TJamesWhite.com

Happy Birthday Grandma
My grandma turned 95 over the weekend. We had a nice little party for her; my brother was in town as were my cousins. It was good to see all of them, and to meet their kids for the first time (and some of them are nearing their teens!).

Grandma is doing OK. She broke her hip a few weeks ago, which is why she is now in a full-care home. She hates being there, partly because she doesn’t understand why she is there, partly because she hates losing her independence. (Proving her independence is how she broke her hip, by the way.)

And while her hip is healing really well (amazingly well for a 95 year old, I’d say), he memories are getting a bit confused. Like when asked who the President is, she said Kennedy — an improvement over Eisenhower last week. But she remembered me and my brother and my wife (though couldn’t think of her name).

This confusion of memory seems to be a concern of my mom’s, and apparently care facilities. But I had to ask, why? She’s 95 years old, does it really matter if she thinks Kennedy is President? Grandma’s happy (relatively) and comfortable, remembers her family. What does it matter if she can’t remember the exact year? Honestly, she isn’t going to be around much longer; I say let her live when she wants. Let’s just keep her happy.

I Forgot
About two days ago I was going to post something but I haven’t had a lot of time to actually type. And now I’ve forgotten what it was. I hate that.

On the Jack & Kristen wedding front – we have tuxes! I feel good about the selection, and I think Kristen can now breath a sigh of relief. Jack, Dave and I met at the Men’s Warehouse last night to look at jackets and, low and behold, they rent tuxes (and didn’t really have jackets that would work for the occasion). Al the tux guy was super nice and got us all sorted out. We have an official rental of one week, but will actually have the suits for nearly two weeks. We even went so far as to get fitted last night! I will leave the rest of the details for Kristen’s Wedding Blog (if there are any details left).

Living in America
I stumbled across this great little advice piece. Enjoy.

Clean Underworld
The positive thing about our little incident on Friday — we cleaned a bunch of junk out of the basement. You know, all those things you should have just thrown away, but, since you’ve got the storage room, you hang on to them “just in case”? Yeah. We got to clean out a bit. Now to clean out the rest of the basement.

Oh, and the cleaning crew from SWF Restorations (20514 Van Born, Dearborn Hts.) did a fantastic job. They were quick, friendly and efficient. Gave the entire basement a good mopping, even the parts that didn’t get wet.

Saturday, after three hours of pain (AK Thai chi with Master Ben Lo) I headed down to see Jack. Had a great dinner at Connors [? something Irish, Main St. Ann Arbor] then went to see Underworld. I’m not much of one to read reviews, but I guess it’s getting pretty awful ones. It wasn’t that bad. Not a great movie, but a bit of fun. Definitely a White Wolf campaign on the big screen. There were a couple of disappointing bits . . .

[POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOLLOW]
[To read, use cursor to select text from here ...]
While the fight scenes were kind of fun, the vampires never did anything really vampirish. Sure they’re eyes changed a bit and they had fangs, but nothing really cool and extraordinary. The werewolves changed and that was pretty cool, but the vamps just kept using guns. I was hoping for something that went more like:

werewolves and vampires meet in dark seedy place; gun fire erupts taking out a few; once the clips are empty, the guns are thrown to the ground; werewolves change shape, vampires claws and teeth extend; super human hand-to-hand combat fills screen for next 5 minutes..

Didn’t happen.
[ ... to here.]
Oh well. Jack and I had fun nonetheless.

Now in Comment-vision
If all is well, comments are now possible. See the link next to “posted by”?

Isabel
Even here in St. Clair Shores we’ve felt the effects of Isabel. It started raining around 3:00 am and didn’t stop until 7:00. The result: a lot of water, including some in our basement. This is the first time we have had basement flooding and thankfully it isn’t too bad. All we lost was the carpet remnant and a few clothes. We only had maybe an 1/8 of water in the laundry room and part of the main area – it certainly could have been worse.

The city had a clean up crew here before I even knew there was a problem. Luckily our neighbor was home on her lunch hour and let them in to inspect our house along with hers. They were back within a couple of hours (and I can home once I got the message) and removed the carpet and anything else we wanted to get rid of. They are coming back tomorrow to do a more thorough cleaning and disinfecting.

In all, there seems to be about 10 – 12 houses on our street affected. I’m not sure how many city-wide. From what the clean-up guys were saying, they’ve seen a lot worse in other neighborhoods. Oh well. We live in a flood plain so we’ve never kept anything of great value in the basement. Good thing.

Why We Don’t Use the Metric Sytem
[From popsci.com, via Die Puny Humans.]

“The Metric Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a bold, if Napoleonic, motto: “Toward a Metric America.” That is, a fanciful future in which we’ll buy decagrams of hamburger and liters of gas. Problem is, the Metric Program employs just two evangelists—hail, ye lone voices in the wilderness!—to convert 281 million recalcitrant American imperial-unit holdouts. Launched with much hope by the Federal Metric Conversion Act of 1975, the Metric Program 28 years later meekly soldiers on, advising federal bureaucracies and trying to pitch the system to—well, to anyone who will listen. The dynamic decimal duo, who declined interview requests, did say that they really work only part-time on metric salesmanship. So it would seem: A spokesman for the program, when queried, didn’t know his own height in meters.”

I didn’t even know this still existed. I remember back in the 70s learning the metric system for a very brief time. They quite teaching it right about the point it would have started to make sense.

Why I Want to Move to Europe
In my latest Racer magazine I read an article about the Nürburing 24 — a 24-hour race around the 16-mile German race track — and it makes me want to move there. Or away from here.

The article points out that, in this day and age, this race on a 16-mile, 100+ turn track through the woods still takes place because

“the pragmatic Germans are wise enough to keep their legal system in check. The prevailing, and very sensible, attitude in Germany is that you respect others and take responsibility for you own actions. If you choose to go haring around the ‘Rings blind turns flat-out in fifth gear in the middle of the night and end up bending your toy, you can only blame yourself.”

Hmm, people taking responsibility for themselves. If only we could do that here in the land of “it’s not my fault.”

And to top it off, there were nearly 200,000 fans gathered for up to a week surrounding the race. At the end of it all:

“Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the Nüburgring 24 came as we left the circuit. We realized we hadn’t seen a single policeman in five days, and the entire area around the circuit was devoid of trash; the thousands of campers had carried out every bit as they left.”

Think of how great things could be if we took responsibility for ourselves – from our actions to our trash. This could be a truly great country then.

A while ago I ran across this interesting little project site: the5line.com. For those of you who have studied art, it probably is nothing new; for others like me, it’s pretty neat. What you do is draw a self-portrait using no more than 5 lines.

Here’s mine: