My Grandma and Father Joe

I am currently in western New York visiting family. I have seen over a dozen cousins (first cousins once removed and some second cousins), four great aunts/uncles, and some other assorted people.

However, the main part of the trip is to check on my grandma. She is 93 years old and having problems associated with getting older. Her memory is starting to fail. It seems like it is only short term things, but we are concerned it could become (or already is) more serious. We have to stop her from driving. A couple of weeks ago the priest at her church called us to say she almost ran someone over. My parents are trying to take her car away without directly saying "You can't drive." She lives alone, so we are telling her she needs to start wearing a medical alert pendent. This way, if she falls, she can use it to call for help. We set this up even before she told us that last month she fell and an ambulance had to take her to the emergency room. We want her to live in her house as long as possible. She has lived in the same house since she was 5 years old.

These are unfortunate things that happen as people get older. All we can do is deal with them.

However, during this trip I have seen something worse than getting older. It is being healthy and wasting your life. While my grandma is running around and doing as many things as her energy level and body will let her do, reasonably healthy and much younger people are sleeping the day away or spending it looking at little screens. There are people in the neighborhood who will sit on their porch and gossip all day.

My Grandpa Joe
Now I need a happier topic. I never knew my grandpa Joe. He died while my mom was a teenager. However, all accounts say he was a character. This is the story of how he got his nickname of "Father Joe."

One day my grandpa Joe and his friends went to a bar. The staff was not coming around to take their order. Since they were waiting a long time and were tired of being ignored, one of my grandpa's friends looked at him and said rather loudly "Father Joe, what will you be having?" When the staff overhead this, they thought he was a priest and immediately started paying attention to his group. After that the name stuck. Anytime he was with his friends, they called him Father Joe.

I recently saw the family of one my grandpa's best friends, Frank. His family would take trips with my grandpa and do a lot of things together. While Frank is deceased, his wife and all of his children knew my grandma, grandpa, and mom when they were growing up. All of these people think my grandpa is one of the greatest people ever. I heard more than once, "Father Joe was the best."

For example, Father Joe taught a couple of them how to drive. When they were old enough, their actual father Frank started to teach them how to drive. However, he did not have the patience to keep teaching them so he stopped. When Father Joe heard this, he took it upon himself to teach them. He did not give up until they could successfully drive.

Baseball, milling, and a form

In the last few weeks I have been to two baseball games. I have not been to a baseball game in two years, so I wanted to go to one at some point this summer.

For the first game I saw the Angeles play the Kansas City Royals. I was joined by James, who is a devoted fan of baseball. However, the Angeles lost.

The second game was on Friday. The Dodgers decisively beat the Cubs. It was also Star Trek night at Dodger Stadium. This involved William Shatner throwing out the first pitch and reading the Dodger's lineup. There were also fireworks after the game set to music from Star Trek. I sat in the free food pavilion. This is an area in the stadium where the price of the ticket includes as many Dodger Dogs, soda drinks, nachos, peanuts, and popcorn as you can get. While I ate three Dodger Dogs, it looked like most of the people around me ate even more food. I got the ticket and saw the game with my friend Andrew, who I know from a mutual friend from high school.

Friday was also an Andrew double play. Earlier that day I saw the Andrew I know from college who had just finished law school and the bar exam. He is currently living in Los Angeles, but will be moving home to Orange County at the end of the month. Since I was volunteering in the city, we met at Philippe's. Andrew explained that is the place he always ate at after he went to the shooting range nearby.

Earlier that day the excitement continued at my volunteer workplace. I wrote G-code to mill a box for a circuit board. I wrote the code from nothing and after some testing I had a complete program. I did not have time to run the final version, but I am confident it will produce a successful final product. My program even finds the exact position of the part to within a thousandth of an inch. It then calibrates its motions so the cutting is perfectly centered without any subsequent user adjustments.

The oddest thing I did last weekend was make changes to a health care form. My friend's wife works for an insurance company. Her boss asked her to make some changes to an application form. However, she has no experience with forms or with advanced features of Word. Since she knows I am good at computer stuff, she asked for my help. After trying to add features like drop down menus in Word, I decided it would be easier to migrate the form to pdf. In case you do not know, moving a file with boxes and a lot of formatting from Word to an Adobe format is a disaster. It rendered one straight line as a dozen distinct line segments that were not in a straight line. It also made one long shading box into many rectangles. It was a lot harder than it should have been and Adobe Designer does not have layers. I added fillable fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, and drop down menus. After some feedback and several hours of work, it looked a lot better.