Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

I just happened to check my FeedBurner statistics and see that as of the first business day of 2009, I had over 1,000 subscribers to this blog for the first time. With a nice push of new subscribers from serverside.com due to Jack van Hoof’s review of my book that was posted there, I’m now over 1,100. While my posting frequency has slowed a bit, I hope to continue to provide useful information to all of you. As a corporate practitioner, I always enjoy hearing what peers are doing, so if there’s something you’d like me to talk about that may be relevant to your work, drop me an email or direct message on Twitter, and if it’s something I’ve thought about or worked on, I’ll do my best to share what I can. Again, thanks for your readership.

At about 4:35 AM Central Daylight Time this morning, I was woken up to my house getting a pretty good shake for about 10-15 seconds. While this may not be news for a good portion of my readers who probably reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s certainly news when you live hear in the midwest. Admittedly, we do have the New Madrid Fault, which did have a major quake over a century ago, but tremor are a very rare occurrence, in contrast to the west coast. I lived out there for four summers and then three full years and felt about three of them. I’ve been here in the St. Louis area now for over ten years and this is the first one. Anyway, it was different than a Bay Area quake. Of the three I felt out there, one was more of a rolling motion, but that was probably attributable to me being on the seventh story of a building. It gave me the weird sensation like dizziness, but without the normal internal sensation you’d normally have in your head. The other two, where I was closer to the epicenter, felt like someone slamming a door really hard. A quick jolt and it was done. This one was a good shake, similar to when I lived near Chicago and we had train tracks on the other side of the street, but a much stronger shake. Of course, probably the most unusual thing of it all was that I was the only person in my house who woke up. I’m normally the one who can sleep through anything. Oh well.

Update:It’s been confirmed. It was a 5.4 magnitude quake centered near West Salem, Illinois, about 130 miles from St. Louis. That was stronger than any one that I experienced in the bay area.

Today, I’m asking you, my readers, to take some time to hug the children in your lives, be it your own kids, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, friends’ kids, whatever. Today, I got a reminder of just how precious and fragile life, and the life-making process can be. My newest nephew was born on Wednesday afternoon and is now in the wonderful care of the good people in the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital where my own children were born. My nephew came roughly 3 months early and weighs in at only 2 pounds, 4 ounces. He has a big battle ahead of him over the next few days, and we’re praying that he’s able to win it. With our health care today, we sometimes forget how challenging pregnancy can be. It can be smooth as silk (well, as smooth as the first trimester can be) one day, and then take an unexpected turn the next. I’m thankful for my three wonderful children, my two nieces, and now two nephews, and all of the children I interact with. They are our future and we can’t ever lose sight of that.