Life with a 2 year old

I don't use the oven much in the summer, but today being the coolest day since May, and since Lauri was an hour late getting home because of physical therapy, I decided today was a good day for a frozen pizza.

So I turn on the oven and throw in the pizza. About 5 minutes later, I notice a slight odd odor that I can't identify. About 2 minutes later, the odor is stronger, and disturbingly chemical in nature, so I go on a hunt.

I open up the broiler pan in my ancient gas stove and find this...


What you are looking at is the bottom half of my broiler pan and two melted and toasted pieces from the interior of my refrigerator that were, last I knew, in the junk drawer. Apparently Alex decided they should be in the broiler pan instead.

The reason they are on the bottom half of the broiler pan is that the top half was done in by a melted sippy cup over a year ago.

Most of the time, I can't imagine why someone would voluntarily go their whole life without becoming a parent.

Other times, I totally get it.

Meet Jeff...

Hey everyone, I'd like to introduce you to Jeff.



Jeff and I have been co-workers for 7 or 8 years now. He served in the Navy during the gulf war, he likes paintball and massive-multiplayer RPG games. Once in a while he jumps in a very cold lake for a very good cause. He's a pretty cheerful guy and always treats people well. I don't really know his wife, but his daughter Erin is adorable. We're not best buds or anything, but we get along well at work.

Jeff got a little thick around the middle in his 30s just like most of us. A couple years ago he saw the "big-four-oh" coming up and decided he didn't want to be forty and fat. He started watching what he was eating, and working out. He started a "Biggest Looser" type contest in our office that helped me loose 5 pounds this year. Jeff himself has been looking pretty trim and fit lately, he's about as healthy as you can be.

Except, of course, for the brain cancer.

About mid-June, Jeff got back to the office after a workout and had a grand mal seizure at his desk. I won't go into the details, but it was pretty dramatic, and a hard thing to witness. He left in an ambulance, but a few hours later he was feeling perfectly fine. He was told that seizures like the one he had are relatively common and are usually not serious, but they made an appointment for an MRI, just in case.

The MRI showed a small lesion in his left temporal lobe. It was about the size of a dime, close to his skull and just above his left ear. Jeff was told that it was probably not serious. After discussing options with his doctors, he chose to have it surgically removed and have a biopsy performed.

A few days before his surgery, he started having headaches. They thought it was a sinus infection; he got some of the strongest antibiotics out there. The headaches got better, then they got a lot LOT worse. They did another MRI and found that the mass had grown from the size of a dime to the size of a golf ball.

His surgery was scheduled for the next morning. They got it all. They did the biopsy and found out that it was stage three cancer, which means that it was growing rapidly and very close to spreading out to other parts of the body. He was very lucky that they found the tumor when they did.

Jeff was back in the office for a few hours today, and I had a chance to talk to him. His Oncologist told him that his chances for beating this thing literally could not be better. They found the tumor early. They got it all out. He's getting the most advanced treatments medical science has to offer, and cancer aside, he's very very healthy. That helps a lot.

Working out and eating right has paid off for Jeff. The seizure that started this whole thing was probably triggered by his workout. Without the seizure, they wouldn't have caught the tumor early. Jeff is going to be around for a while, and in more ways than one, it's because he decided to take care of his health.

I've been thinking for a long time that I need to take better care of myself. Despite the weight I lost this year, I'm still hauling around 10 or 15 pounds of unnecessary flesh. I don't exercise enough, I drink too much coffee, I eat too much junk food and not enough salad, and I haven't had a physical in a few years.

All of that is stuff I've been meaning to change, but I never get around to actually doing anything about it. I'm sure a lot of you are in the same boat. We all know that being healthy will prolong our life, but it's a pretty abstract concept. We hear all kinds of statistics about how people who eat blueberries live an average of 6 months longer or whatever, but we never really connect all of that with our lives. When we think about living a few extra years, we think about living to know our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and when you're still young, that doesn't make a big impression.

Talking to Jeff today changed the way I look at things. It wasn't anything that he said necessarily, it was just sitting there, talking to a guy about my age who might not be here, right now, today, if he hadn't decided to improve his health. It made the whole idea of prolonging my life a lot more real.

We don't all live to be old. There are car accidents. Heart attacks. Cancer. A million things that can go wrong and kill you, but if you're lucky enough, and healthy enough, maybe you get to live.

I love my family. I love my friends. I love being alive and I want to keep doing it as long as I can. If that thing that you never expect actually happens to me, I want to give myself every chance I can to live through it.

So I made a decision today. Or maybe it's realization. I didn't decide to take a walk every day or limit myself to 2 cups of coffee or to stop eating cookies. I might do those things, but rules, chores, prohibitions, don't really work for me. What I'm talking about is something deeper, more basic.

And I really mean it.

I decided that I want to take care of myself.

I want to be healthy.

I want to be here as long as I can.

I want to be like Jeff.

I want to live.

(for a more detailed and accurate version of Jeff's story, go to www.caringbridge.org/visit/Hammerhead)

Flower Blogging

One of the things that I've learned since buying my house 2 years ago is that when it comes to landscaping, Lauri and I make a really good team. She comes up with lots of great ideas about what plants will look pretty where, I like digging in the dirt and have a knack for making those plants grow. We've done a lot with the front part of the house this year, and we've done a pretty good job with it if I do say so myself. All the mid-summer stuff is blooming, so I thought i'd put up some pictures.
We started with a good foundation, a previous owner did a lot of nice things, and the hostas you see here are part of that. They wrap around both front corners of the house. They're overdue for dividing, so next spring I'm going to put a row of them on my south property line next to the driveway. Although much of what this previous owner did hasn't survived subsequent neglect, we still have a very nice cherry tree and some currants, which I don't have good pictures of at the moment.
These are some boxwoods where the cedar hedges used to be. The cedar hedges were so badly neglected that there was nothing for it but to put them out of their misery. These don't look like much now, but imagine them four times this size and all trimmed up. Or check this blog in about 3 years for the pictures.
This is the end of the driveway, there are some sparse lilacs, survivors of my first ever transplant experiment last year. They kind of blend into the grass in this picture but they will be a nice thick hedge in a few years. In front of that you've got some peonies, which I moved up from the middle of the yard last year. I didn't used to like peonies, but I'm warming up to them. There are some pansies around it, the two shrubby things are Holly. I didn't know plants had gender, but the one on the left is a girl holly, and the one on the right is a boy. They both get white flowers in spring, but as long as there's a boy plant nearby, the girl plant will get bright red berries in the fall. They're new this year, they are one of several of Lauri's ideas that I was skeptical about at first, but after seeing them in the ground, I've realized she's pretty much always right about this stuff.
This is my favorite. The gladiolus came from a clearance rack at wal-mart last year, and about 1/4 of the bulbs were in really rough shape. I planted the good ones, and they grew. Gladiolus aren't supposed to come back this far north, the bulbs don't like being frozen and I can't say that I blame them. I didn't get them dug up in time and figured the were lost, but they came back. The row of marigolds in front of the glads is one of the few things that was my idea, not Lauri's

Happy Summer Everyone!

A Hiking story...

Under most circumstances, I'm a very lazy person. I don't think I've been to a gym more than a few times in my life, and even a short jog down the street leaves me winded.

When I'm out in the mountains, though, I can just keep going an going. It's hard to find time for hiking these days, but last Friday I took a day of of work and went hiking south of Mt. Mansfield. Out of shape as I was, I still did about 10 miles over some very rough terrain.

While I hiked, I was thinking about how I can be this energetic about hiking when I'm so lazy about everything else. I have kind of endurance when I'm out in the woods that seems to be more about stubbornness and masochism than it is than any physical characteristic, I just keep going no matter what. I was thinking about why I'm that way. I think it goes way back to when I was 12 years old.

My family was pretty active in the Church of the Nazarene when I was growing up, and as a teenager I really enjoyed some of the New-England wide youth group events that we would go to, even if one or both of my parents came along as the youth leaders. One of these events which happened every September was an overnight trip to Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire. In our group the adult chaperons generally stayed at the bottom and took naps in the shade or whatever while the teenagers were set loose to climb the mountain at their own pace. Other groups tried to keep together for safety, but this isn't really necessary at a place like Monadnock, if you get in trouble one of the 500 other people hiking the mountain that day will be by to help you out.

I was 12 years old when I got to go on this trip as an actually youth group member instead of just the tag-along son of the youth leader. I was hiking along on my own when I ran across a group of kids from a church in Connecticut. Among them was a very cute blond with blue eyes about my age who I had noticed before at some other events.

I was a short, skinny kid with thick glasses and a horrible haircut and the worst case of acne in the history of the known universe (or so I thought). Talking to girls wasn't exactly my specialty.

I attached myself to this group, hiked at their pace and took breaks when they did, hoping that I would be able to work up the nerve to say hi. On my second or third break with this group, I managed to sit down next to this girl on a mossy rock. I'm sitting there all nervous and sweaty palmed, and had just about worked up the nerve to say "Hi" when the youth leader for that group started talking about safety.

He went on and on about wilderness and bears and broken legs and how horrible it would be to die of thirst on the side of a mountain in the big outdoor wilderness of Mt. Monadnock State Park. "So we have to stay safe", he said. "And the way to stay safe is to stay together. And the way to stay together is to have your slowest hikers in front and your fastest hikers in the back."

He looked around the group and his eyes landed on me. He pointed at me.

"You'll go first", he said.

I was humiliated. There was no way that the cute little blond girl would do anything but turn her nose up in the air and look away if I tried to talk to her now. I was humiliated, and angry.

So when the group started up again, I went first, I went as fast as I could, and I never stopped until I reached the top, exhilarated, and a full twenty minutes ahead of the cute little blond girl and mister-safety-man.

And I've been hiking that way ever since.

My Beer-Powered Lawn Mower

Wherever you go these days, you hear all kinds of ideas on how to save gas with your car. While I'd love to trade in my 97 Saab for a brand new Prius, that's just not an option for me right now. The recent demise of my lawnmower did, however, gave an opportunity to cut back on gas in other ways. I am now the proud owner of a beer-powered lawn mower.

Yes, you read that correctly. Unlike most mowers, which run on a combination of gasoline for the mower and beer for the operator, my new mower does away with the gasoline entirely, and does not replace it with any other energy source. As of last week, I am mowing on beer-power alone.

What is this technological marvel?

It's an 18-inch Push-Reel Mower from the American Lawn Mower Company.

When I first saw this thing, I assumed that mowing my yard with it would be a royal pain in the ass. After I gave it a little push, though, I realized that because it's so light, this thing actually pushes easier than the old gas-powered mower I was using, and it's much more maneuverable than power driven ones. It's super quiet - my wife and I were actually talking in normal conversational tones while I was mowing. The lack of noise also makes the process very relaxing - mowing my grass is now a good way to unwind. It's not going to throw a rock that will take out my 2-year-old son's eye, so he can play in the yard while I'm mowing.

The maintenance seems to be pretty straightforward. I'm told you have to sharpen the blades regularly, but based on the users' manual, that will take about 5 minutes and absolutely no mechanical skills. You also have to adjust the position of the fixed blade occasionally. The manual says it's a precise adjustment, but it only involves turning a couple of screws, not exactly rocket science.

There are a couple of potential disadvantages. Although it's easier to push around, you do have to take it slow if you want an even cut. It takes me about an extra 10 or 15 minutes or so to mow my .2 acre lot, but like I said, it's relaxing so I don't really mind. If you're taking care of 5 acres or so, you're going to need something else.

If you're the kind of person who has environmental groups petitioning to have your lawn classified as a protected wilderness by the time you get around to mowing, you might want to look elsewhere as well. When I first used my reel mower, some of the the grass was a little long on account of the old lawnmower being broken, and it took a couple of passes to get it looking good. You also need to actually pick up the sticks first instead of just running them over, as they can get stuck in the reels, which stops you in your tracks. I was doing that anyway, I didn't want to send a twig flying and impale the neighbor's cat, but a lot of people just chop the sticks up.

When it comes to just about anything we buy, phones, cars, whatever, everyone always seems to be clambering for the newest, most advanced, most twenty-first century thing around, But when it comes to lawnmowers, this bit of 19th century technology works just great for me.

Happy Feet

It would appear that Alex enjoyed his day!

All three of us are really enjoying the weekend as a matter of fact. The weather couldn't be better, we're just staying around the house, but I recently learned that due to gas prices, so many people are staying home on vacations and long weekends that it has it's own term - a "staycation". Somehow knowing that makes me feel like I'm doing something hip and trendy, and that makes me feel better about staying home all weekend.

We've got a few projects we're working on, mostly outside, all of them broken into small chunks and frequently interrupted by trips as a family to Home Depot, or to Als for creemies. We've accomplished a lot, but I haven't been this relaxed in months, and we've still got one whole day left.

Here's a couple more pics of Alex that I took on the cell phone today.

Alex and I went on a big 1.5 mile tricicle ride this afternoon,
with a 30 minute stop at Jaycee Park. along the way.

Alex making himself right at home and enjoying some free
popocorn during a quick trip to the local hardware store.

This is Alex, mowing the lawn.

No, he's not really mowing the lawn, but he did
push the broken lawn moweraround a little bit while
I was trying to fix the other broken lawn mower.
It's pretty heavy actually - he's a strong kid!

Alex

This is my son Alex.
He likes mud puddles.