CYO office for scheduling, etc. And I’ve always excelled at sending emails, so that won’t be a problem.

It’s also my job to get uniforms collected and stored in the next week or so as the spring season wraps up. Then get them distributed in the fall. I have to help start a whole new set of teams, as there will be a fall, third-grade league for the first time ever this fall. And I get to be the arbiter of conflicts. I’ve been assured that there have only been a couple complaints from parents in recent years. But if/when they surface, I get to deal with them. Someone remind me to check my sarcasm before I respond to the parent complaining about their daughter getting on the C team instead of the A team, when everyone who saw the tryouts knows this kid is lucky there’s not a D team.

It also has the chance to be a really cool experience. Like it or not, sports are often the face of a school, even at the grade/middle school level. When I’ve kept score, parents from other schools have told me how they never have problems when they play St. P’s teams, or how they enjoy coming to St. P’s because they always feel welcome. Beyond making sure the girls have a great experience, I can’t think of a more important goal than continuing an atmosphere where our teams, coaches, and parents compete hard but with respect and kindness and in a manner where other schools enjoy playing our teams. Even when we’re kicking their asses!

Make no mistake about it, we’re going to win. A couple coaches are already in my ear about ramping up the tryout process and I’m totally down with that.

To wrap this up, I’d like to remind you of one of the funnier stories from the early days when S and I were dating. One night I asked her if she played sports growing up. She said yes, she played kickball. I laughed in her face. She just about punched me as she said, “KICKBALL IS A REAL SPORT!” I checked with my female friends who went to Catholic schools in Kansas City if they played kickball growing up. “Sure, at recess,” was always the response. As I have learned, organized kickball is a very Indianapolis, Catholic school thing.

Almost 16 years later I have two girls playing, and another who is 18 months away from her first game. I keep the book and get kind of fired up during games. And now I’m running the damn program.

What a world. What a time to be alive.

April 22, 2016 / DB

I’ve always secretly made fun of those folks who get all emotional when a public figure dies. No matter what effect their work had on your life, I didn’t understand how an actor or singer or whoever dying would cause you to show public grief.

I think I understand those people a little more today.

Yesterday sadness for Prince’s death slowly grew within me. I spun his tunes, I listened to the two SiriusXM stations that had his songs on repeat and were taking calls from fans, I watched MTV – which had his videos in constant rotation – and VH1 – which was showing Purple Rain on repeat – and checked in on the news channels to catch parts of their pieces. I read tribute pieces online and watched the handful of videos of his live performances that he could not get removed from YouTube. All that slowly combined to make me pretty damn sad by the end of the night. At one point I was reading tributes that other celebrities had posted. While scrolling through those, “The Cross” came on my iPad and it was almost too much. Watching the performance of “Purple Rain” at about 12:10 AM with some bourbon in my system was not a dry-eyed moment.

I thought about how silly that was. Yes, I was sad that a man who meant so much to me had died suddenly. But why? I had not bought an album of his in nearly 20 years. The last album of his that I put in high rotation was *Diamonds and Pearls* in 1991. The majority of my best memories of Prince came from 30 years ago.[1] Those songs, videos, and movies are not disappearing with his death. I’ve been listening to them again all morning.

So why do we get sad when a person we never knew dies?

I guess a chunk of that sadness is actually our way of saying thanks. Regardless of your view of what happens to people when they die, I think being sad is a way of sending out signals that you appreciate what that person did when they were alive to contribute to your happiness.

There’s probably some kind of yearning for our youth wrapped up in it, too. But since I hate that kind of discussion, I’ll skip it.

Our own, personal grief certainly gets wrapped up in it as well. I never saw Prince live. I was supposed to back in early 1998, but came down with the worst case of the flu I’ve ever had and sold my ticket. I was so sick I went to my mom and step-dad’s house for two days and she brought me Advil and Sprite and chicken noodle soup while I laid on the couch moaning. I was thinking of that last night, and remembered that concert was about six weeks before my mom died. I’m sad my step-dad is gone, too.

You can’t help but pull these moments that are specific to your life into this larger, universal moment of sadness.

I was comforted that, through Facebook, texts, emails, and regular conversations yesterday, I saw that so many of my friends were having similar feelings. Well, I’m not happy so many of my friends were sad, but you know what I mean.

I’ve never felt that way I do now after someone I admired, but was not related to, died. In a weird way, I guess there’s no better tribute than that.

And now, “Sometimes It Snows In April” just came on and I think I need another minute to myself.

I used to cry for Tracy because I wanted to see him again

The ones that stood out the strongest: seeing the “1999” video for the first time; hearing “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy” constantly in the summer of 1984; the first time I heard “Raspberry Beret” and, like so many people, not appreciating its genius immediately; watching the “Kiss” video with my classic rock loving uncle, who hated every second of it. ↩

User Error

March 29, 2016 / DB

This post-Louisville entry centers on one particular moment of my visit, and explains why I missed the first four minutes of the game on Saturday.

I took my fancy camera to the ‘Ville. I got a few decent pictures with it, but each time we made a pit stop, I questioned whether I should leave it with the truck or keep lugging it around.

It became problematic when we toured the Louisville Slugger factory and museum. Photography is not allowed when you’re inside the factory. We joined our tour group late and as we were catching up, we passed a guy who was shamelessly snapping pics of everything with his phone. The tour guide said, “Please, sir, in the back, photography is not allowed inside the factory.” Everyone looked to the back of the group, saw me with my camera hanging around my neck, and assumed the guide was talking to me. When he had to repeat himself three times I started getting some pointed looks. But homeboy was now taking videos with his phone. I put my camera back in the bag to make sure folks knew I was a rule-follower.

Later in the day, I took some good-natured ribbing from some friends.

“What’s the deal with the real camera?” one asked.

“I’m getting old and needed a hobby, and it’s cheaper than a sports car.”

That seemed to work.

Anyway, perhaps you see where this is headed.

To enter the KFC Yum! Center, you have to walk through metal detectors and have your bags searched. A security person looked at my bag and informed me that cameras of that size/type were not allowed inside. I was about one beer short of saying “Are you fucking kidding me?” to her face. Instead I said “Are you serious?” She had zero sympathy for my plight. In fact, she seemed annoyed that a guest to her town wouldn’t be fully versed in all the rules of the venue.

So, with about five minutes to tip off, I pushed my way back out through the crowd waiting to get in and ran 10 blocks to throw the camera in my vehicle, then ran back to the arena. It was warm, I was wearing jeans and a jacket, and I was both pissed and nervous about the game. I was sweating quite a bit by the time I got back and gained entry. I was also wearing boots, not the ideal footwear for making a jaunt through city streets. I still have blisters and shinsplints.

In retrospect, I probably should have checked the rules on what you’re allowed to take in before we left the truck for the last time. I know some other stadiums don’t allow certain kinds of cameras in, but I wasn’t even thinking about that at the time.

And, yes, I did consider trying a different door, or not telling them there was a camera in my bag. But I also figured that would just delay the inevitable and I should get to my truck and back as quickly as possible.

I finally walked in just as the game hit the first TV timeout. Then I went to the wrong side of my section and had to wait until the second TV timeout to work my way around to my seat. It was a terrible start to the game. And, obviously, I am to blame for KU’s loss because of my struggles.

Feel free to file this under Stupid Things Happen To Stupid People.

The Local Celeb

March 9, 2016 / DB

We have a star in the family.

My wife appeared on the local noon news yesterday in an Ask the Doc segment. Her topic was kids and sleep, one that was especially timely given the time change this weekend and the state reading test that all third graders begin on Monday.[1]

It was a fairly quick three-minute appearance, but it was very much live and I think it’s ok for me to share that she was a little nervous. There was the nervousness that comes with being on live TV. But I think the thing that gave her the most issues was something we didn’t know about: live bits like hers often have to be roughly scripted ahead of time so that the closed captioning can be keyed in before the the actual segment.

So while she could talk about how much sleep kids need, get on average, and so on for hours, in the back of her head she had to make sure she was not drifting too far from the words she and the producers had agreed on ahead of time. I think that would freak me out more than being on live TV. I’d be afraid I’d start rambling, realize it, and then get super flustered because I knew I had screwed up the closed captioning.

She did great. Which is good because she’s going to be doing this every couple of months. It’s always good when the first experience isn’t a nightmare!

I have to give her a little grief. She told almost no one that she was going to be on. A couple of her sisters knew and that was about it. So her dad and step-mom were surprised when they looked up and saw her on their TV screen. That makes me laugh.

The girls’ reactions were funny, too. I recorded the segment and we watched it after we got back from volleyball and dinner. The first thing they did was laugh uncontrollably. M especially would not stop laughing like a donkey and making weird faces and body movements. I really should have recorded her reaction because it was completely ridiculous. I think they were all laughing just because it was so weird to look at the TV and see their mother’s face on it. I’m anxious to see if any of them bragged about it at school today.

The host took a quick pic and put it on Twitter before the segment aired, too. So S got her first live TV appearance and Tweet in the same day. Not bad for a Tuesday!

Nice timing there, state of Indiana! ↩

A New Beginning

January 18, 2016 / DB

It has not been the best start to the New Year. As I would imagine most of you know at this point, my stepfather died a week ago today. I had mentioned his health issues, somewhat anonymously, in my final post of 2015 and my early posts for 2016. Unfortunately, his cancer had reached the point where there was just no beating it. As much as it hurts to lose him, I’m thankful that he is no longer suffering.

I realized, after talking to other folks who were closer to him, that he never gave me the true story of how sick he was. He hid test results from me. He was not honest about his pain levels. And so on. For some reason he decided he didn’t want to worry me about his situation. Which seems silly, because I was already pretty worried! I just hope that he wasn’t in more pain than he otherwise could have been because he was too stubborn to tell anyone about it.

I appreciate all the support I’ve received from so many of you, whether through text, phone calls, emails, or my friends who attended the memorial service. Honestly that all helps a lot, whether you realize it or not.

So here we are on January 18 and I feel like the New Year never really started for me. I left for Jefferson City the first time on New Year’s Day afternoon. I spent nine of the first 16 days of the year there. When I was back home between trips, I honestly just kind of sat around and waited for the calls I dreaded but knew were coming. I still have cleaning I need to begin from the holidays. There were some projects I wanted to begin after the girls went back to school that are still sitting idle. From the blog’s perspective, I still need to run through my December book list, share a bunch of links that have been sitting around for nearly a month now, and try to get back on a regular schedule here.

Writing here has always been both a way of keeping in touch with my friends scattered around the country and a kind of therapy. I don’t share all my thoughts, concerns, or worries, but I do crank many of them out here. So while it may seem odd to list “posting to the blog” as an item for getting back to normal, it is really something that is important to me.

February 1998 was a really bad month for me. That was the month when my mom died. I had a group of friends who also went through bad patches of one kind or another that month. On February 28, a buddy invited us all to his house. We were going to order pizza, drink a lot, and as the clock ticked toward midnight, we would countdown as if it was New Year’s Eve. We would put the bitch that was February in our past and hope that March brought better times for all of us.

I’m not going to be quite so dramatic about it, but as today is a holiday, I’m going to use it as an excuse to reboot my 2016. It’s been a really shitty three weeks. It’s time for things to get better.