Home

Just a brief note to wish everyone a belated Merry Christmas. Things have been crazy here, as it seems they have mostly been since I came home.

I blogged about my dad being hospitalized with pneumonia over Thanksgiving and I want to let you all know he is doing very well now. He spends most of his days "paddling" around the nursing home, chit chatting with the staff and other residents. He even played checkers with another resident yesterday! Rumor has it they didn't exactly follow the rules, but I figure if you want to make up your own rules at the age of 85, go for it, you've earned the right!

Continuing with the trend of elderly family members being hospitalized during the holidays, my favorite uncle spent Christmas in the Billings Hospital. My brother had taken him to the local hospital at 12:30 AM on Monday. The doctor mistakenly identified a hernia as the cause of his excruciating pain and sent him home with a truss.

Several hours later the pain became unbearable and Mike brought him to Columbus and I took him on to Billings to a hospital there. The doctors did a cat scan and he was in surgery an hour later. They discovered a cancerous blockage in his colon. The doctors are quite certain they got it all, but sent off lymph nodes to the lab to be sure.

Needless to say, Uncle missed out on the family Christmas celebration, but we are thrilled that he is doing well and should be coming home tomorrow or Sunday.

This is just one more reason I am thankful to be home and very grateful that I am able to be here now, when both my dad and uncle need me.

I guess you really can go home...

Heading Home for Our Christmas

As you may know, Christmas 2006 was cancelled due to the bad storm that settled over Denver. My son was unable to fly out, so we decided to wait until he could come home to celebrate the holiday.

I drove up the night before my son was due to fly in. I needed to put up the mini-tree and do a bit of last minute preparation for the big event. This is the sky that greeted me as I neared home.

More to come...

Obscene

As some of you may know, Christmas 2006 was cancelled due to bad weather in Denver. As a result, I have been an intolerable crab and all around grump. I have inflicted my bah-humbugness upon pretty much everyone within a three state area but that, my friends, is about to end. God and Mother Nature willing, my son is going to come home next weekend and we will finally have our holiday!

Before the Grinch stole Christmas, I had been in a very festive mood, decking my blog, decking the office and shopping up a storm. As a matter of fact, I did quite a lot of shopping while I was at state convention. Not only is it a place to learn a lot of conservationy things, it is also a great place to network (a.k.a. drink heartily and mingle). Probably the best thing about convention is the awards banquet, which is held the last night. It’s a really fun affair with entertainment, music and at the end, an auction of items brought in from all over the state.

I am usually able to contain myself and buy only a few reasonably priced items, however, this time it was different. To begin with I hadn’t slept much during the course of the event. The Democrats held their election soirée at our hotel and it was quite a party. A couple of my supervisors and I had a really good time with the “Fire Fighters for Tester”, so much so in fact that when I unloaded our watershed display; one of their posters was in the box. Not entirely sure how that happened…but I digress. As I said, this auction was different. Not only had I been out until the very wee hours of the morning, but our district took top honors in the state conservation newsletter contest (I’m the editor) and my district was awarded the MACD Presidents Award for Conservation. I was exhausted, but in very high spirits, not a good condition to be in at an auction.

The first item that caught my eye was a walking stick. My dad has Parkinson’s disease and is somewhat unsteady on his feet, so it seemed like exactly the right Christmas gift for him. The bidding started at $100.00. It was hand crafted and one of a kind. My excited, exhausted, wine soaked brain told me I had to have it…

Suffice it to say I spent an fairly obscene amount of money on it...but it wasn't nearly as expensive as the other object I bought. I can't tell you about it until after our Christmas though, because my s-o-n reads my blog.