It was a bit of a strange Fourth.

First of all, I got up at the usual time, came down here to the computer and read my mail. Then I went back to bed and slept until noon. I can’t remember doing that in the longest time. It felt good. But it gave the rest of the time an off-kilter feel…like I was late for something, though we didn’t have anything particularly planned.

In the mid afternoon heat I took Abby and Madelyn to the mall. Abby was looking for shirts, Madelyn wanted a new white dress for her baptism. We quickly accomplished that mission — with new shoes too, of course — and then headed over to Mom’s for dinner. This is the first Fourth that I can remember where I didn’t cook anything.

Mother is doing ok. She is hesistant to get out of that chair and she regrets staying in that chair for too long either. Both of her legs hurt and the pain medication yesterday wasn’t doing much to keep her pain-free. I think the long, hard reality of this situation has fully hit Mom. She mentioned that meeting with the physical therapist on Monday might prove to be a tense affair. We’ll see. Discouragement and pessimism is bound to be a part of this but as time marches on I’m sure she will overcome.

The kids got into a water fight. When we arrive Kayla had the water balloons piled high in a basket and the squirt guns filled to capacity. Clearly she was itching for a fight and from all the evidence I saw after the food was eaten she got her wish.

As sunset approached the venue changed to my house, where fireworks are legal.

Well, most fireworks.

It was a weird feeling as most of our usual neighbors were missing this year. Usually those folks immediately around us next door and across the street join us in the street in putting on a little show. But one family is away on a cruise and the other had a family event to attend to. So we thought we would be all alone with the pyrotechnics.

And for a while we were. While we waited to darkness to descend we were content to light off the little parachute guys (well, they aren’t “guys” any more…they are just cardboard slugs encased in the explosive these days).

We had barely started when the police came by. He drove by once and then came back the other way, the second time stopping to ask if we had any illegal fireworks. I told him no. Then he said that someone had called complaining that someone was shooting off bottle rockets. I told him it wasn’t us and he didn’t even bother to get out of the vehicle to check us out.

As darkness completely fell some neighbors from down the street came down with their collection of explosives to join us. That was fine until a few in their company took some of the larger pieces and started “dueling” with them as they burned. I tried to remind them that we had kids present and didn’t want to see anyone going to the hospital but they were intent on having their fun.

Then, when nothing was left, they pulled out a large firework that looked like a fountain that was anything but. Before they lit it I was assured it was legal. But within in seconds it shot up 35-40 feet in the air with brilliant bursts of color and sound. Quickly my children fled, the younger ones scared by the intensity of the display and the older ones motivated by not getting caught by the cops.

Even my little sister, who was celebrating with my niece here with us, bailed quickly as she jumped in her car and sped off.

There was little I could do other than watch it go off and then begin the clean-up, not knowing if the cops were going to come back around. I explained that for several years we saw the fire department come by, checking the school grounds for folks who would go their to launch illegal fireworks. A few years back they actually caught some people in the act and they were fined. This year the going rate for illegal fireworks was $500 and here it had happened in front of my house while I was holding the matches.

Everyone was pretty upset and I have to admit being a little ticked. We have engaged in our little celebration for years but this could well be the last time we do this. I don’t mind neighbors coming over but when they have elements within their group that act as they did and break the law then I want nothing of it. The night ended on a sour note with these events and that saddened me greatly.

This morning, as I look out on the street and see the burn spots in the asphalt, I still don’t have a good feeling about what happened. We were used. A family event was spoiled and that is a great shame. My kids are a bit bitter.

I’m not going to dwell on it. We didn’t get caught, the cops didn’t and won’t come around, thankfully. But we may never celebrate this way again.

As we dragged ourselves to bed last night my wife and I commented about how fast time is moving. Being busy is not a new fact of life for either one of us but our new life is taking giants chunks of time and there seems to be a price to pay. Circumstances have just taken Sandy from the home more as she has driven here and there taking care of things and I’ve learned to fly planes every single week.

These activities just seem to make the time fly. I think we’re grateful to just be home for this long weekend and to be together without much to take us away.

It will be an unusual 4th.

Mom is home now, recuperating from last week’s drama. Mobility isn’t there much for her though as she is hobbling on a surgically repaired right leg and a bruised left leg that is groaning under the strain of last week’s fall (and finally getting the attention it deserves). As she hobbles here and there she has to be careful, as she was instructed to only put 25 percent of her weight on her right leg. How does one do that, exactly? Try it. I did last night just thinking about it. Not easy.

So here we are on the 4th of July, tired and worn out. Last night we purchased fireworks and tonight we’re going to sit in the front yard and light them off. Food will be eaten, we might watch a few traditional movies (1776, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, etc) but mostly I think we’re going to move slow.

Tomorrow is Madelyn’s baptism. We have a few details to attend to in getting ready for that.

But officially, I’m on vacation for a week or so. So maybe I’ll have some time to recharge and get things back together on a personal basis.

Mom is doing much better. When Sandy and I got there yesterday she was sitting up and visiting with Jay, Mary, Kris and Matt. Her thoat was a bit sore from having the ventilator tube put in and later taken out. But she was feeling well.

She doesn’t remember much of what happened after going to the hospital. I’m grateful for that.

While we were there the orthopedic surgeon came in to check on her. He is recommending that she takes a few weeks in a rehab center to begin therapy but said she could just as well do that time at home, which is what I think she will opt to do. The operation itself, he said, went well. They just had a dickens of a time getting her under and getting the ventilator tube down her throat.

That was the reason they left it in her. If after surgery she had any kind of complications they didn’t want to have to struggle getting it installed again so they left it in as a precaution.

Mom was relieve to have it remove. Frankly, so was I. She is quite pale and borderline anemic. They gave her an upper GI to try to determine if there was some undetected internal bleeding. The ortho doc did say she might need a third unit of blood today if her numbers don’t improve.

He informed her that his goal for her today would be to sit up in a chair and begin to get out of bed. If she can stand, move around with a walker enough to get back and forth to a bathroom she will likely be able to go home by Wednesday.

It was five minutes after he left the room that Mom was complaining of being in that bed and somehow moved herself to sit on the edge of the bed and eat dinner. That was when Dad and Debbie arrive, a good moment for them to see.

So, it seems that the road to recovery has begun. I’m not sure how long it would take, months I suppose. But Mom seems to be optimistic about it and certainly up to the task.

Today she will miss Madelyn’s birthday and Kayla’s kindergarden graduation. But we’ll video tape and make sure to share with her as much as we can at the hospital.

I had plans to meet up with my folks today. They were out running errands and had Enoch with them. I was trying to give my wife a nap, so I took the girls with me to meet up with them at their house and to bring Enoch home. Dad called and told me they were running behind so I took the girls to lunch and then on an unplanned excursion to Cabela’s.

When we finally got to the house Debbie, Matt and Enoch were there and said that Mom and Dad were not far behind them. Within minutes of just conversing with them in the kitchen one of my girls came running into the room and said “Dad, Dad — Nana has fallen and needs help out on the porch.”

So I went out there and saw Mom laying on her left side on the porch, in obvious pain and Kris standing over her. Both explained that Mom was just trying to get into the house when her right leg gave way and she went down.

You have to understand that over the course of the past several months Mom’s mobility has been severely impacted. Quite honestly, Mom has not been doing well for quite a while. I’m not privvy to all her health issues but I’m not blind and have watched very concerned as she has slowed way down, suffering from frequent and obvious pain from her hip and right leg especially.  

So there she was on the porch, insisting that she would be ok and just needed a minute to get up, certain she could make it into the house. She claimed the leg “gave the weirdest sensation — I can feel it moving but it’s not moving.” We got some pillows just to give her something to lean against but she wasn’t the least bit interested in trying to get comfortable.

Debbie had the phone in her hand and indicated that she was calling an ambulance and Mom put up a bit of a fight about that. I looked up at Dad and saw a look on his face I hadn’t seen before. That was all I needed. I insisted that Debbie call and to make the call right away. So did Kris. Dad quickly agreed. The paramedics showed up within minutes, having been in the area on the return of another call.

After a few minutes of assessing the situation and providing medication for pain relief, four of them picked up Mom and placed her on the gurney. The pain she must have felt from that had to have been intense. Later, as these things go, hours later at the hospital, we learned that Mom had broken her leg. A clean break of the femur of her right leg was shown on the x-ray, necessitating the insertion of a rod running the entire length of that leg.

Dad and I were able to give her a blessing. Mom was pretty uptight in hearing the diagnosis but, frankly, we were all very relieved that the news was not worse. A simple broken leg is one issue, a shattered hip is quite another. The trauma of surgery was something Mom found daunting and deservedly so. But we had good reason to count blessings right then and there.

She went in to surgery around 8:30pm and came out shortly after 11pm. From what I understand the surgery itself went fine but there were some respiratory issues that caused some complications. As I write this Mom is in ICU tonight, kept under sedation to stabilize her and, hopefully, to give her some rest. We will know more, perhaps, tomorrow.

I won’t bother with how I’m feeling about all this. I’m writing, really, just to let those who don’t know what is going on. Hopefully tomorrow we can assess how she is feeling and begin to discuss the road to recovery. The surgeon already advises that we’re looking at several months of treatment and therapy. 

More later.  

A friend writes, once again, that I’m failing to talk much these days about politics.

Yes, I admit it. I’ve been rendered speechless.

There are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, nothing is going on. Both McCain and Obama have slipped into a near coma when it comes to touching on things that matter to me. Instead both blabber on incessantly about non-issues like the environment and global warming. I’m so sick of these issues dominating news and, frankly, my wallet that I want one of those two idiots to just make it interesting by declaring the whole thing the sham it is. But no. They buy it hook-line-and-sinker, thus promising to take it out of my backside for generations to come.

What matters they won’t talk about.

It really surprises me. All the world is in a tizzy over gas prices and any politician with the huevos of some in the past (Truman comes to mind) would seize on that as the world’s greatest political marketing ploy. Everybody cares about gas prices excepting for the Cadaver and the Toddler. What opportunity wasted.

I guarantee the White House to either one of these two brickheads if they can only figure out how to get gas down a couple of bucks a gallon. In the end, we can be bought. It is always about the economy, first and foremost. Take all the trees, guns, and little babies off the table — but mess with the wallet and you’ve got real power. Neither of these two chowderheads gets that.

Ok, maybe I’m not really bailing on politics. I just think politics has bailed on me. The world is tied up in knots worried about the North Pole sea turning to ice water versus just being ice. Meanwhile, I can’t send my kids to public schools, the retirement money I’m sending to the government to be safeguarded for my old age is vaporizing before my eyes, I can’t afford my health insurance or to actually use it, and somewhere off the coast of California a sea turtle is smiling because the drills won’t get oil from under the water (but the scorpians of the desert be damned — the outside world can drill there all they want, envirnomentalists only seem to care about “my” coastline, mountain ranges, wildlife and deserts).

Perhaps this is ultimately what they want: the total despair of the middle class working, tax-paying, semi-educated public.

They won’t get that. My world will not be ruled, one way or the other, by the follies of politicians. I might not talk about it as much any more but I’ll still vote.

I had to laugh the other day when in Reno I heard that Republican Chris Cannon was defeated by some dude claiming to be more conservative. What a hoot. The dude lost not because he was not conservative enough. He lost because people are just sick of the same old politicians and what they claim to be.

Frankly, if you put Mickey Mouse up against McCain and Obama this fall I’d vote for the rat. Me and about 30 million others. There just isn’t much of anything different these two morons are saying or can do to at this point to capture my vote. After all, they’ve been “elected” for years…and what have they done? Nothing is going to change except everything we don’t want to change with either one of them getting elected.

Vote Mickey. Nuff said.

For years I have written and even trained the “how-to’s” of managing change in business. I have even felt the sting of major change through sudden job loss and the ultimate in change in career displacement. But for whatever reason the changes I am experiencing in my career life right now feels more dramatic to me.

I am struggling a bit.

It is nothing big. In fact, these changes are small and, it would seem to some, easily managed. And to be honest, I am not having difficulty pulling the trigger on these changes and I’m not resisting. It’s just weird.

Take, for example, my phone.

Personally, I have long felt that my cell phone was the bane of all existence. My days consisted of dozens of phone calls, most of which I was expected to pick up right now and attend to immediately. Day and night I kept it on, expecting it to ring from points far and wide. Some times it would ring so much I could not answer it fast enough.

I hated it. I came, at times, to be literally sick of hearing it ring.  

Now my phone has become an email machine. So few call me anymore. They just send emails — by the dozen. My phone has a setting to vibrate every time I get an email and I cannot find the setting to disable it. All it does is sit there and shake, like it has electonic Parkinson’s or something. It is kind of sad watching it sit on my desk and twitch like that.

Worse still is answering email. It is a Blackberry, an ingenious device I once thought of as cool. But the tiny keyboard is hardly convenient for my fat fingers and my generally verbose tendencies gives me weird cramps in my hands as I try to micro-bang away on that thing.

I often wonder what I look like trying to handle this miniature keyboard with my big paws while riding an airport shuttle bus somewhere. I see myself with my tongue hanging out as I attempt to spell check on the go. What a freak.

The problem is I have to do this. People can’t, for whatever reason, just call me. They have to email. Worse yet, they have to “copy” me on everything.

I especially hate this.

It’s like listening to a conversation you don’t want to hear. Just keep me out of it.

But this is my phone life now. It is a change and I have to deal with it.

The phone thing is a mere distraction compared to other elements of my new station. What I deplore worse than anything is the behavior of people around me. Especially those who don’t already know me. I am aware that this is what I have to go through but that doesn’t mean I like it.

I don’t like the stiffness some show. I don’t care for the gushing of others. I don’t appreciate the glowing remarks, the over-the-top explanation, the em-pha-sis to everything. Sometimes I think I’m viewed as deaf or something because people treat things with such urgency around me. Fires on important. But pet agendas aren’t fires and most want me to treat them that way.

I’m just a regular guy. And that is something I won’t change. Position doesn’t impress me much. In most respects, these changes have humbled me a great deal. More so because there is such consequence to much of what I say and do now than because I have any real authority. I want to approach things with respect to those consequences…and not because I hold the key that turns things off and on.

There is much in the way of positioning going on and I don’t like that. That’s human nature and to be expected. But I don’t like it.

What will it take to become comfortable in my own skin again?

I just don’t know. I can only roll with it, continue to analyze it, react as positively as I can and keep being myself. That’s all I know how to do.  

My wife may be wondering why I have chosen to write here before calling home tonight. It’s simple, dear. My cell phone is just about dead. By hooking it up to the laptop it charges while I use the computer.

So I’m charging my phone for a few minutes so I can actually talk to you. Sorry.

Such are the ways of modern travel and communication.

Greetings from the Southwest terminal in Los Angeles. The clock here says nearly 5:30pm — really, it’s 6:30pm for me on a day that began for me at 4:00am. My plane lands- if everything goes as planned — at 9pm tonight.

Long day. Longer week.

From the looks of things, there will be many days like this one. Today has really been my first venture into the realm of my new duties and there is so much to do I hardly know where to start.

At the beginning, I guess.

I’m not at a loss, I’m not feeling overwhelmed and I know I can do this. But tonight I’m just tired and want to turn it off.

So I’m going to drain the battery on my laptop as I await my plane and think of something else. I keep reminding myself that this is going to take focus on balance in my life. That means giving other things their due, even if I’m not physically close to them.

For example, tonight my eldest daughter is on my mind. I have some things to tell her and need to give her a call. That ought to startle her. I usually only call her when there is news and I need her to pay attention to something. There really isn’t any news. But I do need to touch base with her.

Last night Abby and I took a little drive around looking for possible places where she can find a job. She is bored out of her mind. I don’t blame her and I hope we can find something productive for her to do. Note to self: talk to her about the writing projects I have stacked up.

Then there is Madelyn, who turns eight in a couple of days and next week will enjoy her baptism. Much to do to prepare her for that. And to prepare me, too.

Emma — have I talked to her yet this week? She hasn’t called me for a few days.

Yes, I plenty of other things to think about beyond work.

I wonder how my wife is doing?

Hmmm.

Funny thing. I left Salt Lake this morning without bringing the directions to where I was driving when I got here. I had to rely on my memory of one other trip here where I didn’t drive to the office and on the memory of an email sent more than a week ago. I made it. And I made it to a store I had never been too as well. Driving in LA isn’t my favorite thing but after a decade it is nice to know that I haven’t forgotten my way around. I did it all today without a map and that, I suppose, will look good on a resume some day.

Not that I need one, of course.

Going through my mind on this trip business-wise was what in the world my boss was thinking in giving me this position. There are people to get to know, relationships to establish, habits to break and new ones to sell. As I sat today mostly listening to other people talk I had to wonder when the change-shock will subside and we can just get on topic with getting on with things.

In the end, we sell candy. I do it, my boss does it, the people who work for me do it. That’s simply what this is all about.

And it shouldn’t be this hard.

I ache for when I can make it easier for everyone. I think, by and large, we all need to relax, count our lucky stars that we have such a beloved product and just focus on being the very best we can.

Nearly everything else is just a distraction from that.

Speaking of getting off topic, I wasn’t going to talk about work any more…

Sheesh.