Slowing Down.....

Today I knew I would be working in Canandaigua for the morning, then driving south to Naples to work the afternoon. I have made this drive thousands of times, but it seems that I am always racing to get down to Naples to get to work, but this afternoon I had my camera with me so I decided I would finally slow down and take an actual lunch hour to do something that I wanted to do.

I grabbed a quick bite to eat, grabbed my camera and set out for a leisurely drive. As I drove I took notice of things that I have seen before but never really appreciated. This is a short collection of those photos.

Rows of sunflowers planted in between rows of sweet corn.

Windmills on the hills surrounding Naples, NY.

Vineyard and signs.

Then just for the hell of it, I thought a sepia tone would look great on this sign, so I threw it in.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my trip down the road, I know I actually did today.

Still waiting, and waiting, and waiting...

So earlier this spring I decided I would get a few day old chicks, 5 to be exact to raise for the fresh eggs. I have always had a love for simpler times and doing things myself rather than being so reliant on big business, corporate America, "The Man". or whatever you want to call it. Plus I have always wanted to raise chickens. I found a hatchery that would ship small order runs of chicks, and I placed my order. I mixed and matched 5 chicks, I ordered 2 Black Australorps, 1 Barred Rock, and 2 Golden Laced Wyandottes (which are the two I wanted most of all.

They all arrived as day old chicks on April 6th.

Of the 5 chicks, 1 of the Golden Laced Wyandottes died after 3 days, which, from what I hear is fairly common, and the other Wyandotte turned out to be a rooster. I figured out that he was a rooster a couple of weeks ago when I went to let them out of the coop and he was defiantly crowing at me. Unfortunately, for me I can't have a rooster in the village, but luckily for me a friend of mine has been raising chickens and lives in the country so he traded me a hen roughly the same age for my rooster. After all of that I now have 2 Black Australorps and 2 Barred Rocks, and hopefully in a month or two I'll have two more girls hatched from eggs fertilized by the rooster I traded away.

So now the girls are about 14-15 weeks now and I'm still waiting on eggs. Day after day I trudge out to their coop and check the nest boxes hoping to see that first delicious brown egg.

The wait continues, we'll see what tomorrow brings.

The Trouble With Advice.....

There is always a danger when someone asks for your advice. Sometimes people have a pre-conceived notion of what you are going to say, or they believe that you are sympathetic enough to agree with what they want to do and when you don't they get upset with you when you give them your advice. On the other hand, you could give them some good advice, but when they act upon it, it just doesn't seem to pan out for them and they get pissy with you anyways. So I try to stay away from giving advice, but I do occasionally do hand out some small pieces.

These are some of the pieces of information that I have put together and try to use in my every day life to be a better man. They are all pretty obvious and not strikingly genius, but sometimes I get caught up in the day to day that I feel I lose my way, so I always try to come back to these things.

1. Be a good man when no one is watching.

Anyone can be good when someone is watching you, but what you do when no one else is around that defines your character. How do you act when no one is around to sing your praises about a good deed that they witnessed you perform? Would you still perform the same deed if no one was there to see it? Would you still do the right thing when you know that you could turn the other way and no one would know? This is definitely a hard road to walk, but I try to fight the good fight and do what I know is right in my heart even if it isn't easy.

2. A king knows what to do and does it.

A King is charged with the responsibility of his kingdom and he is faced with many decisions on a daily basis, he has to look at the facts, at his history with the factors and make his decision. Then once that decision has been handed down, there is no going back. This, much more simply put is BE DECISIVE! Don't waffle back and forth or agonize or making a decision, the decision is going to be made one way or another, it isn't going to just go away. So look at all the factors involved and weigh them out as logically as possible, then pick your path and defend it. If your decision is the right one then its great, if it turns out to be wrong then you learn from that mistake and move on. For example, in my career there are times where I have been called upon to make hard decisions, when I have made the wrong one I explain what I based the decision on and listen to what other factors that I may have missed and then I take that knowledge going forward for the next time I have to make a hard decision. Its a hard lesson to learn and everyone HATES being wrong, but it has made me a much stronger person both in business and the real world.

3. Let your work speak for itself.

People will always talk about how you got where you going. Most people will recognize the hard work and effort you have put it, but some people will always have something negative to say. "Oh she is in only in that position because she slept with the boss." or "He only has that job because its his Dad's company." I say whatever haters, they are only bad mouthing you because they are jealous of what you have and that jealousy blinds them the countless hours you've put in or the schooling you've had to get where you are. When I hear people talking like this its easy for my temper to flash, but I try my best to keep my mouth shut and stand on the quality of my work. The people that matter know what goes into what you do, the people that don't, don't matter. If the quality of my work was piss poor, you can bet your ass that I would hear about it from my boss, so until I hear that I keep my head down and my focus on the quality of my work and let it do the talking for me.

4. Honesty & Accountability

Everybody knows these things, but in this world where people are stepping on each others throats to get anything they get pushed to the side. Be honest, even if its hard. I am as honest as I can be, because that is exactly what I want from other people. Nobody likes liars, and nobody likes being lied to, so just be honest no matter what it brings. Now don't get me wrong, there is a difference between being honest and being brutally honest/rude. For example the age old joke, when a woman asks "Does this dress make my ass look fat?", a response of "I don't think that dress accentuates your body style" will go a lot further that "No, its your ass that makes your ass look fat!"

Accountability goes hand in hand with honesty because nobody likes cry babies or weasels either. So if you are on the wrong side of the line, own it. Yes I made a mistake and it is my fault. Don't make excuses, well it was so and so's fault, or I was too busy doing everything else to worry about that, NO! You screwed up now accept that responsibility and what comes with it. You want to be treated like a big kid in this world act like a big kid, anything else makes you looks sneaky, slimy and weak.

So there it is, these things are pretty much common sense but people forget them. Take it for what it's worth.

The Getaway -- Grime's Glen

I feel that everyone needs to break free of the stress of their everyday life every once in awhile. Just a place that's your place to go to re-center your frame of mind, even if its only for a few minutes. One of my favorite getaways is Grimes Glen in Naples, NY. It is just a little park that is situated right on Naples Creek and for a long time it was an undiscovered gem that only the locals knew about. I grew up going there and hiking up the creek, as I got older I would go there to get away from everything for awhile. Now it is a little more well known, the state came in, took it over and turned it into a "state park", but it is still a great place to go to get away from life for a day. I try to take my lunch breaks down there when I'm stressing out.

So because it is a such a great little place, I figured I would share a few of my photos with you.

  The second set of falls in B&W

  Another set of falls (That's just the top 20 ft)

Stone steps

Tent Caterpillars

 

So if you every find yourself in the heart of the Finger Lakes, take the time to find this treasure, it is definitely worth it.

Infertility, Hocus Pocus, Voo Doo, the works….

 

Another reason I started this blog is because I am going to cut back, if not cut out completely, drinking beer for awhile. Now to those of you that read my other blog, don’t worry, I will continue to post about brewing and probably try to toss in a a couple of guest beer reviews. So there will still be plenty to read.

The reason I am laying off the hooch is, my wife and I are trying to get pregnant with another child. I know what you’re thinking, "Isn’t alcohol the reason for a lot of pregnancies?” and in normal circumstances I would agree with you. However, I am anything but normal.

I’ll diverge quickly just so you can have a little peak into the mess that is me. When I was born I was dubbed a “miracle baby”. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck and I couldn’t breathe on my own for 45 minutes. From that lovely experience I have very mild cerebral palsy, which gives me a slight tremor, some motor skills issues, and my hands don’t work as easily as they should. Now don’t get me wrong, I am very, very lucky, it could have been a much worse case of CP where I wouldn’t not be able to function without care or help. So I am thankful for my situation. Then on top of CP, throw in Hemophilia, yep I have a blood clotting disorder too. So right off the bat nothing has been easy for me, but it has made me stronger.

So when my wife and I got married and tried to have children, it would only figure that it was me that had the fertility issues. We tried to get pregnant and it wasn’t happening, so my wife’s OB-GYN suggested that I have a battery of tests run and referred me to a Urologist. So I had to go an have a semen analysis, oh what a joy that was, but I’ll leave that for another post. So after all of the testing it turned out a I had a varicocele. To repair this I had to have surgery, then hope for the best. I had the surgery, waited the allotted time to heal and we started to try again. I went for a follow up sperm count check and although my count had come up, it was still low and my motility was low. So trying to get pregnant became much more of a process. To give us a better chance the doctors suggested either trying In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF), which is where they take my sperm spin it down, select the best and manually insert them into my wife’s eggs and then insert the eggs into her womb, or we could try Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI), which is where they collect my best swimmers, spin them down into a concentrated “bullet” and then inject that into my wife’s uterus with a turkey baster. We really wanted to go with IVF because it had a slightly higher success rate, but it boiled down to insurance. My insurance would cover 6 IUI cycles or 1 IVF cycle. We went with the most bang for the buck and chose the 6 IUI cycles, because if the one shot at IVF didn’t work we couldn’t afford the $18,000 for another IVF try.

Now here’s where it gets interesting, every month we would go up to Strong Fertility Center and my wife would have her blood drawn and based on those results they would tell us when to give a shot to wife in her stomach. Then she would take the shot which would stimulate numerous follicles in her ovaries and then we would have to go back to the hospital where she would have to have an ultrasound done to see how many follicles she had and if any of them were the right size to try with the IUI. If everything went well, we would make a third trip to the hospital where it was my turn to be uncomfortable. They would hand me a collection cup, send me in a little room with numerous adult magazines and movies and wait outside while I did my thing. Then I would hand them my “sample” and we would have to wait an hour while it was prepared. Once it was ready they would go ahead with the IUI and send us on our way every damn time with the same “It only takes one!!” smile. Some months Lauren’s follicles would be over stimulated and she would have a cyst which cancelled everything to the next month, other months we would go through the whole process to come to a negative pregnancy test at the end of the month. However through going through this for months and months we were getting discouraged and tried anything we could to better our chances. I quit drinking beer and smoking cigars, and then here’s all of the other voo doo, mumbo jumbo hocus pocus stuff we tried, Lauren bought and started wearing a St. Gerard pendant, I bought more Green Luck candles from the Goya section in Wegmans than I can remember and lit it everyday and left it burning while we were “on the job” if you know what I mean. I drank this juice because it was supposed to increase this, she ate this because it was supposed to do this, we tried this position, we tried that position, we had Lauren put a pillow under butt, and on and on. We tried everything and everything we tried didn’t work, this plus all of the negative pregnancy tests were making us miserable, it was worse on Lauren because she was taking the hormone drugs which were making her have wicked mood swings. We did this intense trying for probably eight months before we were both at the ends of our ropes. We were down to our last IUI try and Lauren decided that all of this was just too much stress and suggested that we take a break before we killed each other.

So we took a break and tried to forget how much we wanted a baby. We got back to our normal, but I felt incredibly guilty that I couldn’t provide the one thing that both of us wanted desperately. So I continued to take a zinc supplement which made me pretty nauseous for the next couple of months. Then one day I was out on the back deck, and Lauren came down with a pregnancy test in her hand. So I just figured it was another negative test, it wasn't out of the ordinary for Lauren to just show me the test rather than utter the words "not this month" again. But this time something seemed different about her, so I looked and was pretty shocked to see that it was positive. So after 3 years of trying and all sorts of voo doo, we were pregnant.

So from that experience I guess I am semi-fertile, but I need all the help I can get. That was a very long story to boil down to the simple point of I'm giving up drinking for awhile to see if I can recreate the magic from the first time.

Bring on the Goya Luck candles, I'm ready!

Sooooooo how did I get here??

It definitely has been a long strange trip for me to enter the blogging world, which I won't bore you with, but I will hit the bullet points quickly. I have always loved writing and have toyed with writing a book loosely based on my life/misadventures, or even writing children's books, but like many of us self doubt has put those ideas on the back burner. But I have continued to jot down thoughts and ideas in a book someplace, just to get them off my chest or to see how they look when actually put to paper, and I realized that blogging is essentially the same thing.

So with that brilliant, unremarkable discovery I decided that I would create a blog. My first attempt was a weight loss/work out blog which I quickly lost interest in. It turns out that I like beer more than I like working out which leads me to my next point. My "workout" blog quickly transformed into the beer blog that I have and am still currently writing. If interested the links are to the right of this post or just click here. So for seven months now I have been toiling away writing about one of my passions, BEER! Now, I'm not an alcoholic, well maybe a little, but anyway I just really dig beer. I brew in my spare time, I review beers, and I try to hit as many brewery tours as I can. But in all of this blogging about beer and the blog's dedication to that liquid gold, I always feel like I can't post about anything other than beer.

That's where this blog comes into play. I figure, hell with seven months of blogging under my belt I can handle writing two blogs. So I will continue writing the beer blog and use this blog to write/document everything else in my life that doesn't have anything to do with beer.

Hopefully that wasn't too long winded for you, but that is basically how I got here. Without further ado, on to the next post........