Memnison Journal

As you can imagine, the champions (my Mere and her pairs partner Eric) are in seventh heaven – as I write this, Susan and Mere are on their way home to us, bearing a new gold medal.   And, of course, all their stuff. The last year, in dealing with Mere getting serious on roller-skating competitive [...]

Meredith and Eric took first place at the National Championships with a flawless, beautiful performance… stunned the people online and the commentators with **OMG WHO ARE THESE GUYS!!!** reactions. They can’t go to World Championships until the elder is 14, which is next year. But my god, they were the best I’ve ever seen them, [...]

Susan and Meredith are supposed to leave tomorrow in the morning for Lincoln, Nebraska, to the roller-skating National competition, and they will have to work really hard to be ready by then. I worry about Susan burning the candle at both ends mentally and physically with this trip, but there’s darn little I can do [...]

* the kids have this insatiable desire to mess around with and ride on my walker, wheelchair and roll-about knee walker; Mere has been drooling over the idea of a swiss army knife for a while, bought one with her money, and proceeded to try to disassemble everything in sight – including the aforementioned AND [...]

At the present, my LEFT foot surgery has been rescheduled for the 5th of July; hopefully nothing else will blow that out of the water.  My RIGHT foot – well, went to see a podiatrist on that, and he took new X-rays of my foot that show how crippled up it looks (which never fails [...]

Christmas Eve is usually the day we spend with Susan’s aunt and mom at Susan’s aunt’s house in the  northwestern suburbs of Chicago; dinner is followed by passing out the presents (a small child is usually too excited to sit through dinner in any sort of relaxed fashion, and is the elf who supervises the [...]

Both of the kids do, indeed, have sinus infections (probably as a result of their not taking care of themselves with bad allergic sinus reactions to pollens, etc.) and both are sick and cranky.   And both are on antibiotics; Mere still can’t handle pills, so we end up trying to see what we can get [...]

Set of Flickr photos of Meredith at her softball games, including photos with her cousin Kay and her sister Mer. Twins upon twins: The Gentle twins (good friends of Meredith’s from school who are also on her softball team) and Meredith and Mer at the game. The team saw Mer as their ‘good luck mascot, [...]

Saw it with the family today; Mere and Kay have been whomped with allergies, and I think they’re turning into sinus infections.  The kids hate taking stuff for the allergies and hate the nasal sprays, but they hate worse being sick. In any event, I wasn’t all that thrilled with the film, mostly because so [...]

I don’t take my Kindle everywhere, but it has gotten a lot of use, especially when i know I’m going to have to sit and wait somewhere.    (Like at the hospital.)    Susan and Meredith have used it a little, as has my niece Kay and my mother-in-law, and it looks like we’re getting another Kindle [...]

The workmen are out in the back of the house, digging the French Drain thing for the drainage project; I hear a steady thonk-thonk-thonk (there seems to be a total of two guys to do the digging and all, and man, that’s got to be killer work by hand) and will have to go off [...]

Due to overload on the family (and that I’m unable to handle the mower at present) we depend on a mowing service to come over and do the lawn – a very nice operation, really, and we recommend them to any locals that might need it. But the dogs have been plagued recently with some [...]

Unlike many folks out there who read this, I’m not a gung-ho Anime fan; part of it is that extreme cuteness isn’t a big draw for me, and the other is that the more wild, cartoony stuff isn’t much in my taste, either. However, I have exposed Mere to the Miyazaki movies, and she’s seen [...]

On Flickr (click through to it) Duckon 2009: The Cheering Section Originally uploaded by jrittenhouse No, Meredith Grace isn’t in this photo, but it shows some of the people important to her – her cousin Kailyn, her sister Mer, and her Official Con Babysitters Lois and Krista (at Duckon last weekend)

…of too much to do and too little time to do it in. Jumping back into work on Wednesday, I found that our phone and internet was intermittently out, and we found and fixed the culprit.  That sort of thing, when you’re working from home, really strangles you, and both Susan and I were doing [...]