Buddy Kicks the Bucket, etc..

I just about forgot about this blog so I guess I'm overdue for an update.

The wife still is working as grammar school principal at a catholic school in inner-city Newark, NJ. She is also staying very active in our local parish doing lots of lay ministry functions

#1 son just finished his first year of graduate school at Northeastern up in Boston. He's home now being a slacker until he goes off at the end of the month to work/study/hangout whatever in Martha's Vineyard doing something for his NU grad program. Nice work if ya can get it, eh?

#2 son working for a beer distributor in Scranton, PA and he's living in the house off campus that him and his slacker fellow students will use for the senor year at Scranton U, starting in the fall. He's getting paid $9 an hour to work four ten hour days a week. I told him not to blow all his pay partying on his three day weekends.

#3 son home nursing a broken "Jones fracture" of his right? foot. He broke it clowning around in a dorm with some friends. He thought it was only bruised but after somehow limping to/from one of his classes, he decided to go to the hospital and get it checked out. Cast scheduled to come off on 6/22 and hopefully it won't affect his pitching motion, as he just completed his first year as a member of Scranton's varsity baseball team. He made the varsity team as a Frosh, and got some starts near the end of the season. For awhile he had the lowest ERA on the staff, but he ran into the two best teams in their conference at the end of the season. The good news is he finished with the second lowest ERA on the team, but the bad news is that it was 6.30 something. The best ERA on the team, from another Frosh pitcher, was 6.10 (something), so you get an idea on what kind of season the team had. All the details can be found at the Scranton baseball web site.

Work totally sucks as they are running around in a Sarbanes-Oxley frenzy and all real work has come to a halt until they can gather enough information to satisfy these stupid consultants they hired. I told someone yesterday that I'm so far from giving a flying fart about things at work these days that I think I’ve moved into a totally different IDGAF dimension.

Lastly Buddy, our six year old springer spaniel, died a few weeks ago. He was real sick for about a month and he was unable to keep his food down for some unknown reason. We had taken him to two different vets, but it didn't seem to do any good in the long run. We had been planning on taking him into a animal hospital in Manhattan, but he passed quietly under our back deck, the night before our planned trip into the city. We guess he had some form of cancer but we'll never know for sure. I dropped off his remains at the Animal Control center on Linden Blvd. the next morning. The city's 311 operator told me that we could have left him in front of the house and they would arrange for a special sanitation dept. pickup but we didn't think that was a very good or practical idea. We had to replace on dining room rug after the dog died and I was finally able to put the screen back in our kitchen screen door, as the dog used to jump up and tear it before I gave up and just left the storm window in all year round.

Farewell Buddy, you were a pain to live with at times but overall you weren't a bad mutt in the end. I guess the best most of us can hope, when we crawl off to die under our back porches, is for people to say that about us when we're gone.