The week that was

Happy Friday, friends.  I hope it’s been a good week.

Last week I was away on a business trip that involved two full days of travel, bookending a day of meetings at my employer’s location in northwest Indiana, not all that far from Chicago (and no, I didn’t have occasion to travel into the city).  

This week was a little more typical for me, with three days of day travel, home every night.  But prior to that, I spent a little better than two hours at my dentist’s office getting a broken tooth crowned.  Fascinating process, whereby the dental office has a machine that make a crown in about an hour, based on a high quality scan of the area to be crowned.  I was pretty impressed, and happy not to go through the traditional process of temporary crowns, impressions and at least one return trip for installation of the permanent crown.  So that was good.

It’s the second week of Lent, my wife’s least favorite six weeks of the year.  She is a devout Catholic and I’m not, but I have always tried to be observant of the customs required by the faith.  And during Lent, Catholics abstain from consuming meat on Fridays.  Therein lies the problem, as my wife dislikes fish in nearly all forms.

Over the years of our marriage (36 years this coming July 4) we have found a few alternatives, which include McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish sandwich (invented by a franchisee in Cincinnati who was getting crushed on Lenten Fridays by a Frisch’s Big Boy across the street), a local restaurant’s fish and chips, a local Asian place’s vegetarian fried rice and a couple of other alternatives.

Last year we bought beer battered frozen cod fillets at Costco and they were very good, but on our last trip they didn’t have those.  So we bought the same company’s fish sticks, which we had also had but my wife liked less.  Having those tonight, so keep your fingers crossed that it goes well.

Happy that the leadership of Major League Baseball and their players’ association reached a labor agreement after a lockout that lasted approximately 100 days.  Shame on these billionaires and millionaires for squabbling when everyone is making plenty of money.  The season will still be 162 games but will start a little late.  So now I can start worrying about the Cincinnati Reds and where they fit into things, having lost three key members of last year’s team to free agency and trades.

Speaking of trades, if you follow the NFL you know that the Denver Broncos finally acquired a quarterback to fit their aspirations, trading for Russell Wilson following ten years with the Seattle Seahawks.  He led that team to two Super Bowls, winning one against the Broncos, and is an established leader in the sport and by all accounts a good guy.  Sounds a lot like Peyton Manning when he came to the Broncos.  All he did was take them to the playoffs three years, to two Super Bowls and winning one.  Perhaps history repeats itself.

I don’t think there’s much I can say about what’s happening in Ukraine that has not already been said or written.  It’s just awful that millions of innocents are being driven from their homeland—many of them children—by the egotistical actions of an imbalanced leader.  I’ve felt rather helpless in the face of what’s reported and my wife and I decided that perhaps we should do something, so decided to send a donation to UNICEF.  It’s not nearly enough but hopefully others are doing likewise and the sum collected will be helpful.

Finally, we have warm weather here in central Kentucky, but tonight we get rain and plummeting temperatures and likely some SNOW.  As they say, if you don’t like the weather in Kentucky, give it twenty minutes and it will change!