Once again I have to admit that I haven’t been on here in a while. Like you didn’t notice. But as they say “Sometimes Life Gets In The Way.” I love writing even though I lack certain skills. Like writing a proper sentence with punctuation, grammar, just those few important things as my friend and adviser Gene would yell at me about! For me its getting my message out. I trust that you all will forgive me for not paying attention in I think 4th and 5th grades.

Back to my life…. Its been a challenge lately, or that matter its been a challenge for a year now. As I have mentioned before, I have a significant  other who is much more significant than I. A year ago they discovered an anuerisym between her eyes pressing on both optic nerves. In fact it was one of the largest ones that they have seen. They needed to do a crainiotomy (brain surgery) almost immediately. If that wasn’t enough a large mass was also found on her pancreas. The biopsy showed that the cells from the pancreas were pre-cancerous and we had some time but no one knew how much. For those of you that don’t know, once it turns to cancer in the pancreas you usually if your lucky have three months left. So a ticking bomb we were left with. She had to recover from cutting her skull open and the doctors removing the mass between her eyes and pressing on the optic nerves. Estimated time for recovery maybe 3-6 months is what they thought. This was after the 30 plus days in the hospital excuse me 2 hospitals then more weeks for complications in several other hospitals.

With no family nearby to help my life had been turned upside down. Yes I could call family on the phone but mainly that would make me relive the experience over and over again as I would have to explain everything again and again. I love my family dearly but they do have their life to live and I certainly did not want to be a burden to them. When they could listen to me I did appreciate it and its good to have a shoulder to cry on.

What makes this even more difficult is that my wife for some unknown reason is allergic to almost all pain killers out there except Delauded or Fentonyl. Both of which are about the strongest ones out there so when and if she takes them she doesn’t know where she is, may not know who I am and may have bad dreams and or visions or is lethargic and can’t do anything like physical therapy to help her get better. So if she doesn’t take them she shakes violently in pain like having the chills.

On top of the chemical allergies she also has many food allergies. Many of these allergies can stop her from breathing, give her hives, make her vomit immediately and continuously and many other symptoms.

Whats really amazing is that the brain surgery is nothing apparently compared to the surgery they had to do on the pancreas. That surgery is about a 10 hour process where almost every organ in your body is moved / pushed aside. It is considered one of the most riskiest surgeries that you can have and the potential complications afterward can even kill you or make it even more of a hell for you if you hadn’t been there already.

My day consists of getting grandma (my mother-in-law, she’s 86) up and dressed and give her breakfast. Then take care of the dogs and make sure she has everything she need for 10-12 hours till I come home. I then go to the hospital for an hour or so and make sure the staff hasn’t killed my wife. Then I go to work. I leave by 4:00pm and go back to the hospital and spend a few hours with her and hopefully see the surgeon and check on any updates. I then go home to make dinner for grandma and the dogs. Take the dogs out, do some laundry or cleaning if I can, go to bed and do it all again tomorrow.

We just passed six weeks of this routine and the woman I married still hasn’t come back to me and that’s the worst part. I don’t have anyone to talk to. (As I’m spilling my guts to you all here! Hopefully it will help) The problem is the not knowing. Not knowing when it will end, when it will be normal again. Or if it will be normal again. Will she still make it through this, if she doesn’t make it how will I cope, how will I take care of her mother. Everyone will say to me you take it one day at a time. For someone that always wants to know the outcome that doesn’t help. So I will stay stuck in my quandary and suffer through it. Forgive me my friends if I don’t call, or if I forget to, or I seen removed from the conversation / not paying attention I’m sorry. You see friends, I’m trying to find my way home. But home is where the heart is and mine is a little lost right now.

In my mind, it was just yesterday that I worked at Tovi’s True Value Hardware Store. It was just yesterday when I lived at our house in Glenview. Then it was just yesterday when I held each of my kids in my arms after their birth and promised to love them and protect them forever. Every time I blink my eyes a memory passes before me. You know what they say… The eyes are our windows to the world. Our short lives are infinitesimal compared to how much time has passed already or how long time will go on without us. It’s not dollars or cents that we pass on to our children, as that too will be gone quickly. Nor is any building that we built or any accomplishments that we were recognized for in our lifetime. It’s the words we said to our children. It’s the lessons they learned from us. It the mannerisms or the way we treated people or how we loved that goes on and is carried from generation to generation.

Some people teach hate to their children. Many of them have it so ingrained in them that don’t even know that they are doing it. It could be in Israel, or in Palestine, it could be in a black or white community. I’m sorry, but in my lifetime I learned that people are people. People are human, there not colors, they’re not identified as a type of person by the clothes they wear.

The hatred that exists today won’t be solved in our lifetime. For that matter, it may go on for generations. I’m not a biblical historian but I think God did wipe out entire populations as a way to cleanse things. To some degree, I’m sure it solved the problem and it also made an example for others to hopefully learn from.   I’m not sure if God’s ready to step in again. If you remember at one time God was asked if he would spare the city if he could find just 10 good people and he said he would. Unfortunately, he only found one man and he saved his family but he might not be as lenient the next time around.

I have a friend named JJ and he has a jazz band that plays every Friday night in our restaurant for the last 15 years. On each of those Fridays he asks everyone to pray for “peace all over the world.” I’m afraid if he gets his wish God will make it peaceful again but none of us will be here. Maybe he should be asking for us all to show love all over the world.

May love be with you all my friends and your friends and their friends until we have a 60’s love fest going. Ok, Que the Beatles record playing… “All You Need Is Love”

I have a game I play at the grocery store when I go there. The game is called “Who Will I Follow Home”. The game usually begins near the checkout counter as people  are getting ready to checkout. If I was single this is a fantastic way to meet the ladies as they always seem to laugh and I get their attention.

I usually admit out loud to these people or persons that “OK I’ll Follow You Home.” Then I go on to tell them they have good instincts in their choices today and I’d be glad to assist them with the scarfing down of their food. Many times the husbands or boyfriends actually invite me to come with them. I think these guys have been deprived of male bonding and need assurance that they are still a man, poor guys. When the ladies are alone they enjoy my banter and if they are closer to my age group I get these looks like, ok where is this going after a little polite laughter. Kids love me, and I usually ask them if I can ride with them in the shopping cart as I’m tired of walking. They usually reply yes, which shocks their mother and I make a failed attempt to climb in.

I have always admitted my addiction to those specialty culinary foods such as Pizza, CocaCola, Ho Ho’s, and meat in general, all baked goods and pretty much anything sugary. It didn’t help me growing up having my French toast with cinnamon and sugar or drowning my cereal with more sugar. If only they had Oreo Double Stuff when I was a kid, I could eat packages of cookies at one sitting. I wasn’t an overweight young man, in fact I was quite svelte and I was very active in sports.

But as you can imagine, as you get older that kind of diet does catch up with you. Especially as we become more sedentary we do not have as much time for sports and activities as our lives take over. Cutting the lawn on the riding tractor or driving the kids everywhere, or glued to the boob tube (and I’m not talking about breasts unfortunately) has set us back. About 20 years back I use to ride a bicycle every night after work. I usually would ride between 15 – 20 miles each ride. I was in much better shape. I also enjoyed my rides so much as they would usually pass through the Chicago Botanical Gardens.

Ok let’s fast forward back to today. I got a present over the weekend. I am in possession of a new bicycle. It was 40% off on sale at Sports Authority going out of business sale. Now my last bike as you read earlier, I rode a lot and when I bought it over 20 years ago it was an $800.00 investment. My new bike was with tax about $189.00. Almost one forth the price but I couldn’t have been happier. It has a gel seat, and a spring in the seat shaft to absorb the shocks of my overweight ass bouncing up and down. (Please remove that image from your brain immediately!) In actuality there was no bouncing as I bottomed out the spring, and my ass would then receive all the pounding it deserved for me getting into my present state of health.

Life is about balance. If you haven’t been doing yoga for the last few years, I can almost guarantee you have no balance. I believe at one point as a child I had a toy that was like a clown on a bicycle that was on a string. The idea of the toy was to get the clown down the string to the other end without flipping it over. My new name is Topsy Turvy the clown. I also do not have a string going through my butt to balance on. If I’m going down I’m going DOWN! When I was my former svelte self to power up a hill, I would stand up and pedal through the uphill battle. On my first ride small inclines felt like mountains and standing up turned me into Topsy Turvey the clown. Oh god, where are my training wheels? Luckily I wasn’t wearing my Tour De France yellow shirt to bring further attention to myself in front of my neighbors.

Somehow, I got through my first ride and I got home. After recovering my breath, I pulled out my phone to look at my new bicycle app. It would give me my average speed, my distance, a geo map of my route, the elevation I overcame and the calories I had burned. I knew based on my past abilities,  at a minimum I did 5 miles or so for being out of shape. I couldn’t wait to post these results online at Facebook which was an option of the app. I could show everyone how great I am.

1.19 miles is what I rode. It had felt like the 20 I use to do and I was dead. But surprised to me, I wanted to do it again. Not that day, maybe the next day or maybe every other day for the first week or so. In the meantime I have to figure how to get this spring shaft out of my ass and get some padded bicycle shorts to make me look hot.  Not sexy hot I’ll actually be sweating hot, sweating profusely and burning the lbs away to get as far away from Topsy Turvy that I can.

Never in my life did I ever think that I would buy a “Doggy Stairs.” I’m sure most people would be in agreement with that statement. However, most people love their animals deeply and would do as much as they can to help their pets. We have two little Shitz Tzu’s, Jake and Chance. Jake, we got as a puppy from a pet store. Chance was gotten at a shelter with Lilly who we recently had to put down. Having spent the first few years of their life in a cage together Chance and Lilly were quite a challenge for us to try and shall we say normalize them. He’s about 8 years old now and still Chance backs away in what seems like fear when I raise my hand to pick him up or pet him.

Since Lilly’s passing, he has been alone in the cage at night (he likes it in there, in fact, he runs to it at night). Even so, in the early morning, it’s like he doesn’t want to be alone and wants out and wants to get close to the wife on the bed. This is usually 5 minutes after I have left the house for work.

With the wife’s debilitating condition she can’t lift the dogs anymore as it would send excoriating pain up her spine. Hence the purchase of the Doggie Stairs. The whole thing when set up is about 25 inches wide and goes up four steps to a height of 25 inches. To a small dog at their height, this contraption must look enormous. Unfortunately for us the only stairs our dogs have ever had to deal with are our front steps or back yard patio door steps. Both of which consist of two steps in total. I think it will take a couple of days for them to get acclimated to its presence in the room. We tried pieces of doggie treats on the steps last night but the only interest was the first step where they could see the treat only after we pointed it out to them. Otherwise, it was, get me away from this alien object that suddenly appeared here before them. Lilly would have just stood off to the side and kept barking at it to defend us all from its existence.

So I guess were in doggie training mode for a while to teach them how to climb stairs and risk their lives for their eventual enjoyment of squirming in our blankets while upside down rubbing every inch of their backs and head until completely satisfied.

I’m an “Internet Junkee” as many of you know. A national clothing store chain uses a slogan “An Educated Consumer Is Our Best Customer.” Many of us are on information overload. Many people are addicted and can’t stop. The information keeps coming, more and more sites are created every day. We keep adding our thoughts and knowledge to our own sites and or contributing to others.

From a marketing guy like myself with all this information, it’s never been easier to target our marketing efforts. You can track your efforts as to how many people looked at your ad, how many clicked on it, what time of day did they click and where were they from. Even more in-depth information is available so you can improve your marketing efforts even further and get a greater return.

Anyone can start their own business online and without much expense. The American dream is now more achievable than ever before.

But at what cost? We use to go out to the movies and socialize. Now entertainment has come into our homes and we don’t have to leave. We use to go out and shop more and now we go online and click at amazon.com or walmart.com and shop to our hearts content without having to talk to a single person and they ship it for free. Some people don’t even go to the grocery store themselves they go online to peapod.com and shop without having to see their noisy neighbors.

It used to be that we knew all our neighbors very well. It used to be our kids would play outside all day. Now they stay inside and play their online games for hours on end. As a kid we use to have adventures for real, now their adventures are fake and online. Are we becoming an unsociable society? What skills are not being developed in the children of the today because of this new way we are living our lives?

Our parents use to say when they retired they were going to slow down maybe retire in the middle of nowhere and we couldn’t understand wanting to escape like that. Well, maybe things haven’t changed that much. In a few years, I will retire and I’m thinking of unplugging, escaping, getting away from it all, going up north, going overseas. Wait I better ask “Siri” to help me with that!