Unsoft's List

Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 3:24 PM

Xander and the ghost of my Grandpa - Oct 2004. 2 minutes old.

f a m i l y t r e e

My Dad grew up with a really old dad. By the time I came around, I only knew him as an old guy who wandered around randomly cooking stuff and not really saying anything all that coherent. Funny how you see the future all your life. As a matter of fact, the minute Xander was born, that was the first thought I had. He looked exactly like my Grandpa as I remember him - wrinkled forehead and frizzy wisps of hair and that toothless smile that somehow seemed to hint at grumpiness just beneath the surface. I haven't seen the ghost of Grandpa in Xander since then, but I just recently saw a pic of the old guy when he was about 40 and his resemblance to me was uncanny. Skinny, frizzy headed wop with the same frown lines and wrinkled little eyes.

He was born outside Palermo, Sicily in 1894 so that picture (wish I had it to post now) was taken in 1934 - a good third of a century before I came along and a decade before my Dad was born. The occasion of the photograph was a celebration of his accomplishment. My Grandpa had just set some sort of record, I'm embarrassed to say I don't have any documentation of it, but the photo referenced a party in honor of Dominick Fish setting the record for the most coal loaded by hand in a single workday.

So when Grandpa was my age, it was the mid 1930's and he was an accomplished laborer in the coal mines of Fayette County - a job that any of us from around here know must've been pretty tough. Besides that, he and his wife raised a total of 12 children as they lived a life very close to the land. They grew, raised or hunted most of their own food, made their own bread in an outside stone oven, made pasta, brewed beer, made wine from the grapes they grew. This wasn't "DIY" or "project work" like it is for me. This was their real life.

In the ways I would hope to be like my stock, I somehow fall short. In the ways I would hope to be different, I struggle also. One thing is similar though. My son is in danger of growing up with an old Dad. Of course, there is only one of him as opposed to a dozen, and I still managed to shave a decade off the generation gap my Dad and Grandpa had to live with (and all too soon, without).

I have been the recipient of much benefit from the legacy of my Grandfather's hard labor and progenic success. Right now I feel the luckiest to be 43 years old and still have my own Father firmly stationed here in this world, cooking, drinking beer, loving my mom and answering his cell phone every single time I call.

Labels: family, fatherhood, legacy, success

Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 3:28 PM

h e l l o w o r l d

I'm blowing the dust off my antique blog for compound and cumulative reasons. The most accurate and relevant of these is the acute manifestation of irreconcilable differences between my burgeoning Twitter addiction and my place of employment's newly reasserted policy against wasting public resources on social networking. They're cracking down on me, so I gotta change my evil ways.

Of course I spend a good deal of my social networking time interacting directly with the public whose resources I'm ostensibly wasting, performing several of the functions our underutilized CRM system is supposed to be taking care of - things like public education and outreach on departmental policies, customer response, timely construction related PSA's and just plain old setting the record straight about what's abuzz in the City.

Regardless, I strive to do good and ethical work during my time in the Public Service barrel so I will keep my Tweeting efforts segregated to my own time and resources while I try to assuage my need for connection with a mass audience by blogging and attempting to promote my efforts to the high quality local forum I've been lucky enough to cultivate after such a short time in the Twitterverse. In other words, I miss my Twitter folks so you guys stop by Unsoft's List every now and again when I put up something new! I'll be Tweeting in the evenings, on weekends and hopefully posting daytime blogs throughout the week also. After all, most of the best of MY Twitter community is also a blogging community. Maybe, with a little practice and dedication, I can also be a contributor.

The older posts here were all written by me 5-6 years ago and have lost much of their relevance in almost 2011. I am making no effort to "fix" them (editing old references, bad links, evaporated images, etc.). I have to admit when I go back and reread that I am certainly much the same even if another half a decade of travel into the 21st Century has rendered the world nearly unrecognizable in some respects. Go back and read the old posts if you are so inclined, but if you don't NBD. If you decide to crawl back into my history a little, be aware that I am a little more refined with my language these days. You certainly won't encounter adult content but you might run across a few more objectionable words than you will from this point forward. Not that I can promise you a comprehensive moratorium on F-Bombs, crass references or double entendre from here on out, because sometimes even I still resort to less than gentlemanly communication habits - I just get more disappointed in myself when I do.

I have to admit I'm a little excited about getting back to blogging a little. Twitter has reawakened my literary and creative demons but I'm really out of practice! This is so much more than 140 characters and I've nearly lost my ability to punctuate, compose formal sentences and I'm almost positive I missed a few double spaces after end punctuation that I still can't recognize after rerererereading.

I have done only the most basic profile editing on this old blog so I will be reshaping it over the next few days and weeks. I believe I will keep my old school handmade format and my neato seahorse image for now. I forgot how much I liked them.

Welcome new readers! I'm sure you are the only kind there are. Feel free to comment so I'll know you stopped by. See you later on Twitter!

TFish726