Month: September 2026

September 15, 2026 – Was It Just Me Or Am I Just Getting Old?

September 15, 2026 /

Last Friday was the 25th anniversary of 9/11. For those of us that were around, it was an extremely impactful event. I was at a class learning about Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) in Charlotte, NC. We didn’t have a phone or access to constant media and so news mostly came through the grapevine. Somebody called the office and was notified by a coworker. It wasn’t until my drive home after work that I got some talk radio input about what was actually happening.

I spoke to my wife before I left and she had heard in kind of the same fashion that I did. We met at home around typical dinner time and turned on the TV. A fellow co-worker from Oregon was working his notice and moving back home called me. His TV was already packed up and asked if he could come over and watch the news. Of course we said yes, we were a country in shock and looking for answers.

The vision I will never get out of my head was the guy that decided to jump to his death from Tower 2 rather than get burned by fire. It was the front page picture on the Charlotte Observer the next day but of course it we saw the video on the news. For some people, it was so devastating that people like Peter Jennings of ABC news took up smoking again to die from lung cancer four years later.

I will never forget that the world almost stopped. The stock market took a week long hiatus and NFL games were cancelled. Of course all flights were cancelled for three days and even my wife was dismissed from work for the remainder of the week. The roads and skies were quiet, the weather was pleasant and it was just dead still.

I of course continued my class and my business didn’t stop. But, the company owners did something that almost everyone felt. They handed out bumper stickers that said “Proud to be American”. Overnight the American flag was added to every car and displayed home. I kind of felt like if your flag wasn’t visible, you were subject to ‘stink eye’ and your patriotism was in question.

There was a lot of anger. In my circle, blue collar South Carolina, revenge was highly desired. I personally felt like there was nothing to justify killing 2000 innocent civilians but I could certainly understand the anger towards the United States for imperialism, political manipulation and pseudo subjugation. There was also a lot of complicity. People were so shocked and even unified that they were willing to give up first amendment rights in the name of empathy. They accepted creation of Homeland Security and voluntary vehicle searches at the airport.

I don’t like a lot of what happened post 9/11. I don’t like the Patriot Act, the growth of government for false security or an 18 year war of futility. But you cannot beat the feeling that we as a nation had on September 12th. We were truly indivisible as people.

The event of September ended the lives of 2977 people. It effected an unofficial count of 4000-5000 people from secondary illnesses. 7073 soldiers were killed and 50,563 wounded in the middle east conflict as a result of vengnece. 7800 military contractors were killed and 1464 allied troops lost their lives in the conflict. It is estimated that nearly one million civilians died from the warfare. Another estimate of 500,000 cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) were resulting from service. I personally know of one suicide resulting from post war PTSD but I am confident that have been many more.

What I really wanted to talk abut today was the lack of remembrance. I saw a handful of articles on my Windows newsfeed but nothing like I was expecting. I thought it was going to be all day long, but it really wasn’t. I suppose I cannot blame people for not being to relate. It is like my relationship to December 7, 1941. That was something that happened 34 years before I was born. I wasn’t there, I didn’t live through it. How can I possibly relate?

I will live the rest of my life with the image of the office worker jumping out of the window. But, I was 26. My Dad is 80 now, my in-laws both passed on. We are quickly getting to the time that we were too young to be impacted or too old to do anything about it. The deeply personal impact it once had has faded with time.

End Your Programming Routine: Yes, we have a lot of problems and many of the are self-inflicted. New York City elects a self proclaimed Islamic fundamentalist and socialist and then wants to complain that he attends the 9/11 commemoration. We keep thinking that if we vote harder, this problem will get resolved. We forget those days like September 12, 2001 when we were all proud to be American regardless of how we got there. That is the spirit of Do Things that Matter.

September 1, 2026 – One Last Sunset

September 1, 2026 /

I have written about my dog Raya from time to time. She is a Covid dog, we recieved her in the early days of the lockdown June 2019. We had already paid a deposit for her in December 2018, long before the craziness of the period were known and it was trendy to get a dog since everyone was home without anything to do. Because of that, she spent her first year pretty isolated from the world except for interaction with the family.

Little did I know that isolation made her pretty skittish. I remember the first vet trip, we handed the vet tech the leash on the sidewalk and she was drug into the clinic while we waited outside. Because of that, she was initially labelled an ‘aggresive’ dog and required a muzzle for the first three years. Time has gotten her more accustomed to strangers and my trip to the vest last week there was no mention of muzzle at all.

Speaking of trips to the veterinarian, we observed some pretty rapid change of behavior about two weeks ago. My wife took an impromptu trip to the local casino and I was sleeping. I left the bedroom door open because that is what I do when she is gone at night. About three in the morning Raya started whining. I thought that my wife had finally arrived home but when I got up, she tore downstairs and so I followed. Quickly, I got the point that she wanted to go outside. I didn’t think anyone was outside because Raya typically barks rather than trying to get confrontational. But I watched out the window just in case there was a bear or a prowler or something nefarious. I saw her immediately run to the grass to urinate.

That was odd but I didn’t think anything of it. Once does not make a trend. But two days later, we noticed that she had not ate at all. I feed her every morning but some days she didn’t eat all of her food, so again I didn’t think anything of it. We thought maybe something had gotten into her bowl, so we cleaned it. I dumped the food and started with a fresh portion. Still no interest. Another day goes by and she still hasn’t eaten.

We were in the middle of deciding to make a food brand change because of conversations with our new vet about the early death of Snow Flake. So, we decided to get new food and go ahead and make the switch. A new bag, a new brand something was definitely wrong. We couldn’t get into the new vet so we made a call to the old vet to get her checked out. My wife thought that maybe she had a urinary tract infection. Other that drinking a ton of water and not eating regular food she seemed fine.

The vet took a urine same and drew blood. We went home with the understanding that we were going to be back in town two days later to pick up any prescriptions that we needed after our scheduled dentist appointment. We got the call late the next day that this was no urinary tract infection but kidney failure, potentially cancer. There was nothing that could be done.

I want to go back to late 2023. My wife was feeling pretty cruddy and spent a whole Christmas vacation (two weeks) in bed. Raya was right there as if she knew. She would lay by the bed all day long while my wife was feeling miserable. We both suspected cancer had returned but it was the sixth sense of the dog that seemed remarkable. Raya seemed to have the ability to know that things were seriously not right. Now it seems the tables have turned and we were not really in tune with it.

I have to say that this sucks. I never expected to have a dog live forever but I certainly didn’t expect that six years was going to be her lifespan. It doubly sucks considering our previous dog Snow Flake died prematurely at about seven years due to a heart defect causing overheating. I was hoping that she would live more like ten years. I was also hoping that I would observe that she was getting older and that there was a decline causing acceptance that she had lived a full and happy life. I certainly didn’t expect that I thought she was happy one day and dying the next.

I will tell you what hurts the most. I have accepted that she is going to die soon and of course I do not like it. But that we are her everything, she still is trying to do her job. The Burmese in her is watching the flock and keeping them all together and safe as she is declining each day. We are trying to get the call out to the kids and people that might want to say their goodbyes while each day it gets harder and harder.

We will make the call to euthanize if or when we see that it is appropriate. But it begs the question of when is it appropriate? The first couple of days we were hoping for a miracle. We are quite the opposite of cruel. Today she has spent most of the day laying on the floor, but when you approach she starts wagging here tail. The picture in today’s post was from last night at the beach. She was running as if nothing was wrong.

Both my wife and I think that it is cancer. I can feel some lumps in her throat in the area that I would call lymph nodes and I haven’t ever felt. I did some quick research to find that lymphoma can occur in up to 25% of all Golden Retrievers. How ironic is that that Raya was by my wife’s side the entire lymphoma treatment in 2024 and now she will be a victim of that herself.

End Your Programming Routine: I know, dogs are very personal. People that love their dogs that often make no or even negative impression on me. So I get it if this kind of falls on deaf ears, but it is a personal tragedy for me. I thought I would never care about a dog like I cared about Snow due to her very loving personality. I will admit it took me a couple of years but now I think Raya has brought something Snow never did, a loyalty to family first. Although you are not gone yet, you will be missed.