Video: The Keene Interfaith Community Breakfasts

One of the great changes in my life over the past year has been helping out at the community breakfasts for the homeless that happen now each winter weekday morning at our church in Keene, NH. While they are held in our church building, the teams of volunteers who staff the breakfasts also come from several other churches in our community. (In fact, we’re looking for one more church or other community group to step forward and help on the one remaining day that needs coverage.)

It’s been quite an eye-opening experience for my wife and I, both in terms of learning about the quantity of people in our region who are homeless… but also in hearing some of the stories and knowing that while often it is very definitely choices that get people into these situations, sometimes it is instead circumstances – job losses, medical expenses, family issues – and that the line between those who have and those who have not can be very thin and fragile.

Recently a local community TV show recorded an episode with several of us who have been involved with the community breakfasts. I represented our church and spoke about some of the changes that being involved has brought about with me and our family.

Give it a listen… and if you are in the Keene, NH, area and interested in helping, we’re always looking for people to help during these cold winter months!

What are the “community” breakfasts that take place at the Keene UU Church (KUUC) during the winter months? How did they get started? How are they an example of interfaith service programs? And how can people get more involved?

In this episode 501 of her show “My Karma Ran Over My Dogma”, Rev. Sandra Whippie explores these topics and much more with a panel including:

  • Rev. Michael Hall, KUUC minister and member of the Interfaith Clergy Association
  • Charlie Gibson, member of the Catholic churches in the Keene area
  • Dan York, member of the Keene Unitarian Universalist Church (KUUC)
  • Marcia Winters, member of the Keene United Church of Christ (UCC)

P.S. For the purpose of including an image for this post in the “carousel” at the top of the site, I’m including this screenshot of me talking:

Danyork interfaith breakfasts

No Adults! An Awesome Aspect of Youth Curling Games

Today I was reminded of one of the truly awesome and wonderful aspects of youth curling bonspiels (tournaments) – when the kids go through the door out onto the ice, the game is ENTIRELY up to *them*.

No adults are allowed out on the ice. No coaches. No parents. No one.

Just the youth.

Unlike other youth team sports there are no coaches helping call the shots or determine the flow of play. There is no one to consult with. (Although we are nearby if there is a rules question that needs addressing or if there are safety issues.) From the initial start with a shaking of hands and a coin toss all the way to the end… it is entirely up to the kids.

The strategy. The scoring. The flow of the game. The making of the shots. The interpretation of the rules.

All of it… by them.

Of course we as coaches work with them to teach them all the different aspects of the sport and to prepare them for the games.

But when they go through that door… it is entirely up to them!

We are left to just watch from behind the glass… to celebrate… and sometimes to cringe… but there is absolutely nothing we can do but watch!

Pretty awesome for the kids!

No Adults! An Awesome Aspect of Youth Curling Games

Beginning A Season Of Youth Curling Bonspiels

Chloe curling 520

Tonight begins a new era in our lives as parents as our 12-year-old daughter competes for the first time in a curling “bonspiel” (tournament) that will go all weekend (or, at least, we hope so!). Over the past three years that she has been involved with the Petersham Curling Club youth program in nearby Petersham, MA, she’s been in the “Little Rocks” program where she has played in typically three or four one-day bonspiels around New England.

But now that she has reached the age of 12 she is in the “Juniors” program… and they play at a much more serious level and in events that take a much greater amount of time!

The event this weekend is the Broomstones Junior Bonspiel at the Broomstones Curling Club in Wayland, Massachusetts, about two hours away from where we live. She’s on a team with three other youth with whom she has been playing for three years. For those who know curling teams she’ll be playing the “second” position in the team. (It’s the second person of four to throw stones for a team.)

The games are full 8-end games, which means they’ll be on the ice for a full two hours! Their schedule right now is:

  • Friday, Nov 21:
    • 7:15pm
  • Saturday, Nov 22:
    • 8:30am
    • 1:00pm
    • 6:30pm

The bonspiel is arranged in a series of brackets with the outcome determining who will play in the playoffs and finals on Sunday. We’re certainly hopeful that the team will do well enough to be in the games on Sunday.

I’m excited for her… and as a parent I’ll be there on the sidelines cheering her team on! (I’ll also be posting updates and a few photos to the Petersham Youth Curling Facebook page.)

And then, yes… we have probably 3 or 4 more of these all-weekend events coming up over the course of the winter, along with some one-day events, too.

Let the curling season begin! 🙂

Of Leaf Bags, Yankee Frugality And Our Disposable Society

Lawn bagsThere I was at the Keene dump at 7:00am this week about to drop off nine bags full of leaves that we’d raked up in our lawn. (The down side of all that beautiful foliage we enjoy!) I backed my Subaru Baja up to the massive pile of leaves and got out to start dumping my bags of leaves into the pile with all the other ones.

As I did so, I noticed a guy with a pickup truck about 20 feet away who was meticulously folding up the now empty paper bags that he had obviously used to bring leaves to the dump.

We gave the silent nods of acknowledgement that people often do at the dump… and then curiosity got the better of me and I asked “so do you re-use your bags?”

“Oh, sure! I usually get a good three years out of them,” he said.

I nodded… and we both continued our separate work. But what blew my mind at that moment was simply this:

I had never considered re-using the paper leaf bags!

They were just the things you put leaves in and then threw out at the dump. Nothing more than that.

My package of 5 bags cost me $3.29 at my local hardware store. I bought two packages and so my investment thus far was a bit under $7. ($6.58 if we’re being precise.) I was figuring I would probably need another set of bags to finish out the season and so I’d buy another set soon.

$10

In my mind just “the cost of doing business” and living in New England. Since the drop-off of leaves is free at our city dump, that $10 is my cost for the season, plus of course the bit of gas to drive out to the dump.

Not a big deal in the flow of our regular household budget.

But still…

$10 can buy other things. $10 could pay for the gas I need to drive back and forth. $10 could be donated to someone who might need it more.

It was a reminder to me that we live in such a consumeristic society where we just think about everything as being disposable. I was thinking about things as being disposable, particularly because these are just paper bags that will automatically degrade along with all of the leaves in them.

But why not re-use them?

By the time I unloaded my nine bags the guy had driven away and I was the only one at the pile. A couple of my bags were ripped from sticks and needed to be thrown in the pile… but I did save seven of them. Just emptied out the leaves and then folded them somewhat back together.

Now I don’t have to buy that third set of bags – and if I’m careful I can probably not rip these bags and hold on to them for next year.

The only way out of being a “disposable” society is for us to think about ways that we can indeed reduce, re-use and recycle… and in this case I chose to re-use!

What about you? Do you re-use leaf bags? (If you are in the part of the world that needs them.) Or have you never bothered with leaf bags anyway and just used tarps and such?

You can hear an audio version of this post on SoundCloud:

It Is So Easy To Choose To NOT Go For A Run

Toronto runA true story – I wrote this email at about 5:00am at a recent conference where I had told someone that I would meet for a run at 6:00am:

<name>

Unfortunately I completely forgot about the <meeting> from 8-9am … and since I also have to pack up to check out of the hotel as I’m flying home tonight, as well as get out some messages/posts *before* the meeting… there’s just no way I can also fit in a run. 🙁

If you get this before going out and could just fire back a quick acknowledgement that would be great. If I don’t hear from you I’ll be standing down in the lobby at 6am NOT in my running clothes.

Dan

I was about to hit the Send button.

My cursor was poised over the send icon button at the top of the message window on my MacBook Pro. All I had to do was tap my finger and the message would be off.

But I paused…

… and as I read that message and re-read it again and again… it just seemed like a really weak excuse.

There will always be reasons to NOT go for a run.

As I thought about it, I realized that if I were truly honest with myself some of those posts and messages that seemed so urgent to send off before the 8:00am meeting… really could wait a bit. Sure, it would be great to get them off first thing… but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they were published/sent a few hours later.

And I realized again that it is easy to NOT prioritize exercise and running.

And that it is all about the choices we make in every moment of our lives.

And that I had a choice right then that would define what were my priorities.

I paused.

And then I chose to NOT send that message!

I did get into my running clothes… and I was down in the hotel lobby at 6:00am… and it turned out that there was a group of about 8 runners who gathered there… and we all went out for a great 3.8 mile run!

And I felt great after doing that!

We all have choices. We choose whether to exercise – or not.

P.S. The photo with this post is one I took on a morning run in Toronto during an IETF meeting. My hard-core, ultra-marathon-runner friend Hannes took it easy and joined us slow runners for a nice run along the harbor front… that’s him in the orange. 🙂

Heading To A “Junior Curling Camp” This Weekend

Curling rocksAbout this time tomorrow I’ll be down in Warminster, Pennsylvania, stepping onto the ice to help out with coaching in a “Junior Curling Camp”.

Yes, curling… that winter sport.

In July. 🙂

And yes, I’m excited! I’m taking two vacation days to bring my 12-year-old daughter Chloe down to this Junior Curling Camp sponsored by the Grand National Curling Club (GNCC), the organization that helps coordinate the sport of curling along the eastern coast of the USA.

Chloe absolutely loves the sport and has been curling for the past three years in the Petersham Curling Club youth curling program down in Petersham, MA, about 45 minutes south of where we live in Keene, NH. This past year she was a skip (captain) for one of our Petersham “Little Rocks” teams (ages 7-11) and did quite well in a couple of bonspiels (tournaments).

Now as a 12-year-old she’ll be going into the “Juniors” program and playing at a more serious level with kids ages 12 up to 21-ish. When we were talking earlier this year about what to do this summer, this curling camp rose right to the top of her choices. 🙂 So we’re heading down to join 31 other kids from around the region for what should be a couple of pretty intense days. It starts tomorrow (Thursday, July 31, 2014) afternoon and goes through Sunday mid-day. Lots of practice sessions, individual coaching, classroom work and some games.

The fun part for me is that I also get to join in the action as a coaching assistant. The camp will have some high-level coaches and instructors from the US Curling Association and from national teams, but they invited other club coaches to help… and I jumped right in. I’m very much looking forward to learning a great deal over the next few days from the other coaches that I can bring back to our Petersham CC youth program, as well as for the Monadnock Curling Club effort we are trying to start up in Keene.

So that’s the plan… curling… in July… in Pennsylvania! 🙂

A Three Year Cancerversary

Dan lori london 2014 3Today an anniversary slipped up upon us without much thought. We just came back very late last night from our first family vacation in about eight years (to London, where the photo accompanying this post was taken) and this morning were dealing with all the fallout of that return in terms of unpacking, getting back into routines, caring for our house and animals, etc. July 1 is also Canada Day, a day we celebrate in honor of our oldest daughter’s birth in that country, and so we were honoring that day.

And then somewhere in the midst of all that jetlagged weariness the dark side of the date infiltrated my wife’s consciousness and she posted a simple message to Facebook:

Today I am a three year survivor! July 1 is the cancerversary of my surgery and the start of 18 months of breast cancer treatment….

It was indeed three years ago today that we spent the day at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center up in Lebanon, NH, as she underwent a dual mastectomy. It was, unbelievably to me, simply day surgery. She was back at home that night, albeit in severe pain and not up and around for quite some time.

It’s been a long, strange road since then.

Some parts of that journey I’ve written about here in my many posts on the topic. Other parts I’ve not shared.

Mostly, we just go on.

I’m constantly amazed by the strength my wife shows through it all, and her willingness to be more open about it than many are. She is an inspiration to me – and I know to others.

Sadly, we’ve certainly come to know that she is not alone… and that even as we celebrate a three year anniversary, others are being diagnosed and treated now… while others are celebrating longer anniversaries… and others are passing away. Cancer is indeed the scourge that keeps on taking.

Hopefully some day we won’t need to be marking anniversaries like this one.

Flying Around The Globe (Literally)

As someone who enjoys maps, globes and all things related to geography, I found it kind of cool this morning to realize that my travel this weekend to ICANN 49 in Singapore (to be involved with activities related to DNSSEC (DNS Security)) will take me “around the world” in a somewhat literal manner. I will start off flying east from Boston to London and on to Singapore – and then will return flying east to Hong Kong and then to Chicago and back to Boston.

Of course, as the “Great Circle Mapper” site reminded me, my “circle” may not be quite as round as I was thinking it would be because the flights will probably take the northern route shown on this awesome image below:
Great Circle Mapper 2

Still, it is rather fun to see that this trip will go in some kind of loop around the world.

I talked about this in one of my “The Dan York Report” podcasts this morning:

I mentioned a “write-on” globe that I use to show where I will be traveling for my kids. While I bought it at the headquarters of Delorme Maps up in Freeport, Maine, the globe itself turns out to be made by Replogle as the “Geographer Globe”. You can probably find it in stores that sell globes or on various online sites. Here is one link to buy it on Amazon.com[1], although you may be able to find it at other places for less.

It’s been fun to use that globe to give my family a sense of where I am going.

It also serves to remind me of just how long I’m going to be in airborne metal tubes! 🙁

[1] In full disclosure, this link to Amazon is an “associate” link. If you were to actually purchase the globe, I would make a tiny amount of money for the referral. If you think that has any influence on my writing about it, you obviously don’t know me well. 🙂

Cancer – The Scourge That Keeps On Taking

Norriscotton keeneToday the terrible beast that is cancer once again rears its ugly head in our life. My sister-in-law begins her chemotherapy today at our local cancer center – and our thoughts are certainly with her and her family as they begin this unwelcome process. My wife’s brother, Scott, has rather eloquently written his thoughts online in his own unique style: The Bad News; It’s Cancer. For me, I just remember the tedious and endless monotony of chemo – and then, of course, all of the effects on my wife… some of which she still suffers from two years after ending her chemo treatments in her own fight against breast cancer.

There is an anger and a frustration that is hard to put into words.

The optimist in me of course is thrilled that such treatments are available so that my sister-in-law might beat back the beast and live a longer life.

But that optimism is balanced by a frustration that battling cancer seems to be the story of one sledgehammer after another and another… for all the millions of dollars we’re spending on cancer research, the weapons and treatment we have still seem so crude.

Yes, I know intellectually that the treatments have come so far from what they used to be. I know that such research takes time and trials and more time and more trials before the benefits can be widely seen.

But emotionally I want the scanner device out of some sci-fi show that can just scan down the body, find the cancer cells and destroy them.

We’re not there yet. Maybe we’ll never get there.

And so we fight the battle with the weapons we have, crude as they are.

And my sister-in-law sits there with an IV drip slowly bringing incredibly toxic chemicals into her body…

Meanwhile, another friend around my age from Burlington, VT, fights a liver cancer that is not responding to treatment… and at this point may give him less than a year to live…

Meanwhile, my wife learned through Facebook that a sister of a friend is apparently entering into her final days of life after an aggressive form of breast cancer…

Meanwhile, someone else we know just finished up her four months of chemo in dealing with breast cancer…

Meanwhile… … meanwhile… …

Yes, all we can do is keep going on… putting one foot in front of the other and living out each day…

But still, there are days when all you want to do is rage against the scourge that is ravishing so many wonderful people out there.

Cancer – the scourge that keeps on taking.

An audio version of this post is available as an episode in my “The Dan York Report” podcast: