Archive for the ‘hiking’ Category

Warming hut – Aug 29, 2010

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2014

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Here are Shannon and Mark in front of a warming hut somewhere out in the woods in the Sierra Nevada. It was closed that day. I don’t think anybody needed warming up in August. Great Art courtesy of my old Olympus camera and part of my famous Shannon, Architecture, Camping, Hiking, and Vacation series.

It’s not too often that I find a picture that fits into five different famous series. Also, I’m pretty sure that picture was used before. But I don’t care. I like it, and I’m still working on my informal Arm Around Mom series. My Loyal Readers are invited to enjoy it.

Pretty good day today. I didn’t really get any work done. I got busy talking to folks on the phone and via email, and in the afternoon I helped Mark put together his new computer. It’s fully operational now and I’m not sure if I’ll ever see him again. My one significant bit of work was going to lunch with a lady I recently met who is a longtime software marketer. She gave me all sorts of good ideas and advice. Plus, the lunch was pretty good. So there’s that.

And there’s really nothing else to discuss tonight, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: peanut butter assault!

See you tomorrow.

Bug inspection – July 28, 2003

Thursday, March 20th, 2014

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Here’s Shannon inspecting a bug with Andy and Mark during a hike in Hickory Run State Park in Pennsylvania back in 2003. At least I think that was a bug. Might have been a rock or a stick or something else. But let’s go with bug. Great Art courtesy of my old Minolta camera, taken during one of our all-time favorite camping trips, and part of my famous Shannon, Hiking, Camping, and Vacation series.

Remember, Loyal Readers, that we were homeschooling the boys, so Shannon was their teacher. She often used little opportunities like this to teach them something useful. How I envy them all that wonderful time together!

I went to a meetup.com get-together this evening. It was at the Peppermill restaurant and lounge at the north end of the Strip and was for single people over 40. Much as I dislike the fact, I’m now a single person over 40. Anyway, I met several very nice folks. I even made a buddy! His name: Buddy. Seems like a nice guy. I hope he likes to golf and is terrible at it. I think I’ll visit this group again. It’s really great to be out with people. I wish I was out with my dear Shannon instead, but that’s not to be.

And that’s about all I did today. Mark and I did our third consecutive day of exercise at the gym. I have some sore muscles, but I’m really trying hard not to overdo things and I think that is paying off. I can still walk! It’s not particularly easy to go there every day yet, but I expect it to take at least several weeks of constant attendance and hard work to start making us feel healthier and stronger. Then it will be easy to go. I may have mentioned that we’re not going at 7:00, as we did with Shannon right after we moved to Las Vegas. We’re going at the much more relaxed time of about 10:00. That allows Mark to get the sleep he needs and lets me get up at a leisurely pace as well, although I’m also managing to get an hour or two’s worth of work (of some kind) done before we go. All in all, I’m pleased with how that’s going.

I watched [amazon asin=B000ECX0S8&text=The Trouble with Harry] this evening. I think it’s one of my two favorite Hitchcock movies, along with [amazon asin=B0045HCJ9E&text=North by Northwest]. Leave it to Alfred Hitchcock to make a hilarious romantic comedy involving the repeated burial and disinterment of a possible murder victim. Beautifully filmed in New England, brilliantly acted, and masterfully directed, of course. Highly recommended.

Paul reports he’s struggling a bit with his feelings about Shannon’s death. Mark told me he had a tough day today, although he doesn’t see his mom’s death as necessarily being the immediate cause. I know Katie and Andy are struggling too. I also got a very touching note in the mail from Mia today, expressing her sadness at her grandma’s death (and including a St. Patty’s Day picture of a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end!). Things are hard. I wish I had a magic wand to wave to make everything better, but I don’t. I sent a note to Mia tonight telling her that I also am still feeling very sad about the death of my own true love Shannon, but I feel that in a very real way, we haven’t entirely lost her. We still have our memories, many photos, a few videos, our endless love for her, and each other. I told her I think the best thing we can do to remember her is to live happily. That’s taking some effort right now, but we all have the ability to do it.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: train-dwelling fugitive crabs!

See you tomorrow.

Duck statue – Sept 5, 2005

Tuesday, March 11th, 2014

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Here’s Shannon with her creation, appropriately named The Duck Statue. When we went to visit this river at Worlds End State Park, we discovered that people were piling up stones and making cool little statues. Some examples:

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Shannon thought that was pretty cool, so she decided to make one too. We all agreed hers looked like a duck. Great Art courtesy of my old Minolta camera, taken at Worlds End State Park in Pennsylvania, and part of my famous Shannon, Statue, Hiking, Camping, and Vacation series.

She was such a creative, gentle, beautiful person. Oh, how I miss her.

Got a few things done today. I went to the bank to have all our accounts transferred solely into my name. Unpleasant, but necessary, I’m led to believe. I also went to the post office and mailed a box to Sandy. It contains a few items of Shannon’s clothes that Sandy and Julie plan to turn into a quilt for me. I’m really touched they would do that. No hurry, Sandy and Julie! But I’m really excited to have it.

Then I went to lunch with my friends Jim and Kathy McClure. They live in Manteca and were in town for a meeting and to go to tonight’s Donny and Marie show at the Flamingo. It was nice of them to think of me. We spent a couple hours talking and enjoyed it. Afterwards, I worked for pretty much the rest of the day on paying bills and providing a bunch of medical information to the life insurance people. Since Shannon died less than two years after our insurance went into effect, they want us to prove we didn’t know she was sick before the policy went into effect. I think we have a very strong case for that. She had her annual checkup in December 2012 and an insurance physical in January 2013. Nothing out of the ordinary was discovered in either of those visits and she felt just fine until just a couple weeks before she went into the hospital. It was coincidental that she got sick right after we moved and we certainly didn’t defraud those people. I hope they give me no additional hassles over it.

Not a lot more to tell about today. I stayed busy and when I’m busy, I’m happy. I need to work some tomorrow and then there are my taxes. Lots to do.

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this combination food violence and exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: Egg salad sandwich, cat and dog caused monkey attack!

 

Weeping rock

Tuesday, December 17th, 2013

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Here’s Weeping Rock. It appears to be a rock that . . . umm . . . weeps. Maybe. I have no idea. But it looks nice.  Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken in Zion National Park last September, and part of my famous Hiking and Vacation series.

Okay, we weren’t technically in any shape to hike, but it is the trailhead for three pretty well-known trails and we could have hiked there. So it’s part of my famous Hiking series. Don’t hate me.

Another kind of frustrating day. Early this morning, LRN4’s nose started bleeding quite heavily and refused to stop. We went over to MD Anderson’s emergency room to have them take a look at her and see if there was anything they could do about it. There was. They decided it was due to low platelets, so they gave her some and she stopped bleeding. Sounds easy, no? Well, it took about six hours to get that done, and LRN4 was absolutely miserable the whole time. I guess she was in a fair amount of pain and it was kind of hard to breathe without being able to use her nose and with blood pouring down her throat. Not good.

The other cause for concern is that this is the first time she has spontaneously started bleeding. Her platelets were fairly low today, but they’ve been much lower before without bleeding. Are things getting worse for her or was this just a freak incident? Probably some of both, but we certainly hope it’s more of the latter. We really don’t want to go through that many more times.

So we got out of the emergency room at about 3:45 and then went up to the stem cell transplant center for our consultation, as mentioned yesterday. They were just trying to work us in, so we waited until about 5:45, at which time the nurse came in and told us they weren’t going to be able to get to us today. So we have an appointment at 11:00 tomorrow morning to try again. We don’t think they’ll have anything substantial to tell us, but we’ll go anyway. Maybe something good will come of it. We came all the way here for this, so we might as well go over there tomorrow and talk to them.

We can’t wait to go home on Thursday.

Did a tiny bit of work on the new app with LRN23 this evening. We’re trying to get the computational accuracy right. He and I both have a bit of homework to do and we’ll talk again tomorrow. I think we’re very close to submitting it to Apple, possibly before their holiday shutdown. It’ll be nice to get it out there for him.

Speaking of apps, I got an email from somebody who is hoping I’ll develop a Windows version of my  education app. I really don’t see that happening. I guess I should do a bit of market research and see if that’s the most profitable direction I could go. My current feeling is that I want to move more towards a server-based product, with clients for iOS and either OS X or a browser. Decisions!

And that’s about it for today. We want to go home! I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: spaghetti sculpture heist!

See you tomorrow.

Triple peaks

Friday, October 4th, 2013

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Here’s LRN4 standing in front of three little mini-mountains at Zion National Park. I believe this was the first place we stopped after we got into the super-private buses-only area. That’s the famous Morrowmobile there on the left. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken at Zion National Park, and part of my famous Vacation and Hiking series.

We walked about 50 feet. Which is about as much as LRN4 is doing right now. So it’s a hike. And it was a good one.

Pretty good couple of days. LRN4 finished day 5 of 10 chemo treatments today and she’s feeling pretty good. No news on the state of her blood. We’ll find that out on Monday. I’m not enjoying the wait.

Work. I submitted an update to the Common Core Classroom app today. Added the ability to delete notes. I had tried to avoid that because I kind of wanted the app to keep an audit trail for users. However, LRN31 convinced me that there’s a real need. What if a teacher enters bad information? The only way to fix it previously was to delete the student’s entire record and re-enter everything. Not a good solution. Now it’s fixed. Or at least it will be when the update gets reviewed and approved.

LRN2 and I installed a new blind over the sliding door. The original curtain turned out to be too much of a pain. It was a great temporary solution, but its useful life was over. So we bought a blind at Lowe’s a couple day ago and we installed it today. Looks great.

LRN4’s car has been in the shop for two weeks now. I wanted them to replace the battery. They replaced a whole bunch of other things and now they can’t get the electronics to work right. I’ve run out of patience. I may have to start getting legal advice.

Ordered a [amazon asin=B007VDN1PA&text=slide scanner] today. We have a ton of old slides and a few photographs that document our entire life before a few years ago when we got our first digital camera, and we want to be able to see and share those photos. So I ordered a scanner. It should come on Tuesday and then we can start the arduous process of scanning them all. I’m sure the end result will justify all the work.

Also, LRN4 got a [amazon asin=B00BOS9DKA&text=neck pillow]. She spends a lot of time in a chemo/transfusion chair these days and this will make that time a bit more comfortable. Totally worth it. Bonus: velvety cover!

And that’s about it for tonight. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: traffic zebra!

See you on Monday.