05/25/2007 Counting your blessings

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Willie asked a question on the forum about how people deal with stress. He pointed out that people with disabilities have the same stresses as everyone else but they also have additional stresses that involve medical procedures, need for personal care attendants and so on.

Life has been very good to me lately and I feel as if I haven't appreciated that fact sufficiently.

I was watching a video about Rick and Dick Hoyt. It is phenomenal and I recommend it to anybody. Rick Hoyt had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck when he was born and was deprived of oxygen. He has spastic cerebral palsy and is quadriplegic. He and his father compete in Ironman triathlons and marathons. In the triathlon father Dick Hoyt pulls his on in a raft. He runs the 26 miles pushing his son's wheelchair and bikes with his son on a specially-made seat on his bike. The same day, my daughter, Ronda was competing in the Panamerican Championships. She lost a somewhat disputed match and ended with a bronze medal. When Ronda was born, she had the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck and wasn't breathing, the same as Rick Hoyt. Her father started crying in the delivery room because he thought she was dead. She had speech therapy to learn to talk and some other effects but she is one of the best judo players in the world now.

On top of Ronda earning a bronze medal, our company also received a grant award notice that our new SBIR proposal for an on-line business ethics course for tribal programs had been approved for $80,000 to develop a prototype.

Instead of being thrilled with how well business is going and happy that Ronda is alive and well, much less winning international competitions, I have been thinking it was too bad she did not win a gold medal and feeling sorry for myself that I have so many deadlines to meet on so many different projects and nothing I have written lately strikes me as particularly outstanding.

Which just goes to show that no matter how many degrees a person gets, they can still think like a complete moron sometimes.

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