What are you doing here?

Do people really visit The Florida Masochist on a holiday? This post wasn't written today, but on Wednesday and scheduled for posting. I may have a few queue a few more posts for the day. What's a day without a Knucklehead award?

The Sci-Fi Channel is having a James Bond festival today. Is Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and The World is not Enough sci-fi movies? I don't classify them as that. This is an improvement over three years ago, when Sci-Fi did a zombie movie festival thanksgiving. Someone may say that was in bad taste.

I just want to wish all our readers a blessed and Happy Thanksgiving. I have no special plans for today. The wife, mother-in-law, and I will have dinner around 4 pm and afterwards may go see a movie. Have a safe and enjoyable day everyone.

Modern Love

David Hlvasa writes about the painful decision he and his wife faced once they knew the baby she was carrying, was already dead at the 20-week point of pregnancy.

We each assumed there was only one possible decision, so when we talked, we talked logistics: appointments to reschedule, job responsibilities to manage. We asked questions we might have asked the midwife, about recovery time.

Then we realized we weren't in agreement. I was talking about the D and C, while Lisa had decided to give birth. Incredulous, I asked why she would want to go through all that pain. She said she couldn't imagine just getting rid of our child by a surgical procedure; she wanted to see him

Resting on my outstretched hand, he was thin, nearly weightless, his skin pinkish-gray and translucent. He seemed to me less like a small baby than a scale model of a stripling child. I cradled his head between the ends of my middle and ring fingers, his features peaceful, perfect, blank.

I can empathize with this couple. Next January 26th marks six years since my son Daniel died 14.5 hours after he was born. Leonita and I also held our son.

In the NICU I stood with Fr. Tomasz watching Daniel's life signs dwindle to nothing on the monitor. At 7:23 a doctor put a stethoscope to m y son's chest and then said "Your son's heart had stopped." After 14.5 hours of life my son had died of septsis.

Later that day DW and I got to hold Daniel in my wife's hospital room. Friends and family came, I had called these people again after what happened this morning. I asked DW if she wanted me to buy a cheap throwaway camera to take some photos. She said no. We both regret not having done this.

Other than the moment the doctor said Daniel's heart stopped, the moment I remember most was right after the nurse took Daniel from my wife and I so the funeral home could get him. DW broke out crying louder and heavier than any time I've seen her in the 17 years we been married. She is such a wonderful and loving person, who does many kind things for other people. Leonita wanted and deserved a child so much, and all she went through to just have Daniel taken from her. Why God, why?

Ann Althouse asks in the title of her post "Would you have labor induced to deliver a 20-week old fetus that already died?" No my wife and I wouldn't but Leonita would have for her 20-week old old BABY. My son was never a fetus, he was always my and Leonita's baby. Neither of us like the word fetus, and from those parents I know who lost a small baby, these feelings from bereaved parents is quite common.

Also note, David Hlavsa at no point in the article uses the word fetus in reference to his son Benjamin. Son or baby are used.

Forgive the slight rant, I really like Professor Althouse despite her poor word choice. I frequently link to her blog. Also we share the same birthday, January 12th.

God bless David Hlavsa, Lisa, and their son Benjamin.

HAVING waited until we were in our 30s to start a family, my wife and I were having trouble conceiving, leading to sperm tests, hormone shots and other extraordinary measures.

Over many months, the process of conception became so technical that when Lisa told me she was at last pregnant, I found it hard to know what to credit. After the first ultrasound, she came home with a black-and-white picture of a tiny curled-up creature. We put it on the refrigerator: my son, the lima bean.

At 20 weeks, we went in together for the second ultrasound. The technician made small talk and popped his gum as he dimmed the lights. Lisa lay back on the table. I shifted in my seat, jammed my hands into my pockets, and stretched out my legs like a teenager settling in to watch a movie. As the technician slid the paddle around on Lisa's belly, the image on the computer screen wheeled, dipped and blurred.

Finally my son's image popped into focus. Arms and legs folded, he seemed to be resting on his back, as if lying on the bottom of a pool, waiting to spring to the surface.

I said, "Cool."

The technician muttered something, hit a button to freeze the image and walked briskly out of the room.

A few minutes later, in walked a small man wearing a rumpled white coat and steel-rimmed glasses, his bow tie askew. He shut the door behind him.

I don't remember exactly what he said; he looked as if someone had left him out in the rain. What we had taken for a frozen image, he explained, was in fact absolute stillness.

We still refer to the man as Doctor Death, perpetually forlorn, always breaking bad news. They keep him in a closet. (A year later, pregnant with our second son, Benjamin, my wife turned a corner at the hospital and saw him at a nurses' station; she did an abrupt, involuntary about-face.)

After Doctor Death left, our midwife arrived to explain that we had a decision to make. Did we want to schedule a D and C or induce labor? Her language was very plain, but it took a while for me to understand what she was really asking: Did we want the pregnancy to end in a surgical procedure in the outpatient clinic, or in the maternity ward as a stillbirth? We asked whether there were medical advantages or disadvantages to either choice. She told us it was simply a matter of preference. No hurry. Let us know.

On the drive home, we were mostly silent. As if exchanging telegrams, Lisa and I said what we needed to and no more. We each assumed there was only one possible decision, so when we talked, we talked logistics: appointments to reschedule, job responsibilities to manage. We asked questions we might have asked the midwife, about recovery time.

Then we realized we weren't in agreement. I was talking about the D and C, while Lisa had decided to give birth. Incredulous, I asked why she would want to go through all that pain. She said she couldn't imagine just getting rid of our child by a surgical procedure; she wanted to see him.

So I had to ask myself: Why didn't I want to meet my own son? Clearly, it wasn't Lisa's pain I was worried about. We pulled into the driveway, phoned the hospital, turned around and drove back.

Going to the hospital for a stillbirth is the photographic negative of going for a live birth. You carry the overnight bag, check into a room in the maternity ward and so on. But they put a marker on your door to alert the nurse-midwives that, in this room, things are different.

As a means of inducing labor in a body that is not yet ripe, Pitocin is brutally effective. But it can take a while to kick in. After an hour of flipping through magazines, Lisa and I decided to take a walk. The nurse said it might speed things along.

Wandering about in the midwinter dusk, Seattle sinking to the bottom of the gray scale, we were about a quarter mile from the hospital, just about to turn around, when the drug took hold, doubling Lisa over. We considered calling a cab, but she decided she could make it, so we stumbled back with her arm around my shoulders for support.

By the time we reached Lisa's room, her contractions were frequent and prolonged -- much more so than they would have been at the early stages of a natural labor -- and each surge of pain seemed to levitate her body above the sheets.

When at last the anesthesiologist gave her an epidural, Lisa sighed and fell back into the pillows. Within an hour, she was asleep, and shortly after that, I dozed off as well, like a Lab curled up in the armchair at the foot of her bed.

My first son was born some time in the gray dawn. In such cases, there is no rupturing of waters. The birth sac slips out whole and unbroken. The bag was a little bigger than my fist. The midwife put it on a towel and, with a small pair of scissors, carefully snipped it open.

She unfolded our son's limbs, disentangling one from the other, unfurling him like a new leaf, talking softly to us all the while, describing him. He was about five inches long, she said. He was anacephalic, which means his brain and nervous system had failed to develop. He had probably died about a week earlier.

Gingerly, she handed him to Lisa, and though it was clear that Lisa wanted to hold him longer, it was only a minute or two before she passed him to me. Later, she told me she was afraid he would come apart in her hands.

Resting on my outstretched hand, he was thin, nearly weightless, his skin pinkish-gray and translucent. He seemed to me less like a small baby than a scale model of a stripling child. I cradled his head between the ends of my middle and ring fingers, his features peaceful, perfect, blank. His feet reaching nearly to my wrist, his toes were like mine and my father's, the second toe longer than the big toe.

When we got back from the hospital, the epidural had not quite worn off, so Lisa did not have full use of her legs and clung to me as we staggered up the front steps. Thinking of ourselves as a public spectacle (How must we look to the neighbors? Drunk again!), we burst out laughing. Once inside, the bleak humor continued: Anacephalic? All right, so he won't go to Harvard.

It wasn't until I had settled Lisa onto the couch that my own legs quit working. I was in midsentence -- something about an errand -- teakettle in hand, halfway between the tap and the stove. A spasm went through me, I doubled over and I heard my own voice howling from far off, the full-throated cry of a child.

On the day I went back to the small college where I work, I felt myself in another kind of altered state, not above the flow of daily life but just below its surface, heavy, settled, still. I had been thinking about how to tell people: my colleagues, my students. Some knew that Lisa and I had been expecting a child; clearly I had to tell them what happened.

Others didn't know about the pregnancy, though. Should I spring the whole story on them all at once? When a parent dies or a partner -- when we lose someone who has lived in the world -- there are customs, worn paths to follow, ways to talk about it. But I didn't see any path with this. Was I supposed to keep quiet and pretend nothing had happened? I couldn't accept that.

So I typed out an e-mail message, brief and plain, explaining: Lisa had been pregnant, the child had died and we took some comfort from the belief that all he had ever known was love. I stared at the screen for a long time.

Then I clicked on the top of the e-mail program and addressed the message to everyone at the college: faculty members, students, staff, people I knew well, people I didn't know at all. I had a fleeting thought that this might be inappropriate, but then I pressed "send." It felt like a form of protest.

I wasn't really looking for a response. I wanted just to get the news out; I couldn't bear to repeat it over and over. And although my department's administrative assistant did field a few complaints about receiving something so personal by a general message ("Who is this guy?"), most apparently understood or at least excused my gesture.

AND then came the outpouring: for weeks after, people I barely knew would come into my office, gently shut the door and burst into tears. I heard stories of single and serial miscarriages, pregnancies carried nearly to full term, stillbirths -- all the lost, lost children. Grief hauled about, and nowhere to put it down. Some said they had never told anyone; who would understand?

My first son is like the faintest scar on my skin now, nearly hidden. Over time, will the mark disappear as my skin becomes mottled and wrinkled?

Lisa was planning to bury his ashes, about a teaspoonful, in the garden, part of which was to be his. Instead, she kept his ashes in the bedside table drawer, right next to her, as if afraid he would wake in the night and need her. She felt him close to her, a wisp of spirit, the smallest presence.

But he's gone now, she says. Offhand, I don't know where she keeps his ashes. But not in the garden. The garden is hers and Benjamin's.

When Benjamin was very young, just beginning to speak in sentences, he asked if he had a brother once. Lisa paused a moment before answering, but by the time she started to speak, he had moved on to something else.

Night Drops

From the Orlando Sentinel-

Bank parking lots can be dangerous places -- especially late at night.

Off-duty Orlando police Officer Alfred L. Gordon became the area's latest victim when he was shot and killed shortly before 1 a.m. Thursday. He had just withdrawn money from his bank's automated-teller machine in Pine Hills, sheriff's investigators said.

So far this year, there have been 10 ATM and two night-deposit-related robberies in Orange County -- a relatively rare crime for the Sheriff's Office, which handles more than 2,400 robberies annually.

"They look like they are more crimes of opportunity, as opposed to a crew that's targeting specific places and doing it repeatedly," said Ron Stucker, the agency's chief of investigations. "We don't have that here."

Seven robberies took place near South Orange Blossom Trail, a major crime corridor. Two, including Gordon's case, were in Pine Hills. Three others occurred in south or east Orange County.

Sheriff's investigators have released few details about Thursday's killing, but accounts of the other crimes can be frightening.

Sometimes an armed assailant jumps out of the bushes. Other times, an SUV blocks a vehicle at a drive-through ATM and several armed men jump out.

The risk of being robbed while using an ATM during late night hours, should be easily apparent. It is something people should avoid. In this day of bank cards, credit cards etc, why does someone need cash in the middle of the night? I guess some do and others are impatient for some reason.

Note- I am not saying anyone deserves to be robbed. My condolences to the family of Orlando police Officer Alfred L. Gordon.

If say a manager gets robbed and shot while making a night deposit, are they covered by workmen's compensation? Even if an employee is clocked out? My wife worked as a retail manager back in 1991-93 before going to work at our Catholic Church. Leonita wasn't a salary but an hourly employee and on average closed the Frankel's Home Furnishings store(In West Palm Beach) one or two times a week. Before going home, she'd make the deposit at a bank across the street from the store. Something that made me nervous back then. Leonita made these depoists after punching out for the day.

Is there a labor law attorney who can answer the above questions? I'm just curious what the answer is.

Linked to- Cao, Commonsense America, Third World County, Webloggin,

Nine Eleven

Six years have passed since that tragic day. What can be said that hasn't already been said? Not a lot, but one thing I feel needs repeating is- This country needs to stay vigilant. There are people out there who if given the chance, would do 9-11 over and over again.

What follows below is my post from last year. How I remembered one 9-11 victim whose path I crossed during the 1990's. God bless the family of Ken Marino and all those who died on 9-11.

Others blogging on 9-11's sixth anniversary- Michelle Malkin, Lorie at Wizbang, Rick at SOTP, Pirate's Cove, Blue Star, Bright & Early, The World According to Carl, Below the Beltway, A Blog for All, Ann Althouse, Cao, Elephant in my Coffee, Hooah Wife, Is it just me?, Jo, Sister Toldjah,

*****


Just some images of that day. One is of Kenneth Marino, age 40. He was a NYC firefigther who died on 9-11. Ken is as close as TFM comes to knowing someone from that fateful day. See Ken and I shared a hobby and we both played in these tournaments. We probably met a few times at the ones in Newark New Jersey. Including this one here, which Ken won and I also played in. I just don't remember I'm sorry to say.

Added note- At the 2002 Worlds, I played against two best friends among Star Tournament players. Eric Wayne and Mike Cohen. We faced off in the quarter-finals that year. I do recall Mike talking about Ken a little at that year's Worlds.

What else do I remember of 9-11? My day started like any other. I got up, ate breakfast, drank coffee, put out the garbage and puttered around the house.(Go online) I frequently turn CNBC early in the morning, and I did so that day. They were soon showing images of the WTC on fire. My wife had left for work. Her day begins at 9 a.m. and so I called her. I probably turned the television off while talking for I didn't see the second plane crash live like millions of others did. The rest of the day was spent mostly stuck glued to the television. I don't remember many details.

Bridge work

The latest on the 35W disaster in Minnesota.

MINNEAPOLIS - Fears that an interstate bridge collapse might produce dozens of deaths eased Friday as authorities said the number of missing, once thought to be as many as 30, was just eight.

At least five people were killed and 79 injured when the Interstate 35W bridge plummeted more than 60 feet into the Mississippi River during Wednesday's rush hour.

Firefighters pulled the fifth victim, the driver of a tractor-trailer rig that was engulfed in flames immediately after the collapse, from the wreckage late Thursday, fire department spokeswoman Kristi Rollwagen said. Video of the fire was among the most compelling images show in the immediate aftermath of the collapse.

The medical examiner's office was working to confirm the man's identity, but Rollwagen said firefighters didn't want the man's family to see the truck "over and over" on TV knowing he was inside.

More bodies had been spotted in the fast-moving currents, which were "even more treacherous" Friday than a day earlier, Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek said. But the death toll, while expected to grow, was not expected to reach the numbers that the disaster amid bumper-to-bumper, two-lane traffic might have produced.

Considering the time of the day and the amount of traffic, the death toll could have been much higher. That is little consolation to the families of those who did lose their lives. God bless them all.

So what was the cause of the collapse?

Structural deficiencies in the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed Wednesday were so serious that the Minnesota Department of Transportation last winter considered bolting steel plates to its supports to prevent cracking in fatigued metal, according to documents and interviews with agency officials.

The department went so far as to ask contractors for advice on the best way to approach such a task, which could have been opened for bids later this year.

MnDOT considered the steel plating at the recommendation of consulting engineers who told the agency that there were two ways to keep the bridge safe: Make repairs throughout the 40-year-old steel arched bridge or inspect it closely enough to find flaws that might become cracks and then bolt the steel plating only on those sections.

Fears about bridge safety fueled emotional debate within the agency, according to a construction industry source. But on the I-35W bridge, transportation officials opted against making the repairs.

Nothing gets done in this country till a tragedy occurs. Bureaucratic footdragging is always the first response when a major project like the repair of the 35W bridge is needed. The public is also to blame, we rather take risks than pay higher taxes too.

Press reports are saying tens of thousands of bridges in the US are in need of work. This was known before Wednesday's tragedy. However here in Florida, our officials are taking a "Don't worry, Be happy" approach.

Florida officials sought to reassure motorists Thursday the state's 11,000 bridges are safe, one day after an eight-lane freeway bridge in Minneapolis collapsed at the height of evening rush hour.

The Minnesota span was classified as "structurally deficient," along with thousands of other bridges nationally, including 32 in Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to federal records."It's never really crossed my mind, but now that something like this happened it creates a question," said Joaquin Gomez, 46, of Miami. "It makes you kind of wonder if they do serial checks of the bridge and the foundation, if it's up to par."

Federal officials have alerted states to immediately inspect all bridges similar to the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River. Florida does not have any state bridges like the one that collapsed in Minneapolis.

Gov. Charlie Crist asked the head of the Florida Department of Transportation for a status report on all Florida's bridges.

All Florida Bridges are safe, sure. I believe in Fairy Godmothers too. This kind of reporting and bureaucratic always follows a scandal or disaster. It can never happen here.

I live in Lantana Florida, and my wife or I cross a bridge over I-95 on average four times a day. There are days when waiting for traffic, that you feel the bridge vibrating. This hasn't happened once but dozens of times in our experience. I'm not saying the bridge is unsafe for I'm not an engineer, still its idiotic to come out and say Florida couldn't have a disaster similar to what happened on I-35W.

Linked to- Bullwinkle, Right Wing Nation, Woman Honor Thyself,

Happy Father's Day

To all of us who hold the second most important job in the world. We know who has the most important. Please say a prayer today for those of us who have lost a child.

I don't much in the way of special plans for today. A trip to my son's grave this morning, Catholic mass, then an afternoon spent watching the US Open Golf.

TFM aka Bill
Father to Daniel 1-25-03 to 1-26-03
Father to Baby Angel 1990

You know you're married to a Filipina if.....

I found this on the web today by accident. My wife is a Filipina, and we will be married 18 years a week from today.. She laughed at many of those I list below. So if its ok with her, then I must be able to post it. The funnier and truer ones are marked in bold.

Linked to- Jo, Random Yak, Samantha Burns,

******

You may be married to a Filipina If... (written by an American guy who loves his Filipina wife in spite of the numerous irregularities):

* Your refrigerator is always full but you cannot find any food that you recognize

* Instead of a dowry, you got the whole bill for the wedding and honeymoon

* You are expected to be able to read her mind just by watching her eyebrows move up and down and by the way her lips are pointed

* The instant you are married you have 3,000 new close relatives that you can't tell apart

* Your house isn't really on fire, you've just got a very charred fish on top of the stove burner

* All the desserts are sticky and all the snacks are salty

* She eats her fruit with giant salt crystals and her fried chicken with ketchup

* Even the ketchup tastes weird...very weird

* You throw a party and everyone is fighting to chop the leathery skin off a dead pig


* You are trying to go to sleep and she keeps asking for the comFORT'r, and you ain't got a clue what she's talking about


* Your phone bills are composed mostly of international and calls that average 3 hours each

* She sweeps with something that witches usually fly around on

* The rice cooker is on 24 hours a day and uses up 50% of your electricity and food budget

* On your first trip to the Philippines, you have 18 giant boxes that weigh 1000 pounds each and your "carry on" luggage requires a small forklift truck

* The same luggage is over filled with things that cost an average of 15 cents each like old magazines and M&Ms -- the worst part is when you get off the plane, the same stuff you've been hauling around half way around the world is available in every store in the airport for half the price!

* The first time she's pregnant you have to go out at 4:00 in the morning looking for some weird type of greasy sausages, green mangoes and bagoong

* You buy a new $500 freezer so she can store 200 pounds of SPAM and CORNED BEEF that was on sale

* Everything in your house was bought on sale, even if you don't need it ... that it was a "bargain" is all that matters

* The only "white meat" she likes is YOU. And that's if you're lucky...

* You were married 5 years before she explained to you that "ARAY!" doesn't mean "ooh, baby!"

* She can eat and talk at the same time; in fact that's her specialty!

* You still don't know the difference between manong and manok

* She and the kids are always saying "Daddy made utot" and you still don't know what it means, but they think it's pretty funny

* Before every holiday and visit, her sisters fax you a 10 page "bilins" list which says "suggestion only"

* All the vegetables she buys at the Filipino store look like they were grown at Chernobyl

* Her home economics course only taught shopping, eating and siesta; cooking, cleaning and sewing were not electives

* You are the only family in a 200 mile radius with 2 Betamaxes, 3 televisions

* She "cleans" her closet by throwing all the crap into your closet

The future of Norris Hall

From AP-

Like the people of New York, Oklahoma City and Littleton, Colo., the Virginia Tech community faces a difficult decision on what it will do with the scene of a tragedy.

The classrooms and hallways of the school's Norris Hall were littered with the bodies of 25 students and five professors on April 16, plus the body of gunman Seung-Hui Cho .

Student Brian Skipper wonders how anyone can ever be expected to learn in Norris Hall again.

"I won't go back in that building," says the 21-year-old junior from Yorktown, who lost five friends in Norris, including his faculty adviser, G.V. Longanathan. "I couldn't see people returning in there and just going back to normal."

Two other students were slain in a campus dormitory.

The university has made no plans beyond cleaning and repairing the flat-roofed, oblong stone structure, which has remained under police guard since the killing spree.

However, faculty, students and alumni have already weighed in with suggestions for Norris' future, one of more than 100 buildings on Virginia Tech's 2,600-acre campus. Built in the early 1960s, it houses the department of engineering science and mechanics.

Ideas for the building's future range from returning it to use as classrooms to making it a memorial or even knocking it down.

*****

At Virginia Tech, Norris Hall is still surrounded by chain-link fencing topped by yellow police tape, distinguishing it from the other buildings made from the same locally quarried rusty gray "Hokie" limestone. Several second-floor windows are open, their glass shattered by Cho's bullets and by students who jumped to escape the gunfire.

The decision on Norris Hall's fate is ultimately up to Virginia Tech President Charles Steger, said university spokesman Mark Owczarski.

An online petition has received more than 20,000 signatures in support of renaming Norris for engineering professor Liviu Librescu, who enabled students to jump to safety by blocking his classroom door with his body until Cho shot him. Librescu, 76, was a Holocaust survivor who had taught at the school for 20 years.

"I felt that something needed to be done to commemorate this brave man," Justin Kozuch, a web designer in Toronto who started the petition, said in an e-mail.

The building now is named for Earle Bertram Norris, who was engineering dean from 1928 to 1952.

My honest opinion is either they knock down the Hall and put up a memorial in its place or the Hall is kept and made a memorial. I don't think I'd want to go back to Norris if I was either a VA Tech employee or student. If the Hall remains standing, I would also name it after Professor Librescu.

Tomorrow marks three weeks since the Virginia Tech tragedy. Today or tomorrow also marks the last time those who died were seen to or spoken to by friends, family and other loved ones. When you lose a child, and I know this from my experience with Daniel, in the beginning you count days, weeks, months since the day your child dies. The pain never goes away, but the counting decreases and eventually stops. My wife and I used to always make it to cemetery on either the 25th(the day Daniel was born) or the 26th(The day Daniel died). We've stopped doing this but we still go to our son's grave once a week. God bless all the families of those who died at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007.

Linked to- Right Wing Nation, Woman Honor Thyself, The World According to Carl,

Don't forget Virginia Tech's wounded

Colin Goddard spoke Tuesday at the funeral of his French teacher, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak. ----------------------->

Those who were shot but survived the massacare on April 16th. I'm guessing, but some are sure to be having survivor guilt or will one day. God bless all of them besides those who died and their families.

Note- The AP article may have done the survivors a disservice. The opening describes injuries and scars that some will think as minor compared to those suffered by the families of those of who died. The mental scars the survivors have I think will be the worst of all.

Linked to- Big Dog, Bullwinkle, Right Wing Nation,

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (AP) -- Senior Kevin Sterne will see the scar on his thigh every time he pulls on his pants. Freshman Hilary Strollo will have to decide whether to bare her stomach in a swimsuit. And on the day someone slips a wedding band on her finger, junior Katelyn Carney will see the healed-up hole that a Virginia Tech gunman put in her left hand.

Most of the dead from the April 16 massacre on campus are buried, their families learning to live with loss.

Those who survived will have their own struggles, from physical scars to deep wounds of the psyche, trying to figure out how to stop the most dramatic event in their lives from overshadowing everything else that happens to them.

Anne Lynam Goddard, whose son Colin was shot three times during the attack on his French class, sees his trauma the way doctors see the shrapnel embedded in the tissue of his wounded leg: trying to remove it would cause more pain and might make matters worse, so it's best to leave it be.

"Your body forms a cocoon, so it will always be part of you, but it won't hurt. That's how I started thinking about this early on," she said. "My biggest hope is that this is how my son will remember this. I hope he can form a cocoon around it and not let it be his defining moment."

The terror of those moments is nightmarish. After sneaking into a dorm and killing two students with two shots from a 9 mm handgun, Seung-Hui Cho took his time, heading to a post office to mail a package of video and writings expressing his anger.

Then he chained the doors of Norris Hall, stormed several classrooms and unloaded more than 170 rounds over nine long minutes. Students -- some wounded, some not -- cowered, played dead and listened in horror as 30 of their classmates and teachers died.

Cho then put a bullet through his head and dropped to the floor amid his victims.

Most of the 25 people hurt in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history are healing in private, declining or ignoring interview requests. (Watch critics question whether Scientologists are comforting or recruiting )

Justin Klein, a junior from Catonsville, Maryland, who survived three gunshot wounds, issued a statement saying he is progressing physically and emotionally. He's back on campus, with friends forming a buffer around his wheelchair, shielding him from reporters.

"My place is here, with my friends," Klein wrote. "The Hokie community is strong and resilient, we will persevere, we will go on and we will heal."

It will not be easy. As the weeks and months unfold, the wounded could experience depression, survivor's guilt, thoughts of suicide, anger, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Physical injuries and painful follow-up surgeries could slow students' academic progress and keep them feeling somewhat isolated, said Melissa Brymer, a clinical psychologist with the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.

"Their scars can be reminders to themselves and to others, so this may impact their peer relationships. Their peers might not be able to cope with those reminders. They might distance themselves," she said.

There is no single way for victims of a tragedy to recover and adapt to what has happened, said Mark Lerner, a clinical psychologist and traumatic stress consultant.

"For some people, getting back on the horse, getting back on the bicycle and exposing themselves to this difficult environment where this has occurred, being back on that campus will be a really good thing for them," Lerner said. "For others, it may be more than can be expected, too much for them to handle."

Hokies will 'get through this together'
Patrick Strollo, brother of injured freshman Hilary Strollo, said there is no doubt she will return to campus after recovering at home in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, from three gunshot wounds.

"What are the other options? She's not the only one who had something happen to her. Every single person who goes to that school has had something happen to them," he said. "She has a ton of friends there and she needs to stick to the people she can relate with, and they're going to get through this together."

Strollo faces a struggle similar to that of Sterne and Carney. Sterne was wounded in the leg, the image of him being carried out of the building captured in a now-famous photograph. Carney was hit in the hand during her German class, but helped fend off the gunman by barricading the door to stop him from getting back into the room.

The bloodbath at Virginia Tech was singular in its horror. But in many ways, the path the wounded must follow is not so different from the one others have traveled.

In January 2000, Alvaro Llanos was a freshman at New Jersey's Seton Hall University when two students set fire to a dormitory. Three classmates died. The flames left the upper half of his body with painful and -- for some time -- obvious scars.

He went through physical therapy and took a year off from school. When he returned, he found support -- and scrutiny.

"I figured I'd feel more comfortable being back at school. Especially when people know what happened, it would be easier than going to a different school and having to answer questions," Llanos said.

But after walking into a Spanish class the first day back, he quickly realized it wasn't going to be that easy.

"I felt like everyone was staring at me," he recalled. "I didn't feel like one of the regular students anymore."

That was six years ago, and Llanos has not graduated. He has made a new life, different from the one he'd envisioned.

'You have to move on'
Instead of pursuing a computer science degree, his recovery process persuaded him to train as a physical therapist. He married, has a toddler daughter and expects a second child soon.

And he has found in himself an energy and positive outlook; he rarely tolerates self-pity.

Some of the Virginia Tech wounded may find it hard to summon patience, but eventually, they must push forward because so much awaits them, Llanos said.

"You have to move on. You can't be stuck because if you stay stuck you're never going to be happy," he said. "Be happy and fulfill your life."

Sitting in her son's hospital room the day after the shootings, Anne Goddard tried to preempt the most difficult question Colin could ask himself.

"There is no answer to the question of why some people got shot and died and why some people got shot and lived," she told him. "There is no answer to that question. Don't go looking for it."

"Yeah," he said. "You're right."

Colin Goddard is already looking ahead. In the emergency room the day he was shot, the child who was born in Bangladesh and raised in Somalia and Egypt wanted to know if he could still do his internship on a development project this summer in Madagascar.

"Some parents would be afraid to let their kid go. I'm not," said Anne Goddard, a veteran aid worker who directs the Richmond, Virginia-based Christian Children's Fund. "I want him to come back in August talking about something very different."

Painful

Below is an AP article detailing the letter released by Sun-Kyung Cho, the sister of the Virginia Tech shooter. I imagine they are going through a not very private hell right now. It is bad enough to lose a child, but in this fashion has to be many times worse. Pray for this family too.

Linked to- Basil, Jo's Cafe, Maggie, Point Five, Right Voices,

BLACKSBURG, Va. - The family of Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho told The Associated Press on Friday that they feel "hopeless, helpless and lost," and "never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence."

"He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare," said a statement issued by Cho's sister, Sun-Kyung Cho, on the family's behalf.

It was the Chos' first public comment since the 23-year-old student killed 32 people and committed suicide Monday in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

Raleigh, N.C., lawyer Wade Smith provided the statement to the AP after the Cho family reached out to him. Smith said the family would not answer any questions, and neither would he.

"Our family is so very sorry for my brother's unspeakable actions. It is a terrible tragedy for all of us," said Sun-Kyung Cho, a 2004 Princeton University graduate who works as a contractor for a State Department office that oversees American aid for Iraq.

"We pray for their families and loved ones who are experiencing so much excruciating grief. And we pray for those who were injured and for those whose lives are changed forever because of what they witnessed and experienced," she said. "Each of these people had so much love, talent and gifts to offer, and their lives were cut short by a horrible and senseless act."

Authorities are in frequent contact with Cho's family, but have not placed them in protective custody, said Assistant FBI Director Joe Persichini, who oversees the bureau's local Washington office. Authorities believe they remain in the Washington area, but are staying with friends and relatives.

Persichini said the FBI and Fairfax County Police have assured Cho's parents that they will investigate any hate crimes directed at the family if and when they ever return to their Centreville home.

The family statement was issued during a statewide day of mourning for the victims. Silence fell across the Virginia Tech campus at noon and bells tolled in churches nationwide in memory of the victims.

"We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person," Cho's sister said. "We have always been a close, peaceful and loving family. My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to fit in. We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence."

She said her family will cooperate fully and "do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well."

Wendy Adams, whose niece, Leslie Sherman, was killed in the massacre, said of the family's statement: "I'm not so generous to be able to forgive him for what he did. But I do feel for the family. I do feel sorry for them."

"I do believe they're living a nightmare," she added.

Robert Jeffers of Idaho Falls, Idaho, a friend of slain 25-year-old student Brian Bluhm, said: "I hope people can see that the right action to take from all of this is love, not hate."

"Based on this sorrowful statement, it is apparent that the family grieves with everyone in the world," Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said.

Cho's name was given as "Cho Seung-Hui" by police and school officials earlier this week. But the the South Korean immigrant family said their preference was "Seung-Hui Cho." Many Asian immigrant families Americanize their names by reversing them and putting their surnames last.

While Cho clearly was seething and had been taken to a psychiatric hospital more than a year as threat to himself, investigators are still trying to establish exactly what set him off, why he chose a dormitory and a classroom building for the rampage and how he selected his victims.

"The why and the how are the crux of the investigation," Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said. "The why may never be determined because the person responsible is deceased."

In memory of

Mary Karen Read. She was one of the 32 people murdered at Virginia Tech this week.

I read this AP article last night. It was a report on Mary Karen's father and the grief he is going through now. Having lost a child myself, I can understand a bit of what Mr. Read is going through. God bless him and all of Mary Karen's family.

The point is, that the media for the most part is concentrating on the killer. His image being plastered all over the internet and newspapers. This IMHO is only serving the needs of that psychopathic piece of scum that ruined so many lives the other day. Not just those he killed but their families also. Why not talk about the lives lost and the ones ruined instead? The MSM is glorifying this killer by their continued focus on him rather than those who died.

That's pretty much what Mr. Read said. He wants the world to know and celebrate the lives of his child and all the other lives lost on Monday. For the next few days, I may put up the stories of those who died. They are the ones we should be remembering.

Linked to- Adam, Jo, Leaning Straight Up, Morewhat, Perri Nelson, Pirate's Cove, Pursuing Holiness, Samantha Burns, StikNstein, Third World County,

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Peter Read wants you to make a choice.

He asks that you turn away from the face of the deranged gunman glaring at the camera. Gaze instead at the face of a bright and bubbly brunette who smiled even when she was unhappy, a face always in the middle of a crowd.

It is the face of Mary Karen Read, the daughter he will now see only in scrapbooks.



Hers is just one of 32 promising lives cut short at Virginia Tech — the life of a musician, an aspiring schoolteacher, a doting big sister to five siblings. A 19-year-old freshman who had just filed her first tax return and learned, the day before she died, how to make a pumpkin pie.

When you think of the massacre that befell this quiet college town, those are the memories Peter Read wants you to remember.

"We want the world to know and celebrate our children's lives, and we believe that's the central element that brings hope in the midst of great tragedy," Read said Thursday, with his wife, Cathy, at his side. "These kids were the best that their generation has to offer."

As the Reads left Blacksburg on Thursday for their home in Annandale, they were exhausted, pale, heartbroken — and furious. On television, the overwhelming image of the tragedy was the face of Cho Seung-Hui — a killer whose name Peter Read cannot bring himself to speak.

"I want to issue a direct personal plea, to all the major media," he told The Associated Press. "For the love of God and our children, stop broadcasting those images and those words. Choose to focus on life and the love and the light that our children brought into the world and not on the darkness and the madness and the death."

Several networks have already heard Read's message loud and clear — from disgusted viewers. Fox News Channel announced it would no longer run the disturbing audio and images of the gunman. NBC, which aired the material first, and cable outlet MSNBC said they would "severely limit" their use.

Read hopes the focus will swing back to the children. Children such as Paul Turner's daughter Maxine, a 22-year-old chemical engineering major from Vienna who loved beaches, swing dancing and her close-knit circle of friends. She would have graduated soon, and she had already lined up a job in Elkton, Md.

At Virginia Tech, Maxine Turner co-founded a sorority and earned a red belt in Tae Kwon Do. She loved the German band Rammstein and signed up for a language class to understand the lyrics.

It was there that she died.

On Thursday, her body rested at a morgue in Roanoke, where state and U.S. flags were lowered and access was heavily guarded by police. A hearse will arrive sometime this week to carry her home, a scenario that will be repeated many times as parents hold funerals.

Like so many today, the Read family is blended: Peter Read, a 44-year-old Air Force veteran, married Yon Son Yi, of Palisades Park, N.J., who gave birth to Mary Read. But the couple later divorced.

Yi remarried and had a second daughter, Hannah, 4 1/2. Read remarried too, and he and his wife had four children: Stephen, 11; Patrick, 4 1/2; Brendan, 2 1/2; and Colleen, 10 months.

The Reads live in a quiet cul-de-sac in Annandale, where they moved in 2001 from Virginia Beach.

Mary Read made friends fast. She joined the French honor society, the National Honor Society and the marching band. She played lacrosse for two years and moved easily between the cliques that fill high school hallways.



She wanted to teach math and science to elementary school students, and she enrolled at Virginia Tech.

In her dorm room were scrapbooks filled with hundreds of photographs — at summer band camp, at Myrtle Beach, on the arm of her father as part of the homecoming court.

The end of her freshman year was just weeks away, and she had planned to spend the summer at home, working at a deli and helping care for her siblings.

She came home Easter weekend, staging practice egg hunts for her brothers. Then, the weekend before her death, she came home again.

She divided her time between her friends and her family those two days but was inseparable from her laptop. She sat on the stairs, where the wireless reception was best, to instant message and e-mail her friends. A brother sat nearby, toy computer on his lap.

"He wanted to be like Mary," Peter Read recalled.

On Sunday, Read's wife showed his daughter how to make her favorite dessert, a pumpkin pie. And when Read took her to the bus stop at 4:30 p.m., she had a slab of the pie and a container of Cool Whip in a plastic bag.

Mary Read never called to check in when she reached Blacksburg, but her parents know what she did that night: She had recorded her favorite TV show, "House," on DVDs and watched them on her laptop during the 4 1/2-hour ride.

The next morning, she had French class in Norris Hall, where gunman Cho Seung-Hui took her life.

When news of the shootings broke, Peter Read started calling his daughter, hoping she would pick up. Then he called her roommate. The hours wore on, without word.

When Read learned that the parents of his daughter's longtime friend Danielle Waters were driving to Blacksburg late that afternoon to find their daughter, he asked to ride along.

On the drive, Olga and John Waters learned their daughter was alive. Around 9:30 p.m., Read's cell phone rang. It was his wife, and the state police were at their door.

The Reads won't talk about their grief over these past few days. It's too painful, too personal. The time is not yet right.

But they share the photos and drawings from their daughter's dorm room, which was just as she had left it.

In a plastic bag was the empty container that had held her pie. And on her desk was a calendar Mary Read's grandmother had given her years ago, each day offering a quote from a famous woman.

On April 16, the words were from a teacher, Helen Keller:

"When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another."

Happy Easter

I want to wish all my Christian readers a blessed Easter. Blogging will be light at TFM this weekend.

A note

TFM wants to wish all his Jewish readers a Happy and Blessed Passover. Shalom.

Daylight Savings Time

If you haven't changed your clocks yet, you have probably been running late all day. This year has seen a change to when DST has started, Congress changing the date in legislation passed two years ago. Of course there were unintended consequences.

The law of unintended consequences appears to be complicating IT professionals' lives once again, thanks to The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was passed by Congress to help people reduce the amount of electricity they use. Among the Act's provisions is a change in the date when daylight-saving time (DST) takes effect, from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March. The idea is that the additional daylight hours (DST also will end in November instead of October) will enable consumers and businesses to use less energy (a more appealing and less-politically sensitive tactic to encourage energy conservation than something like a gasoline tax, but that's a topic for a different editorial).

But of course, it isn't that simple. Time will tell whether or not extending DST actually cuts energy consumption. But because of the need to "manually" change computers' internal clocks, the move clearly is going to increase aggravation for IT organizations. As it turns out, IT groups will need to update and apply patches to everything from infrastructure and networks to handheld devices, and from databases to applications that process time-sensitive transactions and/or support scheduling and sequencing tasks (not to mention having to remind employees who might end up late for work or business appointments to update cell phones, PDAs and anything else that runs on embedded technology). Financial services IT executives probably have been having flashbacks to the Y2K scare, reliving their concerns, preparations and expenditures for the risks of systems disruption that the year 2000 was expected to bring. For better or for worse, we may never know if the fact that chaos did not ensue on Jan. 1, 2000, meant that the massive reprogramming efforts paid off -- or if it was all a big, tedious waste of effort.

Too bad Congress doesn't have to re-imburse these businesses out of their personal pocketbooks. Then they wouldn't pass such dumb legislation.

I don't like DST. The main reason I like to walk after dinner and being a Malignant melanoma sufferer, I have to avoid too much sun. By pushing us ahead one hour, my evening walks have to wait at least an hour past dinnertime. I hate it.

What is your opinion on Daylight Savings Time?

Linked to- Cao, Conservative Thoughts, Morewhat,

Hava neranena, venis’mecha

Below is an article from today's New York Times that I found interesting. It tells the story of Cecilia Nealon-Shapiro who just celebrated her bat mitzvah last month. Sounds like nothing special except for that Cecilia was born Fu Qian, a Chinese born orphan adopted and raised Jewish in the United States.

It is a very sweet story and a few things stand out for me. How Cecilia, and other Chinese-Jewish princesses(I mean that in a nice way. My Brother-in-law Marty is Jewish) regard their religion and heritage as independent from the other. Cecilia, who her parents thought may like a westernized Chinese dress for her coming out, said this wasn't about her being Chinese. Good for Cecilia, and I wish her the best.

TFM has some experience with cross cultural living. My wife is Filipino, I'm American. She grew up dirt poor, I grew up upper middle class. Other than both being Roman Catholic, Dear wife and I were very different when we met. We've been married almost 18 years, and we still have our differences. My wife still has her Filipino culture, and habits. I've adopted some but not all. Those I haven't adopted but dear wife partakes in, I at least respect.

This isn't so with other couples. My wife had a Filipina friend die recently after a long fight with brain cancer. The woman's husband was Turkish, but unlike his wife, doesn't have much faith in God. After the wife died, many of her Filipino friends wanted to honor Violet in the Filipinas do. The husband at first gave his reluctant ok, but the day before the memorial mass changed his mind. He thought my wife and her his wife's other friends were having a party. I tried to explain to this man this was what Filipinas do, and I know it from my marriage but Violet's husband Jordan just couldn't accept. His wife had a memorial mass done for her, but the husband kept the ashes at home!

The point of the above is people from different cultures and religious beliefs will often have problems or friction come from these differences. What is great about the USA is that a Chinese-Jewish girl is accepted is looked upon as just another part of the melting pot this country exemplifies.

Two other quick notes- A story seven years ago of a young Chinese adoptee here in Florida was the inspiration for what I consider the best of my fiction stories on the internet. I combined the adopted Chinese Girl's story with my love of chess to write what I call Chess Prodigy.

Lastly the title of the post is Hebrew for "Let us sing and be glad." Sounds like a good philosopy for life.

Linked to- Right Wing Nation, Basil, Blue Star, Jo, Third World County,

Of the 613 laws in the Torah, the one that appears most often is the directive to welcome strangers. The girl once known as Fu Qian has been thinking about that a lot lately.

Fu Qian, renamed Cecelia Nealon-Shapiro at 3 months, was one of the first Chinese children — most of them girls — taken in by American families after China opened its doors to international adoption in the early 1990s. Now, at 13, she is one of the first to complete the rite of passage into Jewish womanhood known as bat mitzvah.

She will not be the last. Across the country, many Jewish girls like her will be studying their Torah portions, struggling to master the plaintive singsong of Hebrew liturgy and trying to decide whether to wear Ann Taylor or a traditional Chinese outfit to the after-party.

There are plenty of American Jews, of course, who do not “look Jewish.” And grappling with identity is something all adopted children do, not just Chinese Jews.

But seldom is the juxtaposition of homeland and new home, of faith and background, so stark. And nothing brings out the contrasts like a bat mitzvah, as formal a declaration of identity as any 13-year-old can be called upon to make. The contradictions show up in ways both playful — yin-and-yang yarmulkes, kiddush cups disguised as papier-mâché dragons, kosher lo mein and veal ribs at the buffet — and profound.

Yet for Cece, as everyone calls Cecelia, and for many of the girls like her, the odd thing about the whole experience is that it’s not much odder than it is for any 13-year-old.

“I knew that when I came to this age I was going to have to do it, so it was sort of natural,” she said a few days before the ceremony at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a Reform synagogue on West 83rd Street where she has been a familiar face since her days in the Little Twos program. Besides, she said with a shrug, “Most of my Chinese friends are Jewish.”

As Zoe Kress, an adoptee in Mt. Laurel, N.J., said about her approaching bat mitzvah: “Being Chinese and Jewish is normal for me. Thinking about being Chinese and Jewish is a little strange.”

Olivia Rauss, a girl in Massachusetts who celebrated her bat mitzvah last fall on a day when the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot coincided with the Chinese autumn moon festival, said she saw no tension between the two facets of her identity either.

“Judaism is a religion, Chinese is my heritage and somewhat my culture, and I’m looking at them in a different way,” she said. “I don’t feel like they conflict with each other at all.”

While no statistics are kept on the number of Chinese children adopted by Jewish families, over all, there were about 1,300 Chinese children adopted into American families from 1991 to 1994, another 17,000 in the second half of the ’90s, and 44,000 since then, according to the State Department.

Cece was born on Jan. 29, 1994, in Jiangxi Province in southeastern China. She was abandoned to an orphanage because of China’s one-child rule, and adopted by a lesbian couple, Mary Nealon and Vivian Shapiro. (The couple later adopted another Chinese girl, Gabie, now 5.) Cece has been drawing double-takes for a while, like when she used to ride on Ms. Shapiro’s lap on a packed crosstown bus and would burst into the Passover standard “Dayenu.”

Ms. Shapiro, an advertising buyer, was brought up by atheistic Jews; Ms. Nealon, a school nurse, was raised a Roman Catholic. But after they met, they were drawn to Judaism and decided to give Cece a relatively traditional upbringing.

“That was my hope when I started her in day school,” Ms. Nealon said, “that when she got up on the bimah” — the lectern where the bat mitzvah girl reads from the Torah — “she would feel like she had the right to be there.”

The countdown to the big day was the typical blur of lessons and studying, sit-downs with cantors and tutors, caterers and party planners. There was a thick dossier of Jewish history to master — history that Cece confessed did not feel like hers. “I just really try to learn it,” she said. “I don’t try to think of whose history it is.”

And, of course, there was shopping to be done.

“In my fantasy,” Ms. Nealon said, “we’d take her to Chinatown and have this incredibly beautiful Westernized Chinese dress made.”

But Ms. Shapiro said: “She wanted no part of it. For her, this has nothing to do with being Chinese.”

Cece set her cantor’s reading of her Torah portion to “repeat” on her iPod. She met with the head rabbi at Rodeph Sholom, Robert N. Levine, an affable, animated man with an office full of books and baseball memorabilia.

“So, Cece,” Rabbi Levine said, “what do you connect to most about your Judaism?”

Cece had transformed into the archetypal opaque teenager.

“I think I like the holidays, and, um, yeah,” she said, looking down.

The rabbi asked her to recite for him. She did.

“I love it,” Rabbi Levine said. “You have a beautiful voice. Your Hebrew is perfect. The only thing I need you to do, Cece, is project. Just give me a ‘Baruch’ like you’re singing in the shower.”

“Baruch,” Cece said, a bit louder.

On Feb. 17, nearly 200 of Cece’s friends and relatives filed into the vast Romanesque sanctuary of Rodeph Sholom. A box of commemorative yarmulkes with the yin-and-yang pattern sat by the door. Six alumnae of Cece’s orphanage — they call themselves the Fu sisters — had flown in from all over the country.

To the side of the altar, on a red throne, sat Cece, resplendent in a long black patterned dress with a scoop neck.

Ms. Shapiro laid a prayer shawl over Cece’s shoulders, a symbolic transfer of power. Cece and the other bat mitzvah girl that day, Sadie Friedman, lifted their voices and let loose a Hebrew welcome song that Cece had sung with the synagogue choir from the time she was 7.

Rabbi Levine preached from the day’s reading: “ ‘Let the stranger in your midst be to you as the native, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ ”

Cece and Sadie approached the ark, the enclosure, flanked with marble columns and topped by carved lions, where the Torah scrolls are kept. The cantor, Rebecca Garfein, handed them the oversize scrolls, dressed in maroon and gold fabric. The girls held them like bagpipes.

Cece laid her scroll on the bimah and read in Hebrew, in a loud, clear voice, from Chapter 21 of Exodus, a compendium of commandments on the treatment of servants and slaves.

Then she moved to her English speech.

“This long journey to becoming a bat mitzvah today has provided me with so many ways of learning,” she said. “The part that will always stay closest to me is the importance of caring for strangers. Just like Jews were once strangers in the land of Egypt, we have all been, or will be strangers at some point in our lives.”

Cece finished, touched the fringe of her shawl to the Torah and kissed it. She returned to her throne and sat down, cheeks red, looking exhausted and relieved.

That night — the eve of the Chinese year of the pig, as fate would have it — Cece and her guests reconvened at the Faculty House at Columbia University. The outer room was set up like a casino, with Cece-backed playing cards and Cece-faced play money. Inside, the music throbbed, the D.J. yelled, the fog machine billowed. Cece and her friends traded their shoes for white socks and pogoed across the floor.

After dinner — kosher Chinese for the kids, steak for the adults — the D.J. cranked up “Hava Nagila.” Cece, in a chair in the middle of the dance floor, was lifted up, up, up until she bumped her head on the Chinese umbrellas hanging off the chandelier.

Then she was back on the floor, dancing with her mothers and little sister and singing along with the recording: “Hava neranena, venis’mecha,” or: Let us sing and be glad.

Headline news

From the Orlando Sentinel

Patient to face murder charge
12th consecutive day of Salisbury Steak for dinner was the last straw

Boy arrested after using slingshot
Goliath's next of kin expected to file suit next week.

For more headline news, visit Basil.

Linked to- Jo, Third World County,

Pictures for a lifetime

TFM is betting you can't read this St. Paul Pioneer-Press story without being deeply moved by the work photographer Heather Lombardo and the volunteer group Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep do.

Rick and Carrie Wilson knew their daughter was going to die terribly young, either at birth or shortly thereafter.

And the Wilsons knew they wanted Katie Marie's life — however brief — to be remembered. So they asked photographer Heather Lombardo to join them on their journey of grief and celebration.

Lombardo spent hours with the family the night Katie was born. She photographed Carrie with her hands cradled on her pregnant stomach and Katie when she first nursed. And she made portraits of the family at home before Katie died, two months later, of a rare chromosomal disorder.

The Wilsons treasure every day with Katie. And Lombardo's photos — 971 in all, taken and given at no charge — have brought them joy and peace. 'It's absolutely the best gift that we could have,' Carrie Wilson said. 'Having all that has been a godsend — a saving grace in this whole journey. The memories of Katie mean so much to us.'

It's a journey Lombardo has traveled with many families through a volunteer group called Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep. She has photographed babies so tiny they could fit in teacups. She has brought sweaters made for teddy bears for infants to wear in photo shoots. And she made miniature diapers for one set of premature quadruplets; to photograph them bare, she said, would have been too shocking.

Her most heartbreaking shoot involved triplets who died within three weeks of one another. After losing the first two babies, the parents knew what they wanted when the third was removed from life support.

'They read books to her until she passed,' Lombardo said. 'I have a picture of the dad dancing with her as well. He wanted one last dance with his baby girl.

One of the biggest regrets I have so far as my son Daniel is concerned, is the lack of photos my wife and I have. Daniel lived only 14.5 hours and his birth was a rushed event. But we had the opportunity to hold Daniel for six hours after he died. I asked my dear wife if I should get a camera to take photos and she said no. Now we both regret it, for we only have six photos to remember our son's short life.

So I was deeply touched by this article and must thank Joanne Jacobs for putting it on her blog. The rest of the article is below and contact info for Heather and Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep are included. Keep a box of kleenex handy as you read the rest.

'I was bawling. Thank goodness for auto focus. I couldn't see through the lens. I so wanted them to leave the hospital with at least one baby. I stood out in the hall with the pastor and the nurse, and I just sobbed. I just sobbed.'

Lombardo owns Mariabella Photography in Oakdale and joined Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep in late 2005, after learning of it while working with a different organization of volunteer photographers. She now serves as the group's Twin Cities coordinator.

"At first, I said: 'No way. There is absolutely no way that I could ever do this,' " Lombardo said. But she was moved by the compassion of the photographers who help strangers "at their most vulnerable, intimate time of life."

She has photographed 52 babies and remembers each by name. Her first session was with a boy, Joshua, who lived for an hour.

"They've taught me how fragile life is," Lombardo said. "Every little life is so precious — no matter how long they are here with us."

Lombardo gives families black-and-white and color prints, a CD containing all of the photos she takes and a DVD slideshow. Everything is free.

"The photos I take are one of the last things that they have left of their babies," she said. "It's something for them to cherish."

She often has to work quickly so the images can be shown at a baby's funeral.

One mother went to Lombardo's studio to pick up her son's photos just after he died. She looked through the pictures, held them to her chest and sobbed, Lombardo said.

"She thanked me for giving her son back to her," Lombardo said. "I was speechless and cried with her."

Nurses and doctors tell parents-to-be about the organization as early in a troubled pregnancy as they can. But often, photographers are called in a rush after serious complications develop at birth.

In Carrie and Rick Wilson's case, Lombardo was contacted a few weeks before Katie's due date. At Carrie Wilson's first ultrasound, doctors had detected swelling in the back of the baby's neck — a possible indication of Down syndrome. Another ultrasound revealed Katie had a heart defect and possible brain damage.

Katie was diagnosed with trisomy 13, a rare chromosomal disorder that causes significant defects in major organs. Eight of 10 children with the disorder die within a month after they are born.

The diagnosis was shocking.

"When the doctors first said Down syndrome, we were devastated," Carrie Wilson said. "If only it had been Down syndrome, we would have been so happy."

Lombardo planned to take maternity photos at the couple's May Township home a week before Katie's mid-November due date. But on Nov. 2, doctors could barely detect Katie's heartbeat and decided to induce early.

The Wilsons called Lombardo at home. Could she meet them at United Hospital in St. Paul in a few hours?

At 8:45 p.m., camera in hand, Lombardo knocked softly on the door to Room 2340 and introduced herself. She wheeled in the camera bag she keeps packed in her car and quickly got to work. Within minutes, she had created a makeshift photo studio by pinning a black cloth to the room's privacy curtain.

Lombardo asked Carrie Wilson to place her left hand on the lower part of her bare belly. Her right hand went on a spot on the upper right where the skin was pulled so tight it was blue.

Wilson caressed her stomach slowly and reverently. The room quieted. Her face fell into exhaustion. Tears gleamed. She looked away from the camera. Rick moved next to her and touched her gently on the shoulder.

Carrie brushed her eyes with a quick motion, wiping away the tears before they fell, and held herself tight as if trying to keep Katie from spilling out.

"Will you take your cap off?" Lombardo asked Rick. "I know, I ask a lot."

Lombardo positioned the couple's hands around Carrie's bare belly so their fingers formed a heart around her navel. "Those are my favorite pictures — the ones with the hands on the belly," Carrie Wilson said.

An hour later, Lombardo had gotten the shots she needed. "I'm going to take the studio out and let the birthing begin," she said.

Katie was born late the next day, Nov. 3. At 5 pounds and 13 ounces, she had a strong heart and clear lungs — but her skull was not fully formed and she had 12 fingers. Her eyes did not open — not that night, not ever.

Lombardo arrived just before midnight and took hundreds of photos during a nearly two-hour session. She was in and out of the Wilsons' hospital room, making sure the family had time alone with their daughter.

"It's such a fine line, whether you're intruding or being helpful," Lombardo said.

At one point, she gently touched Carrie Wilson's leg and asked: "How are you doing?"

Carrie smiled and nodded that she was OK. Lombardo arranged the Wilsons on the hospital bed for a family portrait.

"Lean in a little more. There you go," Lombardo said. "I want to see her hair. I can barely see her face because her little fist is right up there. You are strong — Daddy's right! All right, little princess, we need to see your face. Oh, hello, little love. There you go."

A nurse came in and Lombardo stepped out — but Rick quickly called her back. Katie, unbelievably, was nursing.

"It was a very special moment," Lombardo said. "It's something the majority of mothers I've worked with have not been able to do. It was powerful because it showed Katie's strength, and it's just a very intimate moment between mother and baby. Rick was also in the photo, and they both had a very joyful, loving expression."

The session ended at 2:20 a.m. Lombardo congratulated Carrie Wilson one last time. "You get some rest," Lombardo said. "Take care."

Rick Wilson walked her to the hallway. "I don't care how much time we get," he told her. "We'll take every minute we can get with her and enjoy it all."

It was almost 3 a.m. by the time Lombardo pulled into the driveway of her Oakdale home.

Lombardo has two daughters — 13-year-old Amber and 4-year-old Emma. She and her husband, John, want another child — and she says her work will change how she feels during that pregnancy.

"I will definitely be more nervous and will be questioning things until the day we have the baby," she said. "Problems happen more than anyone realizes."

Lombardo's experiences with Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep have convinced Amber — who is home-schooled — that she would like to be an obstetrician or obstetrics nurse. Lombardo says she doesn't shield the babies' problems from her daughter.

"It's life. This is life," Lombardo said. "Unfortunately, bad things happen. It happens every day, and it happens more than we know. I don't think I should shield her from that. This is reality. Hopefully, she'll never have to deal with it."

Lombardo doesn't flinch when faced with severe medical situations and is used to middle-of-the-night phone calls: The 33-year-old worked as a dispatcher for the Cottage Grove and Maplewood police departments from 1997 to 2002 before turning her passion for photography into her vocation, specializing in portraits of families and children.

Her experience serves her well during photo sessions.

"I think I just go on auto-pilot," Lombardo said. "You just do what you can to get through the session. I'm not shocked by a lot of what I see."

But Lombardo, a member of St. Agnes Catholic Church in St. Paul, says she has wrestled with faith: How do infant deaths serve God's plan?

"I am struggling. How could I not? It's hard," she said. "I do feel called to this organization. I did not seek it; it found me. My faith has been strengthened, but also after doing so many and seeing so much suffering, it has been questioned. It's a growing experience."

A shelf in Lombardo's home office is filled with thank-you notes from parents she has met through her work.

"These will be buried with me," Lombardo said. "This has become a very important part of my life. It's taught me to appreciate every moment of life and every second I have with my own children. I'm very thankful that I have healthy children. It's also made me strive toward being a better mom."

Each photo session has unique dynamics and emotions, and they might last half an hour — or half a day. Those that involve unexpected deaths can "obviously be much more emotional and, as the photographer, you must be more in tune to the situation," Lombardo said. "We try to not impose and give the family time, whatever the situation."

Many, such as the session with the Wilsons, are calm and loving.

"The Wilsons were very accepting of the diagnosis, and the mood was just peaceful when we were there at the hospital," Lombardo said. "I think they were excited to welcome Katie into the world and just honor and love her for whatever time they were blessed with."

Katie Marie Wilson died at home, in her mother's arms, on the morning of Dec. 28.

"When you enter a pregnancy, you think it's for a lifetime," Lombardo said. "Prior to Katie's birth, I know Carrie and Rick were first just praying for a live birth.

"Then minutes turned to hours, hours turned to days, and days turned to the weeks they had with her.

"Even still, it was not enough."

FYI

For more information or to donate to Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, visit www.nowilaymedowntosleep.org, which also offers support for families grieving the loss of an infant.

Professional photographers are needed to volunteer with the two dozen who now work with the group. Musicians and songwriters who can donate music and songs for the group's DVD slideshows also are needed. Anyone interested should call Heather Lombardo at 651-329-5363 or e-mail her at mariabellaportraits@hotmail.com

Linked to- Is it just me?, Jo, Third World County,

The Knucklehead of the Day award

Today's winner is Kari Barefoot of Riverview Florida. She gets the award for the following.

Kari Barefoot, 41, had asked her boyfriend of three years for money Friday night, and he refused. The two started arguing in their home at 10125 Haverhill Ridge Drive, Hillsborough County sheriff's spokeswoman Debbie Carter said.

Barefoot picked up a shoe with a wooden high heel and swung it several times against the left side of Stephen Burgess' head, Carter said. He suffered a large cut, an arrest report states.

Burgess grabbed a cell phone and tried to get away from Barefoot, Carter said.

Barefoot cast the shoe aside, picked up a knife and chased Burgess out of the home, Carter said.

Deputies responded within minutes and arrested her at 11:15 p.m.

Barefoot faces one count each of first-degree felony aggravated battery with great bodily harm and third-degree aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. She remained at Orient Road Jail without bail late Saturday.

Lol, a shoe batterer named barefoot. This goes down as a funny Knucklehead of the Day. Keep your footwear on in the future Ms. Barefoot.

Linked to- Big Dog, Blue Star, Bright & Early, Cao's Blog, Dumb Ox, Hill Chronicles, Jo's Cafe, Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson, Pirate's Cove, Pursuing Holiness, Random Yak, Right Pundits, Right Truth, Right Wing Nation, Samantha Burns, Stop the ACLU, Third World County, Uncooperative Blogger, Wakeup America, Woman Honor Thyself,

Calling Hillary

From the Miami Herald-

Q: I saw an ad on page 2D of The Herald Dec. 9 for Titleist golf balls. I called the 800 number and gave them my credit card number and everything. I was told they would ship in 10 days via UPS Ground. I had planned to give these things as Christmas gifts, but they never arrived. I called again for a tracking number; there was none. When I called again today, the number had been disconnected.

I don't know what kind of scam this might be, but The Herald should be aware. Can Action Line help?

Hugh Rodham,

Coral Gables

• A: We checked with The Herald's advertising department and, sure enough, the ad had already been pulled following a complaint from another reader -- a Herald employee. His credit card number was stolen and used to wire money abroad. You tell us your credit card hasn't been charged for the golf balls but that you've alerted the creditor to the potential fraud. For added security, we recommend that you change the card account number if you haven't already.

I think the person writing the Herald's help line is none other than Hillary Clinton's brother. CNN has the former Senatorial candidate living in Coral Gables. Anyone want to bet this isn't the same person?

The MSM advertises scams and snake oil all the time. I'd have written or called the Herald if the same had happened to me.

Linked to- Right Wing Guy, Right Wing Nation,

2007

TFM would like to wish all his readrs a happy and prosperous new year.

Update- I just wanted to add that I passed my 13th anniversary of being diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer Malignant Melanoma. TFM asks you to pray for all those affected by this terrible disease. God bless the melanoma warriors.

Others with New Year's Posts- Jo, Basil, Third World County, Rick at SOTP, Florida Cracker, Poliblog, Ann Althouse, 26th Paralell, Kim at Wizbang,