Surrounded by smiles

Mom was released from the hospital one week ago today. I've been staying at her house pretty much day and night to help her. Her restrictions include no driving, no lifting more than ten pounds and no pushing or pulling with her arms. That means that she is not allowed to use her arms to stand up out of a chair and proves to be the greatest limitation. Only one of her chairs is tall enough that she can get up without assistance. Fortunately, though, she has a tall toilet, so she can get up from there very easily as well.

Most of you, my readers, do not know my mom personally. So you do not know about her afinity for smiley faces. Mom has always drawn smiley faces with her name as long as I can remember. She got the habit from her mother. So, for years and years, mom has gotten gifts of all sorts of smiley face paraphernalia for any special occassions and they fill her little house. I usedy iPhone camera to take this grid photo sampler of just a FEW of them...


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Mom Updates

If you're not family and/or don't live here locally, you probably don't know what's been going on with my mom's health. To get you up to speed, here's the short story: Mom had a pacemaker placed in late November due to a slow heartbeat. In the process of working it up, we learned that she has severe atrial valve stenosis. This means that the valve in her heart that controls the exit of blood from the heart to the rest of the body is scarred and quite narrowed. Her heart has to pump harder to get her blood through that barrier and it's severe enough that it warrants surgery.

So we've spent the last month finding out about the options and getting more checks and such. Valve replacement surgery is full on open heart surgery, so this is a big deal. She's had an angiogram as well that showed she has two areas that they will do bypass on while she's in there. So, to cut to the chase, Mom is scheduled for her open heart surgery on Monday - this Monday! It's been a busy week.

good things - she's pretty healthy and strong, our hospital is nationally recognized for cardiac surgery, we requested and got a great surgeon (even our cardiologist said he would pick this surgeon)
risks - she's got diabetes and she's 80. This is not going to be easy to recover from, but my mom is not one to take things lying down. She is very independent and has good drive to stay that way.

I'll be working most of my usual schedule this coming week while she's in the hospital, then I'll be taking 2-3 weeks of family leave to help her at home. Her best friends from Yakima have already arrived and plan to stay until she's home and settled in. We'd appreciate your prayers in the next several days.

Mobile blogging

I just got a new app on my iPhone that let's me blog from my phone. Just thought I'd give it a trial run here.

Denis and I just had our first anniversary that we didn't go out of town. This year we decided to save some $$ by staying home and just did some special things locally. On Dec. 31, our actual anniversary, we had dinner at a very nice place in a neughboring town Jacksonville.

It was a very nice night. Here's what I ordered.




All very yummy. Last night we spent one night in a historic hotel in Ashland. Overall, a very nice anniversary and a happy new year to boot!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Happy New Year!

It's 2010! We're careering towards a new decade. (BTW, after discussion with a friend yesterday, I've learned that the new decade doesn't start till 2011, so now you know!)

Are you making any resolutions this year? I'm not - I try to avoid making resolutions because I know that I'll never achieve them. However, I did join a group in my church that plans to read through the Bible in a year. I've read through the Bible a couple of times, but the only time I managed to do it within a year was the year that I spent at Multnomah Seminary. Through the course of the school year, we did study all the books and reading them was homework.

This year, I've chosen to use the Chronological arrangement and read it in the Amplified Version. Both of these choices are geared towards making it fresh and hopefully keeping my attention. The thing that often happens when I endeavor for getting through a designated section is that it gets really rote. So, I've never read one of those Chronological Bibles before, so that will be new. And using the Amplified Version means that the wording will not be as familiar to me. I'm looking forward to it. Today was day 2, so far so good, but that's not saying much yet... :o)

I've thought about blogging quite a number of times in the last two weeks, but my computer is being a dweeb and it's too difficult to sort my photos and do stuff with them. I'm typing this on Denis' computer. I'll be taking mine into a repair place on Monday to see if they can find what's making it sooooooo slow.