Katherine helped me plant bulbs to remember Evangeline

Last Sunday, we planned to attend a service of remembrance at the Elizabeth Blackwell Center’s Healing garden. Last year, after losing our daughter Evangeline, we were invited to the service to help families cope, grieve and most importantly for me, to remember and acknowledge their loss.  I really liked the idea that in autumn, as plants are dying, we were planting bulbs that would bloom in the springtime.  For me, it was a reminder that sometimes death can help us appreciate the beauty of life and that with my faith, death isn’t final.

So, when it turned out that our daughters were sick with croup and the weather was pretty windy, we were sad that we couldn’t attend the ceremony.  We decided instead that we would still have our own little private ceremony at home and planted bulbs all over our garden.

Katherine was a huge help.  She was really excited to get more ‘eyes’ or ‘eggs’ to put in the holes I dug ( her term for the bulbs). She also was very diligent in putting bone meal into the holes.

I am glad that it turned out this way — I really enjoyed being able to do this at home and spend time reflecting.  Next year, we will again try to go to the service since I find it is nice to talk about it among people who understand what we’ve been through and to be able to at least try to offer a sense of hope and encouragement to others. But I really liked doing this as well and think it will be a new tradition for our family.

A cyclist about to finish the USA Pro Challenge Colorado 2012 event

As we were finishing up our family trip in the Denver area, it was only fitting that we would be able to see some bikers participating in the USA Pro Challenge race finishing in downtown Denver.  The previous day, we drove the Peak to Peak highway and periodically were slowed down by the race event, but it was sort of fun to be a part of it.

It gave us a good excuse to stop for lunch in Nederland at The Savory Cafe.  Not only was the food and service good, there were some musicians that stopped in to play.  Normally, I really don’t like dealing with bands while eating, but this was just one guy on acoustic guitar and one on bass playing very enjoyable bluegrass.  Since the girls loved it, I loved it.

Katherine with Herd of Bison

Katherine wanted to pose for a picture with the Herd of Bison sillhouette art in Denver on 16th street. We had just enjoyed a lovely dinner at Croc’s, an Ohio State restaurant and bar.

Poster for Elvis’ Last Concert

While reminiscing  during this Elvis week, I pulled out some old concert posters that had been given to me as a gift upon leaving my first post-collegiate job.  My co-workers knew I was a huge Elvis Presley and impressed me greatly with these gifts.  One of them is a poster advertising what would be Elvis’ last concert in Indianapolis, Indiana.  The other was for a concert that never happened on August 12, 1977.  Although Elvis didn’t die until August 16, 1977, he wasn’t able to make a few concerts after the one in Indianapolis.  I love how that poster says to ‘Call Leah Rutan for Tickets’.

A poster for an Elvis concert that never happened. It was just 4 days before his death.

I wasn’t really sure what other concerts had been planned that never happened, so I started looking it up and found some pretty good information at Elvis Presley In Concert. While reading the article Feelings and Thoughts about 1977, there was mention about one of my favorite Elvis stories. The story was about how Elvis broke up a fight at a gas station in Madison, WI.  There were two boys beating up on the son of the gas station owner and apparently Elvis saw this and directed the limo over so that he could assist by evening the odds of the fight. When the boys saw Elvis, who was still in a blue jumpsuit, the fight was over. Elvis didn’t leave until everyone had cooled off and shook hands.

I never realized until reading about his 1977 tour just how ill he had been all year and yet this incident happened around a day before his last concert.  As sick as he was, he still went out of his way to help folks like this. Impressive.

Rebecca and Angela at Oxford Park

Rebecca has been raving about Oxford Park in Upper Arlington lately. It is a very nice, small and usually non-crowded park, so it works well for her to take the girls. The other nice thing is that the equipment is challenging and exciting for Katherine, but is safe enough that she can play on her own for the most part. We took the girls there today — we had awesome park weather.

I’d say they had fun.

Angela practicing for roller coasters

Katherine had a fun time

While walking back to my hotel after dinner last night in Denver, I saw a huge pack of bike riders, many of whom were in costume. As I found out later, the group was Denver Cruisers and the theme for the night was Fruits and Veggies. After taking this video, I saw perhaps the best costume. It was a biker that made a helmet that looked like some kind of animal made from a hollowed out watermelon. It even had watermelon ears. Great stuff.

You never know what you will see in downtown Denver on any given evening.

Big Blue Bear at Hindlemann

While walking to work last week, I noticed a familiar sight in the window of  Hindlemann Architecture & Design. I recognized this as the same ‘Big Blue Bear‘ at the Denver Convention Center. Considering how small this model is, it feels awkward referring to it as the Big Blue Bear

I wonder if the guy reflected in the glass thought it was strange that I was taking this picture.

Angela warns me she has a piece on her side.

The other day I was taking pictures of Angela and wanted to get one of her tiny hand. When I looked at the photos I captured, I noticed this one seems to indicate she was giving me a hand sign of some sort.

Was she trying to rally me to victory or prompt me for peace? According to Wikipedia regarding the V-Sign, she may have even been trying to give me the finger if we were living in the U.K.

Perhaps she was trying to tell me that she wanted to listen to Loverboy’s ‘Get Lucky‘ album. It’s doubtful she knows what any of those things are.

It’s possible she was telling me she had a gun on her side or even that she was a member of the Deuces gang.  She can barely roll on her side let alone strap a gat to it and the only thing she might know about a deuce is something she generally doesn’t need to tell us about. We already know.

This made me think about acronyms in the workplace.  Acronyms are often misunderstood since they almost always have more than one meaning. In this regard, they are like making a hand gesture that has different meaning in various cultural contexts.

What makes this worse are acronyms used within a company that also have common use outside the company and mean quite different things.  If you are new, then maybe you feel confused because the context tells you something needs to be explored. That’s the best case scenario.  The worst case is that you think you know what it means and take some action that is inappropriate.

I once heard of a story where an individual was told to put some data files on ‘the FTP server’ at a company he started at.  Apparently, at that company, in this context , FTP did not mean ‘File Transfer Protocol’ but ‘Financial Transaction Pre-processor’ or something similar. It turns out that the FTP server he put the files on was really supposed to receive files that had gone through this pre-processor where some other process would pick the files up and deal with them.

Without getting into even more boring technical details, I will summarize by saying this ended up being a very bad thing. It was the white collar equivalent of flashing the wrong gang symbol in the wrong alley.

What are the best stories resulting from misunderstood acronyms that you have?

Big Blue Bear

The Denver Convention Center is close to the hotel I am staying at this week.  While walking to work, this Big Blue Bear statue is one of the things I see — it definitely catches the eye. The statue is called ‘I See What You Mean’, but is more commonly known as the Big Blue Bear.

According to the artist, Lawrence Argent, one of the thoughts behind the piece was that residents in Denver are often curious about the conventions that are going on.  The Bear symbolizes the curious person trying to see what is going on.

While I am not a resident, I find myself curious about what event is going on during any given week that I am here.  The primary reason I am curious is how it relates to my ability to get a room for the week and what that experience will be like.  When the hotel is at full occupancy, the experience is almost always worse. Poor internet connectivity, less hot water for shower and problems with the elevator to name a few. For whatever reason, that makes me more interested in what event is going on.

This week, the big conference is the World Renewable Energy Forum. There is also an IDUG DB2 Tech Conference going on. I don’t think I’ve seen a single DB2 person, but the energy conference attendees are well represented on the street.