Recently in Personal Category
Any suggestions on places my first born (he's 19, will be 20 in June) can look for a summer gig/internship appropriate to his major in New Orleans?
He's finishing his sophomore year at Ga Tech in Nuclear Engineering. Given how narrow a field that is, any sort of internship or summer gig that is appropriate to an engineer of any major would work. So long as it doesn't involve asking "would you like fries with that?"
Comment here or drop me a note edward@ebranley.com if you know someone I can kick his resume to. Thanks!
I don't usually do all that much navel-gazing here in the blog, mainly because I do that in my LiveJournal. With Ashley's funeral on Friday, I wanted to explain why I wasn't all that sociable to folks who were there.
I only knew Ashley through his blog, so I didn't have the same personal attachment and affection so many of you do. Still, he was a helluva guy, I loved reading his tirades, and I have a soft spot in my heart for die-hard Saints fans. I wanted to honor his life, family and friends, so off to Schoen's on Canal I went.
I forgot how much I don't like that place.
I'm not one who flinches at funerals, to be sure. My dad's family passed on the Irish perspective on death to me, and I'm thankful for that. I enjoy being a part of Louisiana Relief Lodge #1, helping to do the Masonic Burial Service for members of the Fraternity whose families request it. I can go to Schoen as an unattached observer at that point--get in, do business, and leave. It's when I go into that chapel and sit that I don't do well.
With the exception of my daddy (Lamana-Panno-Fallo on Vets took care of him), every member of my family that's passed has gone through Schoen's on Canal. We grew up down the street from some of the Schoens, my mama went to school with others, well, you get the idea. I was always OK at funerals until we lost our daughter.
This story is on my LiveJournal as a "memory" post (so please bear with me, LJers, since I'm cross-posting), but I don't remember if I've ever told it in my "public" blog. I talk regularly about my two boys here, Justin, who is 19 and now goes to school at GaTech in Atlanta, and Kevin, 13, who is an eighth grader at Brother Martin. We had a child in between the boys, my little girl, Kathleen.
While carrying Kathleen, my wife suffered a placental abruption that sent her into contractions at 24 weeks. Her doctor tried to settle them down with drugs, while also giving her steroids, anticipating a premature birth and hoping to boost the baby's development. My wife's condition got worse, combined with a very unusual reaction to the anti-contraction drug (forget the name of it now), and it wasn't looking good for either mom or baby. At that point, her water broke, so we never got to the either/or choice point. Kathleen Elizabeth was born on 2-July-1990 at 25 weeks, all of one pound. She spent the next five months in the NICU at Lakeside Hospital, and we brought her home on oxygen just before Christmas. She had surgery twice over that next year, but was still diagnosed as "failing to thirve." Always struggling to breath, her little heart gave out on 10-December, 1991.
We'd always gone through Schoen, and so did wife's family, so that's naturally who I called. They took care of everything, and we buried her two days later. We had a funeral Mass in the Schoen chapel, and I put her little casket into a gorgeous tomb with rose-colored marble columns in Metairie Cemetery that afternoon.
Five years later, I still had trouble going into that chapel to see my mama off. It wasn't much better last Friday. I'm OK with cemeteries, particularly St. Louis #3, but I was pretty wigged out by the funeral home, so I really wasn't up to sending Ashley off in style, so I left it to his close friends.
But that was last week, it's time to carry on and make sure the city goes forward for my family, yours, and Ashley's.
I've turned off comments on this post.
I only knew Ashley through his blog, so I didn't have the same personal attachment and affection so many of you do. Still, he was a helluva guy, I loved reading his tirades, and I have a soft spot in my heart for die-hard Saints fans. I wanted to honor his life, family and friends, so off to Schoen's on Canal I went.
I forgot how much I don't like that place.
I'm not one who flinches at funerals, to be sure. My dad's family passed on the Irish perspective on death to me, and I'm thankful for that. I enjoy being a part of Louisiana Relief Lodge #1, helping to do the Masonic Burial Service for members of the Fraternity whose families request it. I can go to Schoen as an unattached observer at that point--get in, do business, and leave. It's when I go into that chapel and sit that I don't do well.
With the exception of my daddy (Lamana-Panno-Fallo on Vets took care of him), every member of my family that's passed has gone through Schoen's on Canal. We grew up down the street from some of the Schoens, my mama went to school with others, well, you get the idea. I was always OK at funerals until we lost our daughter.
This story is on my LiveJournal as a "memory" post (so please bear with me, LJers, since I'm cross-posting), but I don't remember if I've ever told it in my "public" blog. I talk regularly about my two boys here, Justin, who is 19 and now goes to school at GaTech in Atlanta, and Kevin, 13, who is an eighth grader at Brother Martin. We had a child in between the boys, my little girl, Kathleen.
While carrying Kathleen, my wife suffered a placental abruption that sent her into contractions at 24 weeks. Her doctor tried to settle them down with drugs, while also giving her steroids, anticipating a premature birth and hoping to boost the baby's development. My wife's condition got worse, combined with a very unusual reaction to the anti-contraction drug (forget the name of it now), and it wasn't looking good for either mom or baby. At that point, her water broke, so we never got to the either/or choice point. Kathleen Elizabeth was born on 2-July-1990 at 25 weeks, all of one pound. She spent the next five months in the NICU at Lakeside Hospital, and we brought her home on oxygen just before Christmas. She had surgery twice over that next year, but was still diagnosed as "failing to thirve." Always struggling to breath, her little heart gave out on 10-December, 1991.
We'd always gone through Schoen, and so did wife's family, so that's naturally who I called. They took care of everything, and we buried her two days later. We had a funeral Mass in the Schoen chapel, and I put her little casket into a gorgeous tomb with rose-colored marble columns in Metairie Cemetery that afternoon.
Five years later, I still had trouble going into that chapel to see my mama off. It wasn't much better last Friday. I'm OK with cemeteries, particularly St. Louis #3, but I was pretty wigged out by the funeral home, so I really wasn't up to sending Ashley off in style, so I left it to his close friends.
But that was last week, it's time to carry on and make sure the city goes forward for my family, yours, and Ashley's.
I've turned off comments on this post.
these are the lilies I ordered from FTD.com and sent to wife at her office yesterday...
because it would work well for me personally. Delta is where I'm "Platinum Medallion" in terms of FF status, and Northwest is part of SkyTeam, the airline alliance to which Delta belongs, so I've flown NWA to get to Singapore and Japan. Still, I understand why the pilots are at odds:
Merger talks between Delta and Northwest — the nation's third and fifth largest airlines — could be over. Executives at the two airlines had hoped that their pilots would agree on labor issues before proceeding with a deal. But Delta's pilots just told their bosses that they reached an impasse with Northwest pilots over the critical issue of seniority.The days when an USAF pilot or USN/USMC aviator could do their 6-8 years in the service and get a good job with a major airline are long gone. New pilots have to start out with regional carriers that pay less than $20K/year, then hope they move up through the ranks to get to the big leagues. The guys in The Show have seniority with their respective carrier. If you mix the workforces, clearly 50% of those folks get bumped down. Even though the merger would have made the largest airline in the world, there's no way they would grow their way out of the seniority problem. I don't know what can be done to convince them all it's a good idea, which is a shame. With NWA's Asian routes and DL's domestic flights, as well as the fact that NWA is affiliated with KLM (great for getting to Amsterdam), I'd be in really good shape.
