StoryWorth

I was fortunate to be in the delivery room for Laura’s birth and as soon as they do whatever with umbilical cords and after stuff, they wrapped her up and laid her in my arms.  My heart melted as my baby girl turned from a pale blue to a warm pink right in front of my eyes. Her tiny hands with fingers unbelievably small gripped my pinky finger and that grip went right to my heart.  I feel sorry for any father that misses the opportunity to experience this once-in-a-lifetime bonding moment.   Like most babies, getting them to go to sleep is a daily routine and sometimes a struggle.  Laura liked to be rocked slowly and I would sing countless verses of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm“, thinking up new animals and what sounds they might make.  Whether I reproduced a proper version of an elephant’s roar or a snake’s hiss didn’t really much matter and after a dozen, or two, or three, she would drift off to sleep. Laura was excellent at reading, spelling, and English in...

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand would be that book.  It taught me that critical thinking was the only way through life, that I would have to dig deep into issues, view them from different perspectives, and make informed, balanced decisions.  It taught me that others have their own agendas and they don’t make them public to you, but you can figure them out if you listen and watch closely.  Often their own selfish nature is disguised as helping others and too often that help is only short-term at best and never actually solves anything.  That whole theme of short-term versus long-term explains a lot of the world’s issues.  Should we be focused exclusively on what’s needed today, this week, this month, etc., and not concern ourselves on what happens later on?  Conversely, is it wise to ignore all short-term concerns and look only at how it will play out later?  These are difficult questions and most often do not have assured positive outcomes in all cases....

Moses was the perfect cat.  He was loving, at least to humans, and everyone adored him.  I would take him to appointments at the vet and he would walk down the check-in desk where all the staff would pet him to his delight and there’s.  He never weighed more than eight pounds even though I kept his food dish full all the time.  He ate when he was hungry or when I opened his favorite treat, a can of tuna fish.   Moses was also a fierce hunter.  When I moved into a new apartment, he spent the first couple of days getting rid of every ant and spider he could find.  He could easily jump six feet in the air and I once saw him clear a six-foot fence with graceful ease as some neighborhood dog gave a fruitless chase.  He only had claws on his rear feet, but that combined with his teeth were more than enough to take out his prey.  Combined with remarkable see-in-the-dark abilities, he would routinely disappear for hours and that leads to my favo...

I’ve written about some of the things I’ve built during my career while answering some previous questions but after forty-four years of dabbling in Information Technology, I accumulated more than a few.   One of my favorite sayings is “I’m glad I never learned I couldn’t do something” and the stories below begin with a pair of projects I undertook at Wright State University that few others would have even contemplated trying, followed by two situations where technical ability had nothing to do with achieving significant changes and finishing up with how I helped resolve a dispute without knowing anything about the subject being discussed. GOTHIC was a mainframe assembler program that read a single input card and printed out, sideways, each character using multiple lines of asterisks, creating large letters in a Gothic-looking font. Since the mainframe printers used continuous forms, GOTHIC was perfect for creating large fancy banners, many feet long, announcing birthdays or ot...

A short-term view of happiness would lean towards accomplishing big goals like finishing a marathon, implementing a new computer system, or hosting the family for Christmas dinner.  The energy and focus needed to pull your mind and body together for a few hours, days, or sometimes weeks is a great adrenaline rush and the sense of accomplishment is a thrill.  But happiness shouldn’t be just about the short period of time when you feel you're on top of the world, but a lifestyle choice that is your normal.  Getting there takes getting to know yourself and laying out a course to get you happy most of the time because life’s twists and turns and ups and downs will guarantee that you’ll never be happy all the time. For myself, I like a balance of social, physical, and intellectual activities.  That balance is achieved over weeks and months, not hours and days, so some days will be a lot more of one than the others, but over the course of a somewhat longer timeframe, thing...

That would be opening Christmas presents when I was a child.  We grew up in a small house in the North Riverdale neighborhood in Dayton and the living room must have been all of maybe eight feet wide by twelve feet deep.  That tiny room was packed with couches, chairs, a TV, a stereo, a Christmas tree loaded with boxes, five kids, and two parents.  Somehow it worked.   At first, we opened presents on Christmas morning, maybe got to play with them for what seemed all of ten or fifteen minutes, and then had to get dressed, go to Our Lady of Mercy for Christmas Mass, and then downtown for brunch.  We were going half crazy by the time we returned home and had time to play with our presents, but even that was short-lived as we packed back in the station wagon for our trip to Grandpa Otto’s house in Beavercreek for continued festivities. It took a few years, but our parents finally realized they were packing too much into one day and decided to let us open our pr...