Week 5 (2 of 2)

I cannot think about anything else to post about after posting my first of two blogs for week 5.  I am numb…

week 5 (1 of 2)

Today was perhaps one of the hardest days of my life.  My father’s Doctor came into the room after rounds in the ICU today and told us, there is almost no hope for him to get better.  Then the Doctor told us if there is not any improvement by the middle of this week, we would need to terminate his current life support.  My father is not only my dad, he is actually my best friend in the whole world.  It will be so weird not to be able to pick up the phone at a whim and call him to talk about sports or life in general.  My wife is up here from Alabama, friends flew in from Texas, and my brother in-law and my second best friend behind my father showed up at the hospital today, so that was awesome.  But this whole situation sucks.  I feel so bad for my mom, it has to be harder on her than anyone else, this Feb they had their 37^th anniversary while he was sedated.  She is losing her best friend, anchor, husband, and soul mate, I cannot comprehend being robbed of my golden years with the love of my life.

Week 4 (Assignment 3 of 3)

I had a lot of fun learning about creating HTML pages and also learning to link between pages, installing pictures/images and videos.  It is a little tricky to accomplish all of those things, but once I played around with it, it was not too bad.  Some of my classmates had awesome sites, I would classify mine as more of a middle of the road.  I did use the CSS functions, but my sites were more based on functionality and a lot of pizazz.  I look forward to seeing what this week has in store…

Week 4 (Assignment 2 of 3)

My wife is flying up in the morning to see her favorite father in law at the icu.  I am really excited she will get to come up and see my dad.  I was not happy with the plane tickets, because her round trip flight was $730.  It is a little pricey, but the cost is surely outweighed by the importance of the trip.  It would be nice to see all four of my daughters too, but they do not need to see their Papa in his current state, plus then the cost of the airfare would have been almost four thousand dollars and that does not come close to fitting into our budget.  Last night they installed the fourth trachea set of hardware for my dad.  They said he has some kind of calcium deposit in his throat which keeps popping the balloons which seal off the tracheostomy.  This new hardware goes further into his bronchial tubes and should not be ruptured.  His vital signs are decreasing and they have put him on methadone to help keep him calm.  This is a really troubling time.  My dad is one of my best friends in the whole world, I talk to him on the phone at least once a day and that has been going on for about the last twelve years…

Week 4 (Assugnment 1 of 3)

I am still in Kansas City and my dad is still in the Cardio Vascular Intensive Care Unit.  His lungs are not responding and the Doctors do not know what caused them to get ARDS (Acute respiratory distress syndrome).  Basically he cannot perfuse oxygen into his blood on his own.  They installed a tracheostomy on Thursday to help ventilate and provide more oxygen to his lungs.  It is a really scary situation watching him take each breath seems like an insurmountable amount of struggle.  He does not have a prognosis and they are telling us to take it one day at a time.  I am very fortunate that the company I work for is allowing me to be here with my dad and the rest of my family during this time.  There are not too many companies which would allow an employee paid time away from the jobsite to be with a family member in the hospital.  I cannot imagine working for another company.  It has been hard to complete my homework and any work for my job, anytime I start to type or get on a roll in my dad’s room, he needs me to hold his hand.  I am not complaining, I am glad I can hold his hand and be there to comfort him…

Week 3 (Assignment 3 of 3)

The internet has changed the way we communicate and relate to one another and it has done so on many levels. Today people have the tendency to use digital communication instead of in-person or verbal telecommunications. This adds a modicum of convenience, however with this convenience comes a degradation of human interaction. I believe the internet has rekindled friendships of the past through the use of social media, however one must actually delve into this a little deeper and come up with their own answers. For myself, I have a Facebook account and initially I had a grandiose vision of interacting with people from my past at a high level. However, for me this turned out to not be the case. I probably converse with about 3% of my “friends” on Facebook. I believe people have an innate desire to be socially accepted, but the time and commitment required to execute an actual friendship is at times cumbersome and does not fit into their daily routine. While perhaps some people enjoy internet communication rather than person to person communication, I believe most people still today actually enjoy the company of another person in their presence more. My speculation is, the percentage of this ratio will move more towards internet communication in the future as people become more detached from actual physical human interaction due to the acceptance of computers as an extension of us…

Week 3 (Assignment 2 of 3)

I choose to insert the blooper video from the Big Bang Theory from You Tube because it is one of my father’s favorite shows to watch.  For the most part I intended my blog to be about Becca and the girls, but I just flew into Kansas City and I am sitting in the cardiac intensive care unit waiting room.  My father received a heart transplant 28 days ago and he still has not been able to leave the hospital.  Everything with his new heart is really going well, but while he was on the donor list he was on some pretty strong medications and apparently they affected his lungs and other organs.  This is disheartening on many levels, everyone thought the heart transplant would be the big hurdle and it surely is not.  He has been sedated and intubated on two different occasions, once for three days, and the last time for six days.  His lungs are not saturating oxygen and providing it to the rest of his body.  His kidneys were shutting down, but now the kidneys are getting better.  It is a big waiting game, I could write a ton more, but I am really not in the mood too…

Week 3 (Assignment 1 of 3)

This week, although it is somewhat out of season, I am posting a picture of the girls, from Halloween last year.  In the picture from left to right is: Molly as Super Girl, Shannon as Laguna Blue, Meghan as Bat Girl, and Skylor as a lion cub. 

 

Meghan, Shannon, and Molly have also all worn the lion cub costume, it is a family tradition.  It was an awesome evening for trick or treating in Alabama last year.  The weather was about seventy degrees and there were not any mosquitos buzzing around.  The girls, Becca, and I had a ton of fun and received about a ton of candy.  We walked through the neighborhood, going door to door for approximately an hour.  Towards the end, the girls began to get a little tuckered out and I was relegated the task of carrying all of the bags,  which would not have been so bad, if some of our neighbors were not giving out cans of soda.  When we finally got home, it was very close to the girl’s bedtime and of course they wanted to stay up and eat pounds and pounds of candy.  However much to their disappointment, Becca and I were  parents and only allowed the girls to pick one piece of candy a piece and they had to save the rest for later.  It is now February and the girls still have some Halloween candy left, ridiculous…

Week 2 Assignment (3 of 3)

The internet has changed the way we communicate and relate to one another and it has done so on many levels. Today people have the tendency to use digital communication instead of in-person or verbal telecommunications. This adds a modicum of convenience, however with this convenience comes a degradation of human interaction. I believe the internet has rekindled friendships of the past through the use of social media, however one must actually delve into this a little deeper and come up with their own answers. For myself, I have a Facebook account and initially I had a grandiose vision of interacting with people from my past at a high level. However, for me this turned out to not be the case. I probably converse with about 3% of my “friends” on Facebook. I believe people have an innate desire to be socially accepted, but the time and commitment required to execute an actual friendship is at times cumbersome and does not fit into their daily routine. While perhaps some people enjoy internet communication rather than person to person communication, I believe most people still today actually enjoy the company of another person in their presence more. My speculation is, the percentage of this ratio will move more towards internet communication in the future as people become more detached from actual physical human interaction due to the acceptance of computers as an extension of us…

Week 2 Assignment (2 of 3)

Please press the play button on the video for your listening pleasure while you read this blog or if you can spare a moment of your time you can watch the video while listening and then read my blog.

 

This blog is about my daughters Meghan, Shannon, Molly, and Skylor and one of their favorite TV shows.  The television show I am typing about is called Phineas and Ferb.  The show comes on the Disney channel and as you can tell by watch the theme/introduction song for the show, it is an animated show.  The basic premise for the show is two brothers Phineas and Ferb are out of school for the summer and they create massive science projects every episode to keep themselves entertained.  They have a pet platypus named Perry.  Perry is actually a secret agent for an unnamed orginiztion and every episode he does battle, unbeknownst to Phineas and Ferb, with the evil Dr. Doofensmirtz.  Phinease and Ferb have an older sister Candace who is always trying to get the boys in trouble for the experiments they create.  However, every time Candace is able to get her mother to look at what the boys have done, what ever it was is gone by that time in the show.  It is a pretty funny show, adults can watch and chuckle along with the children…

Week 2 Assignment (1 of 3)

This blog post will be about my topic of choice for the semester, which is my family. Each week I will be posting a little update about a different family member. This is pretty neat because I get to write about people I love, but also because I get to make them digitally famous. As part of my assignment this week I need to upload a photo image associated with my choice of topic for the semester.

 As you can see from the picture, my wife and I have some pretty cute girls.  This picture was taken at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.  Every year in April, we buy the girls all the same dress and we take pictures of them all together. They are so sweet right now and they are everyone’s little buddies, my wife and I are both scared of what it is going to be like with a house full of teenage girls.  The girls are Meghan (eight years old), Shannon (six years old) Molly (five years old), and Skylor (two years old).  The three older girls read every night, so at the end of this semester, I am going to show them all of the assignments from this course for their reading and viewing pleasure…