Conquering Everest, or maybe the lawn

Lori Schneider, a 52-year-old retired teacher with MS, reached the summit of Mt. Everest on Thursday, May 21. "She said, 'I'm here Dad, I'm on the summit, I made it,' " Neal Schneider recounted. "She was very, very happy, as you can imagine."

Congratulations, Lori.

That same evening, Doug Lee-Knowles, a 38-year-old lawyer with MS, mowed the back yard. "He said, 'The Office was a re-run,' Doug's wife recounted. "He looked like he was gonna pass out, as you can imagine."

Congratulations, Doug.

As I've said before, I don't get much out of the adventures of super-crips like Lori. But I bet Lori gets plenty out of her climbs. I get a similar, if smaller, charge out of doing ordinary stuff that has gotten increasingly difficult for me over the last half-dozen years: mowing the grass, washing the dog, and, a while back, replacing a dodgy distributor rotor.

I suppose I've given up on doing the kind of stuff that other people would care to read about in the newspaper. But I'm still fighting hard to hang on to the trappings of ordinary life. Nobody wants to read about a guy with MS making dinner or continuing to drive a manual transmission, but stuff like that sure makes me feel good.