Liloia.com

Congrats Sarah & John

I just wanted to give a quick congratulations to my sister Sarah and her fiance John. They make a great couple and I am really proud to be able to consider (soon) John to be part of my family.

Trevors who Give Back

Our Trevor is named after Trevor Baylis, a British inventor who has created items like a wind-up radio to be used in areas where electricity and batteries are not feasible.

In 1993, Trevor watched a program about the spread of AIDS in Africa, which observed that in many regions radio was the only available means of communication, but the need for batteries or electricity made them too expensive or too difficult to access....In his workshop at home he experimented with a hand brace, an electric motor and a small radio....His first working prototype ran for 14 minutes on a two minute wind.

In 1997, the new generation Freeplay Radio 2 rolled off the production line in South Africa. Smaller and lighter than the original model, the new radio had been designed specially for the Western consumer market and would run for up to an hour with a thirty second wind.

Now, here comes another Trevor, Trevor Field, who has invented the "play pump -- a children's merry-go-round that pumps clean, safe drinking water from a deep borehole every time the children start to spin."

He noticed that in many rural villages around the eastern Cape, the burden of collecting water fell mainly to the women and girls of the household. Each morning, he'd see them set off to the nearest borehole to collect water. They used leaky and often contaminated hand-pumps to collect the water, then they carried it back through the bush in buckets weighing 40 pounds. It was exhausting and time-consuming work.

It's brilliant—kids get a play structure and the community gets clean water close to home. Go Trevors!

Pacifier

After Tracey saw that I had posted about Douglas (another co-worker) back in July before I had posted about him, he whined. So here it is, a whole post just for him.

Tracey is a cop from Georgia, who now works for the same company as me in the sales and marketing department. He is a great guy, and aside from donating some money to the Republican party at one point he is pretty fun to hang out with and "cut up" with (that is apparently what Georgians say when they really mean "joke around with")

There, are you happy now? Stop whining.

Dude....that's me

Tonight Tracey and I were talking on the phone while tooling away on some websites, and I decided to check in on good old liloia.com. When I got there, I encountered an error message telling me that the domain was not configured. To make sure I wasn't crazy, I asked Tracey to check out the site and tell me what he saw. Here is what transpired.

Tracey: "Well, I see something about Rocky Balboa and then there is this girl with red hair, this black guy with a goatee, and a kid."

Dave: "Dude.....the black guy is me!"

I guess Tara got a little overzealous with my skin shading. I am half Italian and a quarter Mexican, but I could use a little more pigment to match my website. Hah.

Rocky Balboa

There are many offensive things you can find about the new Rocky movie that was just announced. But perhaps the most distateful was the CNN American Morning anchor's horror at the notion that Rocky's wife would appear in the movie:

"You wouldn't want to have a 59 year old Adrian!" she exclaimed. "Adrian will appear in flashbacks where she's young and beautiful!"

Oh yes, better to have a dead woman than an old one, right?

FWIW, Talia Shire is still a fine-looking woman.

He Brings the Waters

I would just like to point out a little something.

Dave visited New Orleans, Louisiana on Saturday. August 26th.
New Orleans was flooded on Monday, August 29th.

Dave visited northern New Jersey on Monday, October 10th.
Northern New Jersey was flooded on Wednesday, October 12th.

Dave will be visiting Montreal in a couple of weeks. Buy flood insurance now.

Grandma Kate

Friday night, my Grandmother Kate Liloia suffered from a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital near my uncles' home in NJ. She seemed to have recovered well and was eating, sitting up and chatting Saturday night in her hospital bed. According to the doctors, they hadn't ever seen someone recover from a heart attack like that so quickly.

At some point early Sunday morning without any other signs of distress, she laid down, went to sleep and quietly passed away.

Grandma Kate was a plain spoken, sassy woman who loved stirring the pot and riling people up just to see them spin. Her knack for finding a four-leaf clover in a large field in seconds was uncanny, and to this day unexplainable. We will miss you Grandma.

Larry LaPrise

From my Uncle Chuck (aka "Doc")

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is
worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, which almost
went unnoticed last week.

Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote "The Hokey Pokey," died peacefully at age
93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.

They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started...

Shut up. You know it's funny.

Vermont Air National Guard

This weekend the Green Mountain Council was invited to visit the Vermont Air National Guard base for a tour. This group, also known as the "Green Mountain Boys" is located close enough to our house that we can hear all the F16's take off, but we have never been this close.

There seemed to be almost 100 Tiger Cubs there today from all over Vermont, and the tour itself was pretty good. Not a lot of organization, but plenty of missles, bombs and jets.

Here you can see Trevor (and Dad behind the camera phone) after we crawled up inside the landing gear bay on an F16. Most people stayed on the periphery of the jet, but since they didn't stop us from going in there, we got on our hands and knees and got inside. After I took this picture, Trev had a really cool conversation with an airman about the stealth tactics of the Air Force and how the paint colors help in that regard.

Great afternoon.