Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
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, [...]
http://www.newsweek.com/id/225492/page/1 The Power of Two: http://www.newsweek.com/id/225098 Photo gallery of the kids, etc. The Intro picture is particularly stunning. This has been in the works since spring. Newsweek came in with a Pulitzer-award winning photographer who was fresh from covering the White House and Obama and Bush to do the shots. The interviews mostly were around [...]
A poster on Facebook was mentioning about missing their mom; I think I miss her (mine) the most at about 10:30 Central Time at night on my birthday, when I would get a call from her wishing me a happy birthday at the time I was born…(about 11:30 Eastern Time, back in Ohio). I really [...]
The wound. There’s nothing but a scar there, according to Susan and Mere. Thank you, God. “Just a little bit of adhesive gunk, and not even a scab,” said Mere last night. I’ll be able to wash my foot properly for the first time in a year. You can’t believe how wonderful that idea [...]
What I can mention is that the New Year’s Party was a good time, though a little frazzling. I also spent a good deal of the day in the library with Rich Rostrom, who stayed over and was helping me with getting all of my stuff out of the closet under the stairs in the [...]
I’m noticing that a lot of my friends-list and others online – and the few I talk to on the phone (man, I am so housebound) – are going to take the holidays easy, cheap and local this year. Our household will, as usual, trot out to Susan’s aunt Marlyce’s house and do the holiday [...]
Susan and I took advantage of the federal holiday (but not one for the elections people) to go for the first day of early voting. We have to, because we’re election judges. The ballot was light – only a scattering of races, and in our heavily red area, a lot of the more local stuff [...]
…I write as much as I do on political subjects, the answer is simple – because I care. My view, for as long as I can remember, and has been ever since, is to see the long run, the big picture. My focus and education was directed at the synthesis of the world around me [...]
Longtime readers will recall that I’m a great fan of the Dutch-American author Hendrik Willem Van Loon, a taste that I got from my mom and her brother, my uncle. There’s an online exhibit at the Ohio State University site of Van Loon’s illustrations (crude, but charming) for his best-known work, The Story of Mankind. [...]
When I was in High School, I was in Honors English and Math pretty much all the way through; they discontinued the Honors program and did this mini-course thing that I grumped about in a recent entry. In any event, there’s something similar in the Lisle school system for gifted kids; there’s the Academically [...]
A little while ago, I was mentioning that there was a particular deal on scanning old photos, and folks had asked me for the details. The outfit is ScanMy Photos.com; the offer is found at this link. This was a photo taken of RJ Johnson by Mark Evans at our wedding; they scanned it at [...]
As I’m helping Meredith expand her already huge vocabulary, I keep running into this scene from “Akeelah and the Bee” (youtube, start about 45 seconds into the clip) about the etymology, the roots of words, and Mere is starting to realize, as Akeelah did, and as I did long ago, that learning the roots of [...]
Back from the meeting with the leukemia doc, and Susan’s totally worn out and has stumbled upstairs to bed to crash. Her leg’s been really bad today; the doc says that it’s a type of knee problem, where you aggravate the knee and a cyst with excess fluid forms in the back; in her case, [...]
Susan has partially converted her large stack of photos (going back a long ways) to a digital format, and has a cheap 300 dpi for free scan thing she’s run across, and so she’s eager to send off a big chunk of 4*6s off to the scanner. Frankly, she wants to finish off the rest [...]
I have the path report, but I really don’t know how to read it all that well. The short version is that I’ve been handed back off to the CLL doctor, as the path report *sounds* like his guess of a localized blowup of the CLL was correct, and that I’ll have to do the [...]