Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I came home from Pennsylvania on Saturday, which stands as one of the harder things that I’ve had to do. My aunt’s condition has been up and down. While I was there she was lucid, eating and drinking a little, watching the Phillies beat up St. Louis, and ornery (she complained to the nurses that [...]

I rolled into Lancaster, PA about 3:30 last night. I’m staying with my aunt for a while (see my sister’s post for why). Road food for a six hour drive that commences at 9 pm? Three Cokes, a bag of peanut M&Ms, and a small bag of mixed nuts and fruit. And water to dilute [...]

Looks like the hosting provider for the Brackbill Wiki, my extended genealogy site, is temporarily offline because of a move. I’ll post another note when it comes back online.

When my grandfather passed away in January, I made a resolution that I would do what I could to ensure that he was not forgotten and that my descendants would know about him. So I started a little project that blossomed. The Brackbill Wiki is a set of pages I set up to collect family [...]

My grandfather worked at an old fashioned water-powered mill, making flour and animal feed for the county, during the first years of his post-college life and of his marriage. The family has always known where the mill was—right around the corner from the Brackbill farm—but not what has become of it in its post-mill existence. [...]

There are three texts that have been in my mind since my grandfather’s funeral service today. One, the morbidly funny Laurie Anderson line from “Gravity’s Angel”: And at his funeral all his friends stood around looking said. But they were really thinking of all the ham and cheese sandwiches in the next room. And everybody [...]

I got a call from my mother this morning informing me that my grandfather, Herman Brackbill, passed away earlier today at the age of 90. He would have been 91 next month. As regular readers of my blog know, my grandfather’s health hasn’t been that great over the past few years, and it took a [...]

I uploaded a bunch of photos last night to Flickr, including some from our vacation in North Carolina: some purely family photos and one large set of a visit to the place I will always remember as Grandmother Jarrett’s house. As you can see in the photos, it’s not really a house so much as [...]

To those of you who know what’s going on with me and Lisa: all is well with our world. To the rest: you’ll find out soon enough. But here’s a note from last year’s Christmas mix to tide you over: I heard the bells on Christmas day Their old familiar carols play, And wild and [...]

Reading today’s Cary Tennis advice column (one of my guilty pleasures, btw), “Does less of a paycheck make him less of a man?,” I find myself thankful for how lucky I really am. When I was between jobs after moving back east, it was extremely difficult. Financially it was OK, though not great; Lisa was [...]

Since I’m still on the road, I would like to take a moment to say a quick word to my wife on our 9th wedding anniversary: it feels like it was just yesterday, and it feels like it has been since the beginning of time. Happy anniversary, dear, and I’ll call later.

New on Flickr, a set of photos from the Brackbill picnic. I was in more of a hurry than last year, since I had a long drive ahead of me, but I managed to capture a few things. One that surprised me was how many kids there were… and how grown up they were. This [...]

Continuing the festschrift in honor of my parents’ 35th wedding anniversary, as started on my sister’s blog: …erm, well, no one could possibly have said it better than my sister did. But I’ll just say this: When I think about how two unpretentious farm kids from opposite sides of the Mason Dixon line managed to [...]

I had a great weekend in Pennsylvania with my parents and my grandfather. I’ve written a bit about his health from time to time on the blog: the stroke, his struggles with diabetes. When I saw him last summer he was withdrawn and uncommunicative, and had trouble moving, though he did respond when I talked [...]

My wife decided to surprise me last night. We won’t be able to spend Valentine’s Day together this year—I will be at the Pink Elephant IT Service Management Conference—so she decided that we would celebrate it last night. I had already been planning to grill some steaks, but she added a surprise to the mix: [...]