Today I write about my dog, Rooney.

I have always had dogs as family members and companions. I think they only time I didn’t have a dog is when we were living overseas, and even then we adopted a dog in England and brought him home when we moved back to USA. This dog – Rooney – is unique in a few ways. They are all unique in personality, but this pup is a kook. So says my vet, who claimed that Rooney was her favorite.

It all started when we adopted Surrey, a beautiful little 2-month-old black lab puppy, from a group called Adopt-a-lab. As it turns out, black dogs get adopted far less often than others as they are not as photogenic. Black lab faces are harder to see in a photo. Surrey came to us as a very young pup, and she was the sweetest dog we have ever had. She still is. She was calm and loving and well-behaved right from the beginning. Surrey is the closest thing to a perfect dog we have ever had.

So…my wife decided that we should try again. You know they old saw about having a perfect well-behaved baby who sleeps through the night, so you figure the second one will be just as good, and then…. Same.

My wife adopted Rooney from the same organization, Adopt-a-lab, and made it her business for it to be a surprise. We picked up Rooney from the van that had driven her from Arkansas or Tennessee or wherever she had come from, I can’t remember which. Rooney was already 6 months old – this is an important fact, as it turned out that she had some history.

Rooney was ill-behaved, skinny, unattractive (for a lab) and difficult. She was not affectionate at all, she pissed and pooped everywhere, starting in the car on the way home. In short, she was everything Surrey was not. This went on for quite some time. We of course got her cleaned up, but she was skinny and apparently untrainable. She ran around, wouldn’t listen, chewed, wouldn’t be house trained and continued to refuse to be affectionate. After a few months of this, the thought that we might not be able to keep Rooney crossed my mind. It was the closest I have ever come to giving a dog back, and of course I could never actually do it, but the thought definitely crossed my mind.

She was named Rooney, after a gentleman named Wayne Rooney. He was one of our (my son and my) favorite footballers (soccer players) in the UK. He played for Manchester United, and was hard-headed, stubborn and ill-behaved. He got in trouble regularly, but was an amazing football player, great with the ball, huge amounts of energy on the pitch (field) and wonderful to watch. My Rooney was same – hard headed and got in trouble and stubborn as hell…but also great with a soccer ball. She (yes Rooney is a she, though I don’t think she realizes it) played only with a soccer ball, right from the beginning. She wouldn’t chase a tennis ball – could care less. Try to get the soccer ball from her, though, just try. I brought her to the high school soccer team’s practice once and dared them to try and play keep away from Rooney. None could succeed.

Rooney turned out to be athletic as hell – she played soccer, she ran with abandon and she could scale the fence (about 5 feet high) around our swimming pool every single day it was open, so she could go swimming. Oh and could she swim. We had to be careful in Maine as she would swim out to follow us in kayaks. One time she followed my daughter for probably 1/2 mile, until she had to turn around and lead her back.

Rooney was an impressive bundle of muscle.

Eventually – we didn’t give her back of course – she calmed down…a little at a time. It probably took a couple of years, to be honest, but she started to pay attention and become part of the family. Surrey probably helped. Rooney and Surrey grew to love each other like sisters and it’s lovely to watch them together.

Rooney is now 11 years old. She can’t scale the fence any longer, but she can still swim 1/2 mile when given the chance. She has turned into a loving girl, and real part of the family. She is definitely a kook and prefers to be dirty. All the time. She sleeps in the dirty in my wife’s garden, she plays in the mud and on the rare occassion she is forced to bathe, she immediately heads for dirt afterward. I’ve given up trying to keep her clean – she is happiest when she is dirty. One of my son’s friends just calls her “Dirty Girl,” and he loves her.

I will never know Rooney’s history, but I am guessing it was pretty bad for a 6-month-old puppy to be so poorly behaved and difficult to deal with. It does prove to me, however, that any dog will respond to love and nurture and eventually come around. We love Rooney – she is weird and quirky but she behaves and she loves us back.

I hope she lives for quite a while yet.

I finally have gotten used to the fact that I am retired from corporate life. My last company was sold – before I was ready to quite, tbh, but that’s life. I contemplated finding a new company. I contemplated seeking board positions, consulting, simple advisory work.

I have ended up (ended?) in the following place. I do some rewarding work for Junior Achievement, a non-profit in Connecticut that I have been associated with for some time. I do some mentoring for a young man who used to work for me in London. And…I have agreed to help my son establish and run his company – Osprey’s Echo Sea Kayaking. He loves kayaking and started his company with my support as well as the rest of the family. I now spend all of my time between May and mid-October up in Maine, working with him. I don’t have a guide license so he is the one on the water, but I take customer calls, I answer questions and talk customers into the right choice of tour. I greet them at our launch site, get them in their gear and the right frame of mind. I help carry boats, I clean gear, etc etc.

All of this is in sharp contrast to the roles I have played in the previous 40 years, leading teams of people around the world, traveling, selling technology solutions. I am outside, working with my son and our dogs. I wake up in the mornings and it’s gorgeous – even on rainy and cloudy days. It’s not bad, not bad at all.

Disclaimer: my experience with grief does not compare with so so many people in the world who have faced it in far more dire circumstances. I have not been to war, I have not lost a spouse or a child. I appreciate what I have and the perspective I try to hold is vital.

Nonetheless, I grieve over losing my Dad and my Mom. I also grieve when i lose a pet. As trivial as that may sound next to someone else’s loss, the days I lost a loved pet are seared into my memory.

I have regrets over how I have dealt with some of this.

My dad had Alzheimer’s disease. This must be one of the worst ways to go imagineable. He was an intelligent man, highly articulate, precise in his communications. Alzheimers trapped him inside his own body. I could see how frustrated he was. The last time I saw him, he was lying in bed, and it was clearly near the end. Mom (who was healthy) had suggested I come visit – she knew he was close to dying. I had my young son with me, but we decided that seeing his Grampy wasted away would not be the best memory for Jack. I went in the bedroom alone. Dad saw me. He recognized me. He made a couple of noises to me and tried to gesture. Mom watched this and marveled that Dad was trying to communicate with his oldest son at this late stage of his disease. I did nothing. I said hi to my Dad and stayed for a minute, but I didn’t hug him, I didn’t talk to him and say my farewells in an earnest way. I regret that last visit so much. I wish I had just told him I loved him. I did love him, and I should have told him. It makes me sad to look back on how weak I was at that moment.

One of our favorite pets died in a vet’s office. She was a beautiful dog, so sweet and so much fun. She was my daughter’s dog, but the family marveled over her. Addie was a big girl and when she got sick she went downhill fast. I think she was only 9 years old when we took her to the emergency vet for the final time. They made it clear that putting her to sleep was the kind thing to do. They asked my wife and I if we’d like to come into the back room and say goodbye. My wife couldn’t do it, but I did. I walked in the back and Addie was lying on the table. She saw me and her eyes lit up; she tried to get up, but couldn’t. I walked over and petted her for the last time. I gave her a kiss and then I left. I wish I had stayed, so that I was the last thing she saw before she died. I was crying too hard (as I am now) and in a moment of weakness I walked away and left her to the vet.

I hope I have learned from these two moments of weakness. They haunt me. Dad tried to communicate with me. Addie just wanted to be with me. I know that these are small things in the scheme of life, but they do haunt me.

I love you Dad. I think of you often and miss you more than you know.

You too, Addie….know that I will be there next time.

There – I have admitted something in writing that I never did before. I think reading this novel about grief inspired me to share this…probably with nobody, but what the heck. At least I wrote it and got it out.

I think about this from time to time. Not just since I retired, but more so now of course. The intriguing elements are that I like to write, and it would give me a project and a sense. of accomplishment if I ever pulled it off. On the downside – not sure I am a good enough writer, and then there’s the question of what to write about!

Could I write a novel? seems like a long shot for me as I don’t have a clear idea on a topic. Could I write a novel set in Maine, where I have a love of the setting? Every time I read a really good novel, however, I marvel as the writing. Not sure I could construct a sentence as elegant as those…

Then there are the non-fiction topics. A business book? A book about sales? (i know a lot about that), a book about myself and the family (who would find that interesting? maybe not even the other 5 Steinharters).

And so my uncertainty goes on. but I’m gonna keep thinking about it. Sometimes it just takes time for an idea to percolate, ya know?

Cat sitting is easier than dog sitting. It just is.

We agreed to pet sit for my daughter’s cat this week, in London. She lives in a flat in central London (our flat, actually), and the cat spends most of her time indoors. She goes outside when supervised by my daughter and her boyfriend, but that is not a responsibility I would take on while cat sitting…so she is living here in the flat.

Don’t feel bad for her – she is well spoiled. There are two bowls of dry food and one bowl of lovely wet food. There are two kitty litter pans, one in each bathroom. There is water in each bathroom and a special one in the living area. There are toys. I don’t know how to estimate how many toys there are, but you wouldn’t want to walk around with the lights off. There are probably 100 cat toys.

Her cat’s name is Piggy. Piggy is short for Pigwidgeon, a character from Harry Potter which my daughter was/is obsessed with. She is also obsessed with Lord of the Rings, and named one of our dogs Gimli, after a dwarf from those movies, but Gimli will have to wait for his own blog post. “Pigwidgeon Christmas Steinharter” is her full name. Sarah also loves Christmas, so there.

Piggy is very pretty (see photo above). She is spoiled, yes, but it is fun taking care of her. Sometimes she wants to be chased, sometimes she wants to play with her toys. Several times a day she gets affectionate. She tells us when that is, we don’t define those terms. She tends to come into our bedroom in the morning and curl up in the bedspread and purr. It’s pretty cute. We don’t have to take her out to pee and poop like our dogs. We don’t have to walk her like our dogs back home. Cat sitting is easy (if you don’t mind scooping out the kitty litter every other day or so).

I do like cats. I like Piggy.

After our long ski weekend in Zermatt, Switzerland, we popped over to the Netherlands to embark on our planned 3-day biking trip.

Firstly, before you get confused, Holland is not the same as Netherlands. The Netherlands is the whole country; Holland is comprised of two of the 12 provinces in Netherlands. So there.

Our adventure seemed pretty ambitious when we booked it, and as we got closer, Dale became more and more nervous, having little experience with biking, much less biking for over 40km a day for 3 days in a row!

Tulip Cycling (www.tulipcycling.com) is the outfit we booked. They were wonderful and I highly recommend doing this and using them. We landed in Amsterdam and took an uber to the nearby city of Utrecht, where our tour began. Pieter (not to be confused with his partner Peter) met us at our hotel, which they had booked for us. He gave us all of our equipment and took the time to explain everything – bikes, bags for carrying stuff, a garmin gps, maps for following along and a commitment to meet us each afternoon with our luggage transported to the next hotel.

We biked first from Utrecht to Gouda (ya, like the cheese), stayed overnight and then biked from Gouda to Leiden. The next morning we biked from Leiden up to the Keukenhof gardens to see their amazing display of flowers, then out along the beach and up to Zanvoort before cycling in to Haarlem (not to be confused at all with Harlem) for our finish. Peter (not Pieter) met us at the Haarlem train station, collected all his equipment and we caught a train to Amsterdam and met a good friend for dinner and wine for our last night.

Point #1 – The Netherlands is beautiful. We cycled through little villages, farms, flower farms, protected lands, past the dunes by the ocean. We saw a lot of babies, since it was April – lamb, calves, chickens, and many more sheep and lambs than we could count. The scenery is gorgeous and the little villages offered opportunities to stop for a tea or lunch or other.

Point #2 – The Netherlands is flat! This is a huge point, especially for those inexperienced or unsure. The biking is easy. The worst you can get is wind or rain. We were lucky and avoided rain, but did have the wind from time to time. Big deal, just keep pedaling.

This was a lot of fun and we handled 40k each day pretty easily. I would guess that we did about 5 hours of biking each day. This allowed for a leisurely breakfast at around 8am, on the bikes at 9 or even 10 and we’d arrive at the next town by 3 easily. Time for a rest, a walk and a nice dinner before bed.

The towns (are they really cities?) are good fun. Our favorite was Gouda, though we missed the big cheese festival by a week or so. It is charming and nice to walk around. Leiden is a university town, so a little bit busier, but we made do at a nice little wine bar. Haarlem is really pretty (yes, Haarlem), and Amsterdam is of course the big city, but one that we really enjoy.

Okay enough pontificating. Just logging and blogging this trip cuz it was a winner. I would do it again.

Off to London to visit our old home for a week.

This week I spent five days in Switzerland. It’s been a while since I had been here and that had always on business. This time it was to see my girls! Dale and I flew to Zurich and spent a day in that lovely city. Dale insisted on going to the FIFA museum in Zurich so I said okay :-). We ate well and drank Swiss beer and wine and the next day the two girls arrived, one from London and the other from Colorado….impressive commitment as it’s heck of a long trip for a ski weekend!

We took the train from Zurich up to Zermatt and discovered what we agreed is the loveliest ski town we have seen. We booked a little hotel on the outskirts of town (Alpen-something or other, of course) and you can see the Matterhorn from our window (see above).

First important point – I am a shitty skier. I can get down the mountain, but without style and always in danger. My wife has always been a good skier and the kids have all learned properly. I ski once (maybe twice) a year and only with Katie. She usually can use her employee status to get me a discount that makes it worth it even if I only last a couple of hours before I start complaining of my knees or ankles.

Friday the two girls skied alone, which I expect they enjoyed. The weather was lousy so I had little interest, and Dale skipped as well. Saturday I could avoid it no longer – I went to the shop, rented all the necessary equipment, bought a one-day pass (i don’t think I had ever skied two days in a row) and headed up the mountain with all three girls. This mountain is huge (over 12,000 feet at the highest point) and it takes a long time to get up there. I made it for a couple of hours and then we got to go sledding, which was a blast and then back to eating and drinking, activities I am far more skilled at…and paying.

Saturday morning started as a bluebird day – not a cloud in the sky, and Sarah talked me into going back out. With plenty of trepidation (two days in a row?) she insisted that I had to see the Italian side of the mountain. It turns out that the mountain lies on the Swiss-Italian border and you can ski both sides with the right pass. It took about and hour to get all the way to the top. It was breathtaking. The view was worth the journey.

But then I had to get down the mountain. We started out and I thought I was going to kill myself it was so steep. Sarah only told me after we made it down the first run that it was supposed to be “for experts only.” that little b____h.

Okay after that I started to get a little confidence and the Italian side was sunny and warm and gorgeous. We went to a tiny little restaurant just on the ski run, not at the bottom. We had lunch, a couple glasses of local wine and then I earned a nap in the sun, while Sarah did a couple more runs and Dale and Katie caught up with us. Nothing like a two-hour break in the sun to rejuvenate. I was then able to join them for several more runs and can now say that I skied two days in a row. Of course we stopped again for more wine and then went out for Italian dinner, and more wine.

I am not much of a skier, as I have already admitted…but the chanced to spend several days with my girls is priceless. They were patient enough to wait for me as I plodded down the mountain…and nobody got hurt.

Bottom line – I cannot recommend Zermatt highly enough. The town and the mountain are gorgeous, the service is excellent (very Swiss) and even though somewhat expensive, the meals were wonderful. Sitting here in the lounge at Geneva airport I decided to kill some time by sharing.