My name is Casey Abell, which may not surprise you after you've seen this page's title. I'm an actuary and I live in Flower Mound, Texas at an undisclosed location. That way the IRS can't find me (fond hope).
Among my hobbies are sleeping, reading, riding my bicycle and sweating, watching old movies and the Three Stooges on TV, looking for easy money, and wandering aimlessly in cyberspace.
My favorite hangouts in Netland are mailing lists. They're not as noisy as Usenet and they're more accessible than CompuServe forums. I've laced this web mass with several of my contributions to mailing list chatter. Some of my frequent destinations are...
TAGFAM -- Gifted kids talk, relevant to our fourteen-year-old
EDUPAGE -- Tidbits on the computer biz
DOWN-SYN -- Down Syndrome talk, relevant to our sixteen-year-old
CASNET -- Actuarial talk for people who need actuarial talk
And many more, some of which I forget about until they hit my inbox. For plenty of information on these mailing lists and tens of thousands more, I recommend the Topica search engine.
I've also included the L-Soft corporation's web site on my hobbies page. These are the folks who make the LISTSERV software used on most of the mailing lists I subscribe to. As an example of the stuff I splatter on these lists, I've included this long-winded post that appeared on DOWN-SYN. It tells you a little about me and my family.
The note about fears during pregnancy brought back memories of the birth of our second child, Nathan, in 1989. After Alison was born with Down Syndrome in 1987, we were naturally a little nervous about a second kid. Alison arrived when my wife was 34, and we decided to have a second child when Sara was 36. By then we knew all about the association of DS with maternal age -- and lots more about DS than we ever wanted to know.
I'm not sure what we would have decided if Alison had experienced severe problems with DS. But she's always been very healthy and high-functioning, so we gambled a little.
We didn't have an amnio or any other kind of test during either pregnancy. With Alison we thought there was no need, and with Nathan we didn't want to know because we weren't going to do anything about it.
Another little twist was that Alison had been born with a C-section, and we were going for a vaginal birth the second time around. But we were a lot more worried about DS, as you might expect. Although the odds had increased only a little, they were still going in the wrong direction.
In the event Nathan was born with no problems in the delivery or in the chromosomes. I have to admit that I diagnosed him within fifteen seconds after birth, checking the eyes and the bridge of the nose and the ridge patterns on the palms. Not that we didn't love Alison to pieces -- and we still do -- but I couldn't help wanting to know about Nathan RIGHT NOW. So I looked everything over as well as I could without getting in the doctor's way.
Eight years later I get a little embarrassed thinking about that day in July, 1989. What if Nathan had been born with DS? It certainly wouldn't have made any difference in how much he's meant to us, and to his sister.
In an odd bit of irony Nathan did turn out to be exceptional, but in a different direction. His school is going to slot him into its LEAP program because he scores so well on the national tests. So I also subscribe to TAGFAM, the mailing list for families with gifted kids.
You might think that TAGFAM would be all sweetness and light compared to DOWN-SYN. It's true that the other list doesn't have heartbreaking posts about kids dying of heart defects or other terrible physical problems. But people still talk about how the schools and society in general don't understand and support their kids.
So everybody's got troubles no matter how their kids turn out. It's a little easier for us because Alison's the best girl in the world and Nathan's the best boy <s>. But if anybody's worried about what a new kid will bring, keep worrying and smiling at the same time. You can't buy the experience, though you'll pay a bundle for it.
Now that you've read a little of my deathless prose, the rest of this Web site (doesn't that sound impressive?) is in separate piles. Click on whatever looks least boring.
E-mail is so wonderful. It lets nerds all over the world flame each other with nobody else watching. I'm not into flame wars myself, but I plow through my inbox every day. So if you have any deep thoughts to share with me...
Finally, I've added a file to this already overloaded Web site. Luckily for you, the writing in the file is much better than my own. That's because the file is a copy of Henry James' superb ghost story, The Friends of the Friends. I call it a ghost story, but there is a tantalizing ambiguity about that description.
This tale is not one of James' best known, but in my opinion it ranks behind only The Turn of the Screw and The Jolly Corner among James' stories of the supernatural. I've tried to locate the story on the Web, but no luck. So I decided to contribute this fascinating account of otherworldly jealousy to the Internet. Also included are James' original notebook entries for the story, and the surprisingly few remarks he made on the tale in the New York Edition preface.
I couldn't resist adding a few comments of my own to James' haunting creation. Please forgive the impertinence and make up your own mind about the story.
I also found a corrupt text of James' early tale, A Landscape Painter, on a Library of Congress Web site. James would publish over a hundred more stories after this 1866 effort, but not many would offer the simple if sometimes naive charm of the diarist's adventure. After much scrubbing and polishing of the LOC text, A Landscape Painter appears here.
I've added one more file to the Jamesiana on this site. James never particularly liked his writings to be illustrated, but that didn't stop various artists from decorating his prose with drawings. This file shows several of the original drawings from first publications of James' fiction and essays.