There are 384 posts filed in Geezer (this is page 25 of 39).
Along with Kelly, I went to a volunteer luncheon at Conn Elementary yesterday. One of our favorite teachers, Nicole Jackson, sat down with us and chatted a bit.
“He was the cutest little boy!” she said of Travis as she told another volunteer how he used to play “peek-a-boo” with her as he passed through the hallways with us, not yet old enough to attend Conn himself.
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Yesterday Travis’s baseball season ended with a whimper when late afternoon storms rained out his last game. Though thunder rumbled and rain fell, I sat in my car next to the field, hoping against hope that some miracle would occur and the game would go on. Sadly that miracle never came, and my phone soon rang with a call from Kelly, telling me that the parents of the other Bees teammates had thrown in the towel. I was surprised at how sad that made me.
Kelly and I agreed that we will probably miss the games more than Travis will. There’s something magically simple about being on the ball field, where one’s only worry is the game itself. All is right with the world. There’s something especially magical about watching as our son progressed and improved throughout the season. As an assistant coach, I’ve been proud to watch as Travis and teammates came together as a team.
With a five-run limit before changing up, our coach wanted to slow down the runs, giving our players as many batting chances as possible. As the third-base coach, I would wave runners on for a double or triple but more often I would hold them at third.
I guess I’m still trying to stretch out the game, trying for one more hit for Travis, or one more goal for Hallie’s soccer game, or just one more after-game hug.
Every season ends. the players grow up and move on, and we’ll never live that moment again. It’s kind of sad, isn’t it?
USS Iowa's turret two explodes
I was in the Navy at the time and I remember well this incident and the subsequent whitewash. It was a lesson to me that the term “military justice” will always be an oxymoron.
The USS Iowa turret explosion occurred in the Number Two 16-inch gun turret of the United States Navy battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) on April 19, 1989. The explosion in the center gun room killed 47 of the turret’s crewmen and severely damaged the gun turret itself. Two major investigations were undertaken, one by the Navy and then one by the General Accounting Office (GAO) and Sandia National Laboratories. The investigations produced conflicting conclusions.
via USS Iowa turret explosion – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A thread on Reddit about a restaurant customer leaving two pennies and a nasty note for bad service got me thinking I needed to blog about my time working for Applebee’s. Working as a server was the hardest job I’ve ever had and likely will have.
As I traveled the world in my previous jobs I was fascinated by the different ways different cultures pay their restaurant staff. In Australia there is no tipping as restaurant workers there get paid a full salary. Do you know what restaurant workers here in America get paid? Try $2.13 an hour. Yes, you can’t even buy a gallon of gas for that, but that’s a server’s base pay. The really sad thing is that that rate hasn’t changed since I waited tables at Applebee’s twenty years ago.
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Nasa HQ
Then something unexpected happened. Watching the shuttle and its carrier pass low over Dulles gave me chills. I did not expect to be so moved by this aging spaceship taking its victory lap, but I was. Suddenly I was a 12 year old kid again, cheering as the very first shuttle, Columbia, made its maiden flight. The thought occurred to me, am I watching the end of manned spaceflight?
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It was 14 years ago that Kelly and I got engaged.
You see, some men really do win the lottery.
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| Raleigh Tornado, 16 April 2011 |
It was a year ago this past Saturday, 16 April 2011, when the deadly EF3 tornadoes roared through Raleigh, damaging over a thousand homes and killing three people. While the lives lost can never be replaced, the homes are returning to normal. The East Raleigh neighborhood of Lockwood held a celebration of the anniversary on North King Charles St this past weekend.
I never posted all of my photos from that devastating day last year, so here’s a link to my Picasa album documenting the damage only minutes after it occurred.
Also, check out the Google Maps satellite imagery of the neighborhood, showing before and after photos. It will be a long while until these neighborhoods regain their leafy shelter.
Two of the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers are now in the Persian Gulf. These carriers certainly raise visibility, though in a bathtub-sized body of water like the Persian Gulf they’ll be spending most of their time just getting out of each other’s way.
One comment to this story was from a former sailor who talked about how boring it is to be on a ship. That is especially true in the Gulf, where one can enjoy “hours upon hours of boredom punctuated with sheer moments of terror.”
The U.S. Navy said Monday it has deployed a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf region amid rising tensions with Iran over its disputed nuclear program.
The deployment of the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise along with the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group marks one of the few times the Navy has had two aircraft carriers operating in waters near the Persian Gulf, said Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost of the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet.
The two carriers will support the American military operations in Afghanistan and anti-piracy efforts off Somalia’s coast and in the Gulf of Aden, she said.
via US Navy deploys 2nd aircraft carrier to Gulf :: WRAL.com.
It was four years ago today that we bought our home in East Raleigh. I’m not as happy now as I was then – I’m happier! It’s turned out to be an amazingly rich experience.
Shortly after my employer at the time imploded and closed up shop, I got to talking to one of my former coworkers. He and I had done the very same job. We were peers and had similar qualifications. Somehow, though, he was getting paid about 40% more than I was! Losing my job smarted, of course, but finding out how I was getting screwed really added insult to injury.
I think about that experience whenever debate comes up about how women should be the paid the same as men for doing the same work. The truth is that almost no one gets paid the same as anyone else. Your boss will pay you whatever amount she thinks you’ll accept, you’ll work for whatever amount you’ll accept, and rarely will anyone else be the wiser.
In today’s workforce, with nearly all gender barriers gone, women and men are now equals. That means women workers can now be as grossly undervalued or overpaid as their male counterparts.
