Nina and I made a quick trip to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, last weekend for a couple of very important family events. Madison was to be baptized into the Church and Jillian was to receive a name and a blessing. We spent a delightful weekend in New Wilmington.

We flew from Denver to Pittsburgh Friday evening and flew back on Sunday evening. While there we stayed two nights at the delightful Jacqueline House bed and breakfast (check the link! Click on "Virtual Tour" and then "The Master Room". We slept there!). All the arrangements worked out very well.

The baptism and blessing took place on Saturday afternoon February 22nd at the New Castle Branch building. Jim and LeeAnn and family drove up from Kentucky for the festivities. Our niece Vanessa along with her husband and boys drove over from Ohio as well. Kirks parents Boyd and Jo were there from Montana. Family was well represented.

We got there Friday night to find that Rachel was sick with the flu. Saturday morning, most people were feeling OK. It turned out that doing the blessing together with the baptism was a Good Thing! By Sunday morning, Dawnmarie and Spencer were both down with the flu which has since spread through most of the family out there. By doing everything Saturday afternoon everyone was able to be in attendance.

We enjoyed the trip. It’s so amazing to be in Colorado at 4:30 p.m. MST and then be in Pittsburgh at 8:00 p.m. MST that same evening. New Wilmington is in very rural countryside. The roads meander through rolling hills, across small streams and bigger rivers. Trees are everywhere and on cloudy days it’s very easy to loose my sense of direction as there are no big mountains to act as landmarks. We’ve lived many years in that part of the world and it still feels like home. I think I could live there again!

We stayed for the first time at a bed and breakfast on this trip. Dawnmarie’s house is small and her inlaws were staying there for this week. So we decided to stay somewhere nearby. There aren’t any motels in New Wilmington and the nearest accommodations of that sort were about twenty minutes away. Dawnmarie located two bed and breakfasts and scouted them both out. Her recommendation was for us to stay at the Jacqueline House which was about five minutes away, just south of the college. It was a lovely choice. The house itself is about ten years old. The owners had an old farm house on the property torn down and then built a modern home built on the foundation. The home was built to look like an elegant old farm house but has all the modern conveniences built in. They then built an addition to the house for the family living quarters. The current owners bought the property about six months ago. There are four rooms available for rent. We could come and go as we wished. Breakfast was served in a common area at whatever time we wished. The room itself was nicely decorated with a bathroom almost as big as the bedroom, including a claw-foot tub. Nina enjoyed a morning bath each morning we were there. We will definitely stay there again on a future trip to New Wilmington.

In the next few days I’ll post some pictures from our trip, including some of Jillian. She is a delightful baby. She wakes up and grins with beautiful dimples! All of Kirk and Dawnmarie’s children a delightful. It sure makes raising Dawnmarie worth it (grin)!

Early Wednesday morning the snow started. By Wednesday evening we had about four inches of snow on the ground. It wasn’t much snow but it sure has been cold. The low last night was about -4 and the high today was 19. It’ll be a little bit warmer tomorrow. These are good days for staying indoors.

Nina probably wishes she had stayed indoors on Wednesday morning! She had an appointment with the physical therapist at 7:30 a.m. She left the house about 7:15, about the time the first inch of snow had fallen. Not quite a mile from the house she lost control of the car and slide over the curb and up onto the sidewalk. While the car survived the incident unscathed, she did not. She wrenched her back and was in quite a bit of pain. She went to the therapy appointment anyway and barely missed being hit on her way home as another couple of cars went out of control in the same spot! Needless to say, she stayed on the recliner most of the rest of the day yesterday. She’s feeling much better today, but it’ll be a couple more days before she’s back in good form.

Even Bradica (the dog) thinks that staying indoors is a Good Thing. Persuading her to go outside, and in particular to get off the back deck before doing her business, is difficult when it’s this cold and there’s snow on the ground. Meanwhile, she’s developed this curious mannerism of standing under things like plants (as in the accompanying picture), or under the edge of a table covering or a bed covering, anywhere that something falls across her back. She’ll stay there for a long time, peering out at the world. It’s quite amusing and seems to have no known purpose. Chuck Sale, our Home Teacher, suggested that it was her jungle instincts coming out. Do dogs get Alzheimers?? She’s a very good dog and fun to have around (even if she is more work than any kid of similar age). She’s now a lurking dog as well.

Why is Nina going to see a physical therapist, you ask? She’s been having a lot of trouble with her right leg. She saw the doctor on Monday who has ordered up a number of tests. Since the most likely cause is sciatica, he sent her to see a physical therapist to work on a better alignment of muscle and nerve in her leg. The first day at the therapist seemed to help. The second day, however, was marred by the wrenched back. She’ll have several more visits with the therapist in hopes of fixing the problem. Meanwhile, the rest of us here are just trying to stay warm!

I think I’ve got all of the programming done and the code working reasonably well. If anyone is interested, you can now subscribe to this weblog. What that means is this: anytime I post a new entry to the weblog, subscribers will get a short e-mail telling them that a new entry has been posted.

Subscribing should be fairly easy. Click on the "Subscribe!" link on the right side of the page. Enter your e-mail address and submit. You will receive an e-mail telling you about the subscription. From then until you choose to unsubscribe, anytime I post, you’ll get an e-mail message. Happy reading….!

I was reading in a magazine about the fellow who created a website called livejournal.com which was one of the early web logs. He developed the code over time from a command-line system to a web system to a multi-user system. He said that he sometimes entered information into his weblog thirty or forty times a day! I have a hard time getting one post a week onto my weblog so it’s difficult to imagine what someone would have to say when they posted thirty or more times in a day. Later on in the article I learned that most of these posts were something like "going downstairs to get a Dr. Pepper" or similar. After that I didn’t feel so bad. But, he did say that an early innovation he put on his web log was the ability for people to send messages to his pager.

Well, I have a cell phone that will receive text messages. So, I’ve added this ability to my web log. On the sidebar on the right side of the page is a new quick link: Send Msg to Roland. Clicking on that link will open up a new window. A text message of up to 80 characters can be sent to my cell phone. Try it out…!!

Now that this works, the next innovation will be to allow folks to sign up to receive an e-mail message whenever something new is posted to this website. Shouldn’t be too hard….!