Play ball!

Baseball was introduced to me at an age when I was still too young to form my own opinions, and similar to religion, food preferences and a lot of other life choices, I started off doing what my parents do.  Yes, there was a chance to change allegiance when I was older, as I did with food preferences and some other habits as a teenager, but being a Yankee fan is just part of who I am.  Being a fan of any other team just wouldn't be right.

Being a Yankee fan runs in the family. My dad grew up in the Bronx and worked at the stadium selling beer in the bleachers when he was a teenager. He watched Maris hit 61 home runs in '61 and has Yankee baseball in his blood.

Therefore, it goes with out saying that my earliest memory of a baseball game takes place at Yankee stadium.  Like my dad, who tells a story similar to the one Billy Crystal's character tells in "City Slickers", my memory also happens before the game started but is perhaps a little less romantic.  At the beginning of the national anthem I wondered out loud who "Jose" was (as in "Jose can you see....") and my dad, being the consummate joker, told me that he was a guy that came to the game but couldn't get tickets so he had to watch the game from the flag pole.

So, let it begin.  Play ball.

The rest of the game (or maybe several memories from games in my early childhood blended together) was spent trying to get Reggie Jackson's attention (he would remain my favorite player until Don Mattingly came along) and learning when to cheer and when not to.  My dad taught me how to tell if it was going to be a home run or a long fly ball (watch the outfielders not the ball) and what to do when the PA played the "charge" call. But he taught me much more than just baseball at those games.  He taught me not to flash your money around when ordering peanuts. Along with the rules of baseball he taught me the rules of life.

At home I knew it was summer not because it was sunny and warm out but because the sounds of Phil Rizzuto saying "HOLY COW...." would fill the living room on a regular basis. The game was always on.

When I was older my dad and I went to a game by ourselves and I remember arriving late to the ballpark and being worried about missing the first pitch because we wouldn't be able to find parking. But right as we arrived to the stadium a police office moved his car so we could park on the sidewalk and told us he would keep an eye on the car and we wouldn't have any problems. When does that ever happen!?!  We arrived in time for the first pitch, enjoyed the game and got in the car to go home right as it started to rain. It was a perfectly timed day.

When I moved to Boston to attend college I was forced to pay attention to the Yanks like I never had to before. Defending the Yanks was an everyday necessity. On the bus, at the super market, walking down the street, at the laundry mat and everywhere in between I had to have the stats to back up why the Yanks were better. Why Jeter was better than Nomar. Why the Yanks would win the division. Phone conversations with my dad always included Yankee talk and a game didn't go by (when they were on in Boston) without several calls to or from dad.

And if the stats failed I could always justify being a Yankee fan by saying "I grew up in NY. My dad is from the Bronx and worked at the stadium in the 60s". And that somehow made it all ok. It made it legitimate. The blood line had been passed down and I was a true Yankee fan, not because I chose to be, or was force to be, but because it was who I was.  It is who my dad is, will always be. Huge Yankee fan. Best dad ever.

If you like this story, or just hate Parkinson's Disease, please visit my Team Fox page and help me reach my goal of $5,200.

I hope you continue to join me in laughing at my dad and join the fight against PD!

Camping and Cursing

Back in the day when it was a punishable offense to call your older brother a doody-head, my family embarked on quite a few camping trips.

I learned quite a bit on those trips, but it wasn't until reading an article today that I realized that everyone didn't learn to curse while watching their dad set up a tent in the rain.

This was surprising to me.

My dad had a bit of a curse (no pun intended) when it came to the weather and camping and it turns out it is actually a family curse. It is the kind of curse that turns a nice June day into a gloomy swear-fest at the first sight of a family tent.  A curse that has put a rain cloud above my car while driving to the camp site when the rest of the sky is clear (really, this happened).  The kind of curse that knows whether I will wait to set up the tent to see if the rain clouds will pass (they won't and the heaviest rain will come while I'm setting up) or if I will set the tent up right away while it is only drizzling (again, it will pour as soon as the tent parts are out of the bag).

The first memory I have of this is sitting in the station wagon with my mom and the doody-head while my dad literally wrestled with a soaking wet canvas tent.  Canvas!  Heavy when dry, super-duper heavy when wet.  And this was a tent that came with 10 pounds of poles that were in a bag that my brother and I could have fit into.

At least my tent is now light weight, water proof and only has two poles that are both the same. My dad had to find the 3 pole segments that go together to make a pole.  And each part of the tent needed different pole lengths which meant different pole pieces that made up each completed pole.  It was a like a pole puzzle and we got to watch him struggle and curse as he built our shelter for the night.

Of course, when he was done pitching the tent, the clouds would disperse and the sun would come out.  In fact the first camping memories I have are of learning a few swear words followed by a great rainbow.  It is the first rainbow I ever remember seeing.  The rest of the day was beautiful and I was introduced to the marvel of burs.  After throwing them at each other for a few minutes under the rainbow and getting a kick about how they stuck to our clothes, my brother fell into the bur bush.  The rest of the afternoon was spent grilling and picking burs out of my brother's hair. 

At the end of the sun-filled week, I got a little refresher course in my new vocabulary words as my dad took the tent down in the rain, while we watched (and listened) from the dry comfort of the car.

Camping with the family was always so much fun for everyone....well, I'm guessing my dad could have done with out the ill timed rain storms.

If you like this story, or just hate Parkinson's Disease, please visit my Team Fox page and help me reach my goal of $5,200.

I hope you continue to join me in laughing at my dad and join the fight against PD!

Learning to ride

When teaching someone else a new task, there are standard methods and then there are the more, shall we say, strange methods. My dad started off with the standard method of teaching me to ride a bike: Get me started on training wheels then take the wheels off and let me ride a little while he holds the bike. When he felt I was going well, he would let go without me knowing. Standard, age old method. He did this for my brother and it worked great. Yes, my brother did go half way down the block and land in a bush but it was a soft bush and he was uninjured.

Enter the strange method.

After I passed my first ride as a very surprised solo rider, my dad decided to make a small obstacle course. Large objects where dragged from the garage to the street where I was going to weave in and out of them refining my control. Guaranteeing that I, unlike my brother, would never crash into a bush. I trusted my dad so I mounted my bike and headed toward the first object, a large metal garbage can. Getting around the first object was easy. Turning tightly enough to make it between the garbage can and the second item, a metal step ladder, was a little bit beyond my current riding skill. I don’t remember what the other objects were because I never made it that far having crashed into the ladder. Scraped up and slightly injured, I headed inside with my dad.

I don’t remember completing my training, but know for a fact that dad never set up another obstacle course. I also haven’t crashed in to anything on a bike since, so maybe this was a lesson I couldn’t have done without.

If you like this story, or just hate Parkinson's Disease, please visit my Team Fox page and help me reach my goal of $5,200.

I hope you continue to join me in laughing at my dad and join the fight against PD!

Snowy day.

'A' enjoying the snow from the warmth of the indoors. 

blog-a-thon: starting March 8th...

Last father’s day I decided to blog some stories about my dad from when I was a kid.  It was going to be mostly stories poking fun of my dad in the hopes of also raising money for Parkinson’s disease research.

Father’s day came and went and I haven’t done much of anything.  But things are getting easier on the home front.  ‘A’ is sleeping better (not great, but better) and I have a nice shiny new iPhone. This will enable me to sleep at home and blog on the bus on the way to work.

The plan is to post one silly (or heartfelt) story about my dad a week, starting on his birthday and going for one year.   There will be guest posters from time to time as well, so if you have a story you would like to share please let me know. 

If you like a story, or just hate PD, please visit my Team Fox page and help me reach my goal of $5,200.

I hope you join me in laughing at my dad and join the fight against PD!

(not) finding time

I haven't been posting as much as I would like.  Truth be told I haven't been doing as much of a lot of stuff as I would like.  Work and sleep, coupled with taking care of "A" has taken up a large portion of my time so extracurricular activities have suffered.
Blogging was done mostly on the bus with my ipod but I wanted to read more so my blogging has suffered.

One other thing I haven't had time to do lately is completing (or more accurately, starting) my father's dad gift to my dad (yes, I know father's day was ages ago....that is my point).

So, I am taking a few minutes today to let you know that coming soon will be some childhood stories about my dad and I.

I hope you enjoy this dad-blogathon.  I also hope you will make a contribution to Parkinson's disease research in honor of my dad (more to come on the details).

Stay tuned......

Walking With a Walker

Taken a few weeks ago.  She is much better at this now...but this is the first time she ever walked with this.
Another cute video will be posted tomorrow so tune back in.

Riding in the Car Car

"Car Car" performed by Jeremy Lyons

Insurance company denies claim....i will fight it for sure

I just got a bill from my Frienemy yesterday. I knew it was too good that our insurance paid for ALL of the bills from my wifes c-section, almost 5 days in the hospital (including labor and recovery) and all the care the baby received, who was luckily healthy and only had minor, common newborn issues. So i was pleasantly surprised for 9 months. Until yesterday. the bill in hand says that they refused to pay for her 9 month, standard, well baby visit. I called and found out that she was over the number of visits allowed in her first year of life. the limit is 10. i checked the calendar and saw we only had 7 (8 is you include the denied visit). hmmm.....after a (very long) call with a (very friendly) insurance customer service agent she figured that they were counting visits from the pediatrician while we were in the hospital. that didn't seem correct to me. i ask to have it fixed. so i was transfered (hung up on, actually) to a person that can help me. i called back and talk to (a cranky) person that was nice enough to (not really) fix the issue by making a one time exception for this bill. this is great.....until we get to her next appointment and i need to go through it all again. i asked to speak to a supervisor and i was told that "there was nobody that can help me". really? don't believe it. i am waiting to hear back for matt-cranky-guy's boss, kate. Ok kate....i am waiting. still waiting.....must have been a long meeting. more to com

clapping, waving, pulling up and.......CRAWLING!

So, after a few weeks of crawling backwards and working on some other skills 'A' finally thinks the world is ready to see what she is capable of....in addition to being cute!

enjoy.

Crawling

A few weeks ago I posted that 'A' was almost crawling.
Well a few days after that my wife filmed the video below while I was at work.
She hasn't made too much progress since so the forward crawling videos don't exist yet. She is starting to pull up though so maybe she will skip the whole crawling phase, who knows? Once I get a video of her pulling up I will post it.
Enjoy.

Home Made Applesauce

I am a few weeks behind on my posts. I still have a lot of things to write about but I have been juggling a lot of other things I want to get done, including finishing my father's day gift for my dad, with work and taking care of the baby.

Here are some photos of the home made applesauce I made a few weeks ago.
Peel and core some apples, slices them in the food processor, boil them and then blend them. One ingredient and very easy to make.

Laughing in the Back Seat

There is nothing more pure than a baby laughing. 'A' is in a good mood a lot but we have only seen her laugh really hard a few times. It is becoming more and more frequent but it is still a treat.
Hope it makes you laugh too.

First Swim

Last week we were on vacation in Florida with my wife's parents, aunt and uncle, brother, sister in-law and two kids.
We took 'A' in the swimming pool and to the ocean for the first time.  Here is the video of her in the pool.
Enjoy.

Almost Crawling

"A" is starting to show a real interest in crawling. You sit her down on the ground and she immediately turns on to her stomach and flails about.

Over the last few days the flailing has become a little more organized. Her arms are under her now and she is pushing the front half of her body off the ground.

Last week when she tried to pull her legs in to get onto her knees her face went down on the ground but now she is starting to get into a four point stance.

She is so close, rocking back and forth, trying to move forward. A few more days and she will have it for sure.

This weekend we are going to do some serious baby proofing. It may be safe now but once she can get around our place is going to be a disaster waiting to happen.

It is going to be so exciting to see her crawling but I am going to miss the days when we can just put her down and know she can't get anywhere.

I also have the feeling she is going to be the type of baby that will never sit still again. She is already constantly moving around. Actually being able to move is going to add a whole new dimension to her energy level that is already off the charts.

Here we go. Videos will be up soon.

Using Ninite.com to Download Programs

Recently while I was installing my new Windows 7 bootcamp machine on my MacBook Pro I used a website called Ninite.com to install all of my extra programs.  This site has a simple list of all the programs they feel you might need, gets the latest version and bundles them into one installer.  Install that one installer and you are done.

I used this to install Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Google Talk, Adobe Reader, Flash, Java, Evernote and dropbox and Notepad++.

One stop shopping and done.

I highly recommend this site, it was a huge time saver.

Tour of a Recyclables Sorting Facility

Yesterday I took a tour of a recyclables sorting facility and I learned a ton of great information. Two things that I took away are:
1) We use, and throw away, a lot of stuff and
2) An hour tour of a sorting facility doesn't make you an expert.


Another important lesson was that every sorting facility (and I am guessing processing plant) has different equipment, and therefore different rules about what can and cannot be recycled and also how you need to prepare the materials before you bring it to the curb. What I learned yesterday doesn't necessarily apply to your sorting facility and doesn't even apply to mine. Knowing how to recycle in your neighborhood is something that is very important to find out. Please find out what the rules are for your town and follow them. The list of items that aren't recyclable is there for a reason. These items get thrown out anyway and if they are not caught in time can cause a lot of damage to the machines that sort the materials.


Even though I am not and expert I would like to take this post (and maybe a few future posts) to show you what I have learned and to dispel some myths about recycling. Feel free to ask more questions or comment about anything in the comments below.


First off, what is a sorting facility? A sorting facility doesn't actually recycle anything. They take a stream of materials that are all (hopefully) recyclable and sort them in to piles of like materials, bail them and send them off for mills and plants to recycle.


The facility we visited was capable of sorting zero-sort materials. Zero-sort is a term that basically means that the consumer doesn't need to separate the paper from the plastic or cans and bottles. They put it all in one bin and the sorting plant divides it up. The process to do this was both fascinating and complicated.


For the most part it is an automated process but there are also 30 people on the line manually sorting materials, mostly for quality control. Their jobs are to pull out materials that are not recyclable, find stuff that is recyclable but can't run through the machine because it will damage the machine, such as plastic bags, which are recyclable but too light for the machine to process properly and will also get tangled in the machine and cause a lot of damage. Finally the grab stuff that was not sorted correctly and either run it through the machine again or sort it by hand.


After quality control the whole process is, at the least, 95% accurate and they strive for 97%. The mills that they send the final product to are able to work with 5% contamination but anything above that is no good.


The facility we toured runs 5 days a week in 2 shifts. They have the ability to run on weekends and a third shift at night but right now they don't receive enough materials to sort. Sometimes the 2 shift goes home early because they run out of materials to sort. This is because estimates put the amount of stuff we throw out that is recyclable at 60%. WOW! That is horrible.


The mechanical process involved to sort the materials is amazing. When you see the piles of materials in the dock it is hard to believe that it is possible to sort and looks like it would take forever but the plant is currently sorting 700 tons of materials a day. That's around 15,000 tons a month and they would be able to do much more if we sorted the recyclables from the trash better at home.


I am not going to go in to details of each station along the way because I fear that I will not be totally accurate and I would hate to put details up that are not correct. I will tell you that the glass bottles all get broken. The small pieces of glass fall through a hole in a screen and are separated from the other trash in this fashion. This answers one question of what happens to the metal lids, they either; fall in with the glass and are separated by the glass plant, or they are too big to fit through the hole and wind up in the metal pile.


Plastic containers are sorted in the one section that I found to be the craziest. The materials all pass under a beam of light. The light passes through the plastic containers and is bent by the plastic. Depending on the type of plastic the light is bent differently. The light then bounces off of the conveyer belt and back up into a camera. The camera detects how the light was bent and sends a signal to a computer that tells an air jet to fire, in the correct location at exactly the right time. The air jet pushes the plastic container up in the air, over a hole where all the other materials go, and into a bin. This is done first for the number 1 plastic and then for the number 2. I believe the numbers 3 through 7 are all kept together but I am not 100% sure about that. Either way this is the process that sorts the plastics from the other trash and from each other. And it all happens very quickly.


Lids that are left on plastics may not be the same materials as the bottles. Again this is sorted up by the next plant by melting the plastic. The labels and mismatched lids are going to melt or burn at a different temperature. So a plastic bottle can be fine while the lid melts and then they have a bottle and some melted plastic which can be easily separated.


Metals that are attracted to magnets are simply separated by a huge magnet. This removes any steel and tin plated steel cans.


Aluminum cans are removed using the same force that keeps you from pushing the north side of a magnet against another north side of a magnet. They use this force, reverse magnetic polarity, to propel the cans off of the conveyor belt into a bin. She didn't go into detail of how this works exactly but I did find an article that explains a little bit more if you are interested. (http://www.americanrecycler.com/0409/spotlight.shtml)


Metal that is too large for the machine to handle is brought to a scrap yard and recycled there. Since the plastic bags can't run through the machines they are collected and made into little plastic pellets for future use. At this point the pellets are approved to be burned for fuel and they are working on the process of liquefaction so they could be used to fuel the trucks that pick up the materials and deliver them once they are sorted. But we aren't there yet.


The visit was very educational but just a small piece of the overall puzzle. This plant simply sorts the materials and sends them to other facilities to use. The melting down and other processing is all done at the other plants so it was impossible to get he answers to all the questions that I have. For example, it is only necessary, as far as the sorting facility is concerned, to rinse the jars and containers of food enough to help reduce rodent problems in the plant. But the needs of the tin plant or plastic plant may be totally different. I am guessing that they need the materials to rinse more than the sorting facility but I can't say how much.


According to the tour guide the amount of energy saved by recycling one tin can (after transportation and other energy costs are accounted for) saves enough energy to power a TV for three hours. So unless you are using enough energy to power a TV for 3 hours to rinse your cans I would say it is still well worth it to rinse and recycle a tin can. No other examples of how much energy it takes to recycle something where given but I may research this further in the future.


Materials that are not recyclable are thrown out and wind up in the same place they would have if you threw them out in the first place.


Another important detail is that recyclables placed inside a plastic bag or trash bag will be removed and end up in the land fill. This is because they cannot tell what is inside the bag without opening it and they do not want to open plastic bags that often contain trash. It is best to NOT throw your recyclables out in a plastic bag. Just leave them in the bin on the curb with no bag.


The materials once separated are worth different amount. Styrofoam is too light to weigh enough to make any money off of and needs to be melted down before it is bailed which is also difficult to do so a lot of facilities do not accept it which is why it may not be recyclable in your town. Other materials vary in price according to how useful they are. Glass is hard to get rid of and after factoring the cost of trucking this facility actually pays to have their glass taken away. Tin on the other hand is very valuable, right now. The prices of everything change like the stock market and even experience crashes. In 1999 and 2008 the prices of materials went down so much that the plants the sorting facility didn't have contracts with wouldn't take any more materials. This company rented a warehouse and stored the materials until the market went back up. I doubt that all companies do this but it is nice to know that they are not just dumping the glass because they lose money on it and that they take the extra effort to make sure things are recycled as much as they possibly can.


I hope to learn more about the overall process of recycling and will share everything I learn with you. Thanks to Gisela for inviting me on this tour, this should be a featured attraction on her website for sure. I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did and I hope you enjoyed hearing about it.

Nobody's Perfect

Wednesday night Armando Galarraga came very close to pitching a perfect game for the Detroit Tigers. For those of you that don't follow baseball, a perfect game is when a pitcher pitches an entire game and no runner ever reaches first base. That means no hits, walks, batters hit by a pitch, batters to reach on a throwing or fielding error, and no third strike that the catcher doesn't catch allowing the runner to run to first before being tagged or thrown out. 27 up, 27 down.

A perfect game is not an easy task despite the fact that Galarraga would have been the third pitcher to throw one this season. Roy Halladay's perfect game, the second of this season, was only the 20th in baseball history.  You need to be good and you need to be lucky. Your fielders have to bring their A-game as well. Well hit balls need to be catchable and almost every perfect game seems to have one defensive gem, such as Austin Jackson’s catch to start off the ninth inning. And, finally you have to have an umpiring crew that is going to give you good calls behind the plate and at first base.

Enter Jim Joyce.

Joyce was the first base ump on Wednesday and has been a major league ump since 1987.  He is considered one of the better umps in baseball and is respected around the league.  But with 26 batters in a row retired the 27th, and what should have been the final batter, hit a ground ball to the first base side. The first baseman fielded the ball, threw it to Galarraga who was covering the bag and the runner was........

SAFE!!!!!!!

"Why is he safe, why is he safe" repeated the Tigers TV announcer sounding like he was holding back tears. After reviewing the replay it was clear that Joyce got the call wrong.

I was mad and upset for Galarraga. He should be the 21st pitcher to have thrown a perfect game. But I feel, and I think I am in the minority here, that Joyce made the right call. Not to say he got the call right. Clearly the call was wrong, and he admitted it after the game which definitely makes him an honorable man, but he made the call that he felt, at the time, was the correct call*.  Despite 50,000 people cheering and millions watching on TV, on a call that Joyce knew would get a lot of attention even if it was right, he made the call as he saw it. Analysts after the game were asking "don't you give the pitcher the benefit of the doubt?"  But why would you do that. The game should be called by the rules regardless of the circumstances. He made the call that he thought was correct and that is how he should do his job. I give him all the credit in the world. He made an untimely mistake. It happens. We are all human.

To quote Galarraga himself, "nobody's perfect".

My New Mac

I recently got a new computer at work.  It is a MacBook Pro and I am running windows 7 on a Bootcamp partition.  The great thing about the new lines of Macs is that you can run Windows on it if you really need to so you are getting 2 computers for the price of one (plus the cost of the Windows operating system).

I received my computer and was amazed at how easy it was to get up and running in the Windows operating system.  Bootcamp simply asks you how large you would like to partition your drive, asks you to insert the Windows install disk and the rest is just like setting up a new PC.  The only additional step is to insert the Mac OS disk when prompted so it can install of the drivers that you need to use the Mac hardware. From there you just use your computer(s) as normal holding down the "option" key during startup so you can choose if you want to boot as a Mac or PC.

This is also the first time I am using Windows 7.  I jumped straight from xp to 7 and I couldn't be happier.  It is faster, more stable and once you get used to the look and feel, it is much more easy to use.

I haven't come across any problems using Windows on my Mac or using Windows 7 but I have only been using it for a few days.  I will keep you posted on any problems or glitches I run into but so far (knock on wood) I couldn't be happier.

Lost - Unanswered Questions

My sister in-law found this video on line and posted it on her Facebook page.  I think it does a great job asking all the questions I would like to ask about Lost (if I had more time).  Funny because it’s true.