With the holidays around and my IT time more focused on ’Maytag-Man’ moments,  I have been working on mobile app development and I have to say that you are without a doubt the most unfriendly platform to try and develop applications on.  You have so many restrictions on your mobile app development that I’m surprised there are so many apps available from your app store.  With regards to the Android platform, they (google) have made it easy to develop apps to post to the general public as well as be able to test the applications easily without posting them to the Android Marketplace.

If I was able, I would quickly dump the Apple hype movement and keep my android devices, but I guess that we have at least 18-24 more months of Apple trying to dominate by control and now sheer volume until the business environment wakes up and realizes that this moment has passed and Apple has yet again lost out on a pivotal technological change by stringently upholding on its vanishing marketshare without focusing on the shift in market environments.

Goodbye Apple…  Hello Android..

So with the theme in mind and the excitement that can only be described as a kid on Christmas eve, we packed up the camper, dusted off the camping list and headed out to Ramblin Pines campground for our first official camping weekend of the season.

Even though the temperatures were a little on the cold side (I think it got down to 28 degrees the first night) we were all snug as a bug in a rug inside the camper  thanks to the space heaters and the wonders of reflectix panels custom fit to each of our screen windows. 

In preparation for the cold weather camping, I did some research online and found that there were many other stupid err I mean excited camping enthusiasts out there that want to enjoy their popup campers in good and bad temperatures.  This led me to adding the ‘extra’ insulation for the tent popup sides by cutting pieces of refletix and putting them into each of the screens on the camper.  Was I excited to try out this new space age insulation?  Oh you bet!

Once I got all of my windows cut out (using a template out of paper laid on top of the 4x25ft rolls of reflectix, I stored each one of the panels under the beds for easy access once we got to the camping trip.  Once in place, Sara and I pulled out each of the custom fit panels and matched them to their respective windows.

Looks more like the inside of a toaster oven now instead of a camper, but it did keep the hot air inside.  Matter of fact, we woke up on Sunday morning to a temperature of 80 degrees in the camper!  Lol

The rest of the weekend was awesome!  We also unveiled our new camping attire from our newly formed camping group, dubbed, the ‘Mountain Pie Maniacs’  Naturally, you cannot start a new group of traveling  gypsies without the proper gear.  We ordered t-shirts, jackets, and water bottles all around. 

While the trip would have been great with just the family, we did not brave the elements alone.   We had our faithful Maniacs with us as well.  Becky and her two girls and Randi and Bobby and their two little maniacs joined us for the trip.

We did have to duck and cover a couple of times for passing rainstorms, but the trip was a kick ass time!  The mountain pie irons were used the entire weekend to make some awesome sandwiches.  We ended the weekend with a graham cracker chocolate marshmallow mountain pie for breakfast on Sunday.

We only had one minor camping incident as Randi and Bobby’s toilet had a massive leak from a broken pipe, so once Bobby got the toilet replaced, we decided to have a little bit of fun with the old one. 

Sooo ready for the next trip.  Bring on the six day Easter fest!

I am so comfortable with the life I live each day.  The comfort of knowing that when I get home each night I’ll have the ability to stay warm, have a great meal, read a book, surf the Internet, and fall asleep in a bed beside the woman I love with my two cherished daughters no more than a couple of steps away in their own beds dreaming about their aspirations and life to come.  The Lord knows that I don’t think that I could be as courageous and stoic as those that I have seen through the media outlets up to this point that are facing such mental anguish.

I continued to gaze out of the dirty window at the girls playing and laughing, their innocence exposed with every action, and I cringed at the thought of the hundreds of other children that had their lives on this earth swiftly taken from them without any understanding of why and how nature can be so beautiful yet dangerous at the same time.

So as any human being would do, I tried to analyze, understand, process, re-process, and ration how something so horrible could happen in such a ‘technologically advanced world’.  Then my thoughts moved to blame, hate, ignorance and indifference.  ‘Well, it didn’t happen in my back yard… So, I’m still here.. so whatever..’  or  ‘Why does the media have to sensationalize every single news event’ to I cannot watch and absorb anymore of this stuff, get me to a channel that has a sitcom running right now. 

In a bipolar moment, my mind shifted back into a reality of sadness and I felt the bottom of my stomach harden like I had swallowed a heavy lead weight and then my chest squeezed as if I was having a heart attack and I realized that I have so much to be grateful for and that I shouldn’t waste anymore time in my short lifespan with blame, with hate, with disgust and instead; just love.  And not just any kind of love, but a love that hurts to the core, a love that is so passionate that rocks that foundation of every belief I have had or have known up to this point. 

So at that point and moving forward, I will try to be more loving, show more compassion, and live everyday as if it’s the last.  Because as this disastrous event has shown us, you may show up to work one day and never make that begrudgingly annoying commute back home.  Make sure that you hug your loved ones soo tight everyday and let them know how you feel, because in a moment, everything you wanted or were planning to do or say can be gone as quick as a thought. 

So as I finished putting away the kids backpacks and cleaning up the kitchen they came back into the house asking for me to get out the sidewalk chalk.  With my tears choked back inside, I whole-heartily agreed to get it out and headed outside with them to enjoy the fleeting moments of the first day of extra sunlight this year.  As we were completing the first hop-scotch plan on the driveway I happened to look straight up at the sky and to my surprise saw a rainbow.  Mind you, we did not have any rain today and for that matter, haven’t had any weather disturbances in the past three days.  In amazement, I yelled to the girls to look up and see the rainbow.   There was something a little different about this rainbow though, because it was not heading or starting in one of our horizons.  Instead, it was a small rainbow ‘fragment’ located straight above our heads gleaming in the sky with all the beautiful ranges of colors arced out in a small section.  When I tried to show the rainbow to the girls, I had to bend them back so far while they were standing up that I had to hold their backs so they didn’t fall over.  After the girls saw the rainbow, I instantly went inside and grabbed the camera, because I knew this would be something that I didn’t want to miss capturing on film forever. 

Looking back now, I know that this was a sign from our higher power reassuring me that everything will be okay in Japan.  While I have been praying and crying for those half way around the world, all I had to do is to look straight up in my sky to know that ‘God’s Promise’ is there for all of those I have prayed for in these past three days.  The only thing that I can believe is that while I was leaning very far backwards staring up at the anomaly in the sky, that there was one of my fellow friends half way around the world on their knees staring up to that same sky praying out for some sort of reassurance that everything was going to be okay and there, in that same sky I was viewing, they saw their reassurance with the hope of a rainbow. 

God Bless everyone in Japan right now and all my prayers and thoughts are for you and your families.

Don’t forget to passionately love everyone around you every minute of the day, because the next minute those we love, may not be here.

My rainbow of reassurance

While I could write novels about the two kittens that I neutrally accepted into our family in the later part of 2010, they have grown on me.   Even though my legal arguing of the eventuality of who would be the final ‘sanitation director’ of these cats was strictly overruled, I knew that while our dogs were gone and the kids were out of diapers, that naturally, I would be required to continually clean shit up for someone else in my household for years to come.

I speak of the open pirate seas with Veronica as each night I come home from work I walk in the door and head straight for the kitchen counter where Sara has left the mail from the day.  (Holy hell, this is sounding a little too ‘Leave it to Beaver’-ish —  Maybe I need to add something like…  ’Sara meets me at the door with my pipe, a vodka on the rocks, my slippers, and the newspaper’  Any who…)   She’ll head right over, jump onto the counter and then leap onto my shoulders, proceeding to dig her cat claws into the flesh around my shoulders to keep her grip.  At this point, I have accepted the pain the same as someone heading in for their monthly  Brazilian wax.  She’ll take a couple of minutes to get comfortable and at this point she’ll start grooming.  When I say grooming, she’ll typically lick and bite/pull my hair out of my head while she purs like a MAC truck waiting at a rest stop in the cold of the winter.  In all honesty…. let’s face it, I’m in my 30′s, my grandfather was bald and as genetics would explain to us, I need to keep as much hair on my head as possible before I have to start visiting the Bosley clinic.  I try to maintain my composure as I’m hunched over like Quasimodo trying to keep the cat balanced on my back while I’m reading the mail.  She’ll eventually settle in and then I feel like there should be some alarm that get’s sounded for her like she’s captured her ’8 seconds’ on my shoulders..  but I digress…

When the night came to an end and the girls were safely tucked into bed (and I had a couple of cocktails) life was serene.  I cannot imagine a better night than this.  To me, it was a new-age Norman Rockwell moment and I imagine that sometime soon, our girls will be walking through a government-sponsored museum describing to their children what pizza tasted like (as at that time, it will not be legally allowed to be consumed) mirroring the conversations of a hippy describing the free-love, free-drug movement of my parents generation.

TGIF..  Much more than a cliched restaurant…

TGIF..  A brief moment in my timeline on earth to enjoy the disfunctionalities of life.

We started the camping season with celebrating Easter with Yogi Bear in Luray, Virginia and ended the season celebrating Halloween with Yogi Bear in Hagerstown, Maryland..

Trip #1

April 1-5th – Jellystone Campground – Luray, VA

• Park Rangers had to deliver our kids back to our campsite
• Easter Egg hunt

Trip #2

April 16-18th – Ramblin Pines, Woodbine, MD

• Setting up the camper in a massive thunderstorm
• Leaving the campsite and having one of our chairs blow into the fire and burning up
• First camping trip with Sean & Alison and his kick ass cooking in a dutch oven
• Getting screamed at by the campground ‘police’ and being threatened to be kicked out for collecting wood from the common area woods..

Trip#3

April 30 – May 2 – Jellystone Campground – Hagerstown, MD

• Celebrating Sara’s 34th birthday

Trip #4

May 14 – 16 – Jellystone Campground – Hagerstown, MD

• Bobby falling asleep in the door of his camper at 2PM in the afternoon
• Wasting money on I-Phone apps that were supposed to show us the constellations in the sky

Trip #5

May 21 – 24th – The Farm, Dayton, PA – Camp Cleanup Weekend

• Not too much cleanup happened, as it poured this weekend.

Trip #6

May 28 – 31st – Memorial Day- The Farm, Dayton, PA

• Trip to the farm without Sara / She was in San Diego

Trip # 7

June 11 – 13th – Roundtop Campground, Gettysburg, PA

• Getting yelled at for feeding the fish in the fish pond (BTW, we brought fish food to feed them)

Trip #8

June 18 – 20th – Roundtop Campground, Gettysburg, PA

• Yelling at Civil War re-enactment people for shooting guns after our kids were in bed
• Lacy reading the riot act to re-enactment people in their tents (Too Funny!!  Picture a three year old shaking her hips, pointing her fingers and mumbling unmentionables to people in Civil War era garb..  It was priceless!!)
• Freezing up our Air Conditioning units because of the heat at 1 AM waiting for the girls to get back from the bar

Trip #9

June 25 – 27th – Gettysburg Campground, Gettysburg, PA

• Amelia running naked from our trailer to Becky’s trailer holding her bathing suit because she couldn’t pull it up
• Yet again, we lost our kids at their new friends campsite…  Took a while, but we found them..
• Feeding the ducks that were at our campsite

Trip #10

July 1 – 12th – The Farm, Dayton, PA – Campville 2010

• Ed totaling the Ford Explorer coming back to camp after work
• Burning Plastic Kids toys on the fire (they make a beautiful fire!)
• The visit from the Blonde Racoon

Trip #11

July 16 – 18th – Family Reunion, Punxsutawney, PA

• The one and only thing..  Two reunions in one weekend..  A bad BAD BAD idea…
• Not a good idea to have fun at your family reunion BEFORE heading to your class reunion…

Trip #12

August 27 – 29th – Ramblin Pines, Woodbine, MD

• 7 campers and met an awesome amount of new friends!

Trip #13

September 3 – 6th – The Farm, Dayton, PA – Labor Day

Trip #14

October 1 – 3rd – Ramblin Pines, Woodbine, MD

• Sara packed up the camper, loaded the kids (and a friend) up and headed to the campground all by herself..  I met them after they were already setup..
• Had AWESOME party neighbors…  (Let’s just say I showed up to camp @ 12:15AM and they were still rocking strong! — They got warned three times about their noise, but @ Ramblin Pines, that’s a normal thing to get yelled at by the mgmt)
• Stink bugs, stink bugs, stink bugs!!!

Trip #15

October 15 – 17th – Jellystone Campground, Hagerstown, MD

• The most AWESOME halloween weekend I’ve ever experienced!  EVERY camper was decked out with Halloween garb!  Great time, kids had a BLAST!  Trick or treating at each campsite..  Next year I know to bring more than three large bags of candy!

What does this mean for her and the family?  No surgery!!  Let me repeat that..  NO SURGERY!

This event was more powerfully burned into my memory than the first exposure to this condition a short year and a half ago.  We walked into Children’s hospital knowing that this could be the fateful day that we found out that our fearless and innocent daughter could soon be exposed to a world of surgery, anesthesia, and confusion that we only hoped we could keep her sheltered from for as long as possible.  We still toiled with the aspects of trying to explain to a 5-year old that the surgery and pain she was experiencing would be for the best in the long term.  I empathise with every parent out there that has to have a young child go through these processes.  God bless you for those never ending nights of anxiety and mental angst you have experienced.

As usual, Mia was a trooper.  She walked into every area and every waiting room with the nervous confidence that was most certainly inherited from her mother and father.  While you could tell she was nervous (and I’m sure she read our emotions like an open book as well) she continued to live life as she always does; with a timid, inquisitive, deep, and humorous aspect to every situation.  I will never forget the jumping from one colored tile to the next on the floor in the waiting room before we entered the ever-dreadful lab for the VCUG.  I sat on the cold, leather-like bench, keeping my mind consumed with visually collecting our toys and other items we brought along to entertain Mia to the point that would place the most OCD sufferer in a state of normalcy.  In those brief moments I wasn’t re-cataloging our distracting items, my attention was focused on the   ‘X-Ray in Session’ sign that would sporadically light up.  I can only explain this sign as looking very similar to a category sign on the 100,000 pyramid game show..  -Shunk- -Shunk-  -shunk-  (the noise I heard in my mind when the light would flash on and off) …  I kept thinking that I would find a little comfort in the illumination if it would have been something close to a Morse code dictation..  Screaming out a message that I might be able to cognitively understand as a reassurance that everything was going to be okay. 

Then it was our time.  When we walked into the room I tried to drown out the exponentially unorganized life outcomes that could be experienced from a 10 minute test.  I surveyed the room studying every warning sign, ceiling tile, storage cabinet, down to the curling edges of the crude 8 1/2 x 11 inventory pages printed on each of the stagnant white cabinets lining the back and side walls of the room.  The room returned a clammy, cold feeling to my body that made me drink down the reality of being in a pseudo clean lab/hospital environment.  But within this moment that seemed to last forever, my eyes were to the ceiling with a dynamic display of a colorful Spirograph-type display that calmed my  nerves.  They had a machine that projected a rainbow, almost psychedelic pattern on the ceiling that Mia would be able to look at while she was having her tests done.  This almost instantly calmed me to the point that I could focus on reassuring the love of my life that this test would be better than the exact one she received less than two years ago.  The nurses and doctors were the best that we had experienced up to this point traveling down this path.  They were very understanding, caring, and were able to comfort Mia as much as they could regarding the events that were going to quickly unfold. 

A couple minutes later they brought out a portable DVD player and Mia was able to watch a princess video while she was having the procedure done.  WHEW!  I knew once the TV came out, that everything was going to be okay.  Hell, I can’t get her attention when she gets locked into iCarly or anything else when she is at home watching TV, so this should be her anthesia that will carry her through this discomforting test.

Well,  I was right.  Other than some minor discomfort with the VCUG, she walked through the process like a pro!  At this point, it was waiting and then visiting with the dr after the results were ready.

Okay, I admit, we had a little sneak peak commentary from techs/Drs during the scan…  We had heard that things looked much better at this point, but we didn’t take anything that they said to heart, cause we had a date with our current destiny in a short 20 minutes from the scan…

As initially mentioned, the results turned out to be an amazing improvement in the right direction. In a short amount of time for us, which is much longer in the duration of Mia’s life, her kidney reflux was waining and my heart turned from one that was digressing to one that was peering over the mountain and realizing that it was shortly going to be a more relaxing journey down the opposite side of the hill towards recovery.

To this point, the journey that we traveled was a long one.  After science and technology was initially ensued, we were facing the eventual reality of the surgery that would hopefully reject the dysfunction of Mia’s urethra.  But everything in life seems to happen for a reason.  The initial doctor that we had retired and we were blessed to obtain the current doc that pushed us towards not operating, but waiting for an additional amount of time to see if the reflux would correct itself.  So, we took the advise of a very smart doctor and waited and through this time we now understand that this was the correct approach for us.  While I applaud modern medicine, it can sometimes try to eject the laws of nature.  In this case, I think that without modern medicine, we would have never known the problems that Mia had been facing and I don’t think she would have been blessed to be in this world for as long as she’ll be.  But in the same token, it’s a good lesson on how far we really have to go with intervening in natures plan.  We try to fix everything right away before we really know that it’s a problem. 

But we cannot rule out spirituality in the entire process.  I think that the issues that Mia had faced were there for a reason and that the energy that was focused her way during the initial tests, following appointments, and up to now really focused her improvements and eventual recovery from the damaging effects of this abnormality.  We are all on this earth for a specific reason and we’ll never know that cosmic goal until that process is completed.  But I think that the energies that we convey, as well as portray to others, is a guiding light for all of us as human beings to understand that there is something beyond the body, the skin, the molecules making up our scientific reality.  It’s an energy that cannot be explained by any mathematical formula.

Mia, I’m so glad that you are getting better and I’m sooo excited that you’re starting Kindergarten this year. 

Make Dad prouder (cause you’re already a shining star in my book)

Signed,

A relieved father.

While I’m only a young sapling with a massive amount  of sap behind my branches, I think that I can still give a small amount of comfort and reassurance to your fears and anxieties of trying to understand and face the realities of life after the exit of someone that was so solarly-polarized that they could change and effect your lives dramatically by their actions.

There is an energy in life that is always present.  Whether it be in the blowing of the autumn breeze, picking up and detaching the expressed leaves which fulfilled their environmental requirements; to the dandelion seeds pressing towards the sky to dance their way into a more fertile environment to promote their species, we as a spiritual being are required to procreate forward.  And with those procreating aspects, the underling reality is that we are always here..  Regardless of whether we are in human form, spiritual form, ionic form, we are always present.

Just remember that you are going through a spiritual winter.. The hardening of reality and freezing of emotions that are typically fluid with energy have come to a crossroads in reality.  They’re confused on how they should approach the next level.  Don’t let these energies consume your own life into a comatose reality of misunderstanding.  Like any winter, there is a defrost and an experience of excitement of what’s possible.  While we know there are many aspects of the spirtual spring that will be normal, this defrost will be faced with the realities of physical absence of something  that we cannot control.  What we must do is face these empty holes and fill them with the spiritual spackling of the past life and move forward.  This spackling is not an ignorant posting of times past, but instead, a commitement on how we are going to consume these historical events into our future commitments to our current reality.

While the past seems to dictacte what we will see and experience in the future, the present gives us a different role to play.  We have the ability to take the experiences learned and portray them into the future as standard procedures.  While your life is rocked with discomfort now, you will soon be able to understand and embrace the changes that your father has made on this reality, and how those changes will impact the multitudes around you.

So, the next time you think that your miniscule actions will not change the world, I want you to think…  How did Tracy’s Dad influce your life?

Once you answer that question.. you can move forward.

All my love to you and your family Tracy…

Sara and I are prepared for an amazing night at the high school reunion and the girls are ready to live it up with a little bit of karaoke at the Milliron reunion; topped with great family, friends and then even more karaoke late into the night!

The summer lives on with great fun, great friends and amazing family!  Life doesn’t get any better than this!!!!

If you think back, it was a short 10 years ago that you spotted that young oak tree swaying in the breeze;  showing all of its young passion through the massive display of branches and leaves perching the summer sun with a green vitality of spirit and kinetic energy.

That was the time that you decided that you would accept the responsibilities of nurturing and rearing the growing pains of such a young sapling without many responsibilities of your own.

Soon that love spawned into two additional branches in our new mutual family.  While we comforted these two new offspring, we understood that sooner than later, they would be a separate part of our lives; hoping that they would mold and develop most of their traits from both of us.  We both weathered many storms and you stood strong in your efforts, while over time I lost almost half of my trunk of life through the death of my father and grandfather within one year.

But regardless of the storms you stood steadfast.   You had a unyielding desire to embrace the loss, mark it as a life lesson, and move life (and the family) forward.  While I was in an emotional coma, I cannot imagine the sacrifices that you went through during this difficult period in my life and I thank you for standing by me during those tumultuous times.  To this day I cannot believe that I made it through this period without having a total mental breakdown.

But here we stand, 10 years into our lives together and facing so many more unknown challenges to conquer, endure, and then embrace the damages.  I only hope that our triumphs will be more than impressionable on our daughters.

I cannot imagine my life with anyone else and I hope you know this.  There is not a day that goes by that I wish I could be able to spend more time with you and not have to deal with the aspects of ‘common life’.  I know that our love will grow stronger throughout the years, regardless of the challenges that face us.

I just want you to remember that it doesn’t matter if we have a house, it doesn’t matter if we have cars, it doesn’t matter if we have materlistic objects adorned by society.  What matters most is that you are here with me.

I do not want to walk down the path of life without you and I hope that you are here in this world longer than I am.  Because life would not be worth living without my friend, my partner, and my soulmate next to me.

I love you so much… Happy Anniversary Babe!

Ed

CAMPVILLE 2010 is quickly approaching in less than 4 days and we are like ants recreating our mound after a ‘Katrina-sized’ human ‘shoeing’ event.  I can’t even explain how many to do, to buy, to pack lists we have right now..  If we survive after this Wednesday’s checkbook cardiac arrest of purchases, it’ll be smooth sailing over the next 10 days.  I cannot explain how amazing it is to get out of the hell of the city and enjoy life the way it should be.  No cars, no traffic, no queues, no congestion, just pure nature, unabated environmental fun for all…

There is an internal liberation when you enter the farm and your cell phone stops working…  No contact to the outside world..  Fan-@W#%@#$@#-tastic!!

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination, but soon… very soon..  It’ll be reality for me.

Nice.