Philip, Jen and Peyton's Pages

Weekend update on dad

We visited with dad yesterday and he is doing extremely well.  His symptoms have disappeared…  The tingling and pain is gone from his arms and shoulders.  He is even seeing improvement with his scoriosis, which came on out of no-where.  I think it may be related to nerve damage or the stress on his spinal cord from the herniated disc, but we’ll see about that.  

He was really happy to see his baby, Peyton, this weekend and get to spend some time with her.   His spirits were good and he had a few visitors while we were there.  I wish we could have stayed longer, but we had breakfast plans this morning with friends who’ll be out of town for a while visiting family in Hawaii, so we came back.

Dad’s neck surgery

This afternoon, my dad had surgery on his neck.  The doctor told us that he had a hurniated disc in his neck that was putting pressure on his spinal cord.  He is doing extremely well and looks to be coming home tomorrow, which is very promising.  He is in good spirits and time will ultimately tell how successful the procedure was…  Just keep us in your prayers.

For everyone who didn’t know about this, my dad has been having back pain for a while.  Its mostly in the upper back and sholders.  He has also developed some tingling and numbness in his arms.  Its worse on his right arm, but also affects his left.  I heard more today than I had previously while he was telling the nurses in pre-op about the problems.  Turns out his GP was blaming diabetes and arthritis for the pain and problems, but dad requested more to be done and was sent to have an MRI in Pinehurst.  The MRI showed that he had a herniated disc and he was referred to a doctor in Florence, and went in for his first visit on last Thursday.  The doctor showed him exactly the problem and gave him his options.  Basically, though, he stressed that dad should have an operation as quickly as possible.  The doctor primarly operates with McLeod Regional Medical in Florence, but couldn’t get dad into surgery until late in September, so he called the other major hospital there and booked it for today.  

Its really a wonder that dad has been as functional as he has and that he hasn’t had more major problems than he has had from looking at the disc.  Mom and I were able to see the MRI (which was on CD) over the weekend and it looked scary.  But hopefully he is on the road to recovery now…  more soon…

Saving the family history

A while back, I started a project on a very cool site called Geni.com.  Geni.com lets you document  your family tree with a Facebook kind of twist.  It takes geneology and makes it social.  Gone are the days of endless research alone trying to piece together details of our family’s history and welcomed are the days of online collaboration by all the members of your tree to help document it together.   The concept is amazing.  I have a few aunts and uncles who have joined along with some of my cousins who are helping to add people to the tree and grow it.  

This weekend, I finally got to do something I have been itching to do for a while.  My family has a lot of old photos that would be awful to lose.  Most of these photos are from the 1950′s or before and there are some that I’ve never really even seen.  My granny has lots of them stored in photo albums that she guards.  So, this past weekend, I took my computer and scanner (which I bought specially to be able to travel with) up and got high resolution copies of many of the photos.  I’m now working my way through touching them up and posting them in Geni.com.  The one down side is that Geni.com only stores low resolution copies, but it will allow all the folks on the tree to see them if they’d like.  I hope to one day have a repository of the high resolution copies for family members to be able to download or make prints from.   More to come.

Archiving photos

For a long time now, we’ve been collecting 4×6 photos in a photo box around our house.  Most everything since 2000 or 2001 has been digital, but every part of our life documented before that was on film.  After a lot of wasted time on Google looking for a nice scanner that would automatically scan a stack of 4×6 photos, I’ve just bitten the bullet and I’m scanning photos for a time on my el cheapo Canon flatbed.  One of my biggest fears is losing all of these memories to a fire or some other catastophe.  One of my friends recently had her business office flooded.  Long stroy short, she lost a lot.  Its taken her several months to rebuild the suite and get back to a sort-of even keel.  And after hearing about the ordeal, I’ve been concerned with things that are irreplaceable in my house.  So, I’ve started digitizing as much as possible.  I have a wonderful online backup service that I use so everything that I’ve digitized will be pushed up to an online backup service where I can get to it, come whatever may…

Jen & Grad School

Something that I have failed to blog about is Jen going back to school.  She has decided to purse a masters in environmental management from the University of Denver.  She will be attending classes online and should get the degree in about two years.  She started classes in late June and just finished class number one.  And, drumroll…..  She found out today she got an A for her first graduate level class!  I always knew I married a smart one!  BIG congrats to her on her first class!

Making up for lost time

Well, I must apologize. I’ve been neglectful of the blog for over a month and really, I don’t think one post a month counts for much either. So, I’m going to be working on some back-dated posts to fill in the gaps over the summer. A lot has happened, so scroll back trough and take a look at what we’ve been up to…