Kathy grew up in New York in a neighborhood where fireworks were not permitted. As a result, though she and the kids have all enjoyed professional firework shows from a safe distance, none of them had ever visited the roadside fireworks stand and loaded up on black powder fueled fun. This year, I decided that we should remedy that sad deficit, and stopped with Kathy on a recent date to blow a bit of money on pyrotechnics.

One of the interesting things about this area is that twice a year, like mushrooms after a rain, several “Fireworks Superstores” spring up along Interstate 35. I’d never been in one of these warehouse-sized stores, since when growing up, we always bought our arsenal at whatever roadside stand had the best coupons in TV Guide that week. Kathy and I stopped in to see what the huge stores were like, and were rather daunted by the high-end supplies available there. From $100 wagon wheel-sized rolls of Black Cat firecrackers to the $230 finale display with customizable fuse connections to the Nascar-themed tailgate party package, the place was pretty amazing. The addition of chain-link fencing that separates customers from the merchandise and the local Christian radio station blaring praise music in the background only added to the surreal quality of the scene.

Though we were thoroughly impressed by our visit to the Fireworks Superstore, we decided that the $15 we were willing to spend would go a lot further at the nearby stand. The proprietors had laid out a sidewalk of plastic sheeting to permit customers to stay clean in spite of the recent rains which had turned the ground into a morass. The young lady who was helping us seemed a bit bemused by my enthusiastic grin as I reacquainted myself with some old favorites — blooming ground flowers, snakes, satellites, fountains, smoke balls, firecrackers, sparklers, roman candles, and pressure caps (the little ones that make a loud pop when you toss them on the ground). We hauled the whole mess home, and enjoyed an hour together setting off the more discreet ones in the backyard, hose at the ready.

The kids were enchanted, running around with sparklers waving, planting smoke balls in various places around the backyard, setting up snakes, adjusting the fins on the satellites for maximum lift, and tossing caps at each other’s feet. Kathy, Dan and I took turns lighting things for the kids and trying to take photos of the various things we were setting off. (The blooming ground flowers were special favorites, as the sparks shooting out looked really impressive.) We wrapped up with a crowd favorite –the Killer Bee, a fountain with whistling “bees” on the side which Kathy had picked.

We later went to the city show which, due to an amazing number of mosquitos, the crowds and traffic, and its meager nine-minute length, was universally voted a disappointment after our first family firework experience.

Ultima Online: Odyssey (inexplicably abbreviated “UXO”) was to be the Next Big Thing in massively multiplayer online gaming from Origin. It had been in development for quite a time when EA moved operations to California and terminated nearly all the developers. The other shoe dropped today when EA announced UXO’s cancellation. Oddly, they didn’t do so with a press release, but left it to the project lead, who put a small note on the UXO website.

Ironically, EA has been down this road before. When I first came onboard, Origin was busily working on UO2, which was summarily cancelled and its developers released just in time for Richard Garriot to hire back all his old developer friends at his new company. Hopefully the vagaries of project management will be kinder to my friends who decided to go to California with EA and continue working on the existing Ultima Online and its forthcoming expansions.

I finally got some problems with my GPS software worked out, and while I’m in no danger of putting my friend Kelly Hendrick out of the map-making business, I was pleased to finally be able to plot Daniel’s and my route on our Geocaching adventure of a couple weeks back:

Yesterday we all went down to San Antonio to spend some time with Dad McMains. He’s glad to be back home, and has been repeatedly surprised with the number of people who have come from various quarters to lend aid and support. Many folks for whom Dad did some small favor many years back have sent flowers and cards, shown up at the hospital and at home, and volunteered to help with typing and paperwork. Closer friends have stopped by to install blinds in the bedroom, offered to help drive Dad around, and have stocked the freezer to help ease things for the family.

One of the risk factors for stroke that Dad showed was high blood pressure. In order to get that down and reduce the risk of recurrence, Dad’s going on a low-sodium diet. There’s a phenomenal amount of sodium on the average American’s menu, so this represents a pretty significant change in eating habits for him, as it would for most of us. We sampled his no-salt sesame sticks (not bad), no-salt tortilla chips (rather worse), and his potassium-based table salt substitute (altogether funky). I made some salsa without salt for him while we were there to help blunt the blandness of the tortilla chips.

Another aspect of the blood pressure control regimen is regular exercise. Toward that end, we all went out for a walk through the neighborhood about an hour before dusk last night. Liam was holding hands with both Dad and I as we walked. Occasionally, as children do, he would pick up both feet so we’d lift him, the load split between me and my father, and carry him for a few steps before setting him down again. Then, he’d start kicking both feet up in the air, and Dad would give him a little push so that his center of gravity would make it over the top, and he’d do a backflip before landing again.

And suddenly, I was immensely grateful for this moment: walking side by side with the father whom I love, splitting the load of carrying my boy, three generations enjoying the coolness of the evening and the closeness of family. The recentness of the stroke only brought home again the fact that, in spite of what we often fool ourselves into believing, we’re not ultimately in control of our own lives. That knowledge makes the times like these that we do have that much sweeter, and imparts a sense of urgency to the task of making sure the things we should say don’t go unsaid.

To that end: I love you Dad, admire you, and I’m awfully glad we get to enjoy this chapter of our lives together.

Dad was checked out of the hospital this morning, and is back home as of lunchtime. It looks like the loss of most of the right side of his visual field may be permanent, though there’s some chance that it will improve over the next 12 to 18 months.

Please keep him in your prayers as he recovers and figures out what effect this will have on his plans for the next several years. This is all still sinking in for all of us.

Tuesday morning my Dad had a stroke.

A stroke is a failure of the circulatory system to deliver blood to a section of the brain, either because of a clot or a burst blood vessel. In this case, the section of my Dad’s brain that was affected was the vision center — he lost much of the right side of his field of vision. There’s a chance that some of his field of vision will return, but if it doesn’t happen in the next 24 hours, the loss will probably be permanent. Because my Dad is subject to migraines with aura, which (like mine) manifest as a temporary loss of vision, he initially thought the stroke was just of those, and didn’t consider getting treatment until the critical first hour was already past.

We’re very grateful that things weren’t worse. Stroke can cause motor impairment, mental problems, memory loss, and difficulties with speech. I was relieved when I got to my Dad’s house to see that he was otherwise in good condition, moving around without difficulty, speaking lucidly, and maintaining a sense of humor about the whole experience. While vision loss is a wretched thing to have to live with, it’s the stroke symptom to which sufferers can most readily adjust.

We checked Dad into the hospital for the night so that they could keep a good eye on him, but it appears that he’ll probably be discharged today after they run an MRI on him to determine whether the cause was a clot or a burst blood vessel. (The treatments for these are different: blood clots can be prevented with blood thinning agents, which would be counterproductive if the brain was already hemorrhaging.)

I’ll provide an update when I know more. In the meantime, you can learn about how to recognize stroke at the American Stroke Organization.

Friday night, I took the kids for our first visit to The Corral Theatre in nearby Wimberley to see Shrek 2. The Corral is an outdoor theater with a single, big screen made from painted plywood, vintage carbon arc projectors, and actual, honest-to-goodness, reasonably-priced concessions. I’d read about the Theatre a while back, and had wanted to bring the kids out ever since, so was pretty excited to actually be making the trek at last.

We arrived without incident, and were instantly charmed with the place. Old, listing wood slat fences surround the place; seating consists of rows and rows of metal lawn chairs and bleachers that look as though they were rescued from a high school practice field; horses from the adjacent ranch stalk the periphery and peek in through knotholes, and the students who work there are courteous and friendly.

We had arrived an hour before showtime, which turned out to be a good thing, as by the time dusk fell, the place was packed. In addition to all the provided seating, many people brought their own chairs and blankets, and some enterprising high school students had brought about 20 boxes of pizza, which they were selling to the crowd for $2 per slice. The high schoolers sitting next to us on the bleachers kept slipping money to a grateful Liam, who would immediately go spend it on candy at the concession stand.

We had a great time at the theater, and look forward to a return visit soon. (For more about the place, see the Houston Chronicle’s article.)

Daniel and I hit the Geocaching trail for the first time in a few months yesterday. We went to find a San Marcos cache that we’d never been to before. Unfortunately, we chose the absolute wrong way in, and had to cross several barbed wire fences and shed a not insignificant amount of blood before we finally found the place. On the way out, we actually followed the roadway that the instructions referenced, and it was blissfully easy.

Good to be back caching again; it’s a great way to kill some stress when my inner introvert has had a bit too much stimulation, and I’m discovering parts of San Marcos and Texas I had no idea existed.

My buddy David went to the opening of the new Apple store at Barton Creek Mall this morning. (An Apple store in Central Texas is long overdue, as far as I’m concerned.) David took a few minutes to start a video chat session with me from there so that I could vicariously take part it the revelries. I held up a magic markered “Hello Apple Geeks!” sign for the benefit of the crowd, a few of whom got a good chuckle out of it. The mob looked excited, and the store looked great — I’ll have to make a pilgrimage soon. (Ironically, the store is right on the way to my old job, so would have been much easier for me to get to several months before it actually opened.)

Thanks to Jason, I now have a Gmail account to play with. (Gmail is Google’s in-testing web mail service, which provides a full gig of storage and strong information management features, as one would expect from Google.) If you want to help me try it out, shoot me a mail at seanmctex@gmail.com . (Yes, that’s an open invitation, Spambots — let’s test their Spam filtering too!)