Proud Parents!

 The other week, Laura and I had a proud parenting moment as our kids were recognized by their teachers basically for being good kids. Sure, they TELL you that their good kids, but are they really behaving. Well, these seem to indicate that yes, yes they are. 

We also received an email from Thomas' teacher last week that iterated that we're raising a great kid: 

Hello Mr. and Mrs. Sutton,

Thomas is a wonderful little boy everyday, but today was extra special.  There was a little boy that was just very sad today.  Thomas went up to him and talked with him to see if there was anything he could do to help!  He included this boy and made him feel better.  I just want you to know that his kindness did not go unnoticed and that I am so proud of him!!

I mean, what more could you want?? Marissa did a similar thing while helping me with coaching Thomas' soccer team. One of the players, who is often late and disinterested, was sort of just laying on the ground for no reason. Marissa went over to see if she was okay and came over to me to report on her. 

So the kids are doing well and we're hoping that tomorrow the CDC will approve vaccines for 5-11 year olds. Laura and I would like to get boosters too, but we don't qualify quite yet. Some interesting info on Covid: 5M people worldwide have died from Covid. Unvaccinated people are swamping hospitals across the country and taking up hospital beds. If someone has a heart attack and you are unvaccinated with Covid, you shouldn't get a room or a bed if the hospital is full. You're problem was completely preventable, so no bed for you!! We need to start being tougher on these idiots who listen to carnival barkers for their medicinal advice. 

The #1 killer of policemen across the country is Covid and they are public servants who are supposed to serve and protect. Can't do that if you have Covid or are a carrier, so yes, mandate vaccinations for cops or fire them. I have absolutely no problem with that. 

Harry Potter and the Mirror of Erised

A beloved series of books in our family, like many, is the Harry Potter series. The kids have Harry Potter Legos, costumes, action figures, wands, etc., a seemingly endless number of things. The books are some of the few that I have really enjoyed reading in my adult life (I'm more of a "I'll wait for the movie" kind of guy). So as we near Halloween, it doesn't seem too surprising that the kids were attending a Harry Potter themed event where they were making potions, casting spells, going through the sorting hat process, picking a wand and playing Quidditch. One other thing they were able to do is stand in front of the Mirror of Erised (Desire spelled backwards). 

Now, if you're a Potter fan I'm sure you remember that the mirror would show what you desired most. For Harry, it reflected himself with his parents on either side of him. It's an understandably sad part of the book and movie. 

When the kids came home from the event, I was upstairs in bed watching one of several sports events on television. Marissa made her way upstairs first (after they both had McDonald's because even though they had dinner before they left, they "were starving"). She crawled on top of the bed to give me the requested hug and told me all about the event. 

Then she said, "And when we went in front of the mirror, do you know what I most desired?" 

No, what?

"Grandpa. Everybody misses him." 

It kills me sometimes how much I love these kids. And I miss you too Pops. ♥

2021, a year in health

 The other day, Thomas declared that he wanted to be a writer….oh, and a minor league soccer player and maybe a football player. He stated clearly that if you are a writer, you’ll also read better. Seems logical to me! Writing everyday is his goal and I told him about my class in college where I wrote in a journal everyday and my blog, which, while not every day, was pretty frequent.  He wanted to see the blog, so I showed him and next to each year down column A on the front page is listed the number of entries for that year. While some were 200 or 300, since the kids were born, the numbers have dwindled to single digits or teens. He implored me to write more, so here I am!!

I’ve been wanting to write about health changes this year as some stuff is going on and it’s probably good to keep a written record. During covid, I put on probably 15 pounds as the gym was closed and I was recovering from shoulder surgery. Did that mean I had to snack before dinner and at night? Nope. Did I do that anyway? Yep. So, as I pushed 230, I realized I had to change my eating habits, plus the gym was now open and I was 6 months away from shoulder surgery and able to workout now. That was all this spring. I started coaching Thomas’ soccer team as I had in the past, but after the first practice in mid April, my back really hurt. It steadily got worse until I realized it was sciatica, complete with nerve pain going down each butt cheek.

To combat the symptoms, I bought new shoes and an inversion table, along with plenty of ibuprofen. Unfortunately it was probably a month or so before looking up online how to treat it and probably two months before going to see the doctor. While the pain was very present when transitioning from sitting to standing, it wasn’t present when sleeping or sitting or standing for short periods of time. Walking longer distances would require a break to stretch, but up to a mile was usually ok. Still, ugh.

My PCP diagnosed me with lumbago sciatica, which Laura got a kick out of (“who uses the term lumbago anymore?”). Anyway, here it is October and with our deductibles met, I’ve decided to try to clear it up with some physical therapy, we’ll see. Interestingly, it doesn’t hurt WHILE I’m golfing or working out; only after or the next day or even the same day BEFORE I do those things.

But I also am fighting the pain by losing weight. I’ve dropped 15 pounds to 213 and I hope to lose another 10. It’s a little tough during Bears season, but I’m managing.

The numbness I would get in my arms when sleeping on one side or the other has subsided though I don’t know if that’s from losing weight or being a year past surgery now or what. My PCP said it’s just part of getting old. Ha!

After my shoulder rehab, I wanted to get out and golf as much as possible this summer and I’ve probably played 25-30 rounds which is a ton more than normal for me. It’s been great and while I’m still a bit inconsistent, my strength is coming back. Unfortunately, the middle finger on my left hand seems to be developing arthritis or something as it stiffens at night, especially after golf. We’ll see what a winter off does.

My eyesight continues to deteriorate a bit, with more “spotting”. They aren’t super noticeable at any point in time during the day, but I do see them periodically if I look for them. And of course reading glasses, while rarely needed 5 years ago, are now essential.  Nothing I can do about that. Even the doctor who did my Lasik surgery when I was 35 said it would have no impact on my need for reading glasses when the time came. He was right!

So there you go Thomas, another update in the books. I’ll try to keep writing regularly if possible and you’ll be able to do whatever you want, or nothing, with the entries!

First Day of School 2021

 It was the first day of school for the kiddos today and it was a completely different day than we’ve had for…..eight years. Thomas started first grade and that meant he and Marissa both were gone to school for the majority of the day, which was a first. It was especially difficult on the heels of 2020 when the kids were remote learning for at least half the year.

We walked them to the bus and even though just last week Thomas “didn’t want to talk about school” and called the first day of first grade “the apocalypse”, he was excited to go. And as you might expect, he had a great day.

Marissa had a good day, but was a little worn out. The A/C was out in the school and Thomas didn’t even realize it until Marissa told him later. Their classes are on different floors though with Marissa’s on two and Thomas on the first, which may have contributed to it being slightly cooler.

Our nanny, Jessica, also started working for another family today. Her new family has a teacher for a mom who needs someone during the school year to watch her newborn, but also get the kids to school and be there when they get home. The situation works out for us because we would need her most in the summer, just when the teacher really wouldn’t need her. Even though she worked today, she stopped by the house at around 5:00 to give the kids “first day of school” treats. Very nice!

Picture time!

The (Three) Season (Room) of Our Lives

Catching up on some things that occupied my mind-space today: a Covid related FaceBook post, a  Wendy's commercial, my awful back pain and the completion of our three season room. 

Someone with whom I used to work, and in fact I hired, posted today on FaceBook a meme related to Covid. It said: If you had a 99.8% of NOT getting cancer, how would you feel if you were forced to still go through chemotherapy? 

Now this person, astonishingly, is a rabid anti-vaxer. In this day and age, you really have to have your head in the sand if you don't believe in the science behind vaccinations. She does. She also chooses to follow and defend discredited pseudo doctors who speak out against vaccines. It's really the dumbest thing since Quanon, only Q happened after anti-vaxers and I imagine their Venn diagram is almost just one circle. 

Anyway, this post was wrong on so many levels. Your chance of getting Covid is not .2%. I believe your chance of DYING from Covid is about .2%, or 10x what it is for the flu. The vaccine has shown to be 100% effective against you dying from Covid. Read that again. Yes, 100% effective. So if you haven't gotten the vaccine, that's on you. 

Chemotherapy is a months long if not years long incredibly painful and exhausting process. A Covid vaccine takes 5 seconds and IF you have symptoms, they are minor and last a day. That's a huge fucking stretch to compare chemo to the vaccine. 

If you have cancer and choose not to do chemo, the cancer will not mutate inside and get passed on to someone else. Covid however, COULD mutate inside you as it replicates and produce an even deadlier and/or more contagious variant of the virus that could harm the entire planet. You could be the Typhoid Mary of Covid if you don't get the vaccine. That's an actual possibility. 

Wendy's is running a commercial where they have an alarm going off and a techno voice saying "Bag Alert. Major Bag Alert." So they have some bag deal apparently, but nobody on their marketing team knows that calling someone a "bag" is derisive and is generally short for douchebag or jagbag or some other such term. Every time I hear the commercial I think to myself, there's a douchebag nearby!! 

A little more than a month ago now, the kids started playing soccer on Thursdays and Saturdays with practice on Thursdays. I didn't volunteer to coach, but I did volunteer to help. Unfortunately, no one else volunteered to do either, so I was left holding the bag. Shortly after running around on admittedly older sneakers, my lower back started ailing. It has continued to hurt with a pain going down both butt cheeks when it flares up. Normally the flare up is right after I get out of bed in the morning, including in the shower. Periodically during the day the pain reappears and stops me mid-step. That said, I'm able to golf and go to the gym to workout (including riding the stationary bike), without pain. Go figure. It could be a slipped disc that would rectify itself in time. It seems like Sciatica has these symptoms as well, which could also rectify itself. OR it could be something worse, like spinal stenosis. Let's hope not. 

Finally, our three season room is complete! We tore out the pergola and put in the room covering a slightly larger foot print. Why 3 seasons? Our house is plenty big and I don't want to add to the tax base for it. Since the room has no heating or A/C, it would not be considered additional square footage for the house for tax purposes. Win win! However, it is SOLID! The HOA said we had to make it look like the rest of the house which, on the first level, is brick. The contractor did a great job a price about half what we were quoted from two other companies. I'll post some pics here of the final product and then work backwards with some pics from construction. 

  

This is how it looks now! We've also added a table and parts of an L shaped sofa, but it's not complete yet.

And now we go back to the construction phase.

Demo of the pergola

Demo of part of the patio

The big equipment

New base poured

The brick exterior going up

Brickwork is done!

An update including our local HIE stay

 It's a lazy, chilly, late March Sunday, the day after celebrating birthdays and Easter with my extended family at a restaurant. As I sit at my desk watching a Will Ferrell marathon while I look for interesting articles to read or sports stories to follow, I decided it would be a perfect time to write a blog entry. But what to write about?? 

My shoulder is ready to go for golf season as I'm able to do pushups on a bench, maybe even the ground, but I haven't tried. Today I went to Golf Galaxy to take some swings with new drivers, but there were too many people there. I'll go back midweek and see what I can do then. 

On Friday, the pergola off the back of the house was taken down, piece by piece, as we prepare for construction to start on our three season room. Very excited!

The Bears decided to allow the man who traded up one spot to select Mitch Trubisky instead of (at the very least!) standing pat at taking whichever of three QBs would fall to him. Spoiler alert, the other two were really good and Mitch was really bad. That same guy had just signed Mike Glennon for a guaranteed $19M in the offseason. He also sucked. Then the same guy trades a fourth round pick for Nick Foles and guarantees him $21M. He also sucked. So the Bears give him one last shot in free agency to right the ship, secretly extending his contract for a year (I'm virtually certain of this) to match his head coach's contract, and he lands Andy Dalton for $10M guaranteed for one year, more than triple what Dallas paid him last year. It's a clusterfuck at Halas Hall. Only a marquis, proven QB can save them. 

One final note, we decided to do a staycation at our local Holiday Inn Express. Below is the letter (and review) that I wrote and posted on several travel sites. No response, 3 weeks later. Contrast that to the local Domino's which gave us flat bread bites  and received a strong rebuke from yours truly. The manager there gave us essentially 4 free orders of bread bits and two desserts. Here's my HIE letter: 

Before posting our review on Yelp and travel websites, we wanted to provide you with a recap of our experience at the Mokena Holiday Inn Express last Friday, February 26.

"We live in town and decided a few weeks ago to have a staycation at this hotel for a night and let our two children, 6 and 8, swim to their hearts’ content.  To make sure the pool was open, we called two weeks ago, at which time they told us that they couldn’t know for sure that the pool would be open, but that it was open currently. Midweek last week, we called again and actually made the reservation at which time we were told the pool was indeed open. Finally, we called FRIDAY MORNING at 10:00 to make sure the pool was open and told the desk person that our SOLE reason for coming to the hotel was for the pool. We were told the pool was open and, in fact, we could check in early (1:00). How nice!

 So you can understand our immense frustration upon checking in at around 1:30 when we were told that the pool was closed. Several times over the next 90 minutes we called the front desk to ask about when the pool would open, why was it closed and why were we told it was open when it wasn’t? We were also told that the front desk had to wait for the General Manager to call and tell them it was okay to open the pool and that the GM was offsite currently and they couldn’t reach them. This means if there was a robbery or the hotel was on fire, nobody on site could reach the GM? That hardly seems likely and if it is then it’s almost worse than lying to us. What an absolutely ridiculous chain of command you have in place if that’s true. “Here’s the only person who can make decisions, but they are unreachable.” That should never be the answer.

Finally, I went down to look at the pool myself and there was a genuinely pleasant, bearded man there skimming the pool. He told me the pool was completely fine and we could come down and swim whenever. I went over the front desk to both inform them and verify that this man had the authority to open the pool (though he was obviously an HIE employee). There were two women working the front desk and one, who checked us in, was at least pleasant while being unhelpful. The other, with red hair, was an embarrassment to all customer service employees. When approached with the information about the pool, she reiterated that she had to wait until the GM gave approval. To which I replied, “Then who is working on the pool and telling me it’s ok?”

“I don’t know.” She replied.

“What do you mean you don’t know?  It’s a bearded guy.”

“I don’t know who it is. I can’t see through walls!” She obviously wasn’t planning on moving from behind the front desk and traverse the 25 yards to the pool and see who it was.

“So there’s a guy working on your pool and you don’t know who it is? This isn’t Disney! It’s not like you have thousands of employees. You probably have, what, 5 people working here today?”

“No sir, we have more than 5.”

“Well one of them is working on the pool and he said it’s okay to swim.”

She continued to insist on hearing from her unreachable GM. She also declined to go investigate who was working on the pool and what they had to say, so I had to go over and ask him to talk to the women at the front desk because they weren’t listening to me. Again, he was super pleasant and said that he would. 

It’s seems to me that pretty high on the list of duties of a front desk person at a hotel,  right behind checking people in and out, is knowing who is in the building and especially who is working. Her rudeness, unpleasantness and shirking of responsibilities would certainly prevent her from working at any company that I would run, so I figured someone in charge there would want to know about our experience. "

Those who know me well, KNOW that my first version had a ton of swearing in it. I really wanted to convey to the owner of this property though that they had a subpar employee. If they choose to ignore it, that's on them. 

Where are they now?

 

Lighthearted entry today covering an interesting topic (to me): the 1971 MLB draft.

Now, how the hell did I get on this topic. Well, you want to talk about a rabbit hole? Actually it wasn’t too bad. It started by looking at baseball cards on Ebay and specifically one entitled “Baseball ReDraft 1971”. 

It’s an interesting theme for a card: who would you choose in the top four given the benefit of hindsight?  Since I was 5 in 1971, it really struck a chord with me as the guys on the card were stars while I was growing up. So that card made me look up the 1971 draft to see if I agreed (I take issue with Hernandez being #4). Looking at the MLB draft for 1971 also took me down memory lane as the players in that draft I remember from seeing play or collecting their baseball card or because they have ridiculous names (like Biff Pocoroba who was drafted in the 17^th round by the Braves and had a 10 year career).

We always hear about those who slipped in the draft and made it big (most famously in the NFL with Tom Brady getting drafted in the 6^th round ,199^th overall and the 7^th QB selected).  In baseball, with technically 48 rounds in the draft (not all the teams even went that deep), those who got passed up and made it, occur more frequently, but not as often as those in the top 10 who turn into busts. As I take a stroll through the list, I’ll be tossing out some of each!

The top 14 are filled with misses except for Frank Tanana at 13 by California who threw from the left side and was a force to be reckoned with when starting after Nolan Ryan. Whew, tough combo.

Tom Veryzer was taken at 11 and had a 12 year career, but only played regularly in six seasons and was traded several times. Not an awful utility man, but not a top 15 draft pick either.

Jim Rice comes along at 15 and he’s definitely well positioned on the card as #3 overall. The two in front of him, drafted in the second round with picks 29 and 30, were also great hitters but played the much more important 3^rd base position.

Larry Herndon was picked at 54 and had a 14 year career that included winning the World Series with the Tigers in 1984. Didn’t help out the Cardinals who drafted him though. I was still very much into the Tigers in 1984 and listened to most of their games on the radio, even during the day in my senior year in high school.

Dennis Lamp was taken at 62 by the Cubs, who wish they took Ron "Louisiana Lightning" Guidry instead who went 3 picks later.

There was a long talent drought then until Warren Cromartie was taken at pick 143, but Dave Freisleben, who was taken at pick 96, is a name I always knew growing up, at least since his rookie card in 1974. You see, that was the year the San Diego Padres were garbage and were being sold to a businessman who was going to move them to Washington. Freisleben was a rookie in the Padre system and appeared with three other players on a rookie pitchers card. Some of his cards, and other Padre players, had the team name replaced with “Washington Nat’l League”. Ray Kroc, yes, the McDonald’s owner, stepped in last minute and bought the Padres and kept them in San Diego.

Then we drop all the way to pick 278 where Dave Bergman was drafted by the Cubs (his favorite team) in round 12, right out of high school. Bergman opted to go to college at Illinois State and was drafted again in 1974 by the NY Yankees. He had a 17 year career including also being a member of the 1984 Champion Tigers.

Not much else talent wise was selected until Keith Hernandez at pick 776. Ron Wrona, Rick Wrona’s (one of three Cubs catchers in 1989 when they won the division) father, was selected by the Dodgers at 788. 

Joe Theisman was drafted with pick 764 by the Twins, but he was also drafted by the Dolphins, though he opted to play in the CFL with Toronto for $50k a year.

Joe wasn’t the only QB drafted in 1971. Steve Bartkowski, who would eventually be taken #1 by the Falcons in 1975 just ahead of Walter Payton, was drafted out of high school by the Royals at #699.

James Van Der Beek was taken at pick #570 by the Washington Senators, the father of the James Van Der Beek that you know from Dawson’s Creek.

But what happened to some of the other guys in the draft? Players like: Otis Zagorski, Hiawatha Roberson, Walt Rzepiennik, Steve Kooshkalis and Don Stackpole, the last player taken in the draft at #794. I bet they have stories too.