hefcar

There's been a lot o' wearin' o' the green lately, but who knew the sun would get into the act?

From birthday girl Bonnie's daughter Colleen:

The blog looks great! I’m enjoying surfing around it. I loved the story you sent in conjunction with my mom’s birthday.
We hope everyone had a great St. Patrick’s Day. It seems as though we’ve been celebrating it for about two weeks now. Today we celebrated my mom’s birthday and I think we’ve carried the St. Pat’s celebration on now for about as long as we can! The reason it seems like two weeks is because we’ve been following Kathleen around as she dives head first into Irish dancing. Kathleen started dancing with the World Academy of Irish dancing in September and absolutely loves it. She had been with the park district for over a year, and wanted to do the St. Pat’s parade so badly that we switched over to a school. Aren’t there other members of the Heffernan clan that either take from WA or have taken in the past? I want to say Berni’s kids but I’m not sure. Anyway, Kathleen danced at the Lemont parade, the downtown Chicago parade, and various nursing homes. Interestingly, she danced at Bethlehem Woods in LaGrange Park on Friday and a few Nazareth grads that I was sitting with fondly recalled cousin Marianne.
I’m sending a pic of Kathleen so you can see her with her curls… [See here] Overall, we’re doing well. My grandpa looks great and feels pretty good. My parents print out the pictures that you send and give them to my grandpa….he really enjoys them. My uncles are great… and uncle Bob is especially amusing. He’s starting to get into the e-mail thing and I’m so proud of him! Though he may not write much on the blog, he does read the updates.
The rest of our clan is doing well. Sean is getting big and will celebrate his 9 mo. birthday on Monday. It’s so hard to believe it’s been 9 months already. He’s already crawling quite efficiently and is anxious to figure out this whole walking thing. He’s pretty close, God help us.
I wish I had some significant family news to contribute. We’re all doing well, so I suppose this is an example of “no news is good news”. Brian and I are considering taking the kids out East in a week to visit Kathleen’s Godmother in Washington D.C. Hopefully, we’ll have decent weather so we can see the Cherry Blossom festival.
I hope you’re doing well. We can’t wait to see you and the rest of the family this summer at our annual get-together.
Please send our best to your mom…she’s a great lady.
Love,
The Hallorans

1964 was a kind of "movin' on" year for me as I finished high school, got my first 'grown up' job as a teamster union member working in Montgomery Ward warehouse on the Chicago River, then started college at U. of I. in Champagne, then quickly dropped out and started work at First National Bank in Chicago, then soon quit that job without notice, and, completely on impulse, enlisted in my Uncle Sam's army.
Between my graduation and enlistment, two of my cousins got hitched and had great wedding celebrations. At the Galassi-Race reception, the strolling musicians, intended to bring everyone together, only managed to emphasize the gulf between the Italian and Irish sides of the wedding party as they fielded requests for Irish Eyes are Smiling and Volare! Hey, what's a wedding celebration without a little tension? It was lots of fun all around.
The other cousin wedding was held just three weeks before I boarded a train for Fort Knox, Kentucky, where I was introduced to the military mind and country music. Back in '64, we'd heard Bing do a few western tunes, and we'd heard Patsy Cline on the Arthur Godfrey show, but when I was awakened at 3 in the morning in November to stand outside in a line for breakfast while gen-you-wine sixties country music blared from a radio somewhere in the distance, I thought I'd awoke on the moon. Really. That was my introduction to surreal. But the memory of the Roeseke-Hagen wedding three weeks earlier helped me to keep my sanity. Oh, how one clings to family wisdom when thrown into the maelstrom.

All of the preceding is of course simply me clearing my throat before wishing Happy Birthday to my delightful cousin Bonnie, who, among her many other distinguished accomplishments, managed, without even knowing it, to preserve her cousin Dan's sanity in a dark period. Bless you, Bonnie, thank you, and I wish you many happy returns of the day.

Up to now, I've included all the posts on this page, going back to the first on Feb 29th. But that makes for a slow loading of the site for people with telephone modems. So, please click the Archives links in the right hand links column to see older posts. Thanks.

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've been there more than once, but what do you know about Twin Lakes?

And of course, we shouldn't forget St Joseph.

Are you ready for a stage musical of The Lord of the Rings?

From Dave:

It seems everyone is off to warm climates this month. Colleen is in Puerto Nuevo, Mexico soaking up the sun this week. We have not heard from her since Saturday, but I'm sure she is having a great time. I hope she is planning on coming back. Pat and Keri are headed to Jamaica in April. Work permitting, Kathy and I hope to get away in the fall.
Hope every one had a great St. Pat's day.
Dave

John's take on being able to read a book at Amazon:

Very cool. I guess I don't get out much. J.

Maybe it's just the funny name blog, but this blog thing seems to have a lot of people mystified. Forget the funny name (which, incidentally, is simply an abbreviation of web log) and think of it as a journal, a diary, a bulletin board. Some blogs do tend to be very personal diaries. Not hefcar. I intend this one as more of a bulletin board for family and friends. I believe the large readership of the email group makes people feel like they're standing at a podium when they address it. While this blog has a potentially larger audience (it can be viewed by anyone in the world who surfs to this address), the actual number of visitors to the blog has averaged half a dozen per day - hardly an intimidating number.
I encourage others to set up their own blogs - it's quick and painless. There are a number of services to choose from. I'm using Blogger, which is free. Posting notes with Blogger is very simple. Since I started, I've been poking around, teaching myself some tricks, like changing the appearance of the blog - it started out pale and monochromatic and stodgy, but I've added some color. But don't worry about tricks, just get started. There's no rule that you have to post every day - most bloggers dont. I look forward to adding your blog to the (oh so short) list of family blogs in the right hand links column. And, whether you start your own blog or not, please bookmark this site, come back often, and email me stuff to post on this hefcar Bulletin Board. Thanks.

From John in sunny California:

Wow. Pretty impressive piece of scholarship, Dan. Your links were very useful, too. I'm tellin' ya, you're one of this family's brightest stars!
John

Well, thank you, thank you, John. Speaking of scholarship, did you notice that Amazon lets you read quite a bit of some of the books it sells? Like this, for example. (Yes, you can turn the pages.)

Birthday Greetings to cousin Pat in Nevada and nephew Fred in Florida. Both are living in places that people dream of visiting on vacation. Well, someone has to live there, it might as well be family.

Today seems to be a day for hearing from people in warm climates. Jan writes:

Happy St. Pat’s to you and Aunt Noreen. We love all of your pictures but I am not familiar with what a blog is or how it works. I did go look! I’m not sure how to add a comment.
Hope you are doing well. Say hi to your Mom for us.
Love

Jan, the way to add a comment is to email me, which you just did. Thanks.

Ben explains his slowness in responding to an email I sent him this morning:

I would have gotten back to you sooner, but spent the day at Epcot with Sean & his science class.

Well, that's one way to spend St Pat's Day.

Arizona isn't the only hot place. From Marge:

Happy Saint Patrick's Day everyone! We're in our 11th day of a heat wave in northern california, too. sorry about that, folks back East. come visit us!

The Mom and I went out to dinner to celebrate the day. We should have gone Italian or Chinese - anything but Irish. We could barely squeeze into the first place we tried, then had to shout at each other to be heard while waiting for nonexistent service at the second place. We did manage to get some lamb stew into us. Just came across this prayer of St Patrick.

A lot of Irish found work building railroads when they came to this country in the 1800s. In their memory you might take a stab at this.

From today's Chicago Trib, an Irish immigrant calls Chicago home.

From Cy in Arizona:

Enjoying Phoenix, although it's record hot - in the 90's, supposed to be in the 70's. Therese and Jay, and Ryan and Connor are here for a few days. Papa (and Nonni) are enjoying time with their grandkids, and seeing some baseball, and swimming, and just having fun! Glad I'm here and not in cold Chicago. We really enjoy getting an update on Chicago weather daily, and laugh and giggle about it.
I'm off to the pool - I'll take a look at your blog soon.
Cy

Here's an Irish website I just stumbled across.

Annie recommends you go here for more interesting stuff about St Patrick.

A very early-rising Annie writes:

Dan,
I'm sorry you could not look at the pictures. Most of the pictures were really cool pictures. The last one was a joke. It was a picture of mars with marshins holding up signs that say, "Yankees go Home". It was really funny.
Annie

The American way of commemorating St Patrick's Day - parades, fests, boisterous celebrations - was influenced long ago by the need for an oppressed minority (Irish and Blacks were often in competition for lowest-paying jobs) to assert and empower itself. (Of course, the Irish in Ireland were equally opressed but weren't having nearly as much success empowering themselves.) The Irish in Ireland celebrated the day strictly as a religious holiday - with pubs closed - and no thought of a parade - until they began seeing New York, Boston, and Chicago parades on their tellies - which gave them the idea of having St Pat's Day parades themselves.
St Pat's Day has certainly become an American holiday, but has acquired an unfortunate reputation for being the American equivalent of Germany's Mayfest/Oktoberfest - a drinking fest, enlivened by the presence of fiddlers and leprechauns. St Patrick, whoever he may have been, is lost somewhere among the commerce and the festivities. A search of Google doesn't readily display anything to do with the man. I did finally come across this. While looking, I came across a Protestant church which is a tourist site, a Catholic church which is a tourist site, a Chicago high school, and a nursing home where several family members spent their last days: grandma Nora's first cousins Therese and Peg Buckley and Rose O'Shea and Nora's daughter Agnes (her daughter Joan also spent a short period there).

(Rose, Peg, and Therese)
It's said of Hollywood that behind the phony tinsel, there's real tinsel. I guess my point here is simply that behind all the silliness of St Pat's Day, for most of us, there are still a lot of real, important, emotional, family things going on here with this holiday. May the road rise up to meet you.

Can a Catholic eat a hot dog on opening day at Boston's Fenway Park?

NASA cousin Annie sent me a Powerpoint file of photos from Mars that she'd like to share with everyone. But I don't have Powerpoint software on my computer and so can't open the file. But I join with Annie in suggesting that y'all take a look at what's being beamed back to us from the Red Planet.

If you haven't the resources or desire to head off to the arctic or equator, maybe you could search for a 'confluence,' an intersection of global latitude and longitude lines - there may be one not too far from you. This form of adventure is new and the result of GPS (global positioning system) devices becoming affordable. Here's a huge, endlessly interesting site with reports of confluence visits around the world, including a locale not far from where Grandpa Dan Heffernan was born. Here's a Trib article about the silliness and wanderlust of it all.

Usually I'm not too big on re-makes of old movies, but this is worth looking into.

Is everyone recuperating from pre-St Paddy's Day celebrating?

Yesterday was Joy Heffernan's 24th birthday. Belated best wishes, Joy !

Congratulations to Caitlin on being inducted into the National Honor Society.

Been playing around with adding photos to this blog. Some may appear right away and others need 'nudging'. Nudging involves moving your 'mouse' to point the cursor at the little x, 'right-clicking' the mouse, and choosing 'Show Picture' from the pop-up 'menu.'
Update: Regarding making the photos appear on this blog: I find that hitting the 'refresh' button doesn't help. But surfing to another web page and then returning to this page makes the photos appear. Does that work for anyone else?
Update: I'm using a new 'server' for the photos, so you should see no more little boxes with red x's, fingers crossed.

I've added Yahoo and Hotmail email links to the links list. (These links will not fill in my email address for you, like the first link does.) If the first email link doesn't work for you, try one of these if Yahoo or Hotmail is your way of emailing. (Let me know if these don't work) Trying to make it as easy as possible for everyone who visits the blog to leave a note before moving on. Please do. Otherwise, very boring.

In Chicago, it's March Forth again on March Forteenth and Party as you will afterwards. Green, green, green. How Celtic can you get?

Activity: Not much. Two computers visited this blog on Saturday. I expected a small audience (not that small) and hoped small would encourage people to contribute to the 'conversation'. Small we've got, but most people who have visited the site have left without contributing - with the obvious exceptions shown below. This is not surprising, as few people in the heffernans email group have contributed to it. Ah, if only we could replicate the grassy stretch under the leafy trees at Twin Lakes, Wisconsin - perhaps folks would speak up. Failing that, I can only ask people to imagine that setting and join in the conversation.