As failures come in threes, so do the lessons. After a week of traveling, listening, learning and speaking about my passion in video games, I’m ready to share the last of this tripartite teaching with a final story that has a happy ending.
What – you thought it was all failures, all the time? That’s not how it works. Not for me, not for you, not for anyone. There’s a third rule to failure that makes it all make sense. Read the rest of this entry »
Failures don’t wait until you’re grown up. For me, failing goes back a lot further in my history. You and I might be a bit alike; I tend to have a limited memory stack for my disappointments, but the right song, the right barometric pressure, and I start to think back to early days, to realize there are lessons still to be learned.
For me, the recent warm weather in Seattle has brought back memories of another summer - of 103-degree days, sweating away in the heat of Huntsville, Alabama; a kid in a powder-blue flight suit.
As part of Failure Week here on the blog, I’d like to tell you a story of a young pilot that trained hard, learned constantly, and failed epically – and it all came down to a switch. I was thirteen years old, in Space Camp, when I learned this important lesson about failure.
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I admit, as thorough as I tried to make my last one-eyed post, I’m afraid I left you all on a bit of a cliffhanger. Am I hopelessly blind? Suffering from a total failure of depth perception? Forced into inescapable eye-patch supervillainy? The answer: not quite.
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The one admittedly dubious plus about having a medical order stamped “BRAIN INFECTION”: it gets you service.
A little over a week ago, I woke up with double vision, worse in the morning and at night. I gave it three days, figuring something about my heathen lifestyle was simply catching up to me. On Friday, I casually took the continuing problem to the doctor.
What they saw, I still don’t fully understand. I hardly had time to react when the doctor signed an inpatient order, told me to call my wife, and before I understood what had happened, had me on my back in a Stryker cart, my only view a jungle of white ceiling tile and automatic double doors, with orders to get floated in a sea of IV antibiotics to control a potentially lethal infection that had spread to my brain.
“Hours count,” I remember the doctor saying, as I lay on a tilting table meant to draw my cerebrospinal fluid down by gravity into a waiting syringe stuck into the L3-4 space in my spinal column. After that, an MRI to find less-visible culprits, and an iodine-fueled angiogram CT to look for aneurysms, before spending a night in the hospital hooked up to a bag of bacteria-killing antibiotics.
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I wanted to take a moment this Father’s Day and share with you a recipe that’s become a fast favorite around these parts: Smoked Dr. Pepper-n-Honey Baby Back Ribs.
You’ll want a grill that can smoke. A Weber with smoke chips works great. Or, if you’re a Traeger owner like me, simply keeping a controlled temperature will do fine.
You’ll also want to buy the real-sugar Dr. Pepper, the kind with the old-timey font and iconography. Having real sugar is a must. Get honey, too, which kind won’t matter too much.
This recipe will take six to six-and-a-half hours, so be ready with that grill by noon if you want to eat these ribs by suppertime. Read the rest of this entry »