Ten Coolest Things

Some of the coolest things I did in my Information Technology career occurred during my time as a student and employee of Wright State University, and those I wrote about back in 2018 can be found at https://lifeexperiences.paulishing.com/2018/08/wright-state-days_10.html.  In this blog, I’ll cover the ten coolest things I did during my employment at a string of paper companies, including Mead, MeadWestvaco, NewPage, and Catalyst Paper, selected from a list of thirty that I fondly remember.

1.       Zellerbach Network Design

What made this cool is that I beat AT&T at their game.

The Mead Merchants division had just acquired the Zellerbach distribution business, and as the Manager of Mead’s Network Services group, it was my responsibility to get their thirty locations added to our Wide Area Network (WAN).  We needed a design that would (a) only have four locations on a single line, (b) each line would run at no more than fifty percent utilization, (c) their major hub locations had to have two separate lines for redundancy, and (d) be at the lowest monthly cost.  We based each location’s utilization on comparable sales data from Mead Merchants locations and gave the above requirements to AT&T to design the best solution.

At the same time, I was taking an MBA-level course in Operations Research, where we were learning how to use Integer Programming (IP) and Linear Programming (LP) to solve business problems.  Our final assignment was to find a problem to solve and use one of those two techniques to solve it.  I thought that maybe the Zellerbach network design would be a candidate, and spent a week thinking it through.  I decided to make that my project even though I knew I would need to solve a very, very large IP.  I decided to use Mead’s mainframe-based software as I would need a lot more computer resources than I could get via the university.  I called up the company’s expert in that software, and he gladly showed me the format of the input card deck to describe the matrix and set the proper solution constraints.  To generate that matrix, I wrote two PL/1 (Programming Language/1) programs that produced over 20,000 columns of potential city combinations.  Each row represented a city, with two rows used for the major hubs.  The intersection of each row/column was the monthly cost of using that line if that one was selected.  Then the software was told that each location had to be selected only once and solve the matrix for the lowest cost.  I submitted my program to run at the mainframe’s lowest priority to avoid causing interference with our production systems and left for the day.  

When I came in the next morning, I was surprised to see my program was still running.  I cancelled the program and went about trying to find out what was going on.  I finally figured out that it was spending all of its time reading and writing to its temporary file because, as I previously stated, it was a very, very large IP.  But since I was a technical mainframe guy, I knew the solution; I just put that temporary file in memory.  I submitted the job again that evening, and it successfully ran to completion.  There were a few dozen more iterations as I tweaked the matrix, some that ran successfully, and others did not.  I was pushing the mainframe and the software to its absolute limit, but eventually found the optimal solution to the problem.  We asked AT&T to price the solution I had created, and it was $100 less per month than the best solution their world-class INOS tool had found.  The two lines to each major hub location tripped up INOS.

I gathered all the documentation for my final report, about an inch thick, and gave it to the professor as the class began the final exam.  I saw the professor looking at the various submissions.  He would look at one for a minute or less and flip to the next one and do the same.  Then he came to mine.  He read for about five minutes, then stood up, walked around the room, still reading, and walked out the door, returning several minutes later.  I think the scope of the problem I tackled and all the various skills I had to use just blew his mind.  And yeah, I got an A+. 

2.       The Business Meeting

What made this cool was that I figured out how two people could both be right.

Of all the cool things I’ve done, this one took, by far, the least amount of time to accomplish, about forty minutes.  I was invited to a meeting with a bunch of business folks, and I had no idea why I was invited.  As the meeting began, I had no clue what they were talking about; I had not heard the business terms they were throwing around before.  After a few minutes, the only clear thing was that two guys had competing proposals for some kind of business change.  At that point, I faced two choices.  I could just sit there and listen politely, or I could try to figure out what they were talking about.  I chose the latter and further decided I would try a novel tactic: I would try to figure out how both guys could be right.  What small detail could there be that one saw working one way and the other differently?  

Over the course of the next half-hour, I slowly started to understand their business terminology.  Fortunately, the conversation eventually turned to something I was familiar with: how several business systems were integrated.  I slowly built a mental model of how each guy saw it working, and after thirty minutes, I thought I understood that one small detail they saw differently.  I continued to listen for another ten minutes to validate my hypothesis as the two guys continued to advocate for their solution.  At the forty-minute point, I said I might have something and asked if I could draw on the whiteboard.  Permission granted, I drew one integration diagram on the left side and a slightly different one on the right.  I then asked one guy if the left side accurately represented his view, and he said yes.  I did the same with the other guy and the right side.  He said yes also.  Then I pointed to the one version that I knew was the way it worked.  The two guys stood up, agreed on the solution based on their new, shared understanding, and the meeting was over.  

3.      NewPage’s IT Objectives

What made this cool was how simply organizing objectives led to so much more.

I joined the NewPage Corporation in early 2008, and one of the first meetings I attended was the CIO covering the IT department’s objectives for the year.  It was a great list and was going to be a challenging year, but I felt it was trying to tell me something, and I just couldn’t put my finger on it.  After the meeting, I asked the CIO if he would send me the slide deck, as I wanted to try to figure out what was bugging me.  He sent me the PowerPoint deck, and I spent a few hours over the next few days staring at it.  Slowly, things began to coalesce and make more sense.  I started moving the objectives around into groups, and then it hit me.  All the objectives sorted themselves into three buckets:  Changing the Business, Changing the Business of IT, and Delivering IT Services.  Under these categories, there were several common themes, which I listed.  Under those, I placed all the objectives the CIO had listed.  Now it all made sense and was far easier to understand.  I sent the updated slide deck back to the CIO, and he appreciated the extra clarity.  But that was just the beginning.

In the new format, Changing the Business was listed first and for good reason.  That was the primary reason the IT department existed and the reason we had a CIO in the first place.  Now, that message was delivered with renewed clarity.  The first thing the executives saw, the first thing the business units saw, and the first thing all the IT employees saw was Changing the Business.  That was a very powerful message.  It also served as a reminder that resources from the business units would be needed to make those changes a reality.  

Changing The Business of IT told everyone that we were spending time, money, and energy making ourselves better.  Delivering IT Services is about the importance of the day-to-day operation that every business unit counts on.  Everything we did could be listed under one of these three high-level objectives.  

The NewPage Human Resources (HR) department ran the system where all objectives and their progress were tracked.  They wanted all groups to link every objective for every employee to an objective for the group’s leader, but they never gave us any guidance on how to actually accomplish that.  Now we had a way.  We loaded all the CIO’s objectives using the new format, and each employee’s objectives would link to a lower-level objective, but if one didn’t exist, it could be linked to one of the three highest-level objectives: Changing the Business, Changing the Business of IT, or Delivering IT Services.  

We used the new format for other purposes, for example, scorecards on project progress.  What started as an idea that a list of great ideas could be better organized led to a profound shift in how we viewed ourselves and how others viewed us.  

4.       Four-Hour Monthly Outage

What made this cool was how it turned into a sense of pride.

Until Mead implemented the SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system in 2000, major maintenance of the computer systems occurred between midnight and 8:00 am on Sunday mornings when the business did not need access.  The paper mills did not need the centralized applications to make or ship paper, so they were good.  That all changed with SAP because the design decision was made to ship paper out of SAP.  Any SAP outage would impact their ability to keep the flow of paper going, and, worst case, the paper machine might have to be shut down, an event that would cost Mead a lot of money.  I had to find a way to minimize the outages, knowing they could not be eliminated.  

After some thought, I decided that we could have a single monthly outage lasting four hours.  We would have to work together to fit all the needed changes in that window and perform as many changes as possible concurrently.  I presented that idea to the technical people, figuring they would really like the idea of only having to come in at midnight once a month.  Their first reaction was that there was no way we could fit all the changes in a shorter, single monthly outage.  They really bristled at not having the systems to themselves.  They would gladly continue interrupting their every weekend to be left alone.  But I insisted we had to try.

The process we used to plan the outage started by having all change requests submitted a couple of weeks prior, and an initial planning meeting from 3 pm to 5 pm ten days before the outage date.  We discussed the changes, and the group would design an initial plan.  The Outage Coordinator would take all the input and create a Microsoft Project project plan, which was reviewed by the group the following Thursday, where any small corrections would be made.  It wasn’t a bad process, and at best it worked okay, but I knew we needed something better.

At the next month’s planning meeting, I told the group we were going to try a different method.  For the first hour, we would discuss all the changes, their importance, and their operational requirements (e.g., certain systems up or down).  For the second hour, the Outage Coordinator, two volunteers from the meeting's participants, and I would work on a more detailed plan.  After that first hour, I asked the group (about a dozen people) for two volunteers to stay for the second hour and help design the plan.  Nobody offered, so I had to pick the two based on the changes being made.  Everyone else hustled to the exit.  The four of us designed a much better plan, and we had our best outage so far.

We followed the new process at the next meeting, and when I asked for two volunteers, I got more than that.  Apparently, word was getting around that the second hour was fun.  At the next month’s meeting, everyone raised their hand.  After another few meetings, I told the Outage Coordinator that I was bowing out.  I really wasn’t adding any value at that point.  A year later, I decided to check up on things and visited at the end of the second hour.  I found the manager of the mainframe group, dry-erase marker in hand, staring at the whiteboard with all the changes written on sticky notes, saying out loud, “I just know we can fit all this in.”  All was good.

There are hundreds of steps during an outage, for example, locking out users or bringing down a server, and I noticed that several of those steps would not go smoothly.  With only four hours from start to finish, these operational missteps were costing us ten or more minutes each outage and were often the same issue over and over.  I suggested to the Outage Coordinator that we write down everything that went wrong, no matter how small, and he agreed.  He brought in a large paper flipchart and placed it in the middle of the room.  We would listen to everything going on, and when something didn’t go right, we wrote it on the flipchart.  On Monday, he would take each item and turn it into a problem ticket and assign it to the appropriate group to resolve.  After a few months, the outages ran smoothly, and the wasted time was eliminated.  

A couple of years later, MeadWestvaco would outsource all computer operations to Xerox Business Systems (XBS), including the people involved in the above process.  I was told later on that they had talked to other XBS support teams that also supported SAP outages, and they wanted to know how we managed a once-a-month, four-hour outage.  They proudly explained all the steps and how everyone worked together to make it happen.  Other teams just shrugged and said they could never do that.  

5.       Data Center Consolidation

What made this cool was how I came to lead the project.

I joined Mead’s Technical Services group in 1981 as a systems programmer after having similar positions at Wright State University and Hobart Corporation.  I didn’t have primary responsibility for any of the major system components, but served as a backup or an extra resource as needed.  Mead had several data centers, and in 1982, it was decided to fold the Cincinnati data center into the Dayton data center, where I worked.  That was announced to us at a meeting one Friday in Dayton.  After the meeting, I mentioned to someone that it would be a cool project to lead; although we had several people with far more experience than I, I hoped to be involved in some way.

A follow-up meeting was held the following Friday in Cincinnati.  I parked my car, and as I was walking to the venue, somebody came up to me and said they had heard I was running the project.  That was news to me, and I said I hadn’t heard that, but I would be excited if that was true.  Surely someone would have told me, or maybe asked me, before that.  It turned out to be true.  I don’t know if they chose me because someone had heard me express interest the week before or simply because I was the easiest person to make available.  

It took about three months to plan, test, and execute the move of the Cincinnati data center.  I worked seventy hours per week over that stretch, collaborating with various teams to identify the differences between the two data center setups and stage the necessary changes. Instead of one big move, we decided to move one division per weekend, starting with the division that would have the smallest business impact in case things went awry.  The first move went well, and we had some lessons learned that we could incorporate into the second move.  That move also went well, and then took the next weekend off for Thanksgiving.  The last move was the largest, most complicated, and amazingly, it also went with no major issues.  Time to go back to my day job.

A few weeks later, my boss stopped by my office and said the CIO wanted to see me and Jerry, my right-hand guy during the project, in his office.  We were so nervous about being called to the big boss's office, and we were sweating bullets, wondering what we had done wrong to be called on the carpet.  The CIO just wanted to thank us for our efforts and presented us with spot bonus checks.  On the way back down the elevator, we couldn’t decide if we were happier about not being in trouble or that we had some extra spending money.

6.       Network Silo Design

What made this cool was how an unexpected outage turned into a better network.

I have this saying that I call “looking for the root, root cause.”  When problems happen in the Information Technology world, most people will find the “root cause”, which they define as the things that broke.  So it was one day back in the early 2000s when we experienced a network outage in Mead’s World Headquarters building, impacting a number of critical business applications.  The problem was quickly determined to be a network switch that had gone haywire, and a simple reset of the device cleared up the issue.  To the technical folks, they had found the “root cause” and fixed it.  

But I dug deeper and found that the network switch was part of a Local Area Network (LAN) that served PCs in employee offices.  How could that affect business applications that run in the computer room?  I needed to find the “root, root cause” of the problem’s impact.  After digging deep, the best metaphor I could come up with was that our network had grown larger over the years, and it resembled a balloon that had grown bigger and bigger, with all the network equipment in that one balloon.  I had no clue how to fix that, so the network team scheduled a session with the IBM network experts in Raleigh, NC.  We had used them several times in the past, and they proved themselves as excellent facilitators and network experts.  In the first meeting, I described our network and how the network switch caused the large outage.  

Robert Brinkman, IBM’s lead network expert, said that other larger customers had moved to a “five-level network”.  After he explained that a few times, I finally understood the concept.  The network is divided into “silos” based on their purpose, for example, a silo for production systems, a silo for test systems, a silo for the Wide Area Network (WAN), etc.  The devices in the silo are attached to high-speed switches, and they can directly communicate with each other.  But to communicate with devices in another silo, they had to exit the silo via a router.  The router not only moved the data, but more importantly, protected the silo from the type of issue we had encountered.  Armed with this new network design, we headed home ready to implement it.  

The first task was to document all of the existing network devices and how they interconnected.  I created a one-page diagram with boxes (i.e., routers, switches, etc.) and wires (e.g., cables) and moved them around until I minimized the number of wires that crossed each other.  I find crossing wires visually confuses people, and I think I only had two or three that crossed.  As soon as I validated the accuracy of the diagram, I built a second diagram that had the silos we had chosen, about nine of them, with vertical lines separating the silos.  Then I moved all the boxes to the silo they belonged in.  Every place a wire crossed the vertical silo lines was a device we had to move to the proper silo.  This created a visual roadmap of the changes we needed to make, and there were quite a few of them.  I had it printed out on a plotter, creating a huge 4’x6’ printout that I hung on my office wall.  The team worked diligently over several months to make those changes, and I would reflect that on the diagram until at last everything was in its proper place.  

As we made those changes, the number of network outages decreased almost magically, and their impact was localized to their silo.  We had always performed most network changes during the Saturday night outage window, and we were now allowed to make changes inside the silos that supported non-production systems during normal business hours, which the team really appreciated.  I used the final diagram to educate our internal audit staff, taking our big, complex network and reducing it to ingestible pieces.  The project was a lot of work for my team, but the results were totally worth it.

7.       Excel Performance Problem

What made this cool was how I solved it while kneeling in church.

One of the consultants the NewPage Corporation contracted with gave me a call one Friday afternoon, asking me to stop by and take a look at a performance problem with Microsoft Excel.  The user said it took 2-3 hours to recalculate the spreadsheet, and they were requesting a faster PC to reduce that wait time.  I brought up the Windows performance monitor and had them kick off the recalculation.  Instantly, all four cores on the CPU went to 100% utilization, and no disk input or output was seen.  A lot of people think PCs are just slow, but when it comes to their CPU, that’s rarely the bottleneck that causes this type of problem.  I had them send me the spreadsheet so I could take a deeper dive over the weekend. 

I briefly looked at the spreadsheet, which was very large with lots of data in it, on Saturday, but nothing immediately jumped out at me.  During church on Sunday morning, my mind drifted back to the problem, and I started thinking of what could cause this type of multi-hour CPU burn.  This is very much not my favorite way of solving problems.  I don't like the “let’s make a guess and see if that’s it” approach.  I prefer gathering data and looking at the details, but since I was kneeling in a church, that wasn’t going to happen, so I thought of what could cause Excel to loop over and over again.  I knew from experience that large table lookups can take some time, particularly if a linear search is used.  A linear search is where you start at the top of the table and go row-by-row looking for a match.  But even if you had a million rows of data, that wouldn’t take all that long.  But if you search those millions of rows over and over and over, it will eventually add up.  In Excel, those table lookups use a function called VLOOKUP.  So I needed to look at the spreadsheet and find all the VLOOKUPs in search of the cause.  I thanked God for the inspiration and returned to paying attention to the mass.

When I got home, I searched through the spreadsheet and found the VLOOKUPs.  I found the VLOOKUPs; some were contained in loops that called other VLOOKUPs, and those contained more loops with even more VLOOKUPs.  I had found the source of the problem, but how to fix it?  I knew I had to replace the linear search form of the VLOOKUP with its binary search form.  In a binary search, the data must be sorted from lowest to highest values, which allows the search to cut the table in half, looking to see if the desired match is in the top half of the table or the bottom half.  The table gets cut in half over and over until the value is found.  A linear search of one million rows takes, on average, five hundred thousand compares.  A binary search of the same million rows takes no more than twenty compares to find the value, a 99.996% reduction in the number of compares.  Now the plot thickens.  The binary search form of VLOOKUP returns the closest value, whereas the linear search form will return “not found”.  I didn’t know how to resolve that, so I did a few Internet searches and found someone with a solution.  Each linear VLOOKUP would need to be replaced with two binary VLOOKUPs.  While that would double the number of total VLOOKUPs performed, the binary form is so much faster that it probably wouldn’t matter much.

Getting into the office on Monday morning, I sent an email to the spreadsheet owner explaining what I had found and that he needed to sort the data and change the VLOOKUPs to the new format.  Early that afternoon, he sent a message back that the spreadsheet was now recalculating in 2-3 seconds and that he was so shocked he had to double-check the answer to make sure things were still working properly.  And he no longer wanted a new PC.

8.       The Oracle Contract

What made this cool was how we saved big money with a timely question.

One of the many cost-saving opportunities I took on during my career was to review our Oracle contracts to identify potential savings.  I was surprised to find we spent about $250,000 a year on Oracle’s database software, since we primarily used two other database systems, Microsoft’s SQL Server and IBM’s DB2.  I pulled all the contract information, and I was surprised we were paying for maintenance on several Oracle licences we had not used in quite a while.  I thought my job was going to be easy, just cancel those licenses and save a bunch of money.  But Oracle made that much harder due to the structure of their contracts.

What I came to learn is that we had three Oracle contracts, and each of those contained multiple software licenses.  We could not simply cancel a license; we had to cancel an entire contract, so even if a contract had one active license, you paid maintenance on all the licenses, active or not.  Now it looked like it was going to be impossible to save any money.  But I wasn’t done trying.

I analyzed the contracts more deeply, looking at the applications using each license, then deciding which might be the easiest to eliminate and which the most difficult.  The easiest contract had only one active license, used by one of the applications that connected to our ERP system and supported by the same on-site team.  I walked over to that team’s lead, Mark, and explained we could save $80,000 by canceling an Oracle contract if it was possible to convert that application to SQL Server.  Mark was ecstatic!  His team didn’t like Oracle very much, preferring SQL Server.  Mark then said that his team was at the beginning of a project to upgrade that application and that the vendor provided automated scripts to convert from Oracle to SQL Server.  He said he would add the conversion to the plan and that he would let me know when they turned off that Oracle database.  It took a couple of months for the upgrade to be completed, and I let the contracts manager know we could cancel the first of the three contracts, saving $80,000 per year.  I think this personifies the saying, “The harder you work, the luckier you are.”

9.       Replacing The Mead Building Coax

What made this cool was not getting fired.

In the 1980s, all Mead offices had a phone and an IBM mainframe terminal.  The phone was connected to the PBX (Private Branch eXchange) system using unshielded twisted pair wiring, the kind used in your average house.  The terminal was connected to the computer room using a coax cable that ran all the way from that office to the computer room on the 16th floor.  That setup was still good when Personal Computers (PCs) were added; we just put a coax board in the PC.  But that setup was a challenge when Local Area Networks were introduced, which required a Token-Ring or Ethernet connection.  We began running a third wire to these offices, one that used shielded twisted pair wires.  In fact, we didn’t need the coax or the unshielded twisted pair wiring anymore; we could use the shielded twisted pair for all three needs. 

We drafted a Capital Project Request (CPR) to remove the old wiring and replace it with shielded twisted pair.  We presented to the I.T. Director (my boss's boss), and he unexpectedly turned it down.  My team came up with another way.  We knew that major office remodeling happens every 3-5 years on all the Mead floors, so we got together with the facilities people.  They agreed to pull the old wiring and put in the new wiring whenever a major remodel occurred.  It cost less money to put in the new wiring, so they were happy to save money.  We were happy that the capital costs incurred were charged to the project and did not use I.T.’s capital budget.  Over the next several years, remodeling projects slowly removed all the old wiring.  A real win-win.

One day, the I.T. Director came to my office on a mission.  He was tasked to get rid of coax cables because if they burn, they can release toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gas.  He asked me how much coax we had in the building.  Half in a state of shock, I told him the truth.  There were four coax cables in the building, and they served cable TVs on the executive floors.  I explained how we worked with the facilities people over the past years, that we saved Mead money, and didn’t use I.T.’s capital dollars.  He just sat there, looking at me.  For a long, uncomfortable time.  Maybe he would fire me on the spot for doing a project that he had rejected.  Then he just got up and walked out of my office.  I never knew what he was thinking, but I think I might have missed a bullet on that one.

10.     Writing Digital Filing Apps

What made this cool was that its greatest value was never imagined.

When Canadian-based Catalyst Paper bought the Rumford, Maine, and Biron, Wisconsin paper mills from Verso, the people who went to Catalyst Paper, including me, moved into a single-floor office, where everybody got to know each other.  It was the first time that I mingled every day with the business folks instead of mostly other I.T. people.  One of the things I noticed was that their business processes involved a lot of paper.  Now, being a paper company, that might seem okay, but I knew digitizing some of these processes would be valuable.  There wasn’t a lot of interest until the two-person Damage Control group started running out of filing cabinet space and asked me to take a look to see if they could go digital.  As we discussed the need, I was happily surprised to find that almost all of the papers they filed away had come to them digitally.  They would get customer forms and pictures of damage attached to emails.  They would print out orders and other documents from SAP.  They would download other documents from websites.  We embarked on a proof-of-concept project to see if a digital filing system could meet their requirements.  

I wrote the first iteration of the application using Google App Script and used a Google Drive for data storage.  I built a small PC application to create a digital “stamp” that could be added to documents to make sure all the needed control information was attached.  I wrote a couple of scripts that would automatically download files from a couple of large customers’ websites.  Over the course of a few months, we continued to refine the digital filing system to meet their needs.  Now that the concept had been proven, I looked for another application platform, knowing that Google App Script wasn’t mainstream enough, and selected Microsoft PowerShell.  It was better than Google App Script in some ways, and worse in others, but it was also free.  I rewrote the application in PowerShell and supported the application when the very occasional problem cropped up.  

I retired a year or so later after China-based ND Paper acquired the business, knowing it was the right time to end my career.  But it wasn’t quite over yet.

Two other business groups, Customer Service and Accounts Payable, contacted me the following year and asked if I would be interested in writing digital filing applications for them.  They had the same problem; they were running out of filing cabinet space.  Having the time on my hands, I agreed and spent much of 2019 tailoring a pair of applications for them.  Another pair of happy campers.  One of my former co-workers told me they showed management how much paper they saved by creating a folded-up, eighteen-foot banner that they spread apart at a meeting.  I thought that was such a creative idea and really made the savings visible.

The three digital filing systems all met their objectives, and no more office space or filing cabinets were purchased.  But we all knew there was going to be a lot more value than that.  Avoiding printing all the paper, at ten cents a page, was a nice saving.  Being able to cover for a co-worker out sick for a day, on vacation, or on maternity leave was easier since everyone could access the files.  An unexpected benefit was that fulfilling audit requests for data went from hours to minutes.  But the greatest value occurred when the COVID lockdowns occurred, and everyone had to work at home.  They worked from home, using a VPN connection, and all three digital filing applications worked just as well as in the office.  I don’t know what the business would have done if these major business processes were still paper-based.  It might not have shut the business down, but it would have certainly slowed it down quite a bit. 

I began my career at Wright State University, writing their first online Admissions system while still a student.  I ended my career writing three digital filing applications while my actual job was an I.T. Strategist.  But as you can see from this collection of cool stuff, everything in between was a wild ride.

Here are a couple of bonus cool stories that I wrote years ago on my TechnologyViewPoint blog.  They both belong in the above list, but I didn’t want to repeat myself.  Along with the six Wright State stories at the link at the beginning of this blog, that makes 18 cool memories.  But really, there were dozens more.  Maybe someday I’ll get to them.

https://technologyviewpoint.paulishing.com/2016/05/the-pocket-directory-story.html

https://technologyviewpoint.paulishing.com/2012/07/5-50-500-5000.html

The Best Of 2025

2025 was the fifteenth year in a row that I’ve written down my best experiences of the year.  Of those thirty-eight, the list was narrowed down to the best of the best, which you will read below.  The bad times are way too easy to recollect, and the good times can be easily forgotten, so writing the good times down throughout the year and recalling them here is my way of staying grounded in the good.  As usual, I will list the top ten in reverse order, saving the best of the best for last.

10.  Buffalo beat Liberty 26-7 in the Bahamas Bowl

The Buffalo Bulls finished the 2024 season with a very respectable 8-4 record, earning them a bowl game.  What better location could they have than to fly to Nassau in the Bahamas?  Elaine’s son Brian is the Safeties and Nickels coach for the Bulls, and his defense limited the Liberty Flames to a single touchdown, while the offense put up 26 points for a decisive win.  We watched the game in our living room, having decided we would travel to watch Elaine’s son Pat and his Texas A&M Aggies take on the University of Southern California in the Las Vegas Bowl.  

9.  U.S. Women’s Amateur Qualifier @ Walnut Grove Country Club

Our country club played host to one of the U.S. Women’s Amateur Qualifiers, and as members, we were allowed to follow the groups on the course.  We were amazed by how far they could hit the ball and how little effort they appeared to muster.  The ladies routinely smacked drives on the 18th hole that soared over the tall tree that’s planted nearly in the middle of the fairway, landing just a short chip shot from the green.  The 17th hole is a 200-yard, uphill par-3 that I’ve managed to hit only a couple of times in our eight years as members.  One group of three ladies, all using less than a driver, hit the green on that hole.  On the par-5 16th, one of the longest hitting ladies was on the green after smashing a driver and an iron.  The ladies were playing from the blue tees, the same as I usually play, but they made that distance look easy.  We watched for a couple of hours until the bug bites got too much to take.  Next time we’ll bring a can of bug spray.

8.  U.S. Open Golf Tournament in Oakmont, PA

Elaine’s niece, Laura, was able to get us a couple of tickets to the U.S. Open in Oakmont, a short drive east of Elaine’s hometown of Pittsburgh.  Her brother-in-law, Albert, chauffeured us to a remote parking lot where we caught one of the dozens and dozens of buses that made the several-mile drive to and from the course.  The organizers deserve a heap of praise for keeping the 40,000 spectators that Saturday, moved, fed, and hydrated.  We enjoyed the afternoon of spectacular golf shots on one of the hardest courses in the world, made even more daunting by the rain that had soaked the course.  Elaine’s pass got her access to the “Suites on 13”, a two-story “tent” that was filled with all sorts of food and drink.  She was sweet to bring me out a popsicle, which I snarfed before it totally melted in the humid heat.  After the round, Albert returned to take us home.  What a nice guy! 

7.  Soft Shell Crab at Uncle Ernie’s in Panama City

We had a week of perfect weather during our trip to Panama City Beach, Florida, in late April.  This was a new place to vacation, and we spent the week exploring its sights and sounds.  I was hoping to find a restaurant that served a soft-shell crab sandwich, and we ventured across the bay to Uncle Ernie’s Bayfront Grill and Brew House.  Situated on St. Andrews Bay in Panama City, Florida, Uncle Ernie’s delivered on my hopes, not with just a sandwich, but a dinner consisting of two huge, fried soft-shell crabs served with a remoulade sauce on a bed of lettuce.  It was so delicious that we went back for lunch a few days later, and I had their equally delicious soft-shell crab sandwich.  

6.  Dinner at Benny’s Coastal Kitchen in Hilton Head

An October trip to visit our friends Dan and Grace in Hilton Head was our usual great time, and among a few new restaurants for us to try, I fell in love with Benny’s Coastal Kitchen.  We began the evening with drinks at the second-floor bar overlooking Skull Creek, my selection being an Orange Crush, a refreshing blend of Deep Eddy Orange Vodka, triple sec, orange juice, and a splash of Sprite. Dinner was their Seafood Fritto Misto, a seafood platter packed with fried shrimp, scallops, oysters, pickled vegetables, harissa, and natural fries.  I washed that down with a Bourbon Peach Palmer, a tall glass of peach bourbon, lemon simple syrup, and unsweetened iced tea.  And since I wasn’t driving, an Espresso Martini for dessert.  Benny’s is now my must-go restaurant on Hilton Head Island.

5.  Christmas Dinner

We stayed home for Christmas this year and enjoyed a few days with Elaine’s son Brian and his wife Deborah.  Christmas dinner was a memorable feast with Elaine making a standing rib roast, a very cheesy sliced potato casserole, and fresh carrots.  The roast was salted and open-cured in the refrigerator overnight, then reverse-seared.  That method has the meat roasted low-and-slow in the oven for three hours, then finished at high heat to sear the crust.  It was the best piece of prime rib I’ve eaten anywhere.  The potatoes were super-cheesy delicious, and I ate every bit of the leftovers.

We served wine with dinner and decided, after years of looking for the right occasion, to open the bottle of 2002 Château Lafite-Rothschild I bought back in 2010 for $180 and now worth 3-4 times that much.  Getting that bottle is a long story in itself; it was dumb luck I found it, and a second bottle for my daughter’s 30th birthday gift.  For those who might not know, Château Lafite-Rothschild is one of the four wines called First Growths that were first designated back in 1855, expanded to five wines in 1973, and represent the best of French wine.  Opening a twenty-three-year-old bottle of expensive wine is a little nerve-racking.  Has it gone bad?  Will it really be as good as advertised?  While I was inserting the corkscrew, the cork was breaking up, a real sign that the wine might have soured.  I had to strain pieces of cork from the wine as I poured it into a decanter to serve.  We raised our glasses for a Christmas toast and tried our first sips.  The wine was fantastic!  Best I’ve ever had and well worth the wait.  A true once-in-a-lifetime experience!

4.  Riley Green Concert @ The Fraze

When we saw that country star Riley Green was coming to our local Fraze Pavilion, we jumped at the chance to get tickets and snagged a couple of good ones on what turned out to be a beautiful Friday night in July.  The energy was electric as he sang songs both familiar and new, and everyone in the packed house stood the entire time.  I’ve been to a fair number of concerts at Fraze over the years with perhaps bigger stars, but I’ve never seen the place that packed.  I hope the Fraze can attract more up-and-coming country artists in the years to come.

3.  40th Birthday Party for Pat

Both of Elaine’s sons are college football coaches, one of the rare professions where you don’t get vacation days.  When I worked, I got a certain number of weeks off each year, and I could ask my manager for whatever days I wanted to take off.  Instead, college coaches have a set schedule that includes specific days and weeks off, which includes a week off for spring break and three weeks between late June and early July.  For the first time, both sons, their wives, and the two grandkids spent a few days during the summer break to visit us.  It was great having everyone together, and we decided to throw a party on Saturday and invited family and friends for a cookout.  What we didn’t tell son Pat was that it was also going to be an early 40th birthday party for him.  Because with a September birthday, at the start of football season, a party at that time could never happen.

We secretly invited several of Pat’s old high school friends to join the party and included their spouses and kids.  The backyard was filled with kids playing, music blasting, burgers grilling, people reminiscing, and lots of laughing.  It reminded me of my youth and all the family get-togethers we were able to have way more frequently.  These moments will be few and too far between, but for a few hours, we had one to savor forever.

2. Cirque du Soleil “O” 

To celebrate Elaine’s 70th birthday, we took a trip to Las Vegas with her siblings, and the highlight of the trip was VIP tickets to the Cirque du Soleil “O” show at the Bellagio.  “O” is a homophone with the French word “eau”, which means water, which is the focus of the performance.  It centers around a massive 1.5-million-gallon pool that transforms into a stage in seconds.  Acts include 60-foot high dives, acrobatics on a swaying, suspended, metal-frame “ship”, and setting an actor on fire.  The VIP tickets got us box seats, drinks before and during the show, and a pre-show visit from three of the cast members, including the actor who gets engulfed in flames.  It’s a truly spectacular show, and I think the best of the several Cirque du Soleil shows on the Vegas strip.

1.  Texas A&M 31-30 Comeback Win vs South Carolina 

We saw two Texas A&M football games at Kyle Field in College Station, Texas, the first close, but under control, a 16-10 win over Auburn in September.  The second game, versus South Carolina, was one for the record books.  The game started with teams trading field goals; however, for the rest of the first half, A&M was not its usual aggressive self, and South Carolina scored touchdowns on two long passes and another on a defensive “strip-6”, building a 30-3 lead at halftime.  In the past twenty-one years, 286 SEC teams trailed by 27+ points, and no team had come back to win.  A&M would have to play a perfect second half of football to have a chance.  And they delivered.

Less than four minutes into the second half, they scored their first touchdown on a 27-yard pass play.  Another third-quarter touchdown came with just over four minutes left, a 39-yard pass play, completing a seven-play drive that began after a fourth-down stop at the A&M 30-yard line.  Now down by only 13 points, the crowd came roaring back, and the place went crazy.  Still in the third quarter, A&M held SC to a three-and-out, forcing a punt.  Starting at their 20-yard line, a holding penalty pushed them back to the ten.  That was followed by the play of the game, a 76-yard pass play to the SC 14.  One more pass completion, and the SC lead was down to 6.  Starting the fourth quarter on their own 1-yard line, A&M went on a 12-play, 99-yard march down the field to take a 1-point lead.  The defense took it from there, never allowing SC to get past their own 40-yard line.  We had just witnessed the largest comeback in A&M school history.  What a thrill!

50 Ways To Balance The Budget

Of course, this should be sung to the tune of Paul Simon's "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover".

----

"The problem is all inside your head"

She said to me

"The answer is easy if you

Take it logically

I'd like to help you in your struggle

To be debt-free

There must be fifty ways

To balance the budget"

She said, "It's really not my habit to intrude

Furthermore, I hope my meaning

Won't be lost or misconstrued

But I'll repeat myself

At the risk of being crude

There must be fifty ways

To be more shrewd

Fifty ways to balance the budget"

Take out the trash, Kash

Clean out the rot, Scott

Give 'em their notice, POTUS 

And clean out the deep state

Put ‘em on the street, Pete

Make ‘em take flight, Wright

Don’t let them be smug, Doug

Give our country back to us

Ooh, Kick ‘em in the pants, Vance

Give ‘em till dusk, Musk 

Root out their scams, Pam 

And clean out the deep state

Show ‘em the lobby, Bobby 

Don’t care that they cuss, Russ

Not even when they plea, Lee

Give our country back to us

The Hottest Times

I love the heat. My co-workers thought I was nuts for enjoying a 90-degree, 4-mile run on the bikeway over my lunch hour.  At the downtown YMCA, I regularly used the sauna and steam rooms, even jogging in place to work up a bit more sweat. I can lay out at the pool or beach under a blaring sun for hours without jumping in the water to cool off.  But as these four stories will detail, there were a few times when the heat got the best of me.

Perhaps the worst of these stories was somewhere back in the 1990s.  I signed up for an eight-mile run that started in Troy, Ohio, and went due north, ending in Piqua.  That in itself is strange as most races start and finish at, or very close to, the same location.  Several factors go into how hot it’s going to feel.  First and foremost is the temperature, and this day, it was in the 80s.  Second is the amount of sunshine and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  Third is wind direction and it was directly at our backs, doing little to help our perspiration evaporate and give us relief.  The fourth is the level of humidity which was gratefully very low that day.  As the race started, I found myself going out with the lead pack, something I’d never tried to do before.  So that extra effort was causing me to generate even more heat.  But the unfortunate surprise was we were running on fresh black asphalt which absorbed the abundant sunshine and took the temperature to the next level.  My body did everything it could to cope, but after about one and a half miles, I started seeing sparkles in my eyes, a sure sign of heat prostration.  I smartly moved to the side of the road and began walking.  At the next water stop, I drank as much as I could and shortly after that, the asphalt returned to a more normal and manageable gray.  Feeling better I began to run again, keeping my pace slow at first and gradually building back to my average race pace.  I finished the race tired and dehydrated, but solidly on two feet.  I usually grab a bottle of water or two, but this race offered Pepsi and other sodas.  I thought a Pepsi would be great, its water, sugar, and caffeine would be the perfect pick-me-up.  Probably so, but I overdosed on five of them and felt terrible.  This day was a great, albeit painful, learning experience.

Summer in Las Vegas is a heat-lovers paradise and back when I was in great shape I decided to go for a four-mile run from the Caesars Palace resort heading north a couple of miles before turning around and heading back.  It wasn’t a hard run as the sidewalks were fairly crowded and stoplights provided little rest stops along the way.  I didn’t feel overheated, wasn’t sweating much if at all, and felt pretty normal until I almost returned to Caesars Palace.  I was getting a little lightheaded at that point and was happy to be finished.  When I opened the door to a side entrance at Caesars, I felt a blast of frigid air.  I walked in without a bit of perspiration on my shirt, shorts, or socks.  It took several minutes to get back to my room and by the time I opened my hotel room door, I was drenched in sweat and my clothes were dripping wet.  That’s the lesson when running in ultra-low humidity.  You are sweating, but the air absorbs it all.  You might not recognize you’re dehydrated until it’s too late.  

When my kids were pre-teen, we had a summer family vacation at Disney World in Florida.  You can count on central Florida to be hot and humid with a half-hour downpour around 4:00 pm which cools things down temporarily but boosts the humidity.  Most years it’s manageable but this one particular year it was the mid-90s, full sun, high humidity, and no breeze.  Wanting to avoid any of us getting dehydrated, I was buying each of us 2-3 bottles of water every hour, not a cheap thing to do.  Waiting outside for a ride was the worst and even the misting fans were little comfort.  Every kid (and many adults) wants to stay all day at a Disney park, but by mid-afternoon, my kids just wanted to go back to the pool at Dixie Landings (now part of Port Orleans) and chill out.  I was very happy to oblige them.  They also loved that I bought them each a big plastic cup that could be refilled free all week long in the restaurant.  Best $9 (each) that I’ve ever spent.  Saved me a small fortune.

The hottest recorded temperature in Dayton, Ohio during my lifetime was Saturday, June 25, 1988.  I figured it would be a good time to play a round of golf at Kitty Hawk Golf Course in North Dayton that afternoon as I, correctly, bet few people would venture out in that type of heat.  My 12-year-old son wanted to join me and I said he could, not knowing how well he would take it, and I made sure we had refillable cups to replenish at the numerous water fountains on the course.  We were both sweating profusely and for the first few holes, he was running around enjoying the adventure.  But after that, he spent most of the time in the golf cart only enjoying the somewhat cooling breeze as we drove to the next shot.  It was tough to keep us hydrated and we were both completely soaked with sweat and happy when the round was over to get in the car and turn on the air conditioning full blast.  It was a learning moment of what not to repeat in the future.  And I haven’t.

The Coldest Times

As a kid, I never remember being cold and I loved to be outside for hours sliding down our sidewalk, having snowball fights, building snowmen, sledding, and catching snowflakes on my tongue.  But as I grew older I found myself tolerating the cold more than enjoying it.  Looking back over my life, I find I have some memories of being so miserably cold I wanted to get them written down.  So here I go.

Back in college, my girlfriend lived six blocks from my parents’ house and one winter’s night found the outside temperature about 20 degrees below zero with a stiff wind to boot.  I wanted to visit my girlfriend that night and knew better than to start my Opel Kadett in that cold.  I bundled up as best I could and trudged through the snow and wind in what seemed to take forever.  It was the first time in my life I realized that this type of cold could kill you, and after a couple of blocks, I knew I had to make a potentially life-and-death decision on whether to turn back or forage on.  I decided to continue, and when I stepped into her house, I realized I’d never loved warmth more than that.  I know I walked back home a few hours later, but I don’t remember the trip back having quite the suspense.  

The only frozen memory not related to the weather was passing my first kidney stone.  I left for work that morning knowing something was off and an hour later I was driven to Miami Valley Hospital doubled over in pain, not knowing the source.  As the doctors tried to determine what was going on, I lay on a table alternating between freezing and sweating.  When I was cold, I shook uncontrollably as they layered blankets on top of me to try to warm me up, which never did the job.  Minutes later I was sweating profusely and they took the blankets off to cool me down.  All that sweat contributed to the next cycle of freezing, making it even worse.  It’s a miracle I didn’t break a tooth, that’s how hard my teeth were chattering.  When the stone finally passed, so did the pain and the temperature swings, and putting that freezing behind me was most appreciated. 

I’ve run a lot of miles in my life, about enough to circle the equator twice, and there were times I just wasn’t smart enough to stay inside.  The first extreme cold experience was running with my buddy Jim.  This particular day was bitterly cold, snowy, and windy.  We took off from the YMCA and headed north on the west side of the Great Miami River bike trail towards Helena Street.  There was nobody to be seen, not even driving cars, it was so nasty outside.  It turned bitterly cold when we started back south on the east side of the river with the wind blowing so hard it would knock our ankles together, a painful collision of bone on bone.  By the time we finally made it back to the YMCA, Jim’s mustache was solid white.  Fortunately for us, a trip to the steam room warmed us back up.

Back when I was dating Elaine, I convinced her to run with me on the Great Miami River bike trail on a day with single-digit temperatures and 20-mile-per-hour winds.  I told her the first half-mile would be cold but our bodies would warm up after that and we would be comfortable.  Perhaps it was blind love and wanting to spend time together that made us ignore just how nasty the weather was.  After that first half-mile, we were still freezing cold but persisted for another mile before heading back to the car.  By the time that run was done, our eyes, ears, lungs, feet, and about everything else were frozen.  It’s a miracle we didn’t have frostbite.  She thought I was hazing her and this was a test to see if she was worthy to marry.  It wasn’t, but she was, and to this day I count my blessings she didn’t dump me over this.

We’ve been to more football games than we can count and we’re greeted with splendid weather for most games, particularly in September and October.  But as the following four brutal memories over ten years will demonstrate, no game is exempt from Mother Nature’s ice-cold grip.  

We attended a Ball State Cardinals versus Miami Redhawks football game in Oxford, Ohio back on November 23, 2012, a unique game because Elaine’s sons were either coaching or on the football staff of each college, and one game we couldn’t miss.  Like many late-season football games, this was a frigid affair and we bundled as best we could against the brutal cold.  Late in the game, there was a chance it could go into overtime and that was flat-out scary.  Fortunately, that did not happen (Ball State won) and we didn’t have to choose a fight (stay in our seats) or flight (run to our car) scenario.  At the end of the game, it took about 15-20 minutes for the coaches to be available to chat for a moment, and we headed inside to get out of the wind and try to warm up a little.  That didn’t work, but we found a room where we could completely get out of the wind and waited, still freezing.  They finally showed up and after a nice chat, we made the hour drive back home, the heater blasting at its highest setting.  That helped some, but we were still shivering when we got home, but a half-hour in the hot tub finally vanquished the chills.

Ball State’s schedule in 2014 included an October 2nd game at West Point, New York to play the Army Black Knights.  The call went out to Elaine’s family to see who would like tickets and about thirty people decided to join us.  We flew into Stewart International Airport on Friday, grabbed our rental car, checked into our hotel, and spent a couple of hours on the most beautiful, sunny, mid-70s afternoon driving through the beautiful West Point campus.  But by the time the game started on Saturday, it was miserable, rainy, and cold.  We all had ponchos to attempt to keep us dry, but as the game progressed, we all got wetter and colder.  By halftime, over half of our group had left the misery for the Newburgh Brewing Company where we had a room for our group.  We lost more folks as the game moved into the fourth quarter and it looked more and more like Ball State would lose the game, which they did, 33-24.  By the end, only three of us remained.  Elaine’s 88-year-old mother Marge stayed to the bitter end because she wanted to talk to her grandson no matter what.  Of course, Elaine stayed with her mother and I stayed because I’m not stupid.  But after a couple of beers in the warm confines of the Newburgh Brewing Company, we put the loss and the chills behind us.

Of these stories, the least miserable was the October 26, 2019 game in Valparaiso, Indiana when the home team Crusaders played the Stetson Hatters.  It took us longer to get to northern Indiana than expected, and we didn’t get to the stadium until the end of the first quarter.  We had tickets waiting for us at Will Call, but the workers abandoned their post by then to seek a warmer climate.  We had to walk up to the attendant at the gate to explain the situation, and surprisingly, he let us into the stadium without tickets.  A guess he figured if we were nuts enough to want to watch the game in those conditions, we were likely telling the truth or simply felt sorry for us.  We cheered our team to a 19-10 victory, the only win of Valpo’s season.  It probably helped that Stetson is located in Deland, Florida, and ill-prepared for the wintry game that hit them in the face.

You would think by now we would have learned to avoid late-season football games. Still, when Elaine’s son’s Duke Blue Devils came to play the Pittsburgh Panthers (her family is from the ‘Burgh) on November 19, 2022, we decided to take the chance, and again, we got burned (actually quite the opposite).  We were again flanked by many family members on a sunny day with 30-degree temperatures and a wicked, bone-chilling 15-mile-per-hour wind that swirled through Acrisure Stadium.  I was so happy when halftime came so I could huddle inside the stadium and feel my toes again.  The second half was worse, concluding with Duke losing a close game by the score of 28-26. 

Remembering Shadow

I met Shadow the first time I went to Elaine’s house as we started dating.  A barking dog of fifty pounds greeted me and it was clear she wanted to chase off this stranger to protect her mommy.  For the most part dogs and cats like me and I have various stories of how I was told their pet would stay away only to have them unexpectedly make an appearance and sometimes even quickly accept me.  But Shadow was a tougher nut to crack and I finally won her over by keeping a box of Iams doggy biscuits in my trunk and bringing her a treat every time I made an appearance at the front door.  She would grab the biscuit and quickly retreat to munch it in a few seconds.  The way to her heart was through her stomach.

Shadow demanded two daily walks and our routine was Elaine would walk her in the morning before work and I got the evening shift.  The normal route was a 0.7-mile loop from our house to Renwood to Hollendale to Rose Bower to Marshall and back to Larriwood.  It was a combination of her stopping over and over to smell whatever dogs like to smell and using all her strength to make us walk even faster.  This stop-and-go was a good workout for us also and on most walks, we enjoyed it as much as her, except when the temperature dipped below freezing or thoughtless neighbors would not shovel their sidewalks.  

Shadow did like the snow and she would come in after needing a backyard potty break with her black fur covered in white snow.  The exception to her love of snow was the year we got two-and-half feet in February along with freezing temperatures that kept that pile around for weeks.  The snow was deeper than her legs were long so I shoveled a path from the backyard patio to the back fence and then halfway down that fence.  She didn’t quite get what I had done, so I had to put her on her leash and pull her down the path to get her familiar with it.  After a week I felt sorry for her so I shoveled again to create a loop around the backyard.  Shadow walked to her previous stopping point then turned around and came back.  Again I had to put her on her leash and drag her around the entire loop to get her to understand.  I wasn’t going to waste all that extra effort for nothing.

Like all dogs, Shadow didn’t like rabbits, squirrels, or any critter invading her territory.  On one beautiful spring day, I discovered a rabbit nest in the backyard and found about eight babies, each about two inches long, and no mother in sight.  Shadow tried to get close enough to eat the babies, but I sternly told her no and she complied.  Each time she was left outside she would slowly circle the nest getting closer with each pass thinking she could get close enough before I could chase her off.  But I would let her see the babies and sniff around, always careful to keep her far enough away.  One day I laid on the grass on my back and put the babies on my chest so Shadow could get a closer look and smell for a few minutes and then returned them to the nest.  Baby rabbits grow incredibly fast and after about two weeks they decided it was time to leave the nest and take off on their own.  When Shadow saw them make a beeline for the back fence, she went crazy.  All her little friends were leaving her behind.  She went so far as to try to leap the back fence at its low point, getting painfully caught halfway over, and making me rescue her.  For several days after she would patrol the backyard looking for her buddies she had come to love.  The neighbors didn’t appreciate that we had more rabbits lurking about, but the hawks did.

Shadow’s morning walk during the workweek wasn’t a problem, but try sleeping in on the weekend and she would whine at the bedroom door.  It started low and infrequent, building and building until you couldn’t ignore her.  We always kept the bedroom shut and we figured out that the whining was partially due to her being closed out.  So we started keeping the door open a few inches so she could see us and that delayed her “I need to go outside now” shining for maybe another half-hour, granting us some well-deserved minutes of slumber.

Shadow’s nickname was “fence-jumper” and I’m told when she was young she was quite the escape artist, clearing fences at ease.  Elaine and her young sons, usually at the most inconvenient times, would drive around the neighborhood to fetch her back.  I never experienced the “fence jumper”, but on a snowy day, I found out how devious she could be.  I was shoveling the driveway and sidewalks and let Shadow join me, off leech, figuring I could keep an eye on her and stop her if she tried anything.  At one moment she was sniffing through a snow pile and the next she was gone.  Panic grew inside me that I would never be forgiven, particularly after I was warned, if she was gone for good.  We looked all over the neighborhood to no avail.  Then she came trotting up the sidewalk with what I swore was a big grin on her face, acting like she had done nothing wrong.

She did not like loud noises and between Elaine’s screaming at football games and my shouting “BOOM!” when my team hit a three-pointer, she wanted to get away.  Shadow would make a beeline for the door and demand she be let out.  She could bark as loud as she wanted, but the humans had a limit.

Shadow spent a lot of her final days in the basement.  In retrospect, she probably wanted to be alone with her illness and that’s how she dealt with it.  One day we found her at the bottom of the stairs having a seizure.  I carried her up the stairs knowing the end was near.  Not wanting her pain to linger, we had her put down.  The crying goes away, but are memories of her are forever.

The Best of 2024

This is the fourteenth year that I’ve collected dozens of the best experiences throughout the year.  2024’s list contained thirty-five entries and as usual, there were ones that were certain top tens and a bunch that contended for the last few inclusions.  Elaine and I made a record fourteen trips in 2024, some to see the grandkids, others to watch football, visit family, or even learn some history.  As I tell people, we put “tired” in the word “retired”!  We start with one of America’s most scenic locations.

10.  Niagara Falls

Elaine’s son Brian and his wife Deborah moved from Indianapolis to Buffalo when he accepted the Safeties & Nickels coaching job at the University at Buffalo.  We made our second trip to Buffalo in September to watch his team play the University of Massachusetts, which resulted in a 34-3 win for the Bulls.  The day before we spent an hour on Goat Island with Deborah to see the spectacular Niagara Falls.  There are three falls, the largest being Horseshoe Falls which dumps about 2.5 billion gallons of water over its crest per hour, far more than the smaller American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls.  It was a beautiful sunny day and the rainbows created by the mists were huge and stunning.  Next time we won’t forget our rain ponchos.  

9.  Little Big Town Concert

One of the few big-name country bands we hadn’t seen over the years is Little Big Town, who have hits including “Day Drinking”, “Better Man”, “Pontoon”, “Little White Church”, and “Wine, Beer, Whiskey”.  We quickly grabbed floor seats with Elaine's sister and brother-in-law when we saw they were playing at PPG Paints Arena in November with opening acts by Sugarland and The Castellows.  Little Big Town is comprised of the husband-and-wife duo of Karen Fairchild and Jimi Westbrook, Kimberly Schlapman, and Phillip Sweet.  We drove down early, had beers at PreGame, saw the concert, and ducked out a bit early to avoid the rush.

8.  Las Vegas Bowl

The Texas A&M Aggies went 8-4 during their football season making them bowl-eligible in the first year of Elaine’s son Pat as their Special Teams Coordinator.  That game was the Las Vegas Bowl on December 27 at Allegiant Stadium.  We flew out on Christmas Eve, had dinner at The House of Blues in the Mandalay Bay hotel, and spent Christmas morning watching our grandkids, Griffin and Joey, open their presents.  We walked the Strip every day, had a nice dinner at the Rí Rá Irish Pub, and watched the sharks, rays, turtles, and other creatures of the sea at the Shark Reef Aquarium.  The football ended on a sad note, a last-minute 35-31 loss to the USC Trojans.

7.  Main Street in Williamsville

Williamsville is the village just north of Buffalo that Brian and Deborah moved to.  From their apartment, you can walk up through Glen Park and along Ellicott Creek as it falls over the Onondaga Escarpment, forming the 27-foot-high Glen Falls, to reach Main Street.  We ate and drank at many places along a half-mile stretch including Glen Park Tavern, Britesmith Brewing Company, Moor Pat (Tap Room spelled backward), Creekview Restaurant, and The Irishman Pub & Eatery.  During our July trip, bands play at a dozen or more venues creating a festive atmosphere.

6.  Silent Disco

In February, we went on a 7-day Caribbean Cruise, with stops in Nassau, Bahamas, Cozumel, Mexico, and Georgetown, Grand Cayman.  The journey to Fort Lauderdale was nerve-racking as detailed in the blog “At Least We Made It”, but after that things calmed down, and while the weather was cooler and rainier than we hoped, we had a good time with family and friends.  We spent a fair amount of time in the middle of the ship in an area known as the Martini Bar and one evening we were introduced to a Silent Disco.  Each participant received a pair of noise-canceling headphones that could play one of three channels, each blasting a different genre of music.  Imagine hundreds of people singing at the top of their lungs, unable to hear each other, and dancing together.  Each channel selection used a different color, so you could meet and mingle with people who shared your taste in music.  It was a total blast!

5.  Bear Creek Golf Club

We took a 16-day road trip from mid-September through the first week of October, something we had never attempted before.  We called it the History and Beach Tour and some other highlights are below, but we’ll start with golfing on Hilton Head Island at the Bear Creek Golf Club.  There are a lot of golf courses in Hilton Head, and most are pretty pricey and very nice.  We found a moderately priced course for our first round, but it was far from nice.  Our next choice, Bear Creek, was affordable, well-kept, and a good challenge.  They had a good driving range with all the balls you wanted to hit.  The course had tall pine trees, plenty of bunkers, left and right dog-leg fairways, and intimidating water hazards.  It was nice that we brought our golf clubs from home and did not have to rent unfamiliar equipment.  Tough and beautiful is a great combination for golf and we enjoyed playing those nine holes.

4.  Salsa Making and Salsa Dancing

Our one booked excursion during the Caribbean Cruise was on the Mexican island of Cozumel.  We started with a bus ride to a Mexican market to buy tomatoes, limes, and other ingredients before heading to Playa Mia to make our homemade guacamole and pico de gallo, making them as spicy as we liked.  We learned a few moves of traditional Mexican salsa dance and sipped a variety of alcoholic drinks before heading back to the ship for another day at sea.

3.  Touring Monticello 

Monticello was Thomas Jefferson’s primary plantation, located a few miles southeast of Charlottesville, Virginia.  Jefferson designed it to look smaller than its 11,000 square feet spanning three floors and a cellar.  We opted for the Behind-The-Scenes Tour, a 90-minute adventure that includes exploring the upper floors that are accessed by very narrow, steep staircases, and the cellar which contains the kitchen, smokehouse, icehouse, wine and beer cellars, and other storage areas.  We passed the small cemetery on the walk up to the house and found the grave of Jefferson.  His mother Jane, his wife Martha, daughters Martha and Maria, and other family and close friends are also buried there.  To make our journey shorter the next day, we drove from Monticello to a hotel south of Richmond, Virginia for the night.  We traveled to North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina the next day and had a delightful time there with Byran and Diane Lebovitz before heading to Hilton Head.

2.  Touring Gettysburg

Gettysburg has been a bucket list item for quite a while and we planned our 16-day History and Beach Tour around finally getting there.  We started with a two-hour Battlefield Bus Tour, visiting numerous fields, monuments, and ridges. The three-day Battle of Gettysburg was fought between Union and Confederate forces between July 1 and July 3, 1863.  We visited Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, and others. We learned how the battle unfolded and how the final day’s Pickett's Charge by the forces under General Robert E. Lee failed to break the Union lines at Cemetery Ridge, forcing them to retreat.  We toured the National Military Park Museum and an emotional late-afternoon walking tour of the National Cemetery where thousands of Union soldiers are buried.  

1.  The 38-23 Texas A&M win over LSU

We picked months in advance which Texas A&M football game would be our first at Kyle Field in College Station, Texas, and it was the perfect choice.  We were among the 108,852 people who packed into the stadium to watch the 14th-ranked Aggies take on the 8th-ranked LSU Tigers.  Everything was first-rate, from parking in the coach's lot to entering through the Athletic Offices to the seats on the 47-yard line in the 17th row, the best I’ve ever had for this big a game.  LSU had a 17-7 half-time lead, but after the first series in the second half, the second-string quarterback, Marcel Reed took over the offense and he ran for three straight touchdowns giving the Aggies a lead they would never give up.  The place was so loud you had to scream in someone’s ear to be heard.   Final score: 38-23.