Author: DJB

2011 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it. In 2011, there were 35 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 365 posts. There were 109 pictures uploaded. That’s about 2 pictures per week. The busiest day of the year was June 11th with 130 views. The most popular post that day was Celebrating Andrew. Thanks for continuing to read this blog. More to come (in 2012)… DJB

Every Three Seconds

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Every Three Seconds. Three seconds may be  the amount of time it takes to bite into one of those juicy pears you received from Harry & David this holiday season.  The amount of time to pour a glass of wine. However, every three seconds someone in the world dies from factors related to extreme poverty. Perhaps three seconds could be the amount of time to decide to make a difference. Every Three Seconds is the name of a documentary film project by award-winning film director Daniel Karslake.  Candice and I met Dan at the home of our friends Tim Boggs and James Schwartz.  There we learned about his new film which… …profiles a number of individuals of different generations whose quest to feed their own hunger for fulfillment has inspired them to help meet the fundamental needs of others. Each has come to recognize that by giving, their hunger is satisfied in a way no amount of material reward could. Karslake is a gifted story-teller.  We were introduced to his work through the award-winning documentary …

Merry Christmas 2011

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For a holiday filled with so many traditions, each year’s celebration of Christmas is different.  Some years the celebration revolves around visits with family.  In fact, so much of what I remember about Christmas from my childhood involves “visiting Mamaw and Papaw’s house” with a passel full of cousins and the accompanying aunts and uncles. But there are also years where other considerations over-shadow the holiday.  In 1997, mom was one week away from dying (she passed away on New Year’s day in 1998), while Candice’s father passed away on December 26, 2008.  In both instances we were able to be with our parents over the holiday season, but the focus was understandably elsewhere. This has been a quiet Christmas.  And that’s been fine. The quiet holiday can have its own special joys.  Some of the things I’ll recall from Christmas 2011 include: The joy of early gifts.  About 10 days ago, we visited the neurologist for a four-month check-up after Candice’s fall and the resulting seizures and severe concussion in late August.  To hear …

Moving heaven and earth

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When she was in the fourth grade, my daughter Claire — in response to the question “What Does Your Father Do?” — told her class that I “signed papers and went to meetings.” Today was not that kind of day. With two colleagues from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, I joined officials from the Washington National Cathedral on a glorious fall morning to see first hand the extent of the damage from the August 23, 2011 earthquake that hit the east coast.  We were visiting the cathedral as part of ongoing conversations about the restoration and preservation needs of this national landmark. The cathedral’s website has a gallery of amazing photographs that document the damage — from just after the quake until the present.  I encourage you to view it and more importantly make a donation to help rebuild this unique place. On our tour, we viewed the damage from outside the building (including the cracks in the flying buttresses at the historic end of the cathedral), and then traveled up to the very …

Acoustic Music Old and New

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Airline travel has its occasional benefits. Earlier this week I had a trip to Boston booked on Jet Blue Airlines.  When I sat down in the seat, I glanced at the arm rest and thought, “Hot dog – Jet Blue is the airline with free XM radio!”  I whipped out my ear buds and settled in for 90 minutes of the XM station Bluegrass Junction. I love to listen to my own iPod playlist, but it also great fun to settle in to an airline seat or a rental car to catch XM radio’s bluegrass station.  Every time that happens I always end up hearing some great new music, and my Boston trip was no exception. On one leg of the trip, the station was featuring one of its staples:  a program entitled Track By Track where the DJ plays a full album by a featured artist who provides commentary along the way.  This week’s show featured the new Compass Records album Somewhere South of Crazy by the Southern songbird Dale Ann Bradley. Now I’ve …

Best Month of Baseball – Ever!

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The period from September 28 – October 28, 2011 is already being proclaimed the  best month of baseball in the history of the game. But like the Greeks, who add two months that don’t exist to the calendar so they can pay workers higher wages and claim to stay within monthly pay limits, I want to add a few days and take the personal view that September 25th – October 28th is the best month of baseball – ever! I go back to the 25th of September, because that’s when our Washington Nationals wrapped up their own surprising September and closed out the home season with a thoroughly satisfying win over the Atlanta Braves.  On that day the Nats – rather than playing out the string – took the rubber game of a three game series from the Braves and did their part to help the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals even make it into the playoffs. Then of course, there was the ridiculous night of September 28th when within minutes of each other the …

Lowering the ole’ blood pressure

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We’ve had a great deal of focus on doctors and health in our family over the past two months.  I’ll spare you the details.  But in recent weeks, I’ve taken to wondering if I should ask the doctors taking care of my wife to give me a blood pressure test while they’re handy. The knowledge that Candice was the focus of these visits kept me from going that far, but I have taken to sticking my arm into the testing machine at the local pharmacy, just to keep tabs. Blood pressure isn’t something I’ve had to worry about very much.  When I go in for physicals, the nurse will generally take my blood pressure, look at me, and say something like, “You’ve got terrific blood pressure.”  While not the picture of health, I’ve always been pleased I could rely on that number to turn out right where it should be. Candice, however, has begun to worry about my stress levels…adding to my worries that she’s now worrying.  And when I took a test at Rite …

World Series Game - October 25, 2019

Church of baseball: Part three

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This post…to follow-on the last two and last evening’s crazy night of baseball…will be even shorter. Joe Posnanski wrote one of the best columns about last evening’s games, baseball and life, that I’ve read in a long time.  Do yourself a favor — pull up a chair and read it.* It begins with this thought: “Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That, in many ways, is the beauty of it. I realize that’s a hard thing to explain to someone who doesn’t love baseball. No, more than hard, it’s an impossible thing to explain, because many people want sports to be more than life. They follow sports to jolt them out of the steady rhythms of the shriek of alarm clocks, the monotony of morning meetings, the rush to get the kids to soccer practice by 4 p.m. They want sports to be bigger than life. What’s the point, otherwise? There is nothing in baseball as jarring as a blind-side hit, as jaw-dropping as a perfect alley-oop, as tense and heart-pounding as a breakaway. And …

Church of Baseball – Part Two

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The River Styx and one chance in 278 million.  Baseball writers are amazing, but they go to a whole ‘nother level when you have nights like last evening. The baseball gods must have loved my last post, because we were all rewarded with the most improbable and dramatic final day of the season.  It was so incredible even Bud Selig couldn’t screw it up.  Three of the four games critical to the wild card races in each league were on our local cable system – conveniently located on channels 41, 42, and 43.  The only one we couldn’t watch was the least dramatic:  the Cards drubbing of the Astros.  But for five delicious hours, Candice and I sat by the television, switching between games almost on a pitch-by-pitch basis in the last two hours, to watch the monumental collapse of not one, but two proud franchises (Boston and Atlanta), and the incredible comeback of the Tampa Bay Rays from too many near-death experiences to count. Baseball writers will opine about this evening for some time …