Editor's Notes

We had a quick dinner with Granny on the way to the airport to return to dinner after our visit to St. Pete. It was nice to get to spend some time with Granny and we only wish that we lived closer.

Note: I wrote this at the request of my grandmother for my grandfather's funeral mass.

I was fortunate to spend a large proportion of my life around my grandfather, much of it during some of the years that he probably enjoyed best. My experience with him certainly leads me to a different picture of him from that of his children, his wife, or even my sister.

As a child, my early impressions of Pups formed as I spent time around him at my grandparents’ house in Forestdale, MA. I remember a man in constant motion, either working on the house, fiddling with his small boat, or driving off in his little import cars to start the daily journey up to Boston to work. In those days, he could be found mowing the grass or tinkering in his shed. Even then, I only remember him slowing down for meals and sports games.

As a teenager, I lived down the street from my grandparents. Their life changed after Pups retired and they moved down to Florida. They traveled and showed us slide shows. We had dinner with them nearly every Sunday and I often helped Pups clean up until the point in the evening where he didn’t want further help. I remember Pups getting frustrated with Florida-style fishing and I remember when he got his ShopSmith, though I don’t think I understood its importance to him at the time. He always got a laugh at telling the story about getting in trouble for having a pet mouse in his desk at school when he was a boy. He once told me that he liked that mouse very much.

As I look back over my high school and college years, I recall Pups experimenting with his ShopSmith, beginning to create a variety of toys and spending lots of time in his little shed. At one point he gave me his Plymouth Horizon and got himself a big Buick station wagon that became well traveled to Scotty’s, Home Depot, and the VA Hospital, where Pups volunteered. He established a routine over the years and was diligent at keeping up the yard and the house to the best of his ability.

In the last few years, it was sad to see such an industrious man become slowed by age. He tried his hardest to maintain his schedule, probably harder than we’ll ever know. Even during those last years, his personality continued to shine through. Granny said that he collected toy designs to the end. Some of the funny little stickers on his shed couldn’t have been placed too long ago because they weren’t in bad condition. His tools were painted silver (a color that he must have settled on more recently because many of the tools that he gave me with the Plymouth were painted green). And his name, whether by Sharpie or by address label, was everywhere.

So what is my picture of Pups? Arnold Andrews was a hard-working man who provided for his family in the best ways that he knew. He led an active life and enjoyed building with his wife a lifestyle that included extensive travel, a pervasive sense of order, and supporting his children and grandchildren. Throughout it all, he patiently nurtured his boyish desires to design and make toys until he was able to realize that hobby during his well-deserved retirement.

Pups probably didn’t make all the right decisions in life. None of us do. He made the best decisions that he knew how to make at each moment in time, then moved on the next decision, and the next. He provided the type of example of constancy and diligence that is rare in my generation, while preserving a good-hearted nature that I always enjoyed to be around. In the end, I’ll be happy if even a small portion of him rubbed off on me and I hope that he realized that it did.

This week I was in Las Vegas, participating in a Microsoft Developers conference. The content was pretty good... I was mainly interested in Iron Python, ASP.NET 2.0, AJAX for ASP.NET, and some of the Visual Studio framework and tools. I came out with my coworkers Steve and Jim. We had a decent week of attending the conference and doing a little sightseeing after hours.

The best talk at the conference was one about making websites accessible to users who need to use text-only readers or speech readers. Fortunately, the YakJive sites look pretty good in Lynx and the speech readers. The biggest issues I see are the javascript form submissions in some places and the fact that I used point font sizes and not %'s or em. I'll have to fix that.

The best bar for views after hours was definitely Mix in THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay. Awesome view of the strip.