After your tenth anniversary at my company, you get 20 vacation days per year (plus personal days and comps for travel). After your eleventh anniversary, you get a little sadder.
What it is: 5/12/08
What I’m reading: Lush Life
What I’m listening to: Rain
What I’m watching: More NBA playoffs and the third season of The Wire
What I’m drinking: Brooklyn Brewery Summer Ale.
Where I’m going: Nowhere!
What I’m happy about: That lunch on Friday still seems pretty awesome to me.
What I’m sad about: That I had to mute the broadcast of the Lakers-Jazz game on Sunday after Mike Tirico had to deliver an extended shill for the new installment of High School Musical . . . and two of its stars happen to be sitting right next to us at courtside! Great corporate synergy, DisneyABCESPN. You probably managed to ensnare a whole new audience for High School Musical: you know, hardcore hoops fans who blew off Mothers Day to watch an NBA playoff game.
What I’m pondering: A whole ton of gardening/landscaping issues, now that the tree removal guys have done their business.
Friendship, character . . . rebounding
Separated at birth: Charles Barkley from tonight’s TNT NBA playoff pregame show, and Jon Polito (as Johnny Caspar in Miller’s Crossing).
“I’m a sporting man. I like to lay the occasional bet.”
We are the goon squad and we’re coming to town
Do fashion detectives get promoted from the rank-and-file of the fashion police?
Ya got MY vote!
The government of France and Italy are clearly waging a massive buildup . . . of hot chicks!
In response to Nicholas Sarkozy’s romance and wedding with hottie Carla Bruni, recently-restored-to-power Silvio Berlusconi appointed Mara Cafagna to the obviously BS cabinet post of equal opportunities minister!
How do you say, “She has a position on my staff,” in Italian?
It’s such a perfect day, I’m glad I spent it with me
Today I decided to have lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, A Mano, an upscale Neapolitan pizza place in Ridgewood, NJ. I got there around 2pm, in the midst of a typhoon (nice day to start our Friday summer hours: 50 degrees and pouring). I opened the door, and saw there wasn’t a single customer inside. A waitress stepped out from the back office. I asked, “You open?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Come on in.”
I sat down at a table, ordered my favorite pizza (the A Mano: bufula mozzarella, prosciutto di Parma, arugula, cherry tomatoes, shaved gran cru, and extra virgin olive oil), watched the cook head over to the wood-burning oven to get my pie started, and listened to nobody.
I thought, “Of the top 10 things I love in this world, I have to include
- fantastic NJ pizza and
- not having to listen to another human being.”
The pizza didn’t take them too long. It was as wonderful as I expected. As I finished it, the waitress came by to ask if I needed anything.
I should’ve asked her to play a Sam Cooke CD on an infinite loop. That’s about the only way the moment would’ve been better.
Unrequired Reading: May 9, 2008
My office decided to go with Friday summer hours (8am-1pm) a few weeks early! We rock! Now enjoy some Unrequired Reading, especially those of you who have to work a full day!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: May 9, 2008”
Blood club
Here’s an update to last week’s call for blood and/or platelet donation for Nathanael Sandstrom, a young (well, my age) man suffering from lymphoma at Sloan-Kettering in NYC. It’s from his wife, and was passed to me via my pal Elayne, who first sent out the call to all VM friends:
A bit of good news: it seems that the doctors have a dignosis and treatment that they feel confident about. Last week, a new doctor came on the case and suggested histiocytosis as the bone marrow disease that has been keeping Nathanael’s blood counts so low and making him so sick for so long. Histiocytosis is an extremely rare condition, usually found in children, in which histiocytes attack white blood cells and platelets. There have only been 2 cases at MSK in the last 10+ years that our doctor is aware of, and so she consults with the authority who is based in Houston. Apparently (in Nate’s case) the disease results somehow from the original lymphoma.
The 8-week treatment for it (combination of steroids, antibiotics, and a new chemotherapy) has been working, albeit slowly, and so Nathanael has been feeling and seeming much better. In the last few months he’s lost a huge amount of weight and most of his muscle mass, so he’s now focused on rehabing his body. If the trend of the treatment stays positive, he may be able to leave the hospital within the next couple of weeks for an outpatient period. After that, he’ll need to go back in for a bone marrow transplant to replace his immune system. That transplant will be used to ultimately defeat the histiocytosis but also to consolidate the treatment for the original cancer.
This sounds like a lot and it is, and so Nate is just looking forward to getting strong enough to be out of the hospital for a little while.
We are deeply thankful to everyone who has donated blood or platelets here in NY; friends, family, colleagues, and people we’ve never even met but who make the trip and the effort on Nate’s behalf. We are deeply moved.
And thanks to everyone for notes, calls, thoughts and prayers, which sustain us on a daily basis.
Onward. xoxo
Get low
Happy 60th anniversary week, Israel!
Photo of the Dead Sea by xnir. As he put it:
The Dead Sea is a salt lake between the West Bank and Israel to the west, and Jordan to the east. At 420 metres (1,378 ft) below sea level, its shores are the lowest point on Earth that are on dry land. At 330 m deep (1,083 feet), the Dead Sea is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world.
You stay classy, Atlanta!
I’ve referred to Charles Barkley as a knucklehead for years. I was wrong; he’s a dumbass.