brains

This afternoon, our friend Jimmy had brain surgery.

You heard me right! Last week, his wife Christy, who is one of Cathy's best friends, found him unconscious at home. She finally got him in to see the doctor, and they found out that he was bleeding slowly inside his skull and he had a brain aneurysm. This was at the start of Labor Day weekend, so since he was in no immediate danger as long as he was under observation at the hospital, they scheduled an exploratory procedure for Tuesday. They discovered the aneurysm during this procedure, and scheduled a surgery to clamp it off for today, Wednesday. Usually we go to church on Wednesday with choir practice after, and we were hoping for the surgery to be over by that time, but as it turned out it took longer than that and we missed the whole service and the rehearsal! BUT: the important thing is that Jimmy came through the surgery with flying colors; the doctor told Christy that things couldn't have gone better. It was pretty close to ten p.m. when we finally got to see Jimmy; he was still seriously drugged up but we spoke to him in case he could hear us, and then we went to pick up the kids from Meme's house.

It was great that Cathy was able to be there for most of the day; there were a couple of times that Christy really needed someone for support, and Cathy was able to be that friend for her.

Thank you, God, for taking care of Jimmy today!

Pack 137 ROCKS!

Today we went to our first activity with Pack 137. Mikey's previous pack, Pack 990 from Grace Christian School, is not active this year, so we're transferring to Pack 137 from Mayo Demonstration School. The kids in the pack (most of which are Mayo students) seem to be really great, and the parents are terrific also. We built three Cubmobile racing cars (kind of like soap-box derby cars minus the soap box) in a couple of hours, and then we had some pizza!

    

(See all the pictures here... I took 127 of them!)

After that we went home and picked up Mama and Hannah and went downtown for the grand opening open house of the new BOK Center arena. I still have my doubts about the wisdom of the logic about parking, but the arena itself is very impressive. I snapped a picture of the three of us outside after we got done looking around, and then just for fun I took a stab at one with me in it. I actually managed to get my head in there, and the heads of several of my family members! (I didn't do nearly as good a job as this guy, though.) Notice Mikey's clown nose in the second picture (Ringling Brothers Circus is coming to the BOK this year).

 

Later this afternoon we went to Applebee's for dinner; Mikey and I had a great time looking out the window as a storm rolled in and the lightning kept lighting up the sky. We watched as these birds on the wire:



...saw some lightning and skedaddled faster than you can say "Hey, bird, it's just LIGHTNING!" (this is the same spot a few seconds later after a lightning bolt went through the sky):



It started raining and we got to watch this cool spider right outside the window. It's a shame the sky was so bright behind him... he just looks like a shadow in the picture, but we could see him really well:

Caturday 8/30/2008

moar funny pictures

Don't TELL me you've never seen ALIEN??!?/!?

(Hmm. Me neither.)

Home School

Today marks the first day of Mikey's second week of school. We're trying something different this year: after three years of private Christian school, this year for third grade we're home-schooling him using Switched-On Schoolhouse, which was recommended to us by several friends. The lessons are all (with the exception of science experiments) on the computer, and they include videos and songs and games, and Mikey is having a great time with it so far. Here's a picture of him busy at his lessons:



Uh-oh. Wait a second. Maybe I should give Mommy a call and get her to check up on him! Wait a second... what's that on the TV in the background??

Caturday 8/23/2008

moar funny pictures

If you don't get it... Remember this thing? Remember how it ate this guy?

That was great.


(It happened sort of like this:)

hold music

I wonder why businesses feel that they need to play music for me when I'm on hold? And I have no way to turn it off. Fact is, I am VERY rarely nto listening to some music already, and having their music playing in my ear is SUPREMELY annoying! I would much prefer, for example, just a recording of someone speaking, even if it is a bunch of advertisements. I have been on hold systems before that allow you to kill the stupid music and just say something every 15-20 seconds (to let you know you're still on hold and not silently disconnected); every hold system should be cool like that.

</rant mode off>

Caturday 8/16/2008

I thought I'd try out the new Advanced LOL Builder (with cool thought balloons!):