Torn

It's been an eventful two weeks since I last wrote. First, thanks to Mike and Sarah O'Donnel and By Golly's in Milford, OH for the benefit on September 12. Also thanks to everyone who came out and donated money, time, gifts for the baskets, and just for showing up. Your support is greatly appreciated by me and my family. It was nice to see everyone and an all around good time. Too bad Cincinnati's professional football and baseball teams weren't more cooperative with providing victories to celebrate. This Saturday September 18, there will also be a benefit organized by our friends at and taking place at Clintonville Academy. The following link is to the event's Facebook Page. Come on down and hang out at this family friendly event if you are in town.

Health-wise the last week or so has been a bit bumpy. The last treatment wasn't too bad, but it was complicated by coming down with a cold so I couldn't tell if I was feeling bad from the cold or the chemo Thursday through Saturday. My blood pressure has also been through the roof (which apparently is a side effect of one of the drugs that's being administered) and the doctor has put me on meds for it but so far there really hasn't been any change. As always "We'll continue to monitor the situation." Now for the meat of my musings:

With the theme of "Ride On" I've hatched a little plan to take a solo motorcycle journey. I seem to have come down with a wee case of the wander lust. I'd say it's inspired by the travels of Ewan McGregor in the "Long Way Round" or Neil Peart in "Ghost Rider" but I have neither that kind of time nor the energy to be able devote to my endeavor so it will be quite an abbreviated trip. I had first planned to take my next "break week" in my chemotherapy cycles and ride to Colorado to stay with some relatives and some friends for a few days and then turn around and come home. I've never been to Colorado and it seems to be absolutely gorgeous from all of the pictures I've seen. I'm thrilled by the prospect of being able to see it with my own eyes. Recently I've been struck with a strong desire to get away from everything and spend some time by myself.. What better way to do so than to travel 2500+ miles by motorcycle? The route I'll take to get there, the route home and the amount of time to take are kind of fluid as of now. As I started roughing my plans together, Laela suggested that I speak with the doctor and see if we can postpone my next cycle of therapy for a week; thereby, giving me two weeks for my journey. Needless to say, I leapt at the chance and will be discussing it with the doctor on Monday.

As my plans are coming together, the prospect of the Cincinnati Reds actually participating the the 2010 post season is looking more and more like a reality. To that end, Laela had entered the lottery for the opportunity to purchase tickets to the National League Divisional Series (NLDS) should the Reds qualify. Lo and behold her name was drawn and we are now proud owners of tickets to the first two home games that the Reds will play in the NLDS. What a boon for a Reds fan, right? Not so fast. According to the MLB Postseason Schedule the NLDS will take place between October 6 and October 13. That's right in the middle of my October 2-October 15 time frame. So what's a fella to do? On one hand, I could selfishly go on a motorcycle trip by myself and get the solo time and adventure that I crave, or go see the Reds in a playoff situation knowing that it might be my last opportunity. I can't really put off the trip for an additional three weeks because I'd have to contend with a MUCH stronger possibility of inclement weather in the form of snow. On the other hand going to the NLDS would afford me the opportunity to spend time with my girls and make memories for all of us, not just me. I am torn like an old sweater and I don't see an easy answer. I'm not complaining that I have this decision to make, it's just hard to commit one way or the other.

Speaking of the Reds, we're going to a bunch of home games over the final couple of weeks. Tuesday night we went to "Bark in the Park" at Great American Ballpark. Laela submitted some of our photos to Jamie Ramsey, author of the Red's blog "Better Off Red" and he featured them in a the following "BoR" post. We also have tickets for September 29th vs the Houston Astros and for October 2nd vs the Milwaukee Brewers in addition to the playoff games. It should be a great couple of weeks for baseball.

That's it for now. In the immortal words of the American philosopher Ed McMahon: Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.

Routine

It's the beginning of September and I'm starting to settle into some kind of schedule now. Vacations are over. Autumn is nigh. School is back in session. Laela is working. Me? I'm at home and beginning the second cycle of my treatment. I think I'm starting to know what to expect out of it and can kind of plan my weeks accordingly.

rou·tine [roo-teen] –noun

1.a customary or regular course of procedure.

2.commonplace tasks, chores, or duties as must be done regularly or at specified intervals; typical or everyday activity: the routine of an office.

3.regular, unvarying, habitual, unimaginative, or rote procedure.

4.an unvarying and constantly repeated formula, as of speech or action; convenient or predictable response

One of the hardest things about dealing with my new routine of the sitting around the house is the sense of aimlessness. When having a good day, it is really odd not having someplace to go, something to do, or people that are relying on you. One would think that I'd have all of this free time for personal enrichment and reflection, but I find myself increasingly being lured to distraction by television and more insidiously...the Internet. I'm trying to read more books which is somewhat gratifying, but it too seems kind of aimless. I guess I need to put together a task list of things I need to take care of around the house and commit to doing a certain number of them a day. It's not just little things around the house that need to be taken care of. It's also long term items for the family's well being, piece of mind, and comfort. There are many things that I could be taking care of to make things easier on Laela. She does so much and now that I'm the "house husband" it's the least I can do. Hopefully it will bestow upon me that sense of purpose that I'm seeking.

On the treatment front, my doctor visit on Tuesday August 31 was very upbeat (Monday's scheduling SNAFU aside). The symptoms caused by my illness are better and I tolerated the first cycle of treatment very well. My oncologist was shocked that I walked a half-marathon on Sunday. Nothing makes me feel better than accomplishing something that people think that I can't do. We've got a plan of action and I'll be getting a CT scan on my chest before my next cycle begins to see if there is any shrinkage in the tumors. Crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. The bad news is that I've put on nine pounds in three weeks. I really need to stop throwing caution to the wind with my diet or a heart attack is going to get me before the cancer does. I'm not very far from flirting with my all time highest weight. That kills me after all of that work that I did to lose it and keep it off.

As expected, Thursday afternoon/evening was rough. I started the day off feeling a little down because my mustache was continuing to fall out in clumps. I decided to take matters into my own hands and remove it myself. I figured that I'd rather do that than have it slowly taken away. It was definitely one of those defining moments. My reaction after the deed was done surprised me. I didn't think I'd take it that badly. After all, it's only hair right? At any rate, to combat the melancholy that was starting to set in, I decided to get my endorphins pumping by getting out exercising. I rode my bicycle 21 miles and was in a much better place between my ears by the time I got finished. Thursday evening, the fatigue and ache started to set in and I essentially spent the rest of the evening on the couch. Miranda and I watched "Top Gun" on Netflix. It was nice to have a little escape.

Friday morning, I slept in until about 11:00am. I was still physically feeling run down, but managed to get up and go out to lunch. I'm feeling better as the day progresses but for the most part, today will be a day of rest. With a busy Labor Day weekend ahead of me, I'm hoping that I'll feel better when I wake up tomorrow.

Spirit of Columbus / Wedding Anniversary Weekend Recap

We had a brief glimpse of fall weather last week. It was really nice and reminded me of the time period when Laela and I started dating. We just celebrated two anniversaries over the weekend. Our 16th wedding anniversary was last Friday and the 19th anniversary of our first date was on Sunday. (Yes, of course they are that close together for a reason). We celebrated on Friday by doing the same thing that we've done for the past eighteen years; we have dinner at the Clarmont. The night that I proposed to Laela, we dined at the Clarmont and we went to see "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" at the Ohio Theater as part of their summer classic movie series. Unfortunately this year the Ohio Theater had a production of Wicked going on and I did not have the foresight to either A) order tickets or B) make our dinner reservations at a time conducive to attending the production. Instead, after dinner we travelled East on Broad Street to Franklin Park and took an evening stroll around the grounds. In my haste to get the evening underway, I had not warned Laela beforehand that that was my plan so her footwear was not chosen accordingly. There weren't any movies going on that we wanted to see, so we made our way home and finished watching the Cincinnati Reds put the finishing touches on a 7-1 victory over the Chicago Cubs. Miranda was out of the house, so it was nice to be able to just relax on the sofa watching the game with no commitments or plans. It was the perfect way to spend the evening.

On Saturday I picked Miranda up from her friend's house and my mother came up to visit from Cincinnati. It was a restful, uneventful day. We went out to lunch at Skyline, had subs for dinner, and watched the Reds game. Unfortunately, after the Reds game my mother and I got sucked into watching Remember the Titans. She had the will power to tear herself away from it at 11:00. Me, not so much and stayed up until 12:30 watching it. Ordinarily that wouldn't be an issue but Sunday morning I needed to be up at the crack of dawn because I was participating in the Spirit of Columbus Half-Marathon.

2010 was the third annual running of the Spirit of Columbus Half-Marathon and Relay. It is also the third year I have participated. In 2008, when I started running I had set my goal as being able to run the SoC. In 2009, the SoC dove-tailed nicely with my training for the Columbus Marathon which was being held in October. This year though was a little different. I knew that I wouldn't be able to run the whole thing, so I set my mind on at least participating as a walker. I also enlisted some of my friends to be renegade participants and walk with me for a few miles each. To that end, my mother walked from mile marker one to mile marker three with me, my friend Sarah Cofer walked from mile four to mile five with me, my friends Adam Swickard and Dan Michalec walked from mile marker seven until the finish line. Kristi Hittepole doubled back after completing the entire half-marathon as a runner and met me at mile marker 11 and of course Laela and Miranda met me at mile 12.5 and we finished the race as team Speed Walrus rollin' six deep. I'm really grateful for all of the support that everyone gave me. Those last two miles were tough. I did finish as one of the last ten participants but I finished it nonetheless. It was very bittersweet because I have a feeling that is the last half-marathon that I'll be participating in. Who knows though. Fortune favors the brave, right? Maybe I'll be foolhardy and strong enough to do something else, but we'll just take it one day at a time.

Bukkit Tour: Windy City Day 4

August 23, 2010 - Alarm set 7:55am, girls actually up by 8:20am. We had to get a jump on things this morning because we were headed back to Wrigley Field. On non-game days at Wrigley there are tours available of the facility. You do have to plan ahead and order tickets, so we ordered ours to pick up at will call when we got to town on Friday. We were out of the hotel and onto the subway before 9:00, record time for us. A quick nine stops later found us back at Addison and we were right back at the ballpark. We took a couple of photos outside that we didn't get on game day because there were too many people about and grabbed our tickets. We had plenty of time before the tour started so we walked across the street to the golden arches and got ourselves some breakfast. Who knew you could feed three people in Chicago for under $20. It was the first time we had done so since arriving. The McDonalds was actually kind of cool because there it had Cubs and Wrigley memorabilia all over the place. On more than one occasion I caught myself forgetting my meal and staring at something on the wall.

We made it back across the street and met up with the tour group at the front gate. They led us back into a bar that had a bunch of television sets mounted on the wall and we watched a 10 minute movie about the park. They then proceeded to take us up to the bleachers to relate some of the park's history (and more importantly the rules of the tour). From the bleachers, we made our way back down to the ground level and they took us out into right field. As long as we stayed on the crushed red brick of the warning track we were in good shape, but woe be to he that actually set foot on the grass. (Friendly confines my a$$...) We got to take a bunch of pictures by the brick outfield wall and Wrigley Fields legendary ivy. Interesting historical note. That ivy was installed over the course of a weekend and the ivy that is there are the original ivy that were planted back in 1937. After being on the field, we were walked up to the press box and the luxury suites. We were unable to go to the visitors clubhouse that day because the field had been rented by a private company for an event and there were actually people using it and playing on the field. The tour concluded with a visit to the Cubs clubhouse. Our tour guide had warned us how small it was several times through the tour. We finally we led down into it and boy, was he right. It is a tiny tiny facility for 25 players plus coaches (never mind the additional 15 players who are called up to the bigs in September). We snapped a few photographs and were on our way.

We boarded the subway to take it back into the city. Our plan was to go to the Field Museum next. Laela wanted to go back to the hotel and then grab a cab to go to the museum, but I figured there had to be a subway stop near it and I found one. So I convinced everyone to take the L all the way to the museum. We got off of the train and we didn't really know where we were, so I got out my GPS and punched in the Field Museum's address. We started walking in the direction it told us to. I must've done something wrong because we ended up walking about a mile in the EXACT opposite direction of the museum. We stopped and asked a meter maid where it was and she said that it was about two miles back the other way. Well, I'd had us walking around in the sun for too long at this point to we went ahead and hailed a cab who then dropped us off at the museum.

We got there and went inside and were greeted by Dinosaur Sue. Sue is the most complete, best preserved, Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered. I believe she is the unofficial mascot of the Field Museum and is quite an impressive specimen. The rest of the Field Museum (aside from being in an amazing building) is just like any other natural history museum that you've ever been to. Lot's of dioramas and taxidermied animals. One exhibit that we went into that was rather cool was "Robosue: The T. rex Experience" Robotics and facial recognition technology combined to make animatronic velociraptors, triceratops, and of course a T. rex. Although it is a small exhibit, the technology behind it is pretty amazing. After we went through that we went and had lunch in the basement. It was getting to be mid-afternoon at this point and I was starting to get tuckered out. After lunch we all went to go explore the third floor and I just needed to sit for a while. There were some very comfortable living room style chairs upstairs and I just plopped myself down in one while the girls checked out the rest of the museum. We left at about 4:00PM so we could get back to the hotel, pick up our bags, and then take the subway back to the airport.

We arrived at O'Hare, got checked in, had a quick dinner at the airport Chili's and went to our gate. We were there an hour and a half early, no thanks to the TSA. Since I had finished the book I was reading the day before and Laela had a dead tree edition of what she was reading, she graciously let me borrow her Nook and purchased for me "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman" So I was able to wile away my time at the terminal reading (although CNN blaring in my ear made it a tad difficult to concentrate). We finally boarded our flight back to Columbus which was very uneventful.

Once on the ground, we grabbed the shuttle back to the red lot and made our way home. Indy was very pleased to see us this time and didn't "cool guy" us at all like she did when we came home from our vacation in July. Vacation time is now all wrapped up. Miranda started back to school last Wednesday and I start round two of my treatment. Looks like it's time to settle back into a normal life.

Bukkit Tour: Windy City Day 3

Sunday August 22, 2010 - Today was the big day, the whole reason we went to Chicago. I wanted to make sure I got a chance to go to a Cubs game to experience "The Friendly Confines" of Wrigley Field. We made sure to wake up around 9:00am on Sunday. I arose with butterflies in my stomach because i was so excited. I was dressed in about ten minutes (after tending to my feet....again) and impatiently waited for the girls to follow suit. We wanted to make sure that we were on the subway bright and early so that we weren't late for the game. We didn't want to have a repeat of New York, where the train broke down and made everyone get off and back onto another train which caused us to be late for the game. So with the girls finally primped and prettied up, we set out for breakfast.

Right on the corner by the hotel was a Corner Bakery Cafe. We had eaten in one in Philadelphia and Miranda had French toast that was out of this world. We were all eager to eat there again and had decided on Friday that we would do so on Sunday. So here we were two days later all primed up and ready to go. Fortunately it wasn't terribly busy for a Sunday morning, but it was definitely full. All three of us ordered the same entrée: the French Toast. The only variation in our orders was beverage. Disappointingly, the Chicago Corner Bakery Cafe's French Toast was not nearly as good as Philly's. In Philadelphia they used cinnamon raisin toast and it was almost like a little loaf of bread. Not so in Chi-town. Not only that, but it was barely warm. Don't get me wrong, it was good but it wasn't what we all remembered from Philadelphia.

So with our bellies now full and me with a cup of coffee, we set out for the red line subway. Wrigley Field is a short nine stops away from where we were staying downtown and fortunately we got on our way early enough that there wasn't a crush of Cubs fans trying to get on the train. It certainly got more crowded the closer we got, but it wasn't terrible.

We got off of the train at the Addison stop and could see Wrigley Field as soon as we stepped onto the platform. I was giddy as a school girl. We made our way onto the street and snapped a few photos across the street so we had the obligatory Wrigley Field sign in the background. We crossed the street and walked into the stadium and there was quite the buzz about the place. You could just feel that it was a different place to watch a game than all of the newer stadiums. It was very similar to how it felt walking to Fenway Park. I was expecting the fans to be a little more rabid than they were, but it was also nice not having non-baseball-know-it-all-guy sitting right behind me telling the person he's with everything about baseball (but being wrong about things more than half of the time).

Our seats were in the fourth row of section 226 so we had a fantastic view. It was also nice that the seats were in the shade. It was the most comfortable ball game I'd been to all year. I was actually wishing I had a sweatshirt and was a little envious of the one Miranda had on. Unbeknown to us prior to arriving at the stadium, we were about to witness history. It was Sweet Lou Pinella's last game before retiring and the last time that Bobby Cox would visit Wrigley Field as the manager of the Atlanta Braves (due to his impending retirement at the end of the season). As a Cubs fan for the day, the game was laughable. The final score was 16-5 and I swear, if that was the best effort that Cubs 3rd baseman Aramis Ramierez is capable of, he is a complete piece of crap. I've seen rec league girls softball players put in more effort to field a ball than he did. It was absolutely disgraceful. Wrigley Field is an absolutely gorgeous ballpark and I'm ecstatic that I had an opportunity to see a game there. At least my streak continues. If I come to your ballpark and I'm rooting for your team, you are going to lose and lose bad. The only exception to this rule that I've during the 2010 baseball season is the New York Yankees. They are the only team that I've rooted for that won. I don't think that really counts though because although I was rooting for them on the outside, in my heart of hearts I wanted them to lose.

When the game was over, we boarded the red line and left Wrigleyville. We got back to the hotel and as usual, it was time for me to take a little nap before we went out and did anything else. When napping time was over, Laela had decided that we should eat dinner at the Weber Grill Restaurant. It was Sunday evening and it was absolutely packed. It was a 45 minute wait to get a table, but it was well worth it in the end. All three of us had the same three things on the menu that we couldn't decide on so each of us ordered one of them and we all shared. We ordered the following: the hickory smoked prime rib, the filet mignon, and the skirt steak. The skirt steak is marinaded in a ginger-soy sauce and then topped with smokey grilled onions and peppers. All three steaks were delicious and they were all served with garlic roasted mashed potatoes. I asked to have my mashed potatoes substituted by a baked one. It was quite honestly the largest potato I have ever seen in my life. It was the size of a pee-wee league football and could have been two meals all by itself.

Having sufficiently stuffed our gullets again, we had one more adventure to embark upon for the evening. We wanted to use our City Passes to visit the Skydeck in the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower). We arrived at about 9:20 and the observation deck closed at 10:00 so we had made it just in time. Coincidentally, this was the same time and day that we visited the observation deck of the Empire State Building so we were expecting long lines. Much to our surprise there were not that many people there. The lobby was under renovation, so it was kind of beat but after a quick elevator ride up to the 103rd floor, the view was incredible. I love getting to go to the tops of tall buildings at night and getting to see the cityscapes all lit up. The Skydeck also has a unique feature for visitors. It is "The Ledge" which is a glass cube which extends off of the side of the building. You can step out onto it and see right through the glass floor to the street 103 floors below. It is quite the experience. Miranda was really nervous about going into it. We walked in together and her knees were completely wobbly and it took her a minute to adjust to it but she finally gained some confidence that she wouldn't be plummeting to her untimely death, relaxed and enjoyed it. It was a really weird feeling being out there. Don't get me wrong, I had to back into it while looking at the exit sign and then turn around and look down or else I might not have done it either. 10:00 rolled around a little quicker than I would have liked and thus concluded our last full day in Chicago. We went back to the Palmer House, set our alarm for 7:55am Monday morning and went to sleep.