Gabriella Riva Hines

Carla called around 1:15 our time to report Gabriella Riva Hines was born at the Puget Sound Birthing Center weighing in at 6 pounds 1 oz and is 19" long.  My dear friend Jeanne Lang informed me President Obama and Gabriella share the same birthdate, August 4th.

Exotic Mushrooms

This is the story of how a couple with two little children
 turned their farm into a mushroom producing business.
 The video is a piece of art! 

How to Make a Clarinet from a Carrot

This is hysterical!  It came from one of my favorite gardening sites, A Way to Garden by Margaret and was filmed in Sydney, Australia as part of a TED talk.

Roslyn Riding on Two Wheels

Laurie and Roslyn on their first bike ride

Geoffrey Eggington - Airport Architecht 1940 - 2014

 

A dear Colgate buddy of Ed's, Geoff Eggington,  passed away July 22, 2014 after bravely battling multiple myaloma.   I did not know Geoff well  having only met him when he sang with Ed's Reunion Singers last summer.

Geoff was the business manager of the Colgate 13 so he did not sing with the group;  however,  he did sing with the Reunion Singers Ed lovingly put together and directed.   Geoffrey told Ed how much he enjoyed singing!  They were roommates their senior year. 

Super Plugged

My cataract surgery was January 13th for the left eye and and January 27th for the right.  

Some people develop "dry eyes" after cataract surgery and this is what happened to me.  In order for the eyes to produce more tears, plugs may be inserted into the tear ducts. The lower and upper lids have one tear duct in the corner of one's eye near the nose for a total of 4 ducts, two upper and two lower.    Dr. Brownstone inserted plugs in the lower lids quite a while ago.  The reasoning?   Instead of the tears going into the tear ducts they will flow into the eye thus eliminating the sensation of dry eyes.  Liquid Tears are available over the counter and I used plenty!

In May temporary plugs were inserted into my upper lids -- didn't do much good.   

Because I am using so many Liquid Tears, the other day Dr. Brownstone inserted permanent plugs into my upper lids.  I felt like a foreign object was in my eyes when I would look to the right or left and so today Dr. Brownstone pushed them in a tad more which means they can not be removed.  But that is okay!

Now then, one of the lower plugs caused this same "foreign object in the eye" sensation to the point where I almost could not drive.    Sure enough, it was coming out just a little and after it was pushed in, all was well.

I find this entire process extremely interesting.    See my post of January 15, 2014.

BOTTOM LINE:  My sight is much better.  Ed does not call me "Magoo" in the morning because I am able to locate my glasses.  

Daylilies

Although the blooms last only a day, their beauty brings joy to many.  There are hundreds of different kinds of daylilies with whimsical names such as Nile Crane (Frasier TV series), Big Bird, Ruby Throat,  Catherine Neal and Joan Senior.

Each morning I go out to the patio garden and pick blooms and pile them on a plate. By the next morning they are shriveled up and ready to go into the compost.

Nelson Mandela's 96th Birthday Today

The Google Doodle of today is all about what he believed. Click on this hyperlink and you will see what he believed in.  He is one of my heroes. He died December 5th 2013. 

Maya Angelou Died Today at Age 86

1928 - 2014

She is one of my favorite persons.  When I taught in the gifted program as well as 6th grade, my students were introduced to Maya Angelou by reading her poetry in choral format.   On the Pulse of Morning was especially captivating to my 6th grade students in 1993 when President Bill Clinton asked her to be the inaugural poet at his inauguration.  A rock, a river, a tree...  they understood the words when we pulled the poem apart.   This poem, On the Pulse of Morning is read in that low, strong Maya Angelou voice imprinted in my brain.  Here is On the Pulse of Morning,  courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

We heard Maya Angelou speak at Illinois Wesleyan University in 1996.

Twin Brother

Injected With Inspiration 

 

 

By RICHARD S. CHANG

Published: December 2, 2007

JAN HYDE remembers Pittsburgh the way it was when he grew up there in the 1950s and ’60s, at the height of the city’s economic boom and the peak of its population and pride.

Jan Hyde and his 1960 Chevrolet Corvette.

Brooklyn Heights

Previous Occupation: Real estate and investment banking consultant

Car: ’60 Chevrolet Corvette

Date Acquired: 1964

 

 

 

 

“Pittsburgh was one of these heavy-duty industrial cities in its day,” he said. “First you had U.S. Steel. You had Gulf Oil, you had Alcoa, you had Rockwell. They had 13 Fortune 500 companies.”
Mr. Hyde, who is 67, also recalls a vice president at Gulf Oil, Grady Davis, who may be best known for his resolve to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. (Steve McQueen drove a Gulf Oil Porsche 917 in the 1971 movie “Le Mans.”) Closer to home, Mr. Grady supported an amateur Corvette race team from a local Chevrolet dealership. Its drivers, Don Yenko and Dr. Dick Thompson, were pioneer club racers and an inspiration to hot-rodders past and present. They were also idols to a young man who had grown up nearby.

“I was a kid and I didn’t know much,” Mr. Hyde, who was starting studies at M.I.T., said. “But it was the neatest thing, and it got me into Corvette racing.” When Mr. Hyde graduated from college in 1962, his father helped him buy a 1959 Corvette. About a year later, he walked out of his apartment in San Francisco where he was working on the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system to discover it had been stolen.

He drove a rental car for the next few weeks, “looking for a Fuelie, and I wanted to get a 1960,” he said. “It took me maybe a month or two, and I found this one in February of 1964.”
Fuelie was the nickname given to Corvettes with the top-of-the-line fuel-injected engine, an option from 1957-65.

“It was the hot setup,” Mr. Hyde said, but compared with the computer-controlled fuel injection systems of today’s cars, Fuelies were notoriously finicky. Mr. Hyde described a Rube Goldberg contraption that depended on diaphragms, flappers and vacuum lines. “It’s a beautifully engineered system that I think was more maybe like a solution looking for a problem.” Today, few mechanics understand the intricacies of early fuel-injected Corvettes, “so you have to have the confidence to take one of these things apart, rebuild it and put it back on the car,” he said.

Mr. Hyde drove the silver-and-white Fuelie from San Francisco to Cambridge, Mass., in 1965 to attend Harvard Business School. He met the woman who would become his wife, and he took her on their first date in the Fuelie. “There were some issues with the seats at the time, so I had them removed to be fixed,” he said. “Phyllis sat on the floor.”

He and Phyllis moved to New York and settled in Brooklyn Heights. Mr. Hyde established himself as a real estate and investment banking consultant, while she raised their son and daughter. (Now their roles are flipped: he is at home, and she has a medical practice.)

In his free time back then Mr. Hyde read enough books on motor sports to fill the shelves of a room in their attic. He also enrolled in racing school, and in 1966 bought a Corvette race car with the goal of competing on the track, as his idols had done.

“This was calamitous,” he said, prefacing a story that makes you look twice at his twig frame for scars and lingering kinks.

In 1975, Mr. Hyde entered the Duryea Hill Climb in Reading, Pa., driving a borrowed ’64 Sting Ray. “Not a Fuelie,” he said. Everything was going fine as he crossed the finish line at 130 m.p.h. But he was unaware that the rear wheels were off the ground; when he tapped the brakes, they locked up. The car twisted sideways, skidded off the road and hit an abutment. Witnesses told him that he must have been going around 90 m.p.h. at the point of impact. “My bones were just sticking out of my leg,” Mr. Hyde said. “There wasn’t a straight piece of plastic or metal left in the car,” he said. “That’s when I thought maybe I’m better as a spectator.”

Now that his status has changed — semiretired, in his words — Mr. Hyde has more time on his hands, time that is spent keeping his car in great shape, though he reminds you it is not a show car.
He has time, too, to keep the heritage of Corvette racing alive. He has produced a DVD on the subject, and last year he and two fellow semiretired Corvette fanatics began trying to record every Corvette that ever raced in an official series — around 2,500 of them — to create an online registry.
Mr. Hyde said that no reliable source of information and expertise on the subject of Corvette racing existed. He said he hoped that the Registry of Corvette Race Cars would fill that void and eventually become self-sustaining. For now, it is the beneficiary of Mr. Hyde’s energy and enthusiasm for the car that captured his heart all those years ago.

“It’s my full-time occupation now,” he said. “I’m enjoying the hell out of it.”