Last fall (2011) Trish put in an application to SXSW, the premiere interactive media conference, and they selected us to present a session entitled ‘Crowdsourcing Cancer Support:  A Love Story.’ Well, we just came back, and it was a fantastic experience. There is a lot social media and crowd-sourcing techniques can do for cancer support – particularly with younger generations.  More on that later…

Trish after chemo and mastectomy, Oct 2010

Building our presentation, forced us both to look at the entire scary experience again.  It’s been about 18 months since Trish had her mastectomy.  Back then we (finally) got the good news that she was cancer-free (by any detectable means).  She’s had multiple surgeries since then to improve the cosmetic appearance of her foobs, but for the most part we have been on the path to ‘normal.’

Re-living the cancer experience, as we built the presentation, was surprisingly painful.  It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but the ‘return to normalcy’ is partly a mirage.  We feel like things are better, and in many ways they are.  But the hurt, fear and despair are wounds that take time to heal.  We are definitely not ‘over’ it.

Kids start therapy

Emma and Lily making cupcakes on Lily's 9th birthday

And it’s not just Trish and I.  The kids have both shown some PTSD-likeeffects this year.  Lily has had a higher rate of emotional breakdown (tears, ‘depression’, ruminating thoughts)  this fall and after her teachers gently suggested counseling, we found her some therapy.   She has quickly responded to it – we see much less of the anxiety-driven panic and sadness.  She seems to be more  her ‘normal’ self.  She’s extraordinarily verbal and talk-therapy is right up her alley.

Elephant Toothpaste science project Feb 2012

Emma has struggled with school, getting B’s and C’s when she can definitely do A’s.  She has always been flaky and it’s her first year in Middle School, but we suspected that there is something else going on causing her to be challenged.  We weren’t sure if she would want or need counseling, so we gave her the choice.  After some very deliberate consideration, She decided to do it and really likes her therapist.  I spend 10 minutes a day helping her piece together the fragments of her homework assignments, and she genuinely appreciates the help.

The cost of therapy is high, but we’ll manage it.  It’s good for the kids to have another place to go to cope.

Meeting our best friends that we’ve never met before:

Sorghul, Erin, Mort, Tink, Khaly, Tajah

The highlight of SXSW was seeing our video gamer friends from Oklahoma and Texas.  Five of them came to visit us in Austin – most going a long way  to make the trip.

Meeting your ‘virtual’ gamer friends in real life is weird.  Online you know a person’s voice better than their face.  You know the sound of it, the inflections they use, the way they breathe.  But you don’t know the face unless you’ve seen it on Facebook – but that doesn’t give you the kind of familiarity that meeting in person does.

So it’s odd, to say the least, to see people you know intimately but have never ‘seen’ them before.  That first meeting challenges your social expectations – do I hug them like I know them?  Or do I shake hands like acquaintances?

All we get is popcorn after waiting for 2 hours to eat.

Unfortunately, Austin is raining and nearly freezing cold and our first night together is spent huddling outside in the rain as we wait for 2 hours for a table.  It does give us a chance to catch up before we wolf down the meal.

Power corrupts, and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.

Have you ever had to do any ‘office work’ with your spouse?  A presentation or a proposal?  Dante had a special level in hell for couples that have to create powerpoints together.

Trisha preparing for the presentation before the show.

Trish and I have been talking about the concepts of ‘Crowdsourcing Cancer Support: A love Story’ for a long time.  But getting it down on paper, with pictures is more difficult.  She wants it to be more of a narrative story, I want to make it more analytical about the state of the social media marketplace for cancer suppport.

Of course the answer is to compromise, and we manage to get the best of both our styles into the presentation without coming to blows.

Cancerpalooza, Live on Stage!

It’s Saturday March 10th, 5pm, and it’s pouring outside Austin, TX at SXSW.  Our presentation room is cavernous, and the 35 people spread out, making it look like very few people showed up.  Some of our close friends are there, in the front row.

David and Trisha Creekmore at SXSW 2012

I had encouraged Trisha to wear a low-cut vest with no bra so everyone could see her new rack.  It makes her uncomfortable, and she started out very nervously.  But she quickly grabs the audience with some real tears when she talks about the fear of dying and leaving our kids motherless.  Then she warms up and rolls along, telling stories and waving her Prada shoes that I bought her for a 1-year survival gift.

My experience is very different.  Part of my job is doing business presentations and I’m always confident on stage.  But I have a really hard time connecting with the feelings I had during the  cancer.  I think all my management presentation experience took over and made it hard for me to be ‘me’.  I did find it really hard to talk about ourselves so much – it’s already self-indulgent to have a blog, but none of you paid $1000 to read this.

Afterward, a person from the audience told me he had to hold back tears.  His Mom and Sister are going through cancer right now.  Another said he would make more of an effort to support his mom, who also has cancer.   One of our facebook friends says she is copying a bit out of our last slide on unconditional love, for her wedding vows.  What a nice thing!

Has SXSW jumped the shark?

Yes.  It’s over.  Next question.

(I actually saw Fonzie jumping the shark, on primetime in 1977.)

Seriously, SXSW is like a young adult summer camp now.   I suspect there are more booth babes than real innovative nerds.  Most of the presentations I went to felt unprepared.  Trish likes the futurist stuff but it’s stuff you can see elsewhere and it’s not really applicable, it’s more sci-fi-ish.

And how hard should it be to get some tex-mex or barbeque in Texas?  We ate expensive Chinese and bad Italian instead because EVERY RESTAURANT IS COMPLETELY PACKED.   (We did have amazing modern japanese at Uchi.  It’s worth going out of your way to get there.)

I was never there in the heyday, but it looks to me like SXSW peaked.  And to add insult to injury we had our credit card numbers lifted for the second year in a row there.  Cash only from now on I guess. It’s nice that we got to present this and have a record of our experience.

Costa Rica Next

In less than two weeks, Creekmoreworld goes to Costa Rica to get the maximum adventure travel that country can offer. We’ll be surfing and jungle camping, trekking and enjoying the hot springs. It should be a blast. Trip itinerary up next.

Related posts:

1. Cancerpalooza Epilogue
2. 2010 Cancerpalooza Extravaganza
3. Cancer Week #21: The End of Cancerpalooza: Slash, death and diamonds.

Then the dot-coms blew up and fuel costs rose. Airlines got stingy with vouchers. Airlines stopped overselling seats as much. No one gives anything anymore if it’s weather or air traffic controls’ fault. We haven’t seen a voucher for 10 years – until today.

Baltimore-Washington isn’t the best airport, but it’s a easy one to navigate and the prices are good. Our flights to Cancun are on AirTran, the current name of ValueJet airlines, infamous for the plane crash in 1996 that killed 105 people. AirTran’s prices are cheap, cheap, cheap – these tickets are $330 roundtrip direct. And they have blow-up palm trees!

We arrive a little later than recommended. At the check-in counter we are conspicuously told that seats could not be assigned: a very bad sign. Through security to the gate, I find out the flight is indeed oversold and we are not likely to get on the plane. But they are offering TWO free tickets per person to volunteer off the flight and go tomorrow. It wasn’t a hard decision, especially since we were very unlikely to get seats anyway. We now own EIGHT free round-trip tickets anywhere Air Tran flies – which is admittedly not a lot of places. But still! EIGHT! Trish and I are already planning the next trips. Surfing in San Diego? Scuba diving in Bonaire?

Back to reality. Trish gets on the phone to rearrange our hotel and car in Mexico. Expedia customer service does a great job changing our reservations. We could go back to our house, but we hate doing that because it’s a downer once you think you’ve started vacation. So I find a hotel near the Airport and we decide to take a trip into Baltimore to visit Port Discovery, the kids museum.

Hyatt has a new chain called Hyatt Place, which is a weird combo of boutique, business and budget motel. They bought the Ameri-suites chain and improved them with high-tech rooms, limited 24-hour food service, free internet and in our case, a pool. We’re paying $90, so it’s not ultra-cheap but still a very good deal and we get Hyatt points.

The last time we were at Port Discovery Lily was a baby and Emma, three. Kids museums always disappoint us. The exhibits are often broken (by kids, of course) and they tend to be madhouses. PD is definitely a good one, but it’s more fun-oriented than educational. (Our favorite educational one is in Bristol, England.)

We enjoyed it. The center section has a three story climbing apparatus with rope bridges, ladders and crawl spaces barely big enough to fit an adult. The Egyptian section was a hoot even though it was completely inauthentic.

The only bad part of the day was lousy food. McDonald’s for lunch and Ruby Tuesdays for dinner is a poor way to start vacation. But as you’ve read elsewhere, we don’t travel with kids for the cuisine. The dinner highlight was Emma’s surprised exclamation as she did the kids’ menu word-search puzzle: “I found an inappropriate word! ‘ASS!’”

The Baltimore – Washington area’s gravity kept us in orbit one more day. But we got some loot and had fun. Tomorrow we try again to blast off to Mexico.

No related posts.

Sledding Near Our House in Northstar at Tahoe, Calif.

In the late 80s, my father bought a one-fifth share in a five-bedroom ski house in the burgeoning vacation community of Northstar at Tahoe. At the time, Northstar was considered the runty step-cousin to North Lake Tahoe’s world-famous ski resorts like Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows. The mountain was underdeveloped, but not in a good way like Kirkwood. It was just kind of lame: very few black diamond runs and a series of blues that all drained into one nasty, overcrowded alley.

Over the last couple of decades, the resort has developed into a luxury family destination resort and the house has become one of the best investments in family I didn’t have to make (thanks Dad!). Now that my sisters and I have our own kids, the Northstar house has become a yearly gathering place where we can reliably bring all the far-flung families together at least once a year.

As the kids are getting older, our on-the-fly sled hills are getting longer and steeper. This particular sled run from 2008 scared the crap out of me. Not only did it get faster as the snow got packed more tightly, but the deep powder made it close to impossible for the little kids to climb back out. Looking back, it was clearly a blast for the kids no matter what the adults were thinking. Another Creekmore adventure pulling serious WIN from the jaws of fail.

– Trisha

Related posts:

1. Family Travel Moment: Fern Canyon, Humboldt County, Calif.
2. Family Travel Moment: Club Med, Ixtapa, Mexico
3. Family Travel Moment: MV Captain Keith Tibbetts, Cayman Brac

Fern Canyon and Home Creek, Redwood National Park, Humboldt County, Calif.

Fern Canyon is one of those otherworldly places in which you expect to discover fairies living under a log or a velociraptor nest high up one of the fern-encrusted canyon walls. Which is why the area has been used as a location for both “Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World” and “Walking with Dinosaurs.”

The two-mile hike along the creek bordered by the canyon’s 50 to 80-foot vertical walls was a breeze for Emma and Lily at ages three and six. We went back two years later and the girls loved the approximately three-mile loop through the canyon, up the wall and around to the beach.

– Trisha

Related posts:

1. Family Travel Moment: Northstar at Tahoe, Calif.
2. Family Travel Moment: Club Med, Ixtapa, Mexico
3. Family Travel Moment: MV Captain Keith Tibbetts, Cayman Brac

We’re in between trips and life feels a little slow. It’s too cold to go camping and work keeps us tethered to the house.

How does a restless family blow off some steam? At a rock show of course! We splurged on tickets for glam-rock gods KISS and tween favorite Miley Cyrus, both at the downtown Washington DC Verizon center.

Gene Simmons gives the Creekmores a big screen scare.

America, love it or hate it, manufactures rock arena events like no other country on earth. The shows have fireworks, stunts, flying band members and elaborate sets – all just a metro ride away. The Obama girls were there too! Here is us doing Hoedown Throwdown for fellow metro riders and at the concert.

Sure, neither KISS nor Miley have soul. Don’t go looking for tortured artists here. But that doesn’t mean they don’t work hard. Miley performs while sick, but manages to keep the energy high. The crowd appreciates it.

Both shows feature prominent advertising. Miley even showed a trailer for her new movie in the middle of her set. lol. But this isn’t art, it’s spectacle. And we love it.

The girls at Miley Cyrus screamed like girls. The adults at KISS screamed like girls. Our youngest Lily said breathlessly before the show “This is the night I’ve been waiting for my whole life.” Exactly, Lily. Exactly.

Related posts:

1. Trapeze: You Can Fly
2. Creekmore Holiday Party Battle
3. Review of Kings Dominion – no more kiddie rides for us.