American Airlines – Act of Kindness

A A Pilots
This is from the American Airline’s Pilots’ Mentoring Website – where the pilots voluntarily offer support and advice to AMR employee’s children who want to pursue a career in aviation. That is a really nice thing to do right there, but this letter tells such a heart-warming story, I wanted to share it.

Dear Captain of flight 2475,

I wanted to express my appreciation for your care and concern when you flew me and my mom home from California on June 19th. I was the daughter experiencing psychological melt-down from the stress of losing my dad, and my mom was the older woman with Alzheimer’s. When you walked back into the plane and took her hand to lead her off your aircraft I thought that was an incredibly kind act, not to mention, very classy. In thee weeks time, my mom lost her husband, her home, her dog, her church friends in Seymore and her posessions. It’s always hard to lose a parent, but my sisters and brothers and I have lost both of them in a sense, due to the progression of her dementia. We love her dearly and she is in a top-notch facility for people with her disease, as we cannot provide nursing care for her. She also had a heart attack the day before Mother’s day, and needs to build up her strength.
Your kind gesture to my mom, enabled me to see God’s love manifested in you. Thank you ever so much.

Sincerely,
Suzanne McTighe

I’m wishing all those kind people well.

Past Few Weeks

Where’ve I been? What’ve I been up to? I have not been idle, that’s for sure! It’s been a busy old time, and I don’t even know if I can remember everything I have been doing, but here goes:

Online:
So, I fired up the computer and…

..I joined a forum around August time, and it was a bit daunting at first. My last experience of a forum was something that sprang out of an eBay competition and it was pretty dreadful. But this one seems different; the other members are friendly and it is vwery wel moderated so that means the forum is generally a pretty good place to hang out. I think I am doing OK working out the rule and so on, and the image editing competitions are my main interest there, apart from the great advice and support from other members. I have even won a couple of competitions, much to my surprise.

.. then I joined a couple of Google’s API developer schemes and am currently working with the Google Maps API – quite successfully, and already have a couple of reasonable-looking prototype maps up and running. Geocoding locations is the hardest part really – there is simply no reliable online resource for finding the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of multiple locations in the UK, say from a list of postcodes. In the end, I wrote a script to fire my ‘bulk’ postcode data at a web page one address at a time using ‘GET’ and output the results into a file, but there was still plenty of editing and not a few errors with that method.
The other Google API that interests me is the Google Talk souce code (named ‘libjingle’) and I only recently started messing around with it – still on the workbench so no link yet but keep watching!

..started a new project under the Servisis Ltd banner. No-one seems to know how to pronounce ’servisis’ – I suggest you say it like ’services’. This site hosts the various online applications I build or install, and also the demo site for my Servisis Project Management Portal (PMP). The PMP is possibly one of the most successful things I have done in the past year, with 5 users in 4 countries so far, and it is also a great tool for my own projects.

If you follow the link above, you’ll need a login to look around, try the user name of dguest and enter the same name as the password. And don’t worry about the message that says you need to have cookies turned on in your browser – it’s always visible just to remind people (keeps the support calls down).

..got invited to join WordPress.com – and here we are! That led to a couple of invites to contribute to other blogs, which is really great.

..I have’t got over having a short story published online yet, it was a really good feeling. Another invite was for NewsVine – social network site for news editing and posting.

But I still haven’t finished…
…created an online portfolio of some of my images and designs. It’s almost finished (honest!).

Offline:

Yes, in spite of all the above, I have a life offline! I am still working full time at RMS, and have a fantastic project under way right now, which is both challenging and rewarding. I love my job! The team at work has changed a lot in the past year, and we are about 8-strong now. We do some pretty amazing projects between us, and it’s good to be part of a successful team.

Health-wise I am doing better than I have for the past couple of years, and to be honest it’s quite phenomenal how great I feel. And I intend to keep going from strength to strength. There’s a ‘big’ birthday looming on the horizon, so this April, I intend to spend my birthday doing something fun, and even slightly outrageous if I can get away with it! Latest idea is to go snowboarding, but more on that later as I am having some difficulty getting it arranged with the friends I hope to travel with. Whatever I end up doing, I need to work on my physical fitness after two years of not being able to do anything much, so I have started walking and swimming as well as ‘just saying no’ to junk food.

I have also been busy building/rebuilding computers and installing a wireless network at home, so that we can both do what we want without the usual cable macrame, and I am glad to report all systems are ‘go’ as I write. I also treated myself to a new dishwasher with the help of some money I got for Xmas, and my hands have never been so soft, haha!

Funny thing, I can manage to do all of this stuff, but writing about it is quite exhausting – think I’ll go have a healthy green tea However you are, whatever you are doing, I wish you well.

Wish Alert: Wish Mark Saadi Well

Many thanks to the friend who sent me a link to Andre Klemmer’s  recent post on his Twitz blog. It contains a simple story of a young family man who suffered a dramatic seizure  just before Christmas, and has been hospitalised.

Andre wants to collect 1,000 (or more!) wishes for Mark, whose wife will read them to him during her visits.  I hope you will consider adding a comment, here’s the link: Wish Mark Saadi Well

Reading through the many comments which have been left already, I found a wonderful, inspirational story contributed by Catgirl, which I plan to post here soon.

So, as I wish all of you a wonderful New Year, please also join me in wishing Mark Saadi well.