Harry's Ruminations

My mom's having surgery tomorrow morning. Preliminary indications are the 'thing' on her liver (they switch from calling it a lesion or a tumor every other time.) isn't cancer. She still has one more test to undergo tonight, then she is "top of the list" for surgery tomorrow at UK. I just spoke with her, and she seems a little tired and on some pain meds, but she doesn't seem scared. I'm taking tomorrow off work to be there for the surgery. * * * In case you can't tell, I'm a bit of a "Momma's Boy", and I love my mother very much. I've not agreed with her much since I got saved and became a man, but we've always had a special relationship and I hope and pray this "thing" is just as mundane as they said. I have a bad feeling it is more than they're saying, but as Whitney says, "You ALWAYS have a bad feeling..." Yep.

Thanks to all of you who've written offering prayers and well-wishes for Mom. She's out of the hospital as of last Friday, but she's going back tomorrow for further tests. What they think they know isn't awful, but it will require more surgery. She's in pain, but she doesn't seem too concerned (typical Mom, in other words!) Please keep her in your prayers.

There are days where I want to rename this blog "Tragedy and trials du jour" So Mom's back in the hospital for tests...she has some sort of "lesion" on her liver. She just had her gallbladder out back in July, but had continued pain during her recovery. I'd really like to list the litany of crap that's going on in my life right now, but that's not going to do me much good. I feel like an over-saturated sponge ( appropriate, considering ), and I've lost the ability to internalize anything.

I know I know...where are freakin' pics? Well, it's been crazy at home, and I haven't had 10 minutes on the computer to upload (insert excuse #2 here....insert excuse #3 here) Summary: She is amazing. We're massaging lotion into her new skin over the burns 4 times a day, and the areas are pinking right up. She's learned to locomotor on all fours the right way, and she can blitz across the living room anytime she sees something shiny. She's one smiling amazing baby girl. The doctors admonished us to keep those areas away from the sun for a full year, and to be aware that for the rest of her life those areas will hold a tan longer and be more susceptible to skin cancer. (Yay :-( ) Overall, though, she's doing tremendously well, and the constant prayers and well-wishes have been great.

Wow, if I just throw sex in there, we'll have all three taboo topics in one, n'est-ce pas? Response to my post yesterday has been overwhelming (well, for me. I'm no Dawn ). I think my wife put it best: "Jesus wouldn't have been [Republican or Democrat]. He was a-political." Let me say this right up front--Christianity is tremendous. To me, it is Truth personified, the Creator of the universe reaching out to us as lovingly as He can, trying to reconcile the ultimate divide (sin) between Himself and us. However, if I might put my historical and practical hat on for a moment, Christianity is an awful form of government. It presumes two principles: 1) Love God. 2) Love your neighbor as your self. Governments (especially democracy) are set up with the opposite principles: 1) You love yourself. 2) You hate your neighbor and wish he'd go away, along with his dog that craps on your hydrangea. Or as I've put it at intervals before: Democracy operates on...

Flash of insight I received during the sermon yesterday: Jesus was a Democrat (or, more appropriately, a 'Liberal'). More specifically, I don't see any way I could call Him a Republican or a Conservative. This all spills out from our current sermon series on the book of Mark. Mark is (probably) the first gospel to be composed, and it was likely written by John Mark, a disciple of Simon Peter, the guy of whom Jesus said "Upon this Rock (literally Petra == Rock) I shall build my church". Mark is all business--this is what Jesus said, this is what it means. If something seems unclear or too Judean, he explains it in a parenthetical note. Mark's the Cliffs' Notes for Christ. So, if I might oversimply my definitions: Republican : Socially, fiscally conservative. Believing in small government, low taxes, and the rights of the individual. Likewise believes each individual is responsible for his own station in life. Believes in harsh punishment for crimi...

(Blathering description of how a device was probably broken, but if it was I had a magic way to fix it 'temporarily') My colleague: "You're into all that nerdly stuff, arencha?" Yes. Yes I am.

I had some really bad chili Wednesday night at church and...well, let's just say I won't be eating chili again for awhile. Maybe ever. I awoke around midnight and began a 36 hour nausea bender, combined with weakness, muscle aches, and general exhaustion. Yep, I was sick. So, Thursday and Friday pretty much didn't exist, and Saturday. Well, Saturday was hard. No excuses, just...I was not my normal, loving self; I was abnormally self-loving, and that wasn't cool. We accomplish much outside once I could stand upright. We dug-up the front planter and put in a Japanese maple and 3 hedges. (Hey, considering I trimmed the holly bushes back to a nub and killed all the backyard stuff with deck sealant, we needed SOMETHING!) So, I'm back at work today, with a meeting to figure out where (if anywhere) we can go with all this Web Services stuff. My stomach's still not feeling its usual cast-iron self, but aside from that, all is well. Quick hits: - Still haven't...

I write this in hopes of saving you some time, if you're looking at MSFT's new RegisterForPrintAsyncNotifications API (new in Vista and Server 2008). At first glance (and second, and third) glance, this API doesn't seem to work. It promises to provide asynchronous notifications of state changes to the print objects in the spooler, but how the $#@^ does it work? Let's look at it more closely. (It's defined int he file prnasnot.h, if you've got your sdk handy. HRESULT RegisterForPrintAsyncNotifications( LPCWSTR pName, PrintAsyncNotificationType *pSchema, PrintAsyncNotifyUserFilter filter, PrintAsyncNotifyConversationStyle directionality, IPrintAsyncNotifyCallback *pCallback, HANDLE *pRegistrationHandler ); pName is a pointer to the name of the print object you want to monitor. If you want alerts from all objects, you can pass NULL here (or so I've observed!) pSchema is a pointer to a schema that the client expects....

Had to steal this from the whiteboard in my old building. "Potential Mottos for the family crest" Why does this keep happening to me? Again?! Recidite, plebes! Duty, honor, payment We don't know what's broke or how to fix it The next one will be normal, you'll see! Fabricati diem too lazy to work, too nervous to steal we don't have clue one What, me worry? rex cloaca! Probably our fault Seldom right, but never in doubt praying for sterility for over 300 years I drank what? Your family is no prize, either. Clovis had it right We're all out of toner! Give us time, we'll screw it up.

Nearly a week on and no update on my daughter. Sorry! As is typical with me, no news is good news--Maria's Aquacell bandages (think big synthetic scabs) have fallen off, and her torso is healing very well. It's trending more towards a healthy pink away from the angry red that it was. We're not so pleased with her leg. Her wound there is still seeping in two places; we're calling the Dr's for opinions on that. As I said before, her mood is pretty normal for an 8-month-old (just as of yesterday): She's curious about everything, and very concerned with how much her teething hurts her. I love her toothless grin so much, it almost pains me to think of her with teeth. Still, that's part of it--can't eat baby food and formula forever! I'll try to post-up some pics soon, thanks to our new iMac 20". MAN I LOVE THAT COMPUTER!

Just sat through Karl Schoemer's "The New Reality" seminar . Schoemer, an Indiana-Weslyan University grad (Woohoo!), teaches a tough-love seminar on recognizing change, dealing with your responses to it (Shock, Denial, Identity Crisis, and Search for Solutions), and recognizing positive and negative behaviors associated with it. The overall message is: "Old reality" is dead. The social contract of selling your soul to a company, working there for 30 years and retiring as a good "company man" no longer exists. Each person is responsible for his relative contribution, attitudes, and responses to change. It's never going back to "the good old days". Stop having this familial, parent/child attitude towards work. They owe you nothing, aside from a paycheck. It's not all as harsh as that, but he's the first person to look at us LXK'ers and say "You're pissed-off. Great! What are you going to do about it?" Trem...

Try this Leave it to compsci guys to take all the fun out of "Six Degress of Kevin Bacon"

First of all, let me thank everyone for the outpouring of support we've been given! Family, church, friends, and mere acquaintances have all written, emailed, called, and visited. If it takes a village to raise a child, then our real and virtual "village" has closed ranks like I've never seen. Maria seems to be getting better. She remains comfortable during dressing changes, and her outer dressings are no longer "dirty" when we change them. Honestly, I think she's more concerned with eating and playing with toys than her burn at this point. She's even gotten up on her hands-and-knees to crawl for short distances. Whitney has been a superior nurse, despite the trauma of reliving the experience each time she sees the burn. She's born the brunt of this, while still taking care of the household. I'd be a complete mess (see "After Maria's Birth"!) if it were left just to me. So, we wait. We wait with hope and prayer for a go...

At 11am Saturday, while she was out enjoying breakfast at Cracker Barrel with Whitney and her Grandmother Cathy, my daughter Maria was scalded over 10% of her body by a carafe of boiling water. The waitress sat the water too close to her, and she reached out and pulled it onto herself. She was seated in a highchair at the time, and the boiling liquid burned her from the center of her chest to her waist, and the upper part of her right thigh. A nurse behind Whitney directed them the administer first aid, and an ambulance took her directly to the University of Kentucky hospital E.R. Evaluating the burn, the doctors said it was 2nd degree , and should not require surgery. They admitted her to the Children's Hospital, room 441, where she remained for observation until yesterday afternoon. Doctors administered morphine in the ER, tylenol with codene at the Children's Hospital, and we're managing her pain with straight tylenol and motrin here at home. She's been given an ...