It’s 2:45 PT, which means it’s 4:45 CT, which means I’m running out of Monday to get this posted.

I’ve been out of town since a week ago for the annual conference the Passive House Institute US (PHIUS)—that would be where I work—was held. We’re a small organization, so putting on the five-day event for a few hundred people is nerve-wracking, hair-raising, and exhausting. Fortunately, the last day of the conference always comprises a bus tour of local passive house projects, which is downright inspiring each year. Architects and geeky building science people go nuts over these things, and they chat furiously on the bus between stops, swapping tips and stories about how to build these things right.

This year included an office building and a dormitory in Palo Alto, a retrofitted arts and crafts house in Santa Cruz, and then—after a gorgeous trip up Route 1—a retrofit house in progress in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood.

The view from the hotel.

I got back to the hotel, had two celebratory martinis, went upstairs to refresh with the intent of coming back down to watch the Bears play the 49ers here in enemy territory. I turned on the game, propped a pillow behind me on the bed, and the last thing I remember was the Bears were stinking and behind 10-0.

I opened my eyes the next morning, feeling better rested than I have in weeks, and learned that, against all odds, the Bears had prevailed. I’ll try to not watch from here on out.

I’m staying out near the airport, and in most cases that wouldn’t necessarily be ideal, but the hotel is across the water from the runways and, this being San Francisco, even this is pretty beautiful.

Though I’ve been in the Silicon Valley area several times in the past 30 years or so, I haven’t spent much time in the city. So tonight, I’m doing a nostalgia trip.

Back in 1982, I was living and working in Washington, D.C. The magazine I worked for (Washington Consumers’ Checkbook) had opened another magazine in the Bay Area, and asked me if I wanted to move out there to help it get off the ground.

I went on a scouting trip with my dear friend and then roommate, Pick, who knew the city and—as he had been on our trips to New York—was a fantastic fellow traveler who helped me see more than I ever would’ve on my own.

We had a grand time, and I was left stunned by the beauty of the city and the, for lack of a better term, differentness of everything. Vegetation. Rowhouses that seemed to hang from hillsides. The people. The hills.

Our trip was grand. But I didn’t take the job. Making that trip somehoe reminded me that—against any prediction I could’ve made about Myself before I moved away from the Midwest—that I wanted to go back. Which I did a few months later.

But San Francisco remains unforgettable. Our trip in 1982 included a trip to the Top of the Mark, a restaurant/bar on the top floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. And that view—the twinkling lights on the hillsides surrounding us in 360 degrees—is burned into my brain.

So, tonight, with the conference over, I’m taking the BART downtown, and I’m going to see if the real thing is as good as what I remember. I’m guessing it will be.

Jim Kessler left Wall Street for The Seeing Eye.

The post is called Career Moves and describes how the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 convinced Jim to leave Wall Street and apprentice at the Seeing Eye in Morristown, NJ instead. My Daily Bark post quotes an article in The North Jersey Record that reports salaries start in the $40,000 range for those in the Seeing Eye’s three-year apprentice training program, and that the salary for full instructors ranges from $50,000 to $85,000. From my Daily Bark guest post:

Odds are that Jim Kessler took a significant paycut to work for the Seeing Eye, but he doesn’t talk about that. He talks instead about his respect for the instructors he works with, his pride in the remarkable work the dogs do, and how much he loves his family.

I learned all this during a drive with Jim when I was at the Seeing Eye training with Whitney. The last few days of training at the Seeing Eye are called “freelancing”: instructors expose us to some of the unique situations we’ll be facing once we’re home. When I learned that Jim and his wife Carrie have three daughters in school (in addition to a two-year-old son at home), I asked if I could spend my freelancing time visiting the elementary school his daughters go to. From the post:

Jim stayed at the school with us during the visit, and you didn’t have to be able to see to know he was beaming when we arrived. He was unabashedly delighted to be at school with his daughters, and they were proud to have their dad – and a Seeing Eye graduate with her working dog – at school with them that day, too.

After what happened on September 11, 2001, Jim Kessler is the first to tell you that he considers himself a very lucky guy. I’m a lucky woman, too: a man with integrity like his had a part in training Whitney. And me.

Whitney, upon graduation from The Seeing Eye.

Beth here. We got such a great response to that beautiful post Mike wrote last week about our visit with Gus that I asked him if he’d be willing to let me re-blog a book review he wrote here a few years ago. Here it is.

A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son

by Mike Knezovich

This is a great book, but I'm not linking to Amazon. Go get it or order it at your local bookstore.

As many of you are lucky to know, Beth has a knack for giving poignant, thoughtful gifts. She was true to form this past Father’s Day when she gave me a book called The Boy in the Moon. I just finished it. And what a read.

Beth doesn’t mention our son Gus very often in these blog posts of hers. Like other parents, we love our son. Think about him. Worry about him. But loving a child who has severe disabilities can be difficult to explain, so we tend not to try.

As for me, I admit I wonder what people think of what it’s like raising a son like Gus. I can get angry if I detect pity — or condescension — toward Gus, toward me and Beth, or the unspoken wonder that we could love a kid like Gus. And I can get hurt if people don’t ask or don’t know how to ask about our son. And then, when they do, sometimes they don’t really want to hear the answer.

Over time, I have come to understand that Gus, and life with him, simply had to be a mystery to others. After all, our son’s life has been—at least in real time—something of a mystery to me. Gus lived with us at home for 16 years, and all that time I had no way of telling others what it was like. And I have no way of telling people what it is like having him live away from us, either.

Now I don’t have to. Ian Brown, a writer for the Toronto Globe & Mail, has done it for me, and he’s done it better than I could hope to in his book The Boy in the Moon. So here’s a request: Go out and buy The Boy in the Moon. And read it as soon as you can fit it into your schedule.

That's Gus and Beth at a lunch date near his home in Wisconsin.

I’m not asking you to do this just for me and Beth and Gus. I do admit to selfish motives, though. If you read this book—which is the author’s account of raising and trying to understand his son Walker, who has a rare genetic disorder that leaves him with multiple disabilities—you will know what it has been like raising Gus. Ian Brown’s accounts are superbly written and uncannily similar to my memories—from receiving the genetic diagnosis to the 16 years of sleep deprivation to what it was like to parade around hyper-normal places like Disney World when things are not normal.

But more than that, you will understand why it all was worth it. As the author writes about his son Walker, “Everything about him compels me, unless it terrifies me, and sometimes it does both.”

The first half or so of the book covers Brown’s experience as a parent and a husband, but the rest is a look at what disabled people like Gus and Walker have to offer the rest of us. What they can teach us. You might be skeptical that they can. Or anticipate saccharine platitudes. I understand. But it’s richer and more complicated than that.

Beth and I and other families and caretakers know that people like Walker and Gus teach us extraordinary things. This book explains how and why better than I can—I hope you’ll read it.

The Bears open their season at Soldier Field today, and though I’m not much of a football fan, I’ll be cheering on Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler. He was 25 and quarterbacking for the Denver Broncos when he was diagnosed with Type I diabetes, joining a team of 2 million other Americans like me who live with the chronic disease every day.

Diabetes is a difficult disease to understand, in large part because of the two different types. Type I is the one that was formerly known as juvenile diabetes, Type II used to be called adult onset diabetes, and both diseases have to do with insulin, which helps move sugar from the blood into cells for energy.

A person who has Type II still has a pancreas that produces insulin, but in some cases because the person has a poor diet and/or is overweight, their pancreas just can’t keep up. In others, people develop a kind of insulin resistance which limits the effectiveness of insulin. Many of the people diagnosed with Type II diabetes can improve the condition (even reduce or eliminate the need for insulin injections altogether) by watching their diet and exercising.

A person diagnosed with Type I diabetes has a pancreas that doesn’t work at all — it doesn’t produce any insulin. No matter what we do (exercise, diet, whatever) our bodies will not make insulin. We either have to take multiple injections of insulin throughout the day, or wear an insulin pump.

There is no behavior that causes Type I–it’s an autoimmune disease — some trigger wrongly tells the body to attack the cells that produce insulin. It usually occurs in childhood. I was diagnosed when I was seven years old, long before short-acting insulin, home blood glucose monitors or insulin pumps came on the scene. In recent years it has become increasingly common for people Cutler’s age or older to be diagnosed with Type I, and thanks to advances in care of Type I, we can test our blood sugar levels regularly at home and give ourselves insulin throughout the day to match our food intake and exercise levels. The more we test our sugar levels, the easier it is to walk the tightrope between high and low blood sugars.

It’s never a walk in the park, though, and I cannot imagine what it must be like for someone to walk that tightrope with millions of people watching TV as he fends off 300+-pound gorillas rushing to knock him down. In an interview in Diabetes Forecast magazine, Cutler was asked how he uses a blood glucose monitor to check his blood sugar level on game days. His answer:

I check my blood sugar about four or five times before the game—try to stay around 150 to 160 [mg/dl] before kickoff. Most of the time, I prick my finger every time we come off the field, especially in the first half.

When asked if he worried whether his teammates, the media, or fans might blame his Type I diabetes as a reason for poor performance, Cutler said he didn’t want sympathy, he just wanted to be judged like every other quarterback. “But living with diabetes in the public eye does make it harder,” he said, conceding that if he goes out and has a bad game, some people might assume it’s because of his blood sugar numbers. “I just try not to worry about it and go out and play my game.”

A short YouTube video shows Cutler visiting with kids in a hospital who have just been diagnosed with Type I. He figures if kids meet him and then see him on TV playing football, they’ll realize that Type I doesn’t have to stop them from doing what they want to do. They’ll just have to learn to manage the disease, and be good with numbers. Like #6

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And now, an update on a few favorite female friends.

Eliza Cooper ended up not racing in that Brooklyn Bridge Swim after the NYC Swims director decided that athletes with disabilities would have to pay an extra fee to participate. A few weeks later, Eliza and her volunteer guide from Achilles International swam 1.2 miles in the ocean, rode a tandem for 56 miles and ran 13.1 miles – they completed a Half Ironman Triathlon, and they finished one hour earlier than they’d anticipated. But wait. There’s more! This past week Eliza started her first day of graduate school –at Columbia University.

Our sensational sister Cheryl was there to visit Flo every single day for the past couple years, whether Flo was still living alone in her condo, or in the hospital, or in a rehab facility. Cheryl went with Flo to doctor visits, she helped Flo with paperwork, and she was there with her kids and grandchildren at Flo’s side the day she died.

Cheryl flew to the Pacific Northwest last month for some well-deserved quiet time on her own, but before she left she went through Flo’s things and divided them into boxes for the siblings. She returns next week, and before then I’m heading to Blind Service Association (BSA) in downtown Chicago with a bag full of papers from my Flo box. Many of the papers are letters I wrote that Flo saved, and the generous readers at BSA have volunteered to read everything out loud to me. I’ll supply the Kleenex.

Nancy Faust just signed a contract to play for the Kane County Cougars again next season. The Cougars are a minor league team in Geneva, Ill., and when I say Nancy is playing for them, I of course mean she’s doing that on her Hammond B3!

I’ve been a fan of the Kane County Cougars ever since they hired me to work in their ticket office in 1994, and now that they’ve rehired Nancy to play every Sunday home game between May and September next year, I’m up for season tickets. All they need to do is come up with a “Nancy Package”: Sunday games only.

This season The Cougars have the most wins of any major or minor league baseball team in the country — the last time they had a championship season like this was back in 2001, when the team was led by Miguel Cabrera and Adrian Gonzalez. The first game of that series was on September 10, 2001. The Cougars won that game, but everything was cancelled after that.

Myrna Knepler is a writer in my memoir class. In a guest post here called when your birthday falls on September 11 she describes the reaction she gets when people at banks, at airports, or at doctor’s offices ask her for her date of birth. “They always comment,” she says. “And sometimes, they commiserate.”

Myrna has learned to refer to the date as “the eleventh of September,” but says figuring out how to commemorate it is still a conundrum. She’ll be 80 years old this year. I say we celebrate the entire month.

Which one is 4, and which one is 14?

Hanni is still going strong, and her human companion Nancy Bollero reports that The 14-year-old star of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is getting creative in her old age: she taught herself to turn the quilt she sleeps on inside-out so she can shape it into a giant ball. “She rolls the ball to a new spot every day,” Nancy told me, describing the artful way Hanni arranges her favorite toys and bones once the ball reaches its new destination. ”And she still wags her tail like mad, thwomping it against the hardwood floor to let everyone know she’s proudof her work.”