Its that time of year again. Yesterday, to mark the opening of deer season, we watched the classic big buck story, Escanaba in da Moonlight. This is the tale of how The Buckless Yooper got his buck. Yooper as in a person from Michigan's Upper Peninsula (U.P.).

The principals in this story are the Soady family along with their friend Jimmer Negamanee from Menominee, and a lost Department of Natural Resources (DNR) officer recently exiled from Detroit to Escanaba. The actors include Jeff Daniels, Harve Presnell, Joey Albright, Wayne David Parker, Randall Godwin, and Kimberly Guerrero.

We have both the regular DVD which is available from Amazon as well as the "making of" DVD, A Picture from Home: The Journey Through 'Escanaba in da Moonlight' which is available from Jeff Daniel's Purple Rose Films web site.

While watching this, my wife asked how old is Harve Presnell? So I looked him up on iMDB and found that he died this last summer at the age of 75 from pancreatic cancer.

This movie came out in the Spring of 2001 and played mostly in the Mid-West. It was released on VHS and DVD on 15 October 2002, at which time I ordered copies shipped to family all over the United States.

Looking back though my email archives, I note that Jimmer Negamanee looks quite a bit like one of the members of my Grandfather's survey crew from back when they laid out so many of the highways across the U.P. back in the late teens, early twenties.

Update: 13 Nov 2009 - Veteran's Day Finish Line

This is part of the annual fund raising for Project Valour-IT.

My gift to them is to Team Navy, in honor of my father who served in the Navy SeaBees at the tail end of WWII and during Korea. As you can see above I helped to break the $100K barrier. The challenge to the Teams was to break the $140K barrier with each team raising $35K. A couple years ago, Team Navy raised the most. This year it looks like the Marines will take honors.

The name Valour-IT originally stood for Voice Activated Laptops for OUR Injured Troops. Seeing as many of our young service people use the technology of cell phones and the internet to communicate with family at home. This project was a way for injured troops to continue to communicate even though they were at Walter Reed and their hands were bandaged.

The back story can be found here, CPT (now MAJ) Chuck Z's blog can be found here, and Fuzzy Bear Lioness' (FbL) blog can be found here.

FbL's Selected Valour-IT Posts:

• Just Read This
• This is What It's Like
• More than Just a Laptop
• Three Kings and Valour-IT
• Bryan Anderson and Valour-IT
• CPT Ziegenfuss and Valour-IT
• Buzz Robertson and Valour-IT
• Travelogue II: The VA Hospital

Sagacitas and The Thomas
25 years ago


This picture was found while browsing through our old pictures.

The Thomas (L) and CCPhysist (R)

Sagacitas-Rodney
Sagacitas and Rodney will be united in matrimony September 26. The bride-to-be is a graduate of Grandville High School and Michigan State University. She and her parents are of Grandville. The future groom is a graduate of Coopersville High School, Grand Valley State University and Western Michigan University. He and his parents are of Coopersville.

The full description of ArtPrize can be found at their Official Site.

This is an international competition backed with $450,000 in prize money. The top prize is $250,000, 2nd prize is $100,000, 3rd prize is $50,000, 4th through 10th prizes split the remaining money.

The public votes on the competition using an up-down mechanism similar to Digg.

The first week's voting determines the top 10 pieces of art.

The second week's voting determines the finish placement within the top 10.

Local coverage of ArtPrize can be found in the Grand Rapids Press on MLive.

Pictures of the art can be found in the Flickr: The ArtPrize Grand Rapids Pool.

I find the logo to be too cute. If you turn the logo on its side, you see "The Calder", La Grande Vitesse, which has become part of the official logo of the City of Grand Rapids:



Update:

The winner was Open Water no. 24



But personally, I liked the Moose welded out of many, many nails.

Ah yes, several months ago I mentioned this.

Anyway, we are now about a month before the wedding and last weekend the groomsmen, Dads and such were measured for their tuxes.

We will be wearing something along the lines of the following:


My hair is not that dark.

The History Channel is running a half hour of CBS News reporting from July 20, 1969 at 8:30 PM EDT and PDT tonight.

See my brother's comments at Live from 1969.

For pictures from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), check out the pictures of the various Apollo landing sites (at 4ft per pixel resolution) at LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites.

10:08 - Watching "Moonshot" and it looks like ithildyn is playing one of the wives,  Janet Armstrong.

12:14 - OMG, Uncle Walter was only 52 in 1969. I don't look that old!

Last night I was greeted by my little friends as I worked on opening the pool.

I have fireflys, so everything is right with the world.

Your results: You are Mr. Scott

Mr. Scott 75% Worf 75% Mr. Sulu 70% Geordi LaForge 65% Will Riker 65% Chekov 60% Uhura 60% Deanna Troi 60% James T. Kirk (Captain) 55% Jean-Luc Picard 55% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 50% Beverly Crusher 50% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 45% Spock 30% Data 30%

You are a fun-loving foreigner with an amazing ability to get any job done on time. Often described as a "Miracle Worker".

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz

Must just be my purty face and rude engineering skilz.

A week ago Saturday, I received the following picture on my cell phone from my eldest (Sagacitas) with the note "Guess What?".


Looks like we are going to have an interesting Fall.

If you note from her web site, she never mentions what the "Big News" was all about ... she got a full time job.

Found at xkcd

Don't Worry, It's Here!

The last few days, they've been predicting that today's snow storm would drop from 6 to 12 inches of snow between when it started at midnight and when it finished by mid-afternoon. By last night they had reduced the range to 7 to 9 inches of snow.

This morning I removed no more than 3 inches of snow off the drive and sidewalks before work. When I left for work, it was still blowing and snowing at a rate of around an inch an hour. The streets had not been plowed and it was interesting making turns at the intersections. (When the roads aren't plowed, the intersections build up hedgerows that have to be broken through. People have been known to bottom-out on these hedgerows so their car gets stuck and they lose traction.)

The snow in the parking lot at work was 6 inches deep when I went in and 8 inches deep when I left at lunch time. By lunch, only the very major roads appeared to be plowed, trucks were getting stuck on the side road leading up to my place of work, and I had difficulty getting out of the gas station after filling up my car.

The snow quit around 1:30, by 5 pm the major roads were plowed clean and side street were more-or-less passable. Overnight my driveway has gone from having a couple of piles of snow to being enclosed by 2 foot high walls of snow.

According to the NWS we have received 10.2 inches of snow at the airport. This sets a new record, besting the 4.5 inch snow fall from 1975. It would not surprise me if we got more snow on our side of the city than at the airport.

And more snow is coming over Saturday night, Sunday night, and Monday. We are certainly going to have a White Christmas.

(This entry will be updated tomorrow morning when the NWS publishes the snowfall map for today.)



Yes, that was some snow.

Here's the snow from the end of this week:

12/06	12/04	12/03

The main roads are clear. The side street and country roads are packed snow and snow covered.

Happy Birthday to Ninjababe

I noticed your birthday when I was at work and I realized that I was going through Finals Week at college on that day, planning to head back home and spend some time working as an intern ... at the same engineering firm I'm still at. Boy, am I boring.

I did celebrate on your birth day, by consuming quite a bit of Martell cognac and then running from one end of the campus to the other. Finals Week and all that.

Hope you all have a nice birthday and that whatever is wrong with the truck magically goes away.

The Maps

Here's the snow so far:

11/30	11/24	11/20	11/17

Oh, the joys of "Lake Effect" Snow.

We are currently under a Hazardous Weather Outlook, its raining, and they expect 2 inches of snow over night.

Sunday we had the first "Snow" of the season. Right now we are getting freezing rain, so tomorrow will be amateur hour as most drivers relearn how to drive under slippery conditions.

Note that the white stuff at the top is not attached to the pink ball at the bottom. This is known as a torn rotator cuff. The surgery reconnected the two.

To make it all easier, I received a nerve block on my right arm which gave that old "its 1968 all over again" feeling just like when I broke my right elbow. When I came out of surgery I had no feeling in my right arm and could not control the muscles, just like after my bicycle accident. It was a disconcerting 24 hours until the nerve block wore off. I got good drugs for the pain including a Stryker Pain Pump which was implanted into the incision. The Pain Pump fed some form of 'caine into the surgery site to block much of the pain for two days after the surgery.

By the Sunday following the surgery the maximum dose of Vicodin wasn't knocking back the pain, so I had to supplement it with the maximum dose of Ibuprofin. That did the job until my stomach got upset. One thing that made it possible to sleep at night was the piece of durable medical equipment that my surgeon insisted on to handle icing the shoulder. He ordered a Blue Arctic Cryotherapy System for me to "ice" the shoulder. All I had to do was to load the little cooler up with ice, fill the ice with water, turn it on, and it would keep my shoulder at 40 degrees all night. I still use it the evenings/nights after the torture of my physical therapy.

I've been back to work for three weeks now, have been through three sessions of physical therapy, and can raise my right arm up to about 8 o'clock when making snow angels. I have cut back on the medicine so that I am only taking it to sleep.

This leaves my right shoulder in constant pain during the day, but as I said before the surgery, I was already in constant pain during the day, so what's the difference?

My current level of pain is not that much worse than where I was before the surgery, so I might as well do without the pain meds. I know that pain meds are supposed to help you heal, but by working myself to the limit of the pain I can endure and knocking back the inflammation at night, I have been progressing faster in my healing that the physical therapist expects.

I have been living with this problem for twelve years as an irritation to both my shoulders and for the past three years as an annoying pain in my right shoulder. We kept taking X-rays to check for bone spurs, but it wasn't until I had to sit up in bed to roll over (due to the shoulder pain) that I asked to see an ortho surgeon. The MRI then showed that I had a 3/4 inch tear in the rotator cuff ... the rest is history. Now I just need to heal.