Moved!

The first load moves into the new townhouse
long after dark on Day One.

After years of hoping, hundreds of hours of work, months of delays and glitches and just plain weird stuff, we have a new home, a new address and perhaps for the first time ever, a home that actually reflects who we are.

It's a townhouse in town. It's brand-new, fresh, clean and terrific.
The move into the place actually came on Feb. 22. The deal for the house was complex and out-of-the-box. The real estate market has been awful, as everyone knows. But the developer of the condominium townhouses came up with a deal: An independent appraiser would set a price for our house in Lake Isabella.

Megan and Robert move my
grandmother's antique dresser.

We would market that house aggressively for 45 days, and if at the end of that time, the house was unsold, he would buy it. He gets out from under a high interest rate construction loan. We get a new home. This is, however, pretty far out of the box, and it took months for the developer to get the financing together. It finally came together.

Furniture, equipment and general debris
get loaded from the Lake Isabella house.

We proudly put the old house on the market in September 2005.
Ahem. The market tanked. The house just sat there. When this deal came along, it was too good to pass up. At one point, we were to close a few days before Christmas, and I declared that the first thing we'd do would be to put up a Christmas tree in the balcony over the front door. That closing date didn't happen, but I was able to keep my promise: The night we moved in, the Christmas tree went into the balcony over the front door.

Dad and Kissy Missy look on
as Robert finishes placing the
Christmas tree in the balcony.

There have been all the dozens of little things to take care of as we've moved in - including a misbehaving furnace, satellite TV (I will NOT use cable), WiMax Internet (I will NOT use cable), and the everyday stuff of living. The living room and garage are piled high with stuff. The first part of putting away stuff is to figure out where "away" is, and sometimes that's tough. All in good time. We're home.

It will be a very nice living room
once it stops being a storage shed.

Happy V.D.

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A Valentine's Day gift from us!

Winter guard

Until I saw a guard competition, I had absolutely no idea that such a thing went on.
I got asked (drafted, really) to drive six teen-agers to Grand Rapids Northview High School Saturday so they could take part in a Michigan Color Guard Circuit competition. The Mt. Pleasant High School guard finished second in Class AA with a score of 48.2 - behind Portage Northern, a comparable-sized school outside Kalamazoo.


The guard warms up in the Northview auxiliary gym.


Guard is an interesting combination of modern dance, military-style drill, marching-band flags and pure athleticism. In band season, it complements the marching band. On its own, it's three to four minutes of fun to watch.


The Mt. Pleasant guard "blossoms" during its show.


The guard swirls and twirls on the floor and produced some solid crowd reaction.


Coach John Demkowicz gives some advice to the guard, left. At right, Katherine listens intensely.

The pep band

Just because football season's over doesn't mean the band goes home. Robert's happily engaged in being part of the Mt. Pleasant High School pep band.
True - they just kind of sit there and play in the stands during basketball games, but it's fun, and adds to the atmosphere of the games.


Big Brother Matthew talks to Katherine as they soak up some of the atmosphere of a game in the Oiler gym.








Sun photographer Ryan Evon pays attention to something out on the floor. Ryan! The real stars are up here!











And why isn't it a surprise that Katherine finds a way to be a part of it all?

The Highest Honor

I had the high honor of speaking at the court of honor for three new Eagle Scouts last week.
It was 13 years ago this month that Troop 798 came back to life. Blessed Sacrament Church in Midland had a strong Cub Scout pack, but too few boys were crossing over into Boy Scouts.
The troop began with the blessing of the church, a hundred bucks, five Boy Scouts and a rookie Scoutmaster – me.
It changed lives, perhaps none as much as mine. Over the past 13 years , 10 boys have become Eagles from Troop 798, earning Scouting's highest honor.




I was humbled when I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the court of honor for Adam Beach, Stephen Bischoff and Garett LaChance.




I talked about success – and how it's elusive, how it sometimes has to be redefined in light of reality, how we learn the most from our failures, and how, when we succeed once, we prepare ourselves to succeed again..
I have to judge Troop 798 to be a resounding success.


Eagle Scouts Adam Beach, Stephen Bischoff and Garett LaChance take the Eagle Pledge.


Junior Assistant Scoutmaster Patrick Sandoval speaks at the court of honor. I also had the honor of speaking at his court of honor; his two older brothers were among the first five Scouts in Troop 798, and also are Eagle Scouts.

A plaque names all the Troop 798 Eagles: John Ballard 1998; Jeffrey Sandoval 1998; Steven Sandoval 1998; Brendan Eash 1999; Eric Gustafson 1999; Erik Rakus 1999; Patrick Sandoval 2005; Adam Beach 2007; Garett LaChance 2007; Stephen Bischoff 2007.

(Photos by Katherine Ranzenberger)

... and for a limited time only ...

Gee, earlier this year, Andrew got an invitation in the mail to apply to MIT.
What kind of invitations is Robert getting in the mail? Hmmm.
I wonder if anyone should tell the good people at Playboy that Robert is, um, 14.
Although that's a little older than I was when I first began, er, reading the articles. Yeah. That's right.
But Robert just shrugged when I pointed out that the offer included a DVD.
And his grandmother is worried about dirty pictures on the Internet.

Snowball fight!

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Happy holidays from all of us!

Faster, faster, faster

I just checked the speed of our high-speed connection from Lake Isabella, and I'm pleased.
That's a lot faster than when I checked it last March, shortly after it was installed. Not bad for the boonies, not bad at all.
This is one downside of moving to town. The Internet connectivity may not be as good.
There's always Charter Cable, but after listening to a myriad of complaints about the service, I think I'd rather revive the Verizon dial-up.
Verizon doesn't offer DSL in the new neighborhood. (What is WRONG with those people?)
There are a couple of wireless providers who might be able to provide a connection. We'll have to check.
Meanwhile, I like that speed from Winn Telecom's Motorola Canopy.

There’s no forgetting Christmas

It’s a quiet Christmas morning.
We’re still in Lake Isabella, which wasn’t the way the plan was originally made.
(Make plans. Don’t plan outcomes.)
The original plan called for us to close on the townhouse last week, make a mad scramble to move in, and celebrate Christmas at the new place.
That didn’t work.
We’re not really sure what happened, but the closing got hung up in legal stuff on the end of the townhouse seller. The sign on the townhouse porch’s railing says “sold,” but that’s not quite true.
We’ve had two closing dates, and they both fell apart at the last minute. Part of me wants to use the word “nightmare,” but that’s way, way too strong.
“Nightmare” is what I saw on the way back from learning that the latest closing date had evaporated: A medical helicopter swooping down to land at Central Michigan Community Hospital, preparing to take someone to a trauma center or neurological intensive-care unit. “Nightmare” is what happened to a 17-year-old Mt. Pleasant High School student on Christmas Eve, when he rolled his 2007 Ski-Doo at high speed and suffered severe facial injuries. That also involved a helicopter ride.
“Nightmare” is what happened in Martiny Township last night – a 34-year-old woman is in jail facing felonious assault charges after deputies answered a “shots fired” complaint. (Usually that kind of stuff doesn’t happen until Christmas night, after people have spent all day getting drunk with the relatives they don’t like.)
“Nightmare” is what I saw as I drove by the cemetery across the tracks from the newspaper on Christmas Eve – a burial. There were probably 100 people gathered in the snow around a new grave, laying to rest a loved one they obviously did like.
Business has been good for my friends in the funeral business the last week or so. On Christmas Eve, six brand-new obituaries popped into my inbox.
Those kinds of traumas will echo for a very long time down through the generations of many families.
My own grandfather died 15 years before I was born. Ordinarily, that would make him a vague, shadowy figure I never knew – but he died on Christmas Day. I have to look up and make sure of the dates of my father’s death, my mother’s death, my brother’s death. But there’s no forgetting Christmas, and despite – or maybe because of -- my parents’ best efforts, that sheen of sadness and loss still permeates the holiday.
It doesn’t help that I work in two industries – the media and education – both with insanely busy times during December. The year’s profit for a publication all comes in December – and the college semester ends in December. Even without the holiday, everything’s busy, exhausting and mentally draining.
Add on the expectation of a Sparkle City Christmas, and things move close to the edge. Now toss in a mortgage and a move. Those are listed by a lot of mental health professionals as almost as stressful as the death of a loved one, physical illness or trauma, or divorce.
No, this delay isn’t really a nightmare. Maybe it’s a salvation, keeping all our heads from exploding. The closing delay is a paperwork problem, and it’s someone else’s problem besides. It will work, but it takes patience.
But tell that to Kissy Missy, who had dreamed of a perfect Christmas in the new house. Tell that to Andrew, whose last Christmas at home will be among the boxes stacked in the living room. Tell that to Katherine and Robert.
So we’re still here at Lake Is, the living room stacked with boxes, half of our stuff inaccessible, the rest unlocateable in the turmoil. The decorations remain packed – they were supposed to go up at the new place.
There are such great expectations for Christmas – a perfect family, perfect cookies, perfect decorations to complement a perfect meal in a perfect house. Well, we didn’t make it this year.
But what we have is a white Christmas, gorgeous snow in the woods and the fields. We have quiet, instead of stress. We have gifts, not lavish, but gifts nonetheless. A ham will go in the oven, potatoes on the stove, and the house will be warm.
And perhaps the biggest gift of all: A chance to rest, recuperate, be with each other without deadlines, without schedules, without trauma and tension and tardiness.
Besides, now we have 365 ½ days (2008 is a leap year) to get the next one right.

Smile for the camera, Andrew

It's a day Andrew has been looking forward to all his life.
The braces are off.
When Andrew's adult teeth came in, they weren't nice to him. His cuspids were way too high, and the rest of his mouth just didn't cooperate.
He was always self-conscious about the way he looked, and as soon as it became feasible, it became orthodontics time.
A big part of me, the way that I was raised, viscerally objected to the whole idea of orthodontics. That was the echo of my own parents' attitudes about it, a certain Puritanism about something with cosmetic benefits. Well, I got over it, and the results are amazing. Andrew came out of the orthodontist's office with the largest smile I've ever seen.
He's spent the rest of the day smiling, and enjoying the taste and the feel of food without metal in the way.
He's still going to wear a retainer for some time, but mostly, he's enjoying that new smile, learning how to make that smile work.
It took patience, oral surgery and several years of tweaks and adjustments. It's done.
And it's paid for.

Ski season begins

Practice for the 2007-08 version of the Mt. Pleasant High School ski team began Monday, and Andrew's ready.
It's his senior year, he's got new skis, and he was running at the front of the pack Monday at the first "dry land" practice.
Malcolm Fox, whose son Ian is on the team, shot this video last February and forwarded it it us.
The first meet is set for Jan. 8.

New ACT scores: Way beyond wow!

Last April, we learned that Andrew had produced some phenomenal scores on the ACT examination. All Michigan high school students are required to take the ACT as part of a battery of tests during their junior years.
Andrew finished the ACT, but got sick during the rest of the exam and didn't take those portions.
Well, the state demanded that he take the whole thing, including re-taking the ACT. Hey, they were paying for it, and a couple of weeks ago, it was standardized test time.
Most of Andrew's ACT scores went up.
The results went from "beyond wow" to "way beyond wow."

Here are the old and new results:

Section...............Old Percentile Revised Percentile
Composite.........31......98..............32..........99
English..............29......93...............33..........98
Math..................28......92...............29..........94
Reading.............34......98...............31..........94
Science..............34......99...............36*........99
Eng/Writing.......27......85...............30.........n/a

*36 is a perfect score

"I feel so inadequate," Andrew said, with a twinkle in his eye.
"You failure!" his loving little sister chimed in. "You missed four points! You have such trouble with algebra and geometry!"
OK, so there was a member of the class of 2006 at Mt. Pleasant High who scored a perfect 36, one of only two in the state. She happens to be the daughter of one of my colleagues in the Journalism Department.
Andrew will just have to learn that good enough -- the 99th percentile -- is good enough.

Welcome to the future, Andrew

Andrew celebrated his 18th birthday on Thursday.
Wow.
The guy who would cuddle with me on the steps leading upstairs on the house on East Haley Street is an adult now. It's just amazing to me how things have changed.
He spent his 18th birthday being a whole lot more responsible than I was on mine. Back in the day, the drinking age was 18, so I spent the evening of my 18th birthday guzzling beer and puking on the dance floor at the old Alibi East. It was wonderful.
Yeah, right.
If someone, that very day, had told me I would have three sons, I would have believed them. If they would have told me what I'd be doing on my middle son's 18th birthday, I would simply have been confused.
I imagined what that conversation might be like:
VOICE OF THE FUTURE: When your middle son turns 18, you will be in Mt. Pleasant.
ME: You mean I'll never get out?
VOICE: You'll go to the Wayside. You'll have many adventures, but you'll return. And you'll be the editor of a Web site.
ME: The "editor" part I understand. What's a Web site?
VOICE: A piece of the World Wide Web, a computer network accessible from almost anywhere.
ME: Computer network ...

VOICE: People will read news, sports, see video images, look up information, buy, sell, even get dates, do almost anything from their personal computers.
ME: Personal ... computers?
VOICE: You, your wife, and each of your children will each have their own personal computer at home.
ME: R..i..g..h..t. Will we have room for anything else?




VOICE: A big part of your job will be to shoot television pictures with a hand-held camera and videotape machine.
ME: Hand-held. Um, that's tough to imagine.
VOICE: The camera and videotape recorder will fit into your hand.
ME: How big will my hands be by then?
VOICE: And you'll edit the footage on a personal computer, and put it on your Web site.
ME: R..i..g..h..t. What was in that beer?
VOICE: You'll be exploring ways to deliver news via text message.
ME: Text ... message.
VOICE: Information that appears on the screens of people's telephones.

ME: Telephones will have screens? Like the PicturePhone?

VOICE: Not exactly. You'll carry your phone in your pocket.
ME: Uh, huh. Those will have to be big pockets.
VOICE: And you can take pictures and videos with it.
ME: With a phone? Ummmmm ...
VOICE: And you'll write about your life on your blog.
ME: My ... blog. And I suppose it'll be OK to show my, um, blog in public.
VOICE: Of course. Your family and friends will eagerly look forward to seeing it. It will be on the World Wide Web. People will Google it.
ME: I don't even want to know ...

Welcome to the future, Andrew. Embrace it. But however it turns out, it won't be like we imagine it.

Ski season approaches

It's almost Christmas with Guns -- Andrew's birthday -- and that means that ski season isn't far behind.
Andrew's got a new set of skis again this winter. That wasn't part of the original plan, but his fabulous racing skis got ripped off near the end of last season.
We might have paid a $500 deductible and replaced them, but Andrew had a different idea: Shop carefully.
He ended up with a never-used, but out-of-production model, and paid stunningly little for them. The bindings that came with the skis probably would cost more than what he paid for the entire package.
When ski season begins, he'll be ready. It's his senior year, and he's got great hopes.

We want you, Andrew

The telephone call - clearly from a nice, cute-sounding student employee -- was excited and joyful. She left the message that Andrew had been accepted to Central Michigan University!
Yeah. OK. Um ...


Andrew didn't apply to CMU.
Well, yes, he did, as a dual-enrollment student, and he was accepted as one. He already is a CMU student, listed officially as a freshman, taking college-level German. He has a CMich e-mail address, a CMich global identifier, a CMich student i.d.
In order to get those, he had to submit an application last spring, so perhaps they've decided that yes, they would allow him to take more classes this fall. But he didn't ask THAT question.
Still, it's nice to have more than one option.
Fire up, Andrew! Go Chips!

Life after band

The Oiler band turned in the best score it's had in years -- 73.65 -- at the state Flight III band championships at Ford Field Saturday night.


The performance was crisp and tight. The musicianship was top-notch. The guard turned in its best performance of the year.
Everything went right. The Oilers finished eighth.

















The competition has become extremely intense in Flight III. Last year, that 73.65 would have been good enough for fourth place. This year, four bands broke 80 with beautifully choreographed, beautifully written and performed shows that were a true joy to behold.
The young Oilers had a great time.

The show was about being there, provoking crowd reaction, and the crowd in the stands loved it. The familiar strains of "Another Brick in the Wall" and "Comfortably Numb" got the crowd moving -- and the sophisticated rock'n'roll drew the people in. They bought it.
It was a great show.

Here are the final standings in the Michigan Competing Bands Association 2007 Flight III competition:
1. Ferndale.............................86.85
2. Stevensville Lakeshore.......85.55
3. Grand Rapids Northview.....83.8
4. Farmington Hills Harrison...81.7
5. Marysville ...........................78.4
6. Allegan................................75.7
7. Byron Center ......................75.4
8. Mount Pleasant .............73.65
9. Redford Thurston...............72.75
10.Fruitport.............................72.3

One show to go

The band invited the community to come to Community Memorial Stadium for a performance of "Socially Numb," and the performance was amazing.
"Well, it could have been better," Robert said. That's always his attitude.
About 150 people were in the stands for what might have been the rightest, tightest, most dynamic performance yet. Kissy Missy, Andrew and I watched from the press box, and the sound was just amazing.
They've added a few new wrinkles, and the show reached the point where it should be -- it brought tears to my eyes.
Band Director Matt Taton says he's approaching this as just another chance to perform, a bonus, and extra show.
Even if it's in front of a few thousand people at Ford Field.
More later from Dee-troit.

It's finals day

The band is psyched.
After what might have been one of the best practices of the year, the Oiler band is ready for one more road trip -- to the state band championships at Ford Field.

First up today is a community performance. That's at 10 a.m. at Community Memorial Stadium. Then it's on to downtown Dee-troit. The Oilers' performance is set for 5:20 p.m. Awards are at 8.

Kissy Missy and I will make the trip to Detroit. Andrew's staying here. He's the technical director for the school play, "The Foreigner," which debuted last night.

In all cases, the show must go on.