Category: Who?

Supercategory to consolidate the family groups

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Making me feel old…

I was down the Tavern Saturday night (like virtually every other Saturday night) when the bartender, Kevin, told me I should hang around later than usual because one of the waitresses, Brianne Kepler, was turning 21 at midnight and was going to stop into the Tavern for her first “official” drink.

Bri’s mother is Anne “Rip” Herpel, one of my ex’s, so I decided to hang around. I’m sure some of you remember Rip, we went out back in the early 70s, and I know she made at least one trip to Chicago. Rip was a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sister of Pat Driscoll, who was my roommate Pat Daugherty’s girlfriend (and later first wife) when I got out of the service in Dec 1970. Rip and I started going out around a year later.

Rip and I had an off and on thing for several years. I can remember being down at the Tavern one time sitting at a table with this older couple, Don and Betsy, who had dinner there almost every night. Betsy started giving me grief about Rip saying I really didn’t treat her well. All of a sudden, out of the blue, their son George who was my age and happened to be sitting with them that night, suddenly chirped up “I agree with Mom. Anne’s such a wonderful woman, I’d leave my wife for her.” I’ll skip some of the details but, sure enough, a year and a half later, he did. Needless to say, George is Bri’s dad.

Well at about 11:45 in come George and Anne to surprise Bri (not as big a surprise as Steve, Gary, Ronnie, and I showing up for Shannon’s 21st but a nice surprise for her anyway). Bri showed up right on cue a couple of minutes after midnight and was very much surprised to see her folks there. Here’s a photo of her having her first official drink (some special shot combination that the bartender made up for her) with Pat, Rip, and me (her dad didn’t join us at the bar for some reason).

Speaking of ex-girlfriends – I was recently sent this photo which I thought Marilyn would enjoy seeing. It was taken in St Martin in the Carribean. The woman on the far left is Diane Wooding, an ex of mine and an old roommate of Marilyn’s. Pat Daugherty owns a vacation home down there and invited Diane and a few others down for a vacation. The woman in the back right is Pat’s current wife Ruth.

The girls up front are some of my “nieces”. On the left is Natalie Berrena, whom I have talked about many times on the blog, the one in the middle is Lindsay Werner, whose father worked with Pat and me at the Tavern, and the one on the right is Kiley Campanis, whose parents I don’t know (at least I don’t think I know them). The girls all worked together at the Tavern (the other two women however are unknown to me).

Lindsay now works in NYC and emailed me the photo telling me about how she met one of my ex’s and got to hear Pat and Diane tell “lots of Larry Fall stories” (Given how one of Pat’s favorite sayings is “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, I can only imagine some of the things she must have heard).

Diane is now retired and living part time in Florida near her mother and part time back in Philly.

I get to feel old every time I run into some ex girlfriend or old friend who’s now retired or who has a kid starting college or turning 21, etc. Of course, one thing that I have successfully avoided that would make me feel really really old would be to have a grandchild (how’s that making you feel Steve B?) 🙂

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NEW Fall Family Champion

Sorry this has taken a while to get to all of you. As you are all aware Ron is not the Fall Family Champ and neither am I.

Nick and I played about 4 weeks ago. Since Nick had not played all year, and if you’ve ever seen his game, I figured match play a stroke a hole would be pretty easy for me to retain my title. Well, unfortunatly, I was wrong. I beleive the final was something like 6 and 5. He shot 103. I shot 94. His 103 wasn’t a real indication of how well he shot during the match play. Once he had it won he wasn’t quite as focused as he was on the first 12 holes. He should have broken 100 easy.

Anyway, he has both the shirts and the hat. I have tried unsuccesfully to get another match this year, but Nick is going to school full time and putting in about 25-30 hours a week at IKEA. By the way, his emploeyee discount is 15% if anyone was to take advantage.

Since the weather is changing rapidly I beleive Nick will have this title into 2007. Get your plans together now to challenge him before Battle Creek or we may not have our tournament in a tournament event next year.

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I’m dead

evidently.

A week ago Saturday, I ran into a couple of my old college roommates, “Doc” Scarborough and Dave Hannum, down at the Tavern after the football game. In the course of our conversation, Doc said to me “Well, it’s good to confirm with my own eyes that you’re still alive”.

When I gave him kind of an inquisitive look he said “Didn’t you know that the Penn State Alumni Assocation published an obituary notice about you in their magazine a few months ago?” Doc added that he was shocked to see it and had emailed Dave about it. Dave replied back to him that he had just seen me a few weeks before and that I looked “remarkably healthy for a dead guy”.

That comment got me thinking. I hadn’t remembered getting the Alumni magazine recently and I had just received a bill from the Alumni Association for annual membership fees even though I am a paid up lifetime member. I jokingly told Doc that maybe the Alumni Association had killed me off to void my liftime membership so they could get me to rejoin.

I called the Alumni Assocation to get to the bottom of the issue last week. They told me that I had received the “dues notification” because I wasn’t flagged on their records as being a lifetime member. When I complained that I’ve been a member for over 20 years, they went into my detailed records and where able to find my payment so they adjusted my membership status.

When I suggested that perhaps the “obituary notice” might have been the cause of my getting dropped from the roles, the representative responded that my old roommate must have been mistaken because there was no indication on my record that I was deceased. When I replied that while I doubted that he had made a mistake, I couldn’t confirm it because I hadn’t been receiving my issues of the Alumni magazine. The rep offered to send me the last few back issues.

Those back issues arrived this weekend and I just got a chance to go through them. Sure enough, in the issue from last March, there I appear in their “In Memoriam” section.

What’s interesting is that I’m listed with our old Rolling Meadows address even though I’ve never lived there. What’s doubly interesting is that, even though I haven’t been getting the Alumni Magazine, I’ve continue to get all sorts of other mailings from them. Also, their online information about me has been correct because I check it every now and then. Strange indeed. I doubt I’ll ever get to the bottom of how it happened but I will be asking them to correct my obit.

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Showered with Gifts!

Last month (I’m a little behind in blogging), Andrea and Shannon threw a beautiful shower for Dawn. About 25 friends and family members enjoyed a Saturday luncheon (fabulous food) at the Metropolis Ballroom a few blocks from Dawn’s home. Baby Bean is going to be the best dressed little boy in Illinois!

Last evening (from 10:00 PM until 2:00 AM) we spent at the emergency room. Dawn’s leg had cramped up and been numb since about 5:00 PM. Her doctor was concerned that there might be a blood clot. An ultrasound of the leg showed nothing, so they sent her on her merry way (still with leg pains). She has a month left and I fear her doctor may put her on bed rest. Her pregnancy has been fabulous, so maybe she has just pushed herself a little too much. She loves to shop everyday and she probably should not be doing that (for more than one reason).

I’ll keep you all posted of her progress!


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My recovery continues

Played 18 on Friday with no problems with the knee during the round. It was a little sore Friday evening but nothing too bad so I decided to play in the senior club championship afterall.

Seedings in the tournament are by handicap following the defending champ who gets the #1 seed. I was seeded seventh which meant that I had to play the #2 seed, the lowest handicapped player in the tournament.

I played as well as I have in a long time and had my opponent on the ropes for most of the match. I opened up with a par and a birdie and quickly went up 2 holes. My opponent fought his way back and managed to tie the match by the seventh hole when he executed a beautiful sand save for a par. I failed to get up and down from about three feet off the back of the green when I missed a five footer for my par.

On the eighth hole, I went one down when I was overly agressive on a downhill 12 footer to win the hole. I slid about four feet past the hole and missed the comeback putt.

My par on nine evened the match when my opponent failed to get up and down from the back fringe of the green. I wound up shooting a 41 for the nine.

Another par on the par three tenth put me one up when my opponent once again failed to get up and down from off the green. The next three holes were all halved with a bogey and two pars so going into 14 I still held onto a one hole lead.

The 14th is a long par five and I laced a drive just into the right hand rough while my opponent wound up in a fairway bunker so I felt comfortably in control. He did manage to advance the ball about 150 yards with a decent recovery shot. I good lie but a downhill stance but as I swung my right foot slipped right out from under me. I only advanced the ball about 40 yards still in the rough. I was about 250 out but the ball was sitting up in the rough so I decide to take an aggressive cut at the ball. Bad move. The ball went off of the toe of the club deep into impenetrable brush and trees to the right. I had to take an unplayable and the hole was basically lost right there as my opponent made par.

That evened the match up but my confidence was gone. I staggered over the next three holes with a bogey, double bogey, double bogey and my opponent went par, bogey, par to close me out 3-1.

All in all, I was pretty happy with my play though. For 13 holes, I was just six over, which is as well as I’ve played in a long time. Plus, the best part was that the knee held up just fine so it looks like I can get back to my normal 5 rounds or so a week.

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Passed another milestone

Our men’s golf league plays on Wednesday nights and I hit the links for the first time since my surgery. After an extremely shaky start I settled down and played the last few holes ok. I had a dreaded case of the hooks for the first three tee shots and I think it came from a subconscious fear of transferring weight to my left side. Once my mind accepted the fact the knee wasn’t going to hurt everything started to turn around.

Further evidence that my recovery was going well was that I didn’t have any additional inflamation this morning when I woke up. I’m going to try a full 18 holes tomorrow and assuming that things hold up OK, I’ll play in the club championship starting Saturday.

Updates will follow.

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Why this picture?


I’ve been using a version of this photo that I have on Facebook in my profile on Blogger. Evidently, Blogger has installed new software that limits the url length of your profile photo to 64 characters and my Facebook link exceeds that. When I inser the photo in this post, it gets uploaded to Gary’s Blogger server and I can now link my Blogger profile to the photo on Gary’s server.

FWIW – the girls, from left to right, Vanessa Fiore, Ashely Schlosser, Susan Kim, and Taylor Baker, are all students hired as Bacardi girls here in State College. They appear at various bars and functions here in town to promote Barcardi products (usually not quite dressed as well though) and were doing such at the martini contest.

Now that that is out of the way, here’s a complete recap of my surgery todate.

The surgery went exceptionally well and everything was super…. but only for about 24 hours.

The surgeon was right. I was able to walk out of the clinic without any problems. I even stopped by the golf course Thursday afternon and went to the Spikes game Thursday night. Friday morning I woke up with a little soreness behind the knee but nothing that was at all a problem. I was even telling people that my left knee (the one that was operated on) was feeling better than the right one (and that was the truth).

Then all of a sudden things changed.

I was crawling on my floor. monkeying around with one of my backup computers, and then got up. Getting up was a little awkward because the knee didn’t have a lot of flexibility. I didn’t particularly notice anything pop or pull as I got up but as soon as I put weight on my left leg, the knee hurt like hell. The knee quickly started to hurt and swell. I pretty much became immobilized – I couldn’t put ANY weight on the leg at all without excruciating pain shooting through the knee. I very quickly put myself to bed (the only moving that I would do around the townhouse was confined to inching along on my hands and butt). And the pills didn’t seem to do much to help the constant pain in the knee. My ambitious plans for the weekend suddenly went all to hell.

For the next 24 hours I really didn’t get much sleep.

Things started getting better by Sunday. The constant pain started to come under control and I could switch my pain medication from Vicodin for pain to ibuprofen to address the inflammation in the knee. I was also frequently icing the knee to try to control the swelling. By late Sunday afternoon I was able to get around the townhouse pretty well by leaning on things and using my walking golf cart (bottom floor of the townhouse only) and a seven iron as crutches.

Today was even better. I’ve been able to find a couple of comfortable positions in bed so I can sleep well. The swelling in the knee has come down considerably. The knee can pretty much bear my weight without any shooting pains. I can now walk around the townhouse without having to hang on things to maneuver. I no longer have to butt hop up and down my stairs as I can safely scale them one step at a time. I also no longer need to improvise crutches (although I am continuing to use the seven iron as a cane – more of an emotional support than anything). And most importantly, I was finally able to stand up long enough to take a shower!

I’m going to try to start bringing my life back to normal in the next couple of days. My stitches come out Wednesday and my objective is to make our men’s golf league Wednesday night… as a spectator only. I’ve given up on my original plan to play – my playing plans are to be ready to play Wednesday a week with maybe a practice round that Tuesday. I’m bummed that I missed the Spikes games this weekend but the way that they are playing I evidently didn’t miss much. I do plan on making the Spikes game this Thursday though.

That’s where things stand at the moment.