Miraclo Miles

The Final Birthday Present Essentially lost in the haze of this darkest April for the Nortons was that a new Heroclix set - Brave and the Bold - hit on April 14th. Flawed in execution in ways I won't bother to go into here, it nonetheless held some promise, and it was if nothing else a new set, and one timed to hit the day before my birthday. My wife pressed to make a birthday present of a case of it for me, so the order was placed. Flash ahead to the early morning of April 5th, when so much changed irrevocably here with her sudden and unexpected death. The days that followed were a painful haze, increasingly filled with details and magnified worries as I began to grapple with the new reality, which, as is the case for us mere mortals who walk the financial edge along the abyss -- something we especially came in for with my wife's illnesses and all of the battles with the thieving "gatekeepers" of our health care system (Oh, what a friend we have in the privat...

Pay It Forward Something for all days. A phrase popularized by Robert Heinlein via his 1951 novel Between Planets , as so: The banker reached into the folds of his gown, pulled out a single credit note. "But eat first — a full belly steadies the judgment. Do me the honor of accepting this as our welcome to the newcomer." His pride said no; his stomach said YES! Don took it and said, "Uh, thanks! That's awfully kind of you. I'll pay it back, first chance." "Instead, pay it forward to some other brother who needs it." ...and goes back, at least in concept, as far as Benjamin Franklin, who on this date in 1784 offered the idea in a bit of correspondence: I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you [...] meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I h...

Long past minor and certainly no miner, nevertheless, today I'm a forty-niner An odd birthday to note, it's more than a little foreboding to me. The countdown to 50 begins seriously. As noted to a friend sometime last year, fifty has the potential to hit me like a freight train if I haven't successfully addressed various issues that have grown to be of great importance to me. I suppose what I choose to do about them before this date rolls around again will be the true measure of how important they are to me. I wrote all of the above months ago, trying to at least have a few posts ready to auto-publish so something would appear here. At the time I had no clue how tragic a turn life would take even before reaching this.