Special Thank You

I will have to step away from blogging for a few days due to a medical emergency involving one of my two children. He should be fine, eventually, but sharing a 12-hour port-and-starboard watch rotation with my wife at his hospital bedside is taking a toll on everything, and blogging takes a big-time back seat to my children.

I'm not posting this, however, to draw a bunch of sympathy for myself or my son. Instead, I wanted to publicly thank the Pittsburgh Penguins for spending the afternoon with all of the kids at Children's Hospital today. My son is too young to appreciate this gesture, and he will never remember it (or anything about this extremely painful hospital stay, which is a real blessing). But I appreciated it. Even though I am not in any way a hockey fan. It warmed my heart.

When the Penguins move -- which I strongly suspect will happen at the end of this year -- this is just one more intangible thing that our region will lose. You'll never see it mentioned anywhere, but the loss of these kinds of non-financial contributions will hurt us all in thousands of ways that we never really think about.

Thanks, Penguins! You made some sick kids happy today.

By the way, the picture shown above is not of my child; I just pulled it off of the Penguin's website. But I did get to sit in the room with the entire team and watch them interact with dozens of patients and parents, including my son and myself. The smile that you can see on the child's face in the picture is just one of hundreds that the Penguins produced today.