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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Sunday, August 06, 2006 - 3:22 am
August 6, 2006 Quote of the Day "People usually fail when they are on the verge of success. So give as much care to the end as to the beginning." – Lao-Tzu
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Monday, August 07, 2006 - 3:35 am
August 7, 2006 Quote of the Day "Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure." – Jack Lemmon
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Tuesday, August 08, 2006 - 2:55 am
August 8, 2006 Quote of the Day "I have an irrepressible desire to live till I can be assured that the world is a little better for my having lived in it." – Abraham Lincoln
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Wednesday, August 09, 2006 - 3:45 am
August 9, 2006 Quote of the Day "Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody." – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Thursday, August 10, 2006 - 2:49 am
Quote of the Day "Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip." – Will Rogers
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Friday, August 11, 2006 - 3:30 am
August 11, 2006 Quote of the Day "It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan." – Eleanor Roosevelt
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Saturday, August 12, 2006 - 4:56 am
August 12, 2006 Quote of the Day "If you haven't forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others?" – Dolores Huerta
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Monday, August 14, 2006 - 4:44 am
August 14, 2006 Quote of the Day "When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, but bend them with gentleness and time." – St. Francis De Sales
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Tuesday, August 15, 2006 - 2:47 am
August 15, 2006 Quote of the Day "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." – Theodore Seuss Giesel
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - 2:21 am
August 16, 2006 Quote of the Day "Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit." – Peter Ustinov.
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Thursday, August 17, 2006 - 3:10 am
August 17, 2006 Quote of the Day "Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." – John Updike
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Friday, August 18, 2006 - 3:29 am
August 18, 2006 Quote of the Day "The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen." – Frank Lloyd Wright
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Saturday, August 19, 2006 - 2:21 am
August 19, 2006 Quote of the Day "We strain to renew our capacity for wonder, to shock ourselves into astonishment once again." – Shana Alexander
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Sunday, August 20, 2006 - 3:14 am
August 20, 2006 Quote of the Day "The Noah rule: Predicting rain doesn't count; building arks does." – Warren Buffett
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Monday, August 21, 2006 - 2:52 am
August 21, 2006 Quote of the Day "It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time." – Winston Churchill
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Tuesday, August 22, 2006 - 2:44 am
August 22, 2006 Quote of the Day "Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out." – James Bryant Conant
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - 2:57 am
August 23, 2006 Quote of the Day "To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe." – Anatole France
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Heyltslori
Moderator
09-15-2001
| Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - 2:18 pm
Skootz, hope you don't mind me jumping in the thread with this...but I received it from a friend of mine and wanted to share. Talk about inspirational. Read the story and then watch the video.
Strongest Dad in the World [From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly] I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck. Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day. Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right? And what has Rick done for his father? Not much--except save his life. This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs. ``He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life;'' Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. ``Put him in an institution.'' But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. ``No way,'' Dick says he was told. "There's nothing going on in his brain.'' "Tell him a joke,'' Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!'' And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, ``Dad, I want to do that.'' Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described ``porker'' who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "Then it was me who was handicapped,'' Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks.'' That day changed Rick's life. ``Dad,'' he typed, ``when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!'' And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon. "No way,'' Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year. Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?'' How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried. Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think? Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? ``No way,'' he says. Dick does it purely for ``the awesome feeling'' he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together. This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time'? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992--only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time. ``No question about it,'' Rick types. ``My dad is the Father of the Century.'' And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack arteries was 95% clogged. ``If you hadn't been in such great shape,'' one doctor told him, ``you probably would've died 15 years ago.'' So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life. Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day. That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. `The thing I'd most like,'' Rick types, ``is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.'' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryCTIigaloQ
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Bandit
Member
07-29-2001
| Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - 2:27 pm
What a lovely story and so amazing! Thanks for sharing that.
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Mameblanche
Member
08-24-2002
| Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - 5:41 pm
dang... now i'm crying.
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Mameblanche
Member
08-24-2002
| Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - 5:46 pm
That was before I saw the video... now I'm sobbing. Wow. ...thanks lori, that was AMAZING.
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - 6:13 pm
that is so amazing. Here in London, we too have an amazing father/son team. Please read about it at here at this site regarding Jesse's Journey. It is an amazing story too.
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Thursday, August 24, 2006 - 3:49 am
August 24, 2006 Quote of the Day "Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is." – Erich Fromm
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Friday, August 25, 2006 - 2:12 am
August 25, 2006 Quote of the Day "The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning." – Gail Godwin
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Skootz
Member
07-23-2003
| Saturday, August 26, 2006 - 3:39 am
August 26, 2006 Quote of the Day "Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience." – Victoria Holt
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