i am thankful

very random thoughts tonight. while i'm not a huge hoops fan anymore, I watched the last few minutes of a college game on tonight. it was pretty good. then i heard a playback of Jimmy Valvano's speech at the 1983 ESPY award show. He was a great coach, but an even better person. Cancer claimed his life early. Very inspirational speech he gave. And just now I read online about the F18 crash in San Diego. A guy lost his 2 daughters, wife and mother-in-law as they were in one of the houses the jet crashed into. One of his daughters was less than 2mos. and the other 15mos. old. He didn't blame the pilot of the jet. Matter of fact, knowing the pilot did everything possible to avoid killing innocent civilians, the man hoped the pilot wouldn't mentally suffer too much over what had happened. The guy, who came over from Korea, said he knew some people endured even worse things than what he is dealing with now. But at this press conference, he wondered aloud how they did it. The poor guy is obviously shell-shocked and devastated by the tragedy, but his words were very lucid. Alina's recent bad cold and case of pink eye are and should be absolute joys to deal with. Just knowing Alina and Helen are in my life give me great joy, and every second I'm with them is a big adrenaline rush.