Another day…

Morning: scuba diving. A couple of rays, a lot of turtles, one guy making silly faces. (Note: you should not intentionally remove your regulator while diving. (The regulator is the mouthpiece that you breathe through.  (Okay, scuba geeks.  That’s not quite complete.  But close enough.)) Other note: I’m not terribly good at following rules.)

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Early afternoon: A visit to the Grand Cayman turtle farm. It was a lot more interesting than it sounds – they farm green sea turtles. Lots and lots of tanks full of large sea turtles, ranging from a few months old up to 30+ year-old breeders. You can lift the 1-2 year olds, and touch lots of them. Interesting observation: the skin of the turtle legs gradually hardens and becomes the shell. There is no transition of the sort you would expect from cartoons – the legs and head cannot retract into the shell, because they do not go into the shell: they just become it.

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After turtles, we stop off for a quick visit to Hell. That’s the name of a post office, here on Grand Cayman.

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Late afternoon: Snorkel with Kate and Diana.  We see a bunch of cool stuff, including a conch shell inhabited by a conch.

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Throughout the afternoon: Andy goes on a walk down Seven Mile Beach. The whole seven miles of it.

Evening: Dinner at the beach party run by the resort. And not terribly well-run, I’m afraid. But at least Kate and Diana get to go free, thanks to Kate’s l33t limbo skillz.

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Two days down. And already our days are getting booked up – so much to do between now and next Thursday, so much that you’ll read about here.

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The evening is for you!

Because it’s when I blog!

Oh, okay. We eat dinner too. Tonight we go to a special pirate-themed dinner here at the hotel. There’s a good buffet, a band that plays quite well, and a fire-eater who was not spectacular, but who was very picturesque.

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Once all that is over, they hold a limbo contest. And guess what – Kate wins!

Now that girl can limbo…

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Her prize is two tickets for the hotel’s barbeque party tomorrow night. Which I guess means that I have to buy three more tickets for that party.

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The afternoon is family time

I get back from diving at noon and meet up with everyone. We go out for some Mongolian barbeque for lunch (yum!). Then a couple hours shopping in town, followed by some snorkeling with Kate. A fine afternoon! Here’s some pictures:

Some of the ships in Georgetown harbor:

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One of the shops we visited:

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Kate and Diana getting eaten by landsharks. (Landsharks are a major problem in these parts.)

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Kate, snorkeling. (She managed to recover from the landshark attack.)

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Me snorkeling.  Note the water-level in my snorkel.  This is the worst snorkel we have – Kate grabbed it when we went down, so naturally I let her have the good one.  I’m lucky I didn’t drown.

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Our resort, from where we were snorkeling. (We went out pretty far.)

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The morning is for me

It looks like I’m going to be settling into a simple pattern. The morning is my time – the kids all sleep late anyway, so I’m free to go off and have my little adventures. In this case, my little adventures consist primarily of scuba diving. That’s one of the main reasons we came here, to the Caymans – it’s a world-renowned scuba destination. So I get down to the lobby by 7:30, meet with my dive operators, and am soon off diving.

The diving is fun, though I don’t see anything fantastic. A rather large green eel (The thing about eels is how they feels), a few turtles, an anchor from the days when the Spaniards ruled these waters. But hey – a nondescript day diving is better than a good day doing just about anything else in my book, so it qualifies as a great morning.

Here’s a few pictures, from the boat ride out and the first dive. My batteries died before the second dive, so alas – no pictures of Spanish anchors.

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Grand Cayman ho!

I’m sitting in the Marriott Beach Resort in Grand Cayman. We’re spending the week here. I do love the tropics, and I have rarely so needed some time to relax, to float in the water and let the world spin on its own for a while.

Nothing much to tell of our flight. We got on the plane, we got off the plane. We got on another plane, we got off that plane. We’re here now.

I’ve already gone snorkeling. There’s a nice bit of reef off the hotel’s beach. Lots of spiny sea urchins, lots of Caribbean-style fish, a couple of anemones, one rather large conch. Plenty of cool reef to explore.

Tomorrow morning I’m going scuba diving. Yay scuba!

We dined at Coconut Joe’s. Quite nice, dining outside under a large tree with a bunch of chickens running around. The girls got a big kick out of feeding lettuce to the chickens, and the chickens seemed to enjoy it also.

Overall, I’ve never been to any foreign country that felt so much like America. The main drag has every American fast-food restaurant imaginable – including two Burger Kings. Julie and I went to a supermarket that would have felt natural in some strip mall in the states. There’s Christmas lights everywhere. And the people we meet are the typical global mix that you’d expect in any US city. Lots of Caribbean natives, sure, but also lots of Americans, Eastern Europeans, English, and miscellaneous. (No doubt brought here by the prospect of working a menial job in paradise. Hey, if you’ve got to be a waitress in a hole in the wall dive, might as well be at a dive that’s across the street from one of the world’s great beaches.)

I’ll fill you all in on the day-to-day activities. For now, time to sleep.

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Christmas wow

This year has been a bit too much – details to follow in my year-end post.  For the latest roller-coaster flip: we had Christmas down at my beach house, with my mother invited along.  Not surprisingly, given that my father had died a little more than two weeks previously, it was an extremely subdued Christmas.  I don’t think any of us were expecting a whole lot of joy – certainly not my mother.

Then we called my sister Sara.  And Sara told us that she is expecting, her first child, due in June.  This is something that we weren’t expecting at all – very good news indeed.  It was about the only thing that could have happened to make this Christmas a joyous occasion.

The wheel of life keeps turning.  I do miss my father, but I welcome the new addition to the family.

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Eugene Dzikiewicz, RIP

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Eugene Dzikiewicz, my father, died on December 9. A slideshow of pictures of him, presented at his funeral, is at http://flickr.com/photos/jdzik/sets/72157603519495034. The following is a eulogy that I delivered at that funeral.

If you ever spent much time with my father, you almost certainly heard one of his stories. He loved telling humorous tales of things he had done and people he had known, which he would finish by saying, especially when speaking to his grandchildren, “And that’s the truth.”

Which wasn’t always accurate. Oh, I’m sure that most of his stories were based on real events, though I couldn’t help but notice that the details tended to shift around over the years. But I don’t really believe that he got that scar in his hand from grabbing a sabre-tooth tiger by the fang, and I don’t entirely believe the story he loved to tell of the time his state-police cruiser went off a bridge, when he fought out of the car, holding his breath, and swimming up, reaching for the light, until he finished by saying, “And then I died.”

My father graduated from high school in 1945. Like many young men of that era, he was soon drafted into the army, where he served his enlistment as a clerk processing the discharges of men who had served in World War II. While he never said it outright, I always suspected that he regretted missing out on what, to his young eyes, seemed the great adventure of his age. At least, some years later, when the war in Korea broke out, he volunteered for another enlistment, this time in the paratroopers, where he liked to say that the first dozen times he took off in a plane, he never landed in it.

My father still did not get his wish to go abroad. Instead, when his superiors noted his natural skills at organization and teaching (did you know that my father served for several years as an instructor at Northwestern University’s Traffic Institute in spite of his lack of a college degree, having been expelled for pulling a prank on an officious dean?), they set him to work training new recruits. He still wanted to be sent to Korea, though, so, knowing that the usual penalty for going AWOL was to be shipped out immediately, he skipped off to home for 29 days, just short of the 30 that would result in an automatic court martial.

But it was to no avail. His commanding officer sighed, took away a stripe, and set him back to training recruits.

Soon after leaving the paratroopers, my father stumbled his way onto the Massachusetts State Police. Most of his best stories were about those days. From my father’s telling, the State Police were like one big sitcom, full of eccentric characters like the old-school Sergeant Sinkievich, Sinky for short. It was Sinky who once sent a rookie out to lead the way over a flooded-out road to make sure there were no holes big enough to swallow a police cruiser. When the recruit worried that he might fall into a hole, Sinky said, “That okay. I can replace you easier than replace cruiser.” It was also Sinky who testified in an early trial involving one of the first uses of radar to catch speeders. When asked by the defense attorney to explain how radar worked, Sinky said, “Radar work good.”

But most of his state police stories involved my father playing some prank or other. One day, he was on patrol with Joe Desolets, who often showed up in my father’s stories as a combination sidekick and straight man. It was a snowy day, and the cruiser got stuck in the ice. My father got out and walked to the front wheel while Joe looked on. “Hey Joe, I heard that if you’re stuck in the ice, it helps to let some air out of the tires.”

“I heard that too.”

“Right.” My father drew his revolver, took careful aim, and fired into the ground next to the tire. The last time he told me that story, just last week, he was still laughing at the look on Joe’s face.

Once he was returning from some late-night function with Joe when they saw a truck barreling down the highway at around 20 MPH over the speed limit. They hit the sirens and pulled over the truck. The truck driver, a little guy, climbs out of the cab and says, “Oy, have you got me!” And because he made my father laugh, my father let him off with a warning.

Another time when my father stopped someone for speeding, the guy had what he thought was a foolproof method to talk his way out of a ticket. He had read the local police blotter, picked out an unlikely looking police officer’s name, and was ready with his story. “But officer, I’m a close personal friend of Corporal Eugene Dzikiewicz. Maybe you could let me off this time.”

“You’re a friend of Eugene Dzikiewicz, are you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well I can’t stand that guy. That sonofabitch took my girl out the other night.”

“Oh, uh, I’m sorry. I’m, uh…”

“And make sure you read the name of the arresting officer on the ticket.”

Some of his best stories came from his years at the Police Academy. We have somewhere the memoir of a former Massachusetts State Trooper, and in his academy days the role of stereotypical ass-kicking drill sergeant is filled by my father, something that I always found far-fetched, as my father was anything by a strict disciplinarian when I was growing up.

One time at the academy they had an athletic competition between squads of trainees, with the winning squad getting a weekend’s leave as prize. After the winners packed up and left, my father was left with the sad losers.

Saturday morning, he took the troops out on their morning run. While running down the nearby highway, my father noticed that the door was open at one of the nearby restaurants. “Left face,” he called. “Line up.” And he directed them into the restaurant.

The place was empty, so he ordered them to sit at the bar. In a back room, my father found the assistant manager, cleaning up after the night before. “I’ve got a few men out here who would like a drink,” he said.

The assistant manager came out to the front, took a look at the line of sweaty recruits sitting at his bar, and sputtered: “What are you doing here? We’re closed! Go away!”

“All right, men,” my father called. “Form up.” And he had them run off, much cheered from the morning prank.

I’ll finish this with two stories of my own. When I was about ten or eleven, my father was working for the federal government, giving grants to state police forces throughout the New England states. One time, he had to travel through northern New England for a number of meetings with various police officials and assistant attorneys general. And so naturally, like any government worker off to meetings with important people, he brought his ten year-old son. I learned to love garlic bread at one particular dinner with Vermont officials on that trip.

At one point, we were driving on the New Hampshire turnpike. As we came up to a tollbooth, my father said, “Watch this. I’m going to go right through without paying toll.” Ever so smoothly, he slowed the car as we neared the booth. He suavely pointed to the toll taker and gave a knowing nod. The attendant gave him a little wave, raised the gate, and we drove on through.

I was astounded. “You did it,” I shouted. I couldn’t believe he had gotten away with it.

About ten years later, I was telling the story at a family dinner. And my mother, who often had the job of bringing a little truth to the proceedings, pointed out that we had been driving in a government car, borrowed from the federal motor pool. And in New Hampshire, government cars were allowed to drive on the turnpike toll-free.

I suppose I could have gotten mad at my father. But I thought it was a marvelous prank – after all, you never let go a chance to pull a prank like that, that’s one of the things I learned from him. And I had learned from that and a few other experiences with him that with enough chutzpah, you could get away with murder. That’s a lesson I often used during my teenage years.

A few years later, when I had children of my own, I realized another lesson from that trip. Sometimes it’s a father’s job to make the world a more magical place, and next to that, what difference does a little truth make?

My last story: this last summer was my father’s eightieth birthday. We had a party for him, just the family. And my mother had the idea that the thing he would most enjoy would be to give him a funeral when he could still enjoy it. So Sara, my sister, read a humorous poem that she wrote about him, and I gave a first draft of this speech. He absolutely loved it, loved being the center of attention, loved hearing his own stories told back to him.

Later that day, I stood with him outside by the pool. And he said to me, “You know, eighty years is pretty good. Eighty years is just about enough.”

A month or so later, after he was diagnosed, I reminded him of that, joking, “When you said eighty years was enough, I didn’t know you were serious.” Which also made him laugh, and which he repeated to others later. Because that, of course, was how he dealt with hard times – with a joke and a laugh.

But all I can say is, Dad, eighty years may have been enough for you. But it was not enough for us.

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A new home, and a new beginning

I’ve decided to act like one of the blogging big boys, and set up on my own domain. Maybe I’ll even play with the theme of the site, so that it does not look quite so boring.  (But I’m not a visual person, so don’t hold your breath on that.)

I’ve also decided to start blogging more, and I am a words person, so that might actually happen.  So follow this site – add it to your feed reader, come by here occasionally, etc, and you may actually start seeing content show up.

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What makes me really mad about Iraq

Heaven knows that there are plenty of good reasons to get mad about the War in Iraq.  The incredible incompetence shown by this administration, the way that we surrendered the moral high ground at Abu Ghraib, the stovepiping of intel to find excuses for war – all of those come easily to mind.

But there is one thing that, whenever I think on it, makes me just incredibly angry about our little misadventure in Iraq.

Osama bin Laden is still out there.

I vividly remember September 11, 2001.  I remember how angry I felt about what had been done about this country.  I remember how resolved I was that the people who had launched the greatest attack on this country in my lifetime must be brought to justice.

I still feel that way.

But by going into Iraq, we created a massive diversion.  The only problem was, we diverted only ourselves.  We set up a situation where we had to devote our best and brightest, our most able military forces, our best strategic thinkers, the bulk of our military capability, to a war that had nothing to do with 9/11.  And in the course of doing so, to piss away the diplomatic capital that we needed in dealing with the difficult foreign relations issues that would arise in any concerted effort to go after bin Laden.

Clearly, there’s no way of knowing for certain that, had we made bin Laden our primary focus, we would have him today.  Maybe he’d still be sitting out there somewhere, taunting us with the occasional video, showing the world that you can kill thousands of Americans and get away with it.  We can’t really know how things might have shaped up differently – counter-factual history is never reliable.

But by taking the actions we took, we damn-well increased the chance that he would escape our clutches.  And escape our clutches he has done.

And that makes me profoundly angry.

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Make it more like Google!

After reading the Randy Falco interview in the Washington Post today, something that made me ever more joyful to be out of AOL, one of the biggest mistakes of the Falco-Grant regime occurred to me.

Grant is notorious amongst those who pay attention to such things for demanding that AOL properties copy the look and feel of Google and Yahoo. Even when told it would cost AOL millions (as happened when they made AOL search a carbon-copy of Google), Grant responded, “What part of make it look like Google don’t you understand?”

But there’s a part of “make it look like Google” that Grant and Falco will never understand. Google is a company that puts decision-making power in the hands of web-savvy engineers. Yahoo is a place where the people who make product decisions are expected to understand the Internet. But Grant and Falco’s AOL will never look like such companies.

It’s sad, truly sad. There’s a lot of great people at AOL, people who understand their industry, who can come up with innovative products and great technologies.

But they are not in charge. Instead, AOL is run by people who just don’t get that achieving the successes of a Google or a Yahoo is not a matter of copying their markup.

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