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My grandfather, Thomas Erskine, died this morning.
These are some things I remember when I think about him.

Back on June 20th of this year we all went to visit him.
We took pictures and it was clear he enjoyed the energy The Mermaids brought to his place that day.

Even then he was waxing poetic saying what a good life he had; and he was right.

One of his favorite stories to relate (about me) was the time I volunteered that my name was Shawn to a salesperson. He frequently called me Shawn with a glimmer in his eye…probably even on that day last June.

He also liked to talk about how he would walk the railroad tracks at lunch over to our house to see me as a newborn. He would hold me, during lunch he said, on his lap until I fell asleep.

When I was older and laying on the floor watching something on TV at his house, he would reach down and grab and hold my fingers with a crazy strength in his toes.

In one of my earlier memories I recall how he would blow magnificent smoke rings from his cigar so my brother and I could poke our fingers through them.

He used to accuse me of not having washed my face when I didn’t shave and I still remember the night the men in the family played poker (for $2) and watched a Stag movie (Hunting the White Tailed deer…all 30 minutes of it) because he didn’t have a bachelor party when he was married.

He had an incredibly firm handshake, sometimes painfully so.
I think everyone who met him remembers that.

Yesterday, at approximately 13:28 (so says my camera’s time-stamp) The Mommy urgently required our attention to the hawk she spotted in our backyard.

Digression. Incidentally, it was scoping the two corn-fed rodents we keep penned that were instinctively huddled under one or the other of the covered portions of the pen.
I am quite confident that my over-engineered rabbit tractor will keep the rabbits safe from anything this neighborhood can dish out and the hawk agreed; he didn’t dilly-dally. Methinks he spied all those staples and made haste.
Only a motivated bear would be capable of overcoming my defenses…well that and any mildly interested three year old who might occasionally leave the door open.
Come to think of it, I wouldn’t feel too comfortable, for the rabbits sake, with an Ozette-trained raccoon in our backyard; I bet one of them could muster my gravity-fed, door-clasp.

It was really close at first and quickly moved to another perch for another view into the pen. I run-walked for the camera and snapped about 6 pics before it flew off.

I KNEW I could identify it with some quality shots.

So I confidently opened my birdbook (3rd edition) and quickly found that the Sharp Shinned and Coopers hawks are so danged close in all respects (and may even be confused with the Northern Goshawk) that the book makes a point of saying how “confusingly similar” they all are.

Argh!

So, I can’t be sure of anything but how freakishly happy I am with this picture (and by extension my camera). This second shot is only a close-up (full resolution) of the head from the first shot which allows you to see good color, good beak detail, and an amazing red eye.

For my own self, I am leaning towards Sharp Shinned only because of the slightness of the bird. Sharp Shinned hawks are 10-14″ while Coopers are 14-20something” in length. That and the Sharp Shinned is more common around here.

I could reproduce the image with me out there holding a ruler but I am quite sure I would find that the estimate would be 14″ – so fahgeddaboudit (for now).

Tonight, on the 40th anniversary of the first man setting foot on the moon, I realized that the International Space Station (ISS) was doing another fly-by at an estimated magnitude of -3.3*, so I taped it; sorta.
I have stacked 4 images into one here and screened them together using Photoshop.

Not the best astro-photography to be sure but it marks the occasion and isn’t bad for a point and shoot.
I set the camera to Shutter Speed Priority, set the shutter to four seconds, ISO at 400, put the exposure bias to -2 and set it upside down on the ground…on a t-shirt. Oh and I also set it to take ten, 3 second pictures in a row.

Here, once I thought that maybe the subject was out of range of my original placement I moved the camera so that if the ISS flared again like Saturday night I might capture it.

It didn’t flare again, but it sure looks like it wiggled a lot.

The flare: On Saturday I woke La Grande Mermaid up at 22:56 to see the ISS fly over at an estimated magnitude of -3.5 and, well, she doesn’t wake up too easy; but I was eventually successful, she did see it, and she corroborates my story about the flare on the south side.
BopOp and Monya, watching from 2+ miles away didn’t notice a flare.

I didn’t see a flare tonight but still really cool all the same; especially so because tonight there were 13 astronauts on board with the new crew from the now docked shuttle Endeavour coming on recently. I think that makes this the cut-over from Expedition 20 to Expedition 21 combined shuttle and Expedition 20 crew the largest crew under one roof in space ever. Expedition 21 is expected to take command in October of 2009.

Considering where we were forty years ago, where we are today, where we could be if only…well it is all pretty amazing that we can do this at all.
Go Space Station Go!

* by the way, a magnitude of -3.3 is no slouch; the wikipedia article on apparent magnitude claims the following apparent magnitudes:
−4.7 Maximum brightness of Venus and the International Space Station (when the ISS is at its perigee and fully lit by the sun)[3]
−3.9 Faintest objects observable during the day with naked eye
−3.8 Minimum brightness of Venus when it is on the far side of the Sun
−3.0 Maximum brightness of Mars
−2.8 Maximum brightness of Jupiter
−1.9 Maximum brightness of Mercury
−1.47 Brightest star (except for the sun) at visible wavelengths: Sirius

This next post was GOING TO BE about my LiveStrong adventure but current events, that seem to happen in threes, have surpassed that post…more on LiveStrong later.

I could probably count on one hand how many times I have called 9-1-1 and actually had to say more than “this is a non-emergency”.

This week I haven’t called 9-1-1 at all but some of my closest friends & family members have.

1 of 3
Sunday night, after 24 hours of a raging migraine The Mommy finally called 9-1-1 because of strange visual symptoms. In summary, about 5 minutes later she could have been living any firefighter fantasy she may have had because three hurkin dudes in boots and suspenders were standing over the bed.

But, she had a headache, so instead they took her to the ER in an ambulance for some pictures…of her brain. All pictures came back normal.

2 of 3
At noon on Monday I took The Little Mermaids to Monya’s house for some splashing about while The Mommy had an acupuncture treatment. Incidentally, acupuncture proved mostly successful today she has taken full custody of The Urchins The Little Mermaids and at last check was somewhere near 20% of the pain experienced prior to the treatment.

On the way home from lunch La Grande Mermaid stuck her head between the bars on Wells Bridge for a better look at the fishies and got stuck.

One 9-1-1 call, three wrong bridges, plenty of worried 6 yr old tears, and two bright-red ears later the police department successfully extracted her from the clutches of the Wells street troll.

3 of 3
Then today, I get a call from my riding-commute buddy, let’s call him The Prosecutor.  We were scheduled to meet at 05:45 and he informed me at 05:35 that he had a flat. I rode on and arrived at work in a timely fashion.

The Prosecutor’s next call, at about 08:00, was from the emergency room where he reported a not-so-soft landing onto the sidewalk, from his Specialized road-bike, at speed – whereby he has likely suffered a separated shoulder.

That is three and therefore this concludes our test of the emergency responder system.

LiveStrong
I don’t consider myself a very empathic person.
That very sentence proves my point; I use words like “consider” and “thought”. I suppose if my speech patterns (blog patterns?) were analyzed there would be much fewer phrases like “I feel” and “I can just tell” than there would be “I think” or “I know”.

Tangent: To get any useful numbers an astute statistician would throw out my entire early childhood until about age 15 or so because it would completely skew the “I know” statistics. I said that so much my parents made me a shirt bearing the slogan so I could save my breath. Heck, I even named this blog along similar lines but only slightly tempered by 25 yrs of humility and fact checking.

The two older mermaids in my life have just started to show me what it means to be empathic, so consider this something like my entrance essay.

This morning I am up early, really early: 4AM
I only get up that early for two things: something fun and something loud.

Today it is fun for me; I am riding 100+ miles in a LiveStrong Challenge event in honor of Johnny Carbaugh who has stage 4 Metastatic Melanoma and is having one hell of a time. He is in the prime of his life and he wakes up at 4AM for the 10th or 15th time in a row not because he is going fishing and not because his wife heard a door slam but because his body is hurting him; it is screaming loud in his brain and in every other part of his body where the battle is being waged.

Getting up this early to ride my bike doesn’t feel like it’s hard anymore.

I have really only barely begun to feel what it means to be affected by cancer. It turns out that my empathy-weakness has helped to shelter my thinking self from even realizing the number of people very close to me and very close to people I am close to that have been affected by cancer.

Anne Marie Kilburg
Ward Zimmerman
Donagene Bell
Evelyn Pyles
Ruth Brandal
Pete Lenhart

I am sure there are more; I have only just scratched the surface. Feel free to enlighten me.

What I have seen, heard, and felt since I decided to do this ride is really only the tippy top of a very big iceberg. I thought, at the time, that I was doing this ride out of self interest and with a cause but I feel now like it is a need that has been knocking. It has been knocking so many times and only now that my learning in empathy has really begun in earnest am I able to understand what can be done, said, or felt.

So thanks to my beautiful wife and my empathic 6 yr old daughter for helping. As I see it, me and The Wee One have a lot to learn from you two.

Thanks to many donors I raised $830 that has been donated to LiveStrong so that people with cancer may live a better and less hurtful life in the future.

Now I will keep up my end of the bargain.

By request we have the only shot together of the girls in their Easter finery.