Gerard's blog
Cancer everywhere
Written by Gerard on Wednesday 16 December 2009
Let's come straight out and say it: Lisa's mother has been diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer. The events that led up to this have been unfolding over the past month, and a fairly concrete diagnosis came something over a week or a fortnight ago.
Lisa, naturally, was devastated. She didn't help herself much by doing some web research into the survival rates and details of the disease. Seems Ovarian Cancer is dubbed the 'silent killer'...
The Fightfort
Written by Gerard on Thursday 26 November 2009
We went out for Lisa's birthday on Saturday night and had a nice, boisterous, drunken time. Lisa's mum stayed in our house with the kids while we stayed overnight in her house. A brilliant arrangement and we didn't have to be home too early.
The end of the night is actually the most memorable. We initially wanted to get kebabs from a South Belfast kebaberie, but our taxi arrived and offered to take us to a chippie in Andersonstown. We all hopped into the cab and Wooftie and I went in to order.
So, we rehomed our dog Tommy
You may recall that back in May we took in a dog called Tommy. Well, I came to call him Tom, because that sounded more manly when calling him in the street.
Anyway, the thing with Tom is that he was a total nightmare. Without an enclosed back yard, we had to tie him up whenever he wasn't inside the house. He hated this, and would howl, especially when he saw us in the kitchen.
Not Coping With Grief and Loss
Written by Gerard on Wednesday 18 November 2009
As the regular readers among you will know, my father died in June from lung cancer. I guess the survivors have dealt with the grief in their own individual ways.
For my own part, I was devastated and temporarily paralysed by the grief I felt afterward. A cornerstone of my life...gone. But strangely enough, real life intruded, and I was forced to snap out of it. The possibility of returning to work, as well as dealing with my father's financial affairs certainly kept me grounded. As well as that, my own family needed me.
How my Primary School teacher stopped me from smoking
Written by Gerard on Tuesday 17 November 2009
Seamus was a substitute teacher who taught our class in the last year of primary school. We kind of called him Seamus behind his back because he lived just down the road from us, and that's what the parents called him.
I remember we'd been doing some lessons about the dangers of smoking. It was the usual stuff - rancid, rotting lungs that had been damaged by years of smoke filling them. Do you remember those specimens? The little microscopic bits of lung that were blackened and corroded? Yuck.
But one morning Seamus took the anti-smoking campaign to an entirely new level - he strutted into the classroom and produced a packet of cigarettes. Making quite a display of the next part, he took a cigarette out of the pack and lit it up. The constant background noise of the classroom died away as everybody realised the teacher was smoking in the class!
Halloween story: Collecting junk for the bonfire
Written by Gerard on Saturday 31 October 2009
It seems the lost art of Halloween bonfire building is actually lost. Aside from officially sanctioned bonfires and fireworks displays, there are very few ad-hoc bonfires being built in neighbourhoods. So today I'm going to play old-timer and recount for you how we built bonfires back in the day.
Should children call parents by their first name?
Written by Gerard on Thursday 22 October 2009
Do you call your parents Mum and Dad, or do you use their first name? Or, more importantly, do you allow your children to call you by your first name?
I've been meaning to ask this question on Familytastic for a while now, because our daughter - quite of her own free will - has been calling me "Gerard" and "Dad" intermittently for almost as long as she could talk. And to be honest, a little part of me likes the idea of being on first-name terms with my children.
Is repeating a year good for a child's confidence?
Written by Gerard on Monday 19 October 2009
I was tucking Daniel into the car tonight after football practice when I heard a roar beside me - "BYE BYE DAVID!" It was coming from the other side of the car, where my other son Jake was waving a salute to his friend who was on the other side of the car park
This was unusual, to say the least.
My Inheritance
Written by Gerard on Monday 7 September 2009
Before he died, my father insisted that he wanted me to have two old fog watches that his father had passed to him. My reaction was visibly lukewarm, but I accepted them and promised that I would make sure to pass them down the generations. As long as Lisa doesn’t eBay them first. I’m joking :) See? I used a smiley-face!
But wait, judgemental reader, this wasn’t because I was holding out for a high value item such as a house or a car. No, it was because no physical item would ever replace him.
I wasn’t visiting the hospital so regularly hoping to nudge myself into a more favourable spot in his will. No siree, and I think he knew that Lisa and I are fairly non-materialistic folks. Funnily enough, the one thing I would have loved to receive would have been some kind of letter from beyond the grave. Yes, you can almost taste the diet of Hollywood schmaltz - did Bette Midler get a letter at the end of Beaches?
Goodbye Self-employment?
Written by Gerard on Monday 7 September 2009
Well, dear readers, it seems recession, parental deaths and a series of other little factors are pushing me back toward a desk job.
It was almost a year ago that we took the decision to concentrate completely on the business, and I quit my job. For about six months, we were plodding along merrily, the effects of the recession not giving us any cause for concern. Then two things happened:
- My father took ill in Lourdes, was diagnosed with cancer and died within about three months. It completely took me away from developing our business and into a world of family issues I’d distanced myself from for years. Even after the funeral, my head was fuzzy with grief and I was totally unfocused.
- The dreaded alliterative nightmare that is the credit crunch visited us. Despite no worrying signs at all, in June advertising revenue from our sites took a massive downturn. Suddenly relying on the great passive-income generator that is Google AdSense (and other advertising schemes) didn’t seem like a great idea anymore.
Now, the summer time is a bad time for ad revenue anyway: people go on holiday or spend more time outdoors. You can feel the general quieting of the Internet for the holiday period. Plus, Big Brother was bleeding viewers, the showbiz world decided to have a slow-news summer and the only thing to write about was the Katie and Peter split. Yawnnnn.
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