This past Sunday was Abigail’s eighth birthday. We had a party to celebrate that milestone, as well as to give friends an opportunity to visit with Chris, who was in town with his English lady friend Becky. (She was a great hit with everyone, and I kept asking her questions just to get to hear her speak.) I still haven’t gotten a complete rundown of the gifts Abigail received, but a few that stood out were a Playmobile Valkyrie from Chris (presumably because of how much she enjoyed Siegfried), a bound copy of Abigail and the Seamonster from Daniel, and a handmade stuffed Seamonster, based on the one in the story, from Christina, Daniel’s sister. A tattoo maker, the origins of which are unclear to me, has also made its presence evident in the form of outbreaks of heart-shaped pox across the bodies of the youngsters.

The party was great fun, as these things inevitably are, thanks to our great assortment of relatives and friends who lend us their presence. We did in a butterfly piñata, which bore a startling resemblance to Mothra. (Chris’ friend Bruce suggested that we should get a Godzilla piñata and let them go at it.) We ate heartily, enjoyed the fine weather, and I did battle with the assembled hell-bent-for-dunking swimming pool youth.

Kathy sang a solo this morning in church. This is noteworthy not only because she has never done so before, but also because she’s not had any formal vocal training outside of church choir. I thought it remarkably bold of her to volunteer when our choir director asked for someone to sing during the offering, and was very impressed with how well she did. She worked really hard during the course of the week to master the song and the juggling act that is good singing technique, and did a great job pulling it all together. I was very proud. (Now to see if I can convince her to sing with the band once in a while!)

Way on over at his weblog, Daniel has, at long last, wrapped up the first draft of Abigail and the Seamonster, a children’s story he’s been working on sporadically for the last year and a half. I think it’s a very fine read, and not solely (or even primarily) because the eponymous Abigail is based loosely on our own. Go have a look, and then read it to your kids. If you don’t have any kids, borrow someone else’s.

When we were young, my brother and I were mortal enemies. Our antagonism wasn’t the vague, namby-pamby, “my brother is such a dork” variety, but a screaming hurricane of verbal and physical attack, red in tooth and claw. One particularly memorable exchange started with me throwing a stick at Chris. He raised the stakes by hitting me with a padlock. I upped the ante and went after him with a telephone — not a current era-phone, but a hefty pre-deregulation one that we’d rented from the phone company and which was made to last. The battle culminated in him picking up a big spring-loaded, 15 pound pogo stick and taking swings at me with it. High comedy, if you happen not to be on the receiving end of our attacks.

We lived through this time largely by deciding to be interested in very different things. Chris spent a lot of his time in athletics, while I lost myself in books and computers. Because by this point our parents were divorced, and I was still too young to be left at home by myself (which Kathy might assert still hasn’t changed), we’d all end up spending many a fine Saturday morning at the football field while Chris did gridiron battle with some other elementary school kids from around San Antonio. I loathed these times. My fraternal antagonism, catalyzed by the fact that I had no interest in football whatsoever, made these three hours the longest of my entire week, and I resented them thoroughly.

During one of these games, as I was sulking around behind the bleachers, kicking dropped gum wrappers and lamenting missing cartoons again, I noticed that there was a public library adjacent to the playing fields. My mom, who was likely sick to death of my whining and complaining at this point, readily agreed that I could go over to the library and explore it. I strolled over, cracked the doors, felt the cool, conditioned air flow over me, and fell in love over the next two hours.

Initially, I scampered around looking for The Hardy Boys and Danny Dunn, the McDonalds of my literary diet at the time – predictable, and easy to digest. Then I started indulging my curiosity: Wow, a book on volcanoes. Sweet, Star Trek books! Holy cow, they’ve got records you can borrow? A sex ed book – are they allowed to have that in here? (Yeah, I looked for it. I was 11.) Here’s one about…sheesh, I can’t even read it. It sure looks interesting though. A book on Thomas Edison! Wow!

I finally settled down with a novel that featured time travel, altered history, and an era-spanning romance. Five pages into the book, the library had dropped away, and I’d been lost in an extraordinary tale, thoughts of football, resentment, and cartoons far away, until Mom’s hand on my shoulder recalled me to reality, fifty pages and an hour and a half later. It was time to go, so I put the book back, expecting to pick it up where I left off the next time we had a football game there.

When I returned to the library a few weeks later, I couldn’t remember the name of the book. I scoured the shelf where I remembered it being, searched the piles of books on nearby tables, and spent a long time casting about the library, trying to relocate it, to no avail. For the next several years, I would quixotically scan card catalogs as I visited various libraries, hoping to finish the story that had delivered me from football, but was never able to finish what I remembered as one of the best things I’d ever read.

Though my time with that particular book ended sadly, the experience engendered in me a love for libraries that has continued unabated since. The smell of old paper, the weight of knowledge embodied in the stacks, the church-like quiet, and the proliferation of stories combine to make them one of my favorite places: a catacomb of knowledge, rife with tunnels down which one can disappear for hours, discovering untold treasures along the way, never exhausting the beautiful, interesting, mysterious things to be seen. A library allowed me to escape from one of the most trying times of my young life, and has always seemed a wonderful place since.

Now I’m working in a 313,000 square foot library set on a hill, with giant views of the Texas Hill Country all around. There are millions of books, a photography gallery, periodicals, media, computer labs, an impressive children’s section with many of the oversize storybooks librarians use at storytime, books on tape, and great music. If you take a left out of my office, the first thing you see is the canvas-wrapped remains of Gus McRae, boots sticking out the bottom. (It’s a prop from the mini-series Lonesome Dove.) I’ve walked through each of the building’s seven floors, have spent hours exploring, and still have only the barest grasp of the treasures in this place.

So, if you find me upstairs during lunch with a book in my hand, a distant look on my face, and I don’t respond when you say “Hello”, don’t feel slighted – I’m off treasure-hunting, traveling through time, visiting old friends, making new ones, or somewhere deep in the catacombs. I’ll be back soon, and if you wait for me, I’ll tell you the things I’ve seen along the way.

Kathy grew up in New York in a neighborhood where fireworks were not permitted. As a result, though she and the kids have all enjoyed professional firework shows from a safe distance, none of them had ever visited the roadside fireworks stand and loaded up on black powder fueled fun. This year, I decided that we should remedy that sad deficit, and stopped with Kathy on a recent date to blow a bit of money on pyrotechnics.

One of the interesting things about this area is that twice a year, like mushrooms after a rain, several “Fireworks Superstores” spring up along Interstate 35. I’d never been in one of these warehouse-sized stores, since when growing up, we always bought our arsenal at whatever roadside stand had the best coupons in TV Guide that week. Kathy and I stopped in to see what the huge stores were like, and were rather daunted by the high-end supplies available there. From $100 wagon wheel-sized rolls of Black Cat firecrackers to the $230 finale display with customizable fuse connections to the Nascar-themed tailgate party package, the place was pretty amazing. The addition of chain-link fencing that separates customers from the merchandise and the local Christian radio station blaring praise music in the background only added to the surreal quality of the scene.

Though we were thoroughly impressed by our visit to the Fireworks Superstore, we decided that the $15 we were willing to spend would go a lot further at the nearby stand. The proprietors had laid out a sidewalk of plastic sheeting to permit customers to stay clean in spite of the recent rains which had turned the ground into a morass. The young lady who was helping us seemed a bit bemused by my enthusiastic grin as I reacquainted myself with some old favorites — blooming ground flowers, snakes, satellites, fountains, smoke balls, firecrackers, sparklers, roman candles, and pressure caps (the little ones that make a loud pop when you toss them on the ground). We hauled the whole mess home, and enjoyed an hour together setting off the more discreet ones in the backyard, hose at the ready.

The kids were enchanted, running around with sparklers waving, planting smoke balls in various places around the backyard, setting up snakes, adjusting the fins on the satellites for maximum lift, and tossing caps at each other’s feet. Kathy, Dan and I took turns lighting things for the kids and trying to take photos of the various things we were setting off. (The blooming ground flowers were special favorites, as the sparks shooting out looked really impressive.) We wrapped up with a crowd favorite –the Killer Bee, a fountain with whistling “bees” on the side which Kathy had picked.

We later went to the city show which, due to an amazing number of mosquitos, the crowds and traffic, and its meager nine-minute length, was universally voted a disappointment after our first family firework experience.

Ultima Online: Odyssey (inexplicably abbreviated “UXO”) was to be the Next Big Thing in massively multiplayer online gaming from Origin. It had been in development for quite a time when EA moved operations to California and terminated nearly all the developers. The other shoe dropped today when EA announced UXO’s cancellation. Oddly, they didn’t do so with a press release, but left it to the project lead, who put a small note on the UXO website.

Ironically, EA has been down this road before. When I first came onboard, Origin was busily working on UO2, which was summarily cancelled and its developers released just in time for Richard Garriot to hire back all his old developer friends at his new company. Hopefully the vagaries of project management will be kinder to my friends who decided to go to California with EA and continue working on the existing Ultima Online and its forthcoming expansions.

I finally got some problems with my GPS software worked out, and while I’m in no danger of putting my friend Kelly Hendrick out of the map-making business, I was pleased to finally be able to plot Daniel’s and my route on our Geocaching adventure of a couple weeks back:

Yesterday we all went down to San Antonio to spend some time with Dad McMains. He’s glad to be back home, and has been repeatedly surprised with the number of people who have come from various quarters to lend aid and support. Many folks for whom Dad did some small favor many years back have sent flowers and cards, shown up at the hospital and at home, and volunteered to help with typing and paperwork. Closer friends have stopped by to install blinds in the bedroom, offered to help drive Dad around, and have stocked the freezer to help ease things for the family.

One of the risk factors for stroke that Dad showed was high blood pressure. In order to get that down and reduce the risk of recurrence, Dad’s going on a low-sodium diet. There’s a phenomenal amount of sodium on the average American’s menu, so this represents a pretty significant change in eating habits for him, as it would for most of us. We sampled his no-salt sesame sticks (not bad), no-salt tortilla chips (rather worse), and his potassium-based table salt substitute (altogether funky). I made some salsa without salt for him while we were there to help blunt the blandness of the tortilla chips.

Another aspect of the blood pressure control regimen is regular exercise. Toward that end, we all went out for a walk through the neighborhood about an hour before dusk last night. Liam was holding hands with both Dad and I as we walked. Occasionally, as children do, he would pick up both feet so we’d lift him, the load split between me and my father, and carry him for a few steps before setting him down again. Then, he’d start kicking both feet up in the air, and Dad would give him a little push so that his center of gravity would make it over the top, and he’d do a backflip before landing again.

And suddenly, I was immensely grateful for this moment: walking side by side with the father whom I love, splitting the load of carrying my boy, three generations enjoying the coolness of the evening and the closeness of family. The recentness of the stroke only brought home again the fact that, in spite of what we often fool ourselves into believing, we’re not ultimately in control of our own lives. That knowledge makes the times like these that we do have that much sweeter, and imparts a sense of urgency to the task of making sure the things we should say don’t go unsaid.

To that end: I love you Dad, admire you, and I’m awfully glad we get to enjoy this chapter of our lives together.

Dad was checked out of the hospital this morning, and is back home as of lunchtime. It looks like the loss of most of the right side of his visual field may be permanent, though there’s some chance that it will improve over the next 12 to 18 months.

Please keep him in your prayers as he recovers and figures out what effect this will have on his plans for the next several years. This is all still sinking in for all of us.

Tuesday morning my Dad had a stroke.

A stroke is a failure of the circulatory system to deliver blood to a section of the brain, either because of a clot or a burst blood vessel. In this case, the section of my Dad’s brain that was affected was the vision center — he lost much of the right side of his field of vision. There’s a chance that some of his field of vision will return, but if it doesn’t happen in the next 24 hours, the loss will probably be permanent. Because my Dad is subject to migraines with aura, which (like mine) manifest as a temporary loss of vision, he initially thought the stroke was just of those, and didn’t consider getting treatment until the critical first hour was already past.

We’re very grateful that things weren’t worse. Stroke can cause motor impairment, mental problems, memory loss, and difficulties with speech. I was relieved when I got to my Dad’s house to see that he was otherwise in good condition, moving around without difficulty, speaking lucidly, and maintaining a sense of humor about the whole experience. While vision loss is a wretched thing to have to live with, it’s the stroke symptom to which sufferers can most readily adjust.

We checked Dad into the hospital for the night so that they could keep a good eye on him, but it appears that he’ll probably be discharged today after they run an MRI on him to determine whether the cause was a clot or a burst blood vessel. (The treatments for these are different: blood clots can be prevented with blood thinning agents, which would be counterproductive if the brain was already hemorrhaging.)

I’ll provide an update when I know more. In the meantime, you can learn about how to recognize stroke at the American Stroke Organization.