Entry 18, February 20th, my first European vacation

First the update portion:

Went to see the rehab doctor for brain and had good news. My scores from January 29th which thought were low had actually increased significantly over when I left the hospital 2 weeks prior and if tested today I would be even higher. I will be able to be on my own (no 24 hour surveillance) in a week and I got the green light to be evaluated to drive again. He said I can start to plan to go back to work, with somewhere in the second half of March place to start. All great stuff.

Cardiac- I forced myself into Cardiac rehab-a month before they had scheduled me. As I mentioned before my stress test scores were great. Tt has been hard getting their attention since I am not in an emergency. I have been working on remedying that situation. The key is working on it. From now til when I return to my job in March, I will be me working on my rehab to prepare return to MRCY.

Spoke to Wim yesterday over Skype-a great tool if you do not use it. I will probably go to hang out with my Dutch friends and their families for vacation later in the summer. I have known Wim and Alexander both since 1986. I lived in the same house they did in Cambridge in 1986 while they were students. I have been to visit them in Europe 6 times including standing up in both of their weddings. I was telling them how I had paid for my first trip to Europe to visit yesterday.

My brothers and I were not crazy (which is being nice) about my grandparents on my Dad's side.
I think the term ogre was the way I heard my grandfather being describe and my grandmother was a little better however after not seeing us for 3-4 months she would sit us down and force us to listen to her read letter from my California cousins sent 3-4 years prior. She tried to cook but it never turned out quite right. Glenn and I remember the Eggs being to loose (rawish), lots of canned fruits with fruit slime, pineapple juice coming from the leftover of a can of Dole pineapple and as Glenn put it, Flour bomb cookies (hard as rock chocolate chips-flour grenades). I could go on forever but the question would be, what does this have to do with how I paid for my first European vacation?

GP (aka Grandma Primack) died in the mid/late 1980s. As they were settling her estate there somehow was ~10K to the 3 of us. For my two brothers they were down payments on their schooling (Scott medical school and Glenn's MBA). For me, I deposited part of the money and the rest was spent on my first European vacation. It was the nicest thing Grandma and Grandma Primack did for any of the 3 of us. It made me believe there was equilibrium in the world.

That's end of another post,

Brian