On a very happy note, we’re recognizing two birthdays today. Jaelene and her husband Scott both were born on January 29th. They’ve been out east helping Daryl celebrate his thirtieth birthday, so they’re probably not doing any celebrating today! Happy, happy birthday to both of you.

Dad is home and having a lot of trouble with his TV / Home Entertainment equipment. There are too many buttons on the remote control. Dad’s fine motor control is poor (giving it a huge benefit of the doubt), so he’s forever pushing the wrong buttons. He has to use headphones to listen to the sound and has managed to catch the headphone cord when standing up and broken that cord. Things are just not quite what he needs.

So, the headphone thing can be taken care of by going with wireless / infrared headphones that have no cords. I think I’ll go buy a universal remote control. I’ll take it over to Soda Springs and program the on / off button, the volume up and down buttons, and the channel up and down buttons. Then I’ll take it apart and disable all the other buttons. That way he can push all the buttons he wishes, but doesn’t then have to call someone to figure out what’s the matter with the TV! There might be something to this idea of a primitive remote control that provides very limited functionality. Remember, you heard it here first!

My cold is still “growing” and hopefully will peak real soon now. I’m not looking forward to flying to Belgium on Saturday sporting this cold! It seems to be settling in my chest with lots of coughing. I came home from work at noon and slept the rest of the afternoon. With any luck I’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep tonight and maybe tomorrow the cold will start getting better?? It’d sure be nice.

A few days ago, I started having some pain in the right side of my mouth. By Friday the pain had gotten bad enough that I decided to call the dentist to see about an appointment. They had time this afternoon at 2:45 p.m.

Since dad came home from the hospital yesterday and Perry and Chris were visiting them, Nina and I drove over to Soda Springs this morning. The pain in my mouth by this morning had localized to my lower jaw right front and I didn’t sleep very well last night. We had a good visit with mom and dad — who is very happy to be back home — and came back to Pocatello. I went to the dentist’s office for my appointment.

Today is a Saturday. I was rather surprised that the office was even open on a Saturday! I got there and discovered why: it was full of families with kids. Two dentists, the orthodontist, and the hygenist were there, all quite busy. They took an x-ray and the dentist told me that there was some infection going on at the bottom of one tooth in the right front lower jaw. I needed another root canal. Since I’m leaving for Belgium next Saturday, they decided to do the root canal right then and there. By 5:30 I was out of the dentist’s office, the numbness had started wearing off, and I headed for Walgreens to pick up an antibiotic prescription. The dentist said that I was down to six teeth in my mouth that could possibly need a root canal in the future. All the rest are either gone or the procedure has already been done.

My dad had all of his teeth taken out when we were living in Tooele and I was going to 1st Grade. While in the gene pool, I got his predeliction for bad teeth and have passed that trait along to a couple of our kids (sorry!). So, here I sit at the computer with a rather sore mouth. The numbness is almost gone. My stomach is acting like it doesn’t like the antibiotic. I’m a bit cranky. And it’s too early to go to bed … or is it?

Dad continues to make a good recovery. He was cleared by the doctors to be able to go home for a few hours yesterday and today. My sister Terry and her husband Allan helped mother take him to the house yesterday. Nina, Ashlyn (Nina’s niece who is visiting for a few days), and I went over today (I took another short video of the day).When we arrived, he was ready and raring to go. Mother brought her car to the front of the hospital, Nina and Ashlyn helped him get in, and off we went to their house for a few hours.

Dad enjoyed being home and sitting in his chair. He watched some television and did a little snoozing. Nina had put together a nice Sunday dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy,  peas, and Nina’s canned peaches for dessert. We had a good time and managed to get dad back to the hospital only a little late for his 6:00 p.m. curfew. He was tired, but happy.

I just got off the phone with mother for an update on dad’s progress. She talked with me between spoonfulls of soup. My brother Perry had called a few minutes ago. She was quite pleased with the day and what was happening. Today the therapist set the walker aside and dad had do a lot of walking with no assistance (other than a belt tightly held by the therapist in case dad lost his balance). I was sure that would come some day but this is earlier than I had expected. It’s a very nice piece of news. He is really looking forward to going home!

The cold weather continues to persist although the high temperatures have finally gotten into the high teens and we’ll possibly get into the mid 20’s tomorrow. My car barely starts putting out heat by the time I get to the house after leaving work. Like my brother, I’ll try very hard not to complain about the heat this summer. I like air conditioning better than running the furnace.

Traci would have been thirty-three this past Monday. Trevor would now be thirty-five. It’s been six years since Trevor was killed in that automobile accident. Both events seem like yesterday. The memory of the emergency drive to the hospital in Duesseldorf-Heerdt in the middle of the night with no idea where the hospital was located still makes my heart pound. The drive from San Jose to the San Francisco airport followed by the flight to Salt Lake City is burned in my brain as well. All of those people in the airport and on the airplane going about their happy, unconcerned lives was such paradox to me that it seemed I was in a different world from everyone else and that I couldn’t relate to their world. I’ll not write more since it’s just too hard. I don’t think it will ever, ever be easy. It just hurts.

Nina is at the womens prison tonight teaching them about journals and keeping memories. She’s been helping a couple of girls who have been released on probation to get into an apartment, get a minimum amount of furniture (such as a bed!), some food in the apartment, and a bus pass so they can get around town and find a job. One of the women remarked that for her whole life she has lived with people on drugs and alcohol. She’s never been in any other circumstance until now. This is her second time in prison and out on parole. The first time she got out, she went home and as she walked in the house, a family member handed her a hit of meth and welcomed her home. This time she’s not told anyone in her family that she’s out nor where she is. She wants to somehow break that chain and do something different with her life. I sure hope that it can happen. She deserves a chance at a real life rather than the illusion of life that she has been in before. It will be good for her to leave that world and join our world.

Happy birthday, Traci. I’m looking forward to getting to know you. Trevor, know that we love and miss you. I’m looking forward to getting to know you once again. We’ve got a lot to talk about.

It has been a nice, quiet evening at home. These don’t happen very often lately it seems. I’ve been able to catch up on a few things that needed to get done, such as mail off some dues and donations, fix a nagging boot-up problem on my Windows PC, get the second hard drive for my iMac cleaned up, and package up the eStarling digital picture frame to be returned. That last was a purchase that I hoped would work for mother and dad for folks to email pictures to them. Well, it just doesn’t quite work. First, it had to be within about 20 feet of the wireless access point. eStarling thought that the power supply shipped with the device might be the problem, but that turned out not to fix the issue. Secondly, it would quite often hang while displaying a picture. Then from that point onward, it would hang on that picture until the picture was deleted. Unfortunately, there’s no way to delete the picture directly on the digital picture frame! It has to be deleted on the web site and then wait until the update has been sent to the frame. Only then can it be turned off and back on again and start working. Finally, the screen resolution was pretty poor. My iPod has better resolution! It was just too high-maintenance for it to be anything that mother and dad would be able to use. The final straw was that Kodak announced a new line of digital picture frames at the Consumer Electronics Show which seems to be pretty state of the art. I think that Kodak might get this right. The Kodak device will ship sometime in March or so, and I’ll buy one of those to check it out. I still think that being able to set up a wireless display device that can receive email pictures would be pretty cool! Further, the Kodak device is supposed to also be able to play short videos. So, the eStarling devices goes back and I’ll try to trade up.

Dad continues to make progress, but not nearly as fast as mother would like! He goes to bed pretty early (around 7:30 or so) and wakes up pretty early (around 5:00 or so). Sometimes he’ll call mother at that hour of the morning because he’s lonely. Yesterday it was because he was lonely and he was out of Diet Caffeine Free Coke…. He moves around quite well with his walker but hasn’t yet been able to tackle going up and down steps. That’s pretty important as he has to go up and down steps to go in and out of the house. Until he can easily find his center of balance, steps will have to wait. He’s getting pretty vigorous physical therapy twice a day and that’s working quite well.

I watched about 5 minutes of American Idol tonight and had all of that I could stand. Out came the iPod, the Bose Quiet Comfort 2 noise cancelling headsets, and I’ve been listening to the music I want to hear tonight. First it was a delightful album titled Chilling With Beethoven and then a big switch to Jewel’s Goodbye Alice In Wonderland which I also enjoy. One of my recent favorite quotes comes from this album: “Everything’s temporary, given enough time.” Only problem is, the bed will call me much sooner than I’ll be done listening to music. Maybe another night!

Dad is making excellent progress and we had a very nice visit with him and mother today. We drove over to Soda Springs in the late morning and stayed through most of the afternoon. I’ve made another video — this is a bit better than the last one. I’ll never become a professional (I’ll leave that to Jared), but it does show the kind of progress that dad is making in his recovery from the stroke.

It has been very cold here and the cold weather seems to be making its way eastward. At least seven people in the great plains have died as a result of this unusually cold weather. It certainly does curtail outdoor activities for most people, that’s for sure. We went downtown to pick up a couple of items before driving to Soda Springs and there was literally no traffic in town!

The past week seems to all blend together. I had very early morning meetings four days this week — and by early, I mean 6:30 a.m. be at work, being human kind of meetings. This morning when the alarm went off, I groaned and started to get up before I realized that it was Saturday and I could push the snooze button! That elicited a sigh of relief. Nina has also been swamped this week and we’re both kind of worn out. It’s nice to have a quiet weekend to recharge.

My trip to Belgium is also firming up. It’ll be a short trip this time, leaving on Saturday February 3rd and returning on Friday, February 9th. Hopefully the weather will cooperate. It has been unseasonably warm in western Europe the past week. I’ll not complain if that continues.

On a political note, I’m increasingly unhappy with what is happening in Iraq. It seems to me that there is nothing we can do there as those folks can simply wait us out, all the while picking off our military men a small group at a time. Whenever we leave, an all-out civil war will certainly erupt. I’m becoming of the opinion to let them kill each other off. It’s certainly better than them killing our troops! Somehow we have to put a stop to this kind of an action where we go in with guns blazing and then have no idea what to do next. I wish that the Democrats had a better plan, but nothing is emerging there, either.

On a happier note, it’s Girl Scout Cookie time. I think the only Girl Scout among the grandchildren is in Pennsylvania, so I’m working on how many boxes of cookies I will be buying. I think at least eight … but I had dinner a while ago so I’m not very hungry right now. Maybe I need to think about this again before dinner…!!

A brief note about the video. This time I’ve put it out only in Windows Media format. Of the sixteen people who viewed the video last week, fourteen downloaded the Windows Media format and one of the others downloaded both. If I only do one format it goes in about half the time. So, unless I hear anything else, that’s the only format I’ll be doing for the next while. There are bloopers plenty … starting with saying there were four video clips when in reality there are five. Someday I’ll learn to count (not).

It took most of the day, but I’ve finally gotten the video from dad uploaded to the website. I’ve made it in two versions … one in QuickTime format and the other in Windows Media Player format. I’ve learned a lot from this process. As long as I don’t have to do any editing, the video comes together quite quickly. If I need to do any editing, then it gets very complicated. However, it is some good video of dad and his present condition. The next video should go much better.