Winter Wonderland

"Pittsburgh will be spared the full blow of this winter storm ..." were the words of the weatherman from the local newscast on Friday as he showed the states and cities that were about to be clobbered by the coming storm to our South.
Fast forward to Saturday morning (a day full of planned activities by the way), when we woke up to find everything covered in white outside. Another weatherperson on the morning news was saying how we should feel lucky we "only got 8-9 cm of snow"since states like Virginia and cities like Washington DC and New York City were expected to get as much as 30 cm from this storm.

Here is what it looked like as I stood on my front porch, looking at my neighborhood (my driveway is at the bottom of the picture and the road goes across the middle of the picture at an angle - see the yellow fire hydrant at the edge of the road).
I walked outside and started shoveling my driveway, trying to clear a path to the street which was still impassable at the time.
The snow was still falling, but I was simply trying to clear-up the majority of the snow at that point.

Soon I heard the rumble of the snow plow going up and down the street, clearing snow and spreading salt behind it.
The street was now navigable and I only needed to clear my driveway to enable us to actually attempt to drive on it.

The closer I got to the end of the driveway, the wetter and heavier the accumulated snow became (partially melted by the salt from the snow plow). Eventually the path was cleared and it was time to clear the sidewalks and the pathway to the front of the house. It took about two hours and the falling snow was starting to turn the areas I had cleared white again. It was time to deploy the salt, which was sprinkled on the the surfaces and started working right away, since it was about -2C, still warm enough for salt to be effective.

This is the view of the end result from the sidewalk (standing by the yellow fire hydrant).
My son Greg had to take his last two final exams at Pitt today (yes, they also give finals on Saturday I found out) and we planned to go pick him up in the afternoon.
Unfortunately each municipality is responsible for snow removal on their streets and others were not as efficient as our own local folks.
Still, my wife employed a slow and steady pace and managed to go to the university and bring him home without any mishaps.
Now we get to sit back and relax, perhaps we might even have a white Christmas...

Foundation

My friend Mike (Mihalis) passed-away last Saturday.
He had been suffering from prostate cancer which had metastasized to his bones. A long-practicing Anesthesiologist, he had no misconceptions as to the diagnosis, nor his prospects. What amazed me was the calmness with which he described his illness and how he had made peace with himself.

I remember when I had first met him at our parish church, following a Sunday service, while we were sitting in the social hall.
Greek Orthodox churches in the US are quite different from their counterparts in Greece. Here the entire Greek community comes together around the church and there is a whole social scene that plays-out in parallel to the religious experience.
When Mike had asked me what I did and I answered I was involved with Marketing, he went on to say he was going to seek my advice about how to best market his Foundation. We talked about many things over the years, however we never got around to discussing this specific topic.

This week, following his passing, we found out a bit more about Mike's Foundation: the Christian Orthodox Monastery Preservation Foundation. Mike had visited many monasteries throughout the world in the last twenty years and he had been truly touched by the monastic way of life. He had used a large portion of his net worth to create a perpetual endowment fund for his Foundation when he financed it in 2001. The goal of Mike's Foundation is "to provide the means whereby monastic communities can preserve, practice, perpetuate and proclaim their unique way of life through the development of tangible and effective projects, programs and activities of a philanthropic, educational and evangelistic nature."

A number of monasteries have already benefited from this Foundation and it's work will be continued, being carried-forth by our parish priest, father John.
I couldn't help but be awed by the calm, quiet and unassuming way in which Mike had made sure that he could continue to aid monasteries throughout the world, helping them create the basis, or groundwork, the foundation so to speak, for continuing to spread the message of Christian Orthodoxy.
May God rest his soul.

A Fool for All Seasons

A couple of years ago I decided to walk to meetings that take place in different buildings around our campus, rather than drive. I figured a little bit of exercise would do me good. While this is fairly easy to do when the weather is nice, the weather this past week provided some challenges.

Friday morning was not typical for early December: temperature was around -7C, the wind was blowing at 30-50 km/h and the wind chill temperature was calculated to be around -15C. While Pittsburgh had been spared the massive snowfall that was recorded to our North and Winter was still officially about a week away according to the calendar, it certainly felt wintry when I began my walk.

Distance to the building I was headed for was about 0.5 km and as I walked there, I saw various co-workers driving by in their cars, giving me strange looks. Once the meeting was completed, I decided to expand my "stroll" and take the 1.5 km nature trail before returning to my office.
A friend who sometimes walks on the nature trail with me stopped his car as I was leaving the parking lot, rolled down the window and asked if I needed a ride back to my office. "No thanks, I'd like to get some fresh air and clear my head" was my response. He laughed as he drove off.

Once I arrived back at my office about 30 minutes later, my face red from the wind and the cold, my glasses fogging-up from the condensation, I saw that same friend in the hallway. He asked if I had taken the nature trail and I told him I had. He laughed again and said it was too cold for that and that I was a "braver fool" than he. We chuckled good-naturedly, but I could tell from his tone he was also slightly envious.

As my body began to warm-up and I got down to business, I found I was re-energized and felt pretty good. When nature throws a challenge like that and you can respond, it has a way of making you feel good.

Some might shake their heads and wonder if I've lost my mind. I just know that they can call me a fool, but it won't change the way I feel once I have overcome a challenge - even a relatively minor one like this.

Extreme Sport

A long time ago in a neighborhood far, far away, a couple of high school kids decided to take skateboarding to the next level...
The events I will describe transpired in the late 1970's and it should be pointed-out there were very few kids who skateboarded in Athens at the time.
My cousin Stefanos and I, having mastered the basics of skateboarding were getting to the point where we were experimenting to see if we could push the boundaries of what could be done on a skateboard.

We would go down the steep sidewalks and roadways of the foothills of Mt. Hymettus sitting, kneeling, or finding other ways to use our skateboards in ways they were not originally designed to be used. We invariably went too fast and ended-up performing various experiments which tested the "coefficient of friction" between asphalt and various materials: polyurethane skateboard wheels, athletic shoe soles, jeans, copper rivets (if the aforementioned jeans happened to be riveted), leather (skateboarding gloves), even human skin (not by design, I should point out).
These feats, while resulting in various bumps, abrasions and bruises, did not end-up inflicting any permanent bodily injury.

Since this was before the time video became mainstream and well before the advent of "Reality TV" our feats were not captured on video, nor broadcast to any network.

Fast-forward about 30 years, where every kid can now capture video on their cell phone and broadcast it to various channels on the internet for almost instantaneous consumption.

A friend forwarded the attached link to a video of what was christened "Asphalt Sledding" in Switzerland.

While we did not go that far in our younger years, I feel the need to salute this guy because he's exhibiting the same passion for speed and uses a definitely wacky conveyance to satisfy it.

Sports Psychology

The Pittsburgh Steelers football team won Superbowl XLIII (played on Feb. 1, 2009).
This was the sixth Superbowl victory for the Pittsburgh Steelers, the most of any team, and the Steelers were proclaimed the best team in football.

(the picture at left was taken outside of Heinz Field, the home of the Pittsburgh Steelers)

A type of euphoria suffused through Pittsburgh, such that despite the cold winter and the economic meltdown, had people here in a relatively jovial mood.

Then the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team started playing better toward the end of their season and ended-up winning the Stanley Cup on June 21, 2009. The Penguins were thus crowned the best hockey team in the US and Canada - and all through the summer Pittsburgh took on a new "glow".

(the picture at left is from a game we attended when they played the Florida Panthers on Oct. 23, 2009)

Most towns would be ecstatic at winning the championship of one of the four main spectator sports in America: football, baseball, basketball, or hockey. Pittsburgh teams won two of those titles in the same year - and it felt good!

This Fall, Steelers football started again, but the champions from a few months back haven't looked quite as tough as last year. Last Sunday they lost a heartbreaker to the Cincinnati Bengals and today they lost in overtime to the Kansas City Chiefs. Their record this year is 6 wins and 4 losses and they will have to fight hard to get into the playoffs.

It will be a tough week of practice ahead as they will play the Baltimore Ravens next Sunday (the fact they will play in Baltimore will make it an even tougher game). My guess is that the mood in the city might be a bit subdued this week.

Thanksgiving will be here in a few days and maybe that will lift the spirits of this town.
Pittsburgh has a lot to be thankful for this year, and maybe the Steelers will also win a few more games.

Walking for our Heart

The American Heart Association's annual Heart Walk was a great opportunity to get out and stretch those legs on October 17. I don't happen to think of a 5-k walk as anything major, but to people who are used to driving everywhere, it may be a bit more of a challenge.

The starting point for the walk in Pittsburgh was Heinz Field, the home of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team. This is the team that won the Superbowl last year (in February 2009), though they are not playing quite so well this year. The temperature was 36F (2C) that day, with overcast skies and drizzle.

There were plenty of people from Bayer participating in the Heart Walk (including "yours truly"), all wearing red T-shirts over our coats, including the flag-bearer for the Bayer team, Mr. Sergio Kyriakis.

After waiting for around two hours as various VIPs gave speeches, we finally got started and it really felt good to walk and get a chance to warm-up.

Great scenery accompanied us on our walk, since the route followed the bank of the river for the second half of the walk, as we returned to the stadium. Here is a view at Point state park (aka The Point). This is where the Allegheny and Monongahella rivers meet (coming from the left in this picture) and join to form the Ohio river (going to the right).
The fountain at The Point sometimes has the water dyed in different colors - on this occasion it was dyed pink to promote breast cancer awareness.
You can also see the yellow Fort Pitt bridge and the tunnel by the same name behind it - this is one of the main thoroughfares into downtown Pittsburgh. The steep hill that rises on the far side of the river is called Mt. Washington, as it is said this was where Gen. George Washington, early in his career, scoped-out the British-occupied Fort Pitt (which was located where The Point now is located). There are some great restaurants on Mt. Washington, which in addition to outstanding food, also offer an amazing view.

Great views, good times and we also managed to raise some money for the American Heart Association - I call that a "win".

It's Good for You

One of the small pleasures I enjoy every day is a lunchtime walk through the woods in the rolling hills that surround the place where I work. This routine started about a year-and-a-half ago, as a means of helping me get some exercise during my mostly sedentary day. A program at work encourages employees to get-up and walk, get the blood pumping so to speak - and I took advantage of it. I even bought a pedometer, so I can count how many steps I take every day - setting goals for myself and seeing if I can meet (or even sometimes exceed) them.


There are also some other advantages to being outside on a daily basis though.
You get to see nature up-close and sometimes, if you are lucky, you also catch some glimpses of the wildlife that makes its home in the woods.



The pictures above were taken a week apart, mid-to-late October.
The groundhog was eyeballing me warily and skittered off into the woods as soon as I took the picture, while the particularly tame pair of deer (you can only see the tail end of the second), nonchalantly walked deeper into the forest when they noticed me stopping to take their picture.

What I also find enjoyable is seeing the forest change with the seasons. When I took the picture at the very top of this post in mid-October, the leaves of the Burning Bushes had just changed from their regular deep green color to the bright red you see - those leaves are now gone, the bushes standing bare.

All the pictures in this post show the colors of Fall, which will soon give way to the drab browns and even the whites of winter.
When I took the picture at left on October 30, my footsteps crunching through a thick layer of leaves with every step, the yellows and reds of the leaves were starting to turn to brown, signifying that the present act of nature's amazing color show was being completed.

That is OK by me, I have enjoyed the Fall color show and I am looking forward to the upcoming Winter show.

I have also come to the end of this post with a simple conclusion. Walking in the woods is good for me - for my body and my mind. It grants me a brief period of exertion and a chance to clear my head. It is a feast for my eyes (which I try to capture with my camera) and a chance to marshal and re-prioritize all the various thoughts, tasks and ideas running through my head.
It gives me a chance to escape into nature, while still being able to return to my office to resume my work in a timely manner - a blessing I am not too sure many of my colleagues grasp.

Diametrically Opposite

I was in Miami Beach for the 2009 IDSA international conference a couple of weeks ago and had a few hours to experience this playground of the rich and famous. I was staying in a small hotel in the Art Deco district and when I wasn't at the conference, I had the opportunity to walk along the beach and the main "drag" (Collins Ave.).





Exotic cars and obviously well-heeled folks could be seen at every corner.
As I interpreted the various sights and sounds, it became obvious that people came here from all over the world to play and to be seen. And many others came to see them, to admire them.


The beaches were truly beautiful and walking there in the early morning the sight was surreal - plus the heat+humidity were still tolerable in those early hours.
This was also the time when another contingent of Miami Beach residents could be seen.
They seemed to exist in the periphery - while there were quite a few of them, they weren't always visible, or so obvious, during the day.
They could not be missed in the early morning hours however.
Sleeping on benches, beside the lifeguard shacks, beneath the Palm trees, or even right on the beach's sand.
Before the hustle and bustle of the new day caused them to seek refuge elsewhere.


All of them human beings, all co-existing on the same narrow sliver of sand at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
Two groups which appear to be on diametrically opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Ancestral Thoughts

Appropriation of Statues

We fashion statues with materials
from statues fashioned
by other older craftsmen,
we fashion poems with words
from poems written
in other times by other poets,
we fashion lives with feelings, events
that other people before us
had experienced.
We appropriate works, modify
plans, change perspectives
invent something new
fashion things entirely ours
always leaving traces
of an earlier origin.
We go on putting our names
beside other names
even those
that we'd like to erase.

Titos Patrikios (1928 - )

I happened upon this poem in the book my father gave me this summer (A Century of Greek Poetry 1900-2000, Bilingual Edition). I was thinking of the statue of Makrygiannis (above) which I photographed close to the Acropolis Metro stop this summer after visiting the New Acropolis Museum.

Speaking of the museum, when the Persians sacked ancient Athens in 480 BC, the previous temples built upon the rock of the Acropolis were destroyed and their remains were later used by the Athenians to build the foundations of the classic temples and the defensive walls around the Acropolis. Pieces of many wonderful statues and earlier works have been unearthed and can be seen on display in the New Acropolis Museum.

Back to Makrygiannis (1797-1864) - he was a Greek merchant, military officer, politician and author, best known today for his Memoirs. Starting from humble origins, he joined the Greek struggle for independence, achieving the rank of general and leading his men to notable victories. Following Greek independence, he had a tumultuous public career, playing a prominent part in the granting of the first Constitution of the Kingdom of Greece and later being sentenced to death and pardoned (Wikipedia).

He was uneducated, yet he did some pretty amazing things in his time and the whole area at the base of the Acropolis is today called Makrygianni (hence the statue). He used his common sense and the bits and pieces he picked-up along the way; ancestral thoughts and works that were put to new use - a lesson well worth remembering.

Education

My son moves-in at his dormitory at the University of Pittsburgh next week. Freshmen get to move-in a week ahead of all the other students, to familiarize themselves with the campus.

The University of Pittsburgh (aka Pitt) mascot is the Panther - all their athletic teams are called the Panthers. This statue of a Panther is located outside the Pitt Student Union on Forbes Ave.

University education - the next step towards broadening a young person's horizons and moving beyond the basics taught in high school.

He gets a chance to explore options and focus on what he feels is important - to make-up his mind about what matters.

I wish him the wisdom to chose clearly.

Burning Rubber

My car failed the annual safety and emissions inspection.
The tires were too worn-out ...
Might it be that the wide tires my car requires wear-out too soon?
I certainly don't feel like I am pushing the car to its limits, driving aggressively and all that.

- The stock Michelin MXV tires lasted about a year-and-a-half (13,670 miles).
- Then I bought a set of Avon Tech M550 tyres (British spelling) - they lasted one year and one month (8,380 miles) - AVOID these tires at all costs!
- The third set I bought were a set of Yokohama Avid H4S tires - they lasted one year and nine months (15,470 miles).
- Now I just bought the fourth set - they are Michelin Pilot A/S Plus tires - all this on a car that is four-and-a-half years old and has a total of only 37,520 miles on the odometer!

The tires seem to be wearing-out much too fast under what I can only describe as "normal" driving conditions.
My guess is that the tire manufacturers have figured-out how to make their tires wear-out faster, so that the drivers will need to replace them more often.
I'll apologize if I sound like a conspiracy theorist -- I think the proof I supplied above speaks for itself.

How to Say it

My first blog entry ... what to write?
Explore my motivation to create a blog perhaps.
Well, that is easy - to record some random thoughts, to help make some sense of all the varied inputs, to leave some breadcrumbs which might help me find the way.

I looked-up the U2 song "One" today, prompted by a post from my cousin Stavroula, and discovered the Mary J Blige version on YouTube. While I had heard the U2 version of this song many times before, I was riveted by this particular performance. This performance was different, this one made it past my ears and the auditory apparatus in my head, this performance went deeper.
I felt there was such emotion in this recording and I thought of the title for this first blog entry - I thought, they found out "How to Say it", how to connect with me.

But before I forget, I need to present a disclaimer (I work too much with attorneys): the thoughts presented here are solely my own and are not associated, nor do they represent positions held by my employer