Surgery

See how calm I look, night before a grand adventure?

Wisdom teeth being taken out, Friday, 10:30AM. General anesthesia. Pray for me, OK?

It's not really 12:45AM. Can't fix the time on the posting.

We're ready. Got the frozen peas, got the comedy DVDs, got the soy-based frozen treats (no dairy with the pain meds). Got directions back home for when I'm out of it and useless as a navigator. Rob's bringing the Marantz to record everything I say after surgery, in case I'm amnesic for an extended time beyond the actual surgery. Might be our first podcast.

Like, I said ... pray. Not the most fun thing I've ever anticipated, eh?

Where we're at

We had a busy Thanksgiving day, even though I wasn't the one cooking (I only helped with the sweet potato casserole, spicy edamame and gravy). Friday, we just didn't do anything all day. Saturday, we had a sitting for our church directory portrait in the morning. We had considered going to see a movie but my uterus started freaking out so we had to go home. The pain went away in a few hours so we began to think of things to do that evening. Kate's parents were borrowing their kids for the weekend so we decided to have a grownups night out. We went to Illuzions (sp?) in Issaquah and played arcade games for an hour before singing karaoke for another hour. I hadn't done karaoke in in a long time. I got to sing echo (with Eric) for "If I had a million $" and lead on Aerosmith's "Dude looks like a lady" and Alannah Myles "Black velvet". Eric did U2's "With or without you" and Rob did Weird Al Yankovic's "Dare to be stupid". I actually blew out my voice singing, for the first time ever! I got it back in about an hour though, so it's all good. Just must warmup next time.

Rob presented during adult education hour at Cross of Christ (our home church) yesterday morning. I put up our new, permanent ministry display in the library there. Then, we came home and hung out together all afternoon. I'm feeling much better now, starting to feel normal again. I should be at full physical capacity some time today.

Our Trumba calendar thing isn't going to work anymore (they're making it un-free in January) so we're using iCal from now on. I just need to figure out how to integrate that with this blog. Keep your eyes peeled ...

Taking care of business

I've emailed almost a hundred pastors in the last 5 days. And I've already gotten preliminary responses from 6 of them ... yay! Things are looking hopeful for the spring bookings.

And Dielda just emailed me this picture, which she took at the Mary and Martha group we spoke at last week (at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Renton).

We have a doctor's appointment this afternoon so I'm finishing up what I can this morning.

in case I forgot

The link to hear one of Rob's sermons from speaking at Trinity Lutheran in Bellingham is http://www.touchmyfez.com/trinity ... I'm assuming the link to his message is still there. I'm going through the inbox today, getting receipts together for LBT.

We got the power

Made it home fine with dinner before 9PM. Ate by candlelight, then pondered what to do with all the meaty (Chicken Posole) leftovers. Thankfully, before the decision needed to be made, the power came back on. At 10PM, we even got to play Neverwinter Nights 2 for a bit. Will post a screenshot tomorrow, I think. Now, bed.

Outage

The power went at about 3PM so we're limited in what we were able to accomplish today. I had a crockpot dish cooking that had an hour left on it so we waited to see if the power would come back before doing anything drastic. Well, 6:30 rolled around and still no power so we picked up the crockpot and brought it to Kate's church. We left it plugged in on high and dinner should be done by 8PM, when we're going back to eat. We're at the library now, which is across from the church.

I just bought a bunch of meat to cook for meals this week so I'm really hoping and praying that the power comes back on pretty quickly. For now, we'll just not open the fridge. And I'll get in a couple of hours of library time, where they still have power.

Endometrial update

Had the sonohysterogram today. I have 3 big polyps in there. So, they'll scrape them out during a hysteroscopy, probably in January.


Normal endometrium












What mine kind of looked like (not the actual picture: I just found one online that looked kind of like what I saw onscreen)

Home sweet home

Made it back to Woodinville, safe and sound. Man, I'm beat. Rob's making me go to bed. He says I'm looking way tired. I can't argue the point. I couldn't find my supplements before I left for Dallas and, therefore, didn't take them all week. Plus, I had training all day, each day. Plus, I got up at 6AM to fly today. And 6AM Dallas time is 4 AM here. If I didn't look like dogmeat, I'd be Wonder Woman.

All done

Here's a shot from this afternoon, in the classroom, right after class finished.

Training is complete ... yay! It was fabulous. I even caught a free (bonus!) training on how to do a monolingual demonstration, from Mike Cahill. I wonder if I'll get the chance to try it soon.

I fly back to Seattle tomorrow.

Chicken! Head?

Training is great. Met some other LBT-ers here. Had lunch with Anna Moore on Monday, will have lunch with Tim and Michelle Miller today. Reading books from the library that I can't get anywhere else. Gotta run to class now. May post more later.

Safe and sound

Rob made it to the Hunger Symposium in Belfair and back, despite the nasty weather that doubled his travel time. Flooded roads and all, I hear. We were on iChat earlier, catching up.

I'm in my dorm room, in Dallas. Realizing now that I hadn't actually been in any of the dorm rooms when we lived here, back in the fall of 2004. We lived across the street, in the Zuni St apartments. I'm online so all is well. A friend of ours from when we'd been here before picked me up at the airport, Emma. She also took me to get groceries before bringing me to my room. I had kind of forgotten how there's nothing to eat here on campus and you can't walk anywhere in Dallas. But I now have a bunch of bananas, a bag of apples, some yogurt drinks and a container of ruby red grapefruit juice. Oh, and a bunch of rice cakes. That should last me until the cafeteria opens on Monday.

Also, I'm going to Cedar Pointe Church tomorrow. They meet here on campus as their permanent building is still being built. Bill Leckie is the pastor I talked about in our most recent newsletter, in my "Wait Training" article. Looking forward to seeing the CP churchfolks again.



Here I am, in my dorm room. I took the picture with PhotoBooth by clicking the photo button and running to the bed across the room to sit down.

Could have been SO much worse ...

So, I went to install Neverwinter Nights 2 on my MacBook last night, only to discover that it absolutely would not run on it. I was shocked and saddened. I mean, it's a brand new computer ... what's the deal? Come to find out, the Intel GMA 950 graphics processor doesn't support graphics-intensive games (read 3D games, like UT2004, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2 ... everything Rob and I play, basically). And yes, I do mean even with Windows installed, running in Bootcamp and with Direct X and Direct 3D enabled. This is a known issue, though not known to me until I Googled "MacBook" and "World of Warcraft" together. However, I was pretty miffed that the sales guy at the Mac store in Redmond hadn't known about this. Should they know everything about every computer, what they can and cannot do? I don't know. Thankfully, this is a question that didn't need to be answered conclusively.

We went to the Mac Store in Redmond, where I had purchased my custom-spec MacBook, and explained the problem. The manager, Tim Jahn, not only didn't give me grief about exchanging for a MacBook Pro (which runs Windows 3D games in Bootcamp just fine, as Rob can testify) but made the transaction utterly painless and easy for me. I even get to keep this MacBook until the refurbished MacBook Pro comes in, a great relief to me since I'm flying to a software training tomorrow morning for next week, to Dallas, and kind of needed a computer for that. I was so happy that I bought an optical mouse from him right then and there, said that I would sing his praises from the rooftops. He laughed, told me to sing loud. That was the best customer service I have received, in any situation. I highly recommend Tim Jahn and the Mac Store in Redmond, WA for their devotion to my total happiness. Kudos!

Redmond Mac Store site: http://www.thecomputerstore.com/redmond.php