We Made It!

There's so much to talk about, but I'm not crazy about the laptop I have to do it on. I'll probably blog a little more in the next week or so. I just wanted to drop a quick note to let everyone know that we arrived late last night in Gainesville and I reported to work for my first day this morning.

I LOVE MY MAGELLAN!!!

PICS!!!! There's some new ones!

I just posted some pics on my flickr. Check the badge on my sidebar. Who knows? You might even be in one?!

We're wrapping up our final week here in Western Washington. As we prepare for our departure early on Sunday, we had a little get together yesterday afternoon. Thank you all for stopping by and saying some final goodbyes before we leave. I'm sure we'll be back at some point.

I think yesterday at the end of 2nd service at church, it really hit me that we're leaving. I felt very honored to be able to sing with the band on my last Sunday. I was asked to pray for the offering and made it through that in both services without any tears. But while we were singing that one last song, I was hit in the eyeballs with emotion.

Thanks everyone for an awesome Sunday.

Have I mentioned the mental illness??

Yes, that crazy little friend of mine that lives in my head is back at it again.

Maybe it's the busy-ness of leaving a great job and a home where I've been for 15 years and moving across the country for a new job and tons of unknowns. Maybe it's the fact that I missed too many doses of my favorite little happy pill. Maybe it's all these anonymous comments I've been getting. Maybe it's that my bestest friend in the whole wide world keeps going on vacation and I'm moving away in a couple of weeks and I miss her. Maybe it's because Softie is now the one grieving the loss of his father who passed away yesterday evening. Maybe it's that my mom fell and is broken, but more than that. Maybe it's because we don't know why she fell in the first place. Maybe it's because something miraculous happened in our bank account and I don't have to worry about the big transitional stuff anymore.

I don't know. It could really be any of that. Or all of that. Or just one of them. Or maybe it's some crazy combination of some of that! Or all of it!

the closer it gets

The less time I have here in Washington, the stranger my heart feels about moving. It seems as though I'm stuck in a loop between so excited, not enough time, and not soon enough.

Softie's dad appears to be in the last stretch on earth. He seems to be taking a one way journey to the afterlife. Sounds like it'll be less than a couple of days before he sees eternity. Softie has been taking it pretty hard. Not sure what to do about it. Their relationship has been estranged for years, but he is still his dad. No matter how hard their relationship has been all these years.

So, in the midst of all this new stuff coming up, there's a lot of stuff going on in our lives that's kind of distracting from the plan at hand. Keep us in your prayers.

a little more about my new job.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I've accepted a new job offer that will require some pretty big changes. I did leave out the really big changes details, so I'll try and detail a little here.
The biggest of changes is that our geographical location will markedly change.

My new job starts in about 4 weeks. The kids and I will be hopping in the car for our road trip early in the morning of the 26th of August.

I've mapped out our trip. The night of the 26th, we should be in Bozeman, Montana. On the 27th, we'll have seen Mt. Rushmore and Wall Drug. We should make it to Kansas City on the 28th, Nashville on the 29th. Which puts us in a good position to pull into Gainesville, Florida by the 30th. I'll report to work for my first day on the 31st.

Maybe you figured it out. Maybe not. I'm going to work for the software company that I visited in April of this year. I'm very excited to have this incredible opportunity for advancement in my field of expertise.

I've spent a lot of time during the last few weeks evaluating some stuff and I've come to realize that I'm not as strange as I believe myself to be. I spend so much time thinking that I'm inadequate and crazy, but other people don't see me that way. It's a strange new place to think of myself as adequate or desirable professionally.

It's been good, this time of self-reflection. Unexpected certainly. Completely exciting.

finger counting

This post is going to take a little imagination. I'm going to try and use my amazing artistic skills to demonstrate the story that follows, but dude! For real? This was so funny when it happened, so I'm sharing it here.

Yesterday was Mini Mann's birthday. He turned 6! It was pretty early in the day when he got all excited that being 6 was demonstrated on TWO HANDS! He demonstrated this as shown here. (don't hate me because I'm so creative - it's better than it was)

He was marching around showing his sister, brother, and I that it took two hands to show how many 6 is. She and I were so proud and encouraging, but Middle Mann needed to pick a fight for some reason. He was disagreeable and continued to argue that Mini wasn't showing him 6. He was showing him 15 and the little dude is not 15! (said in his full-on Napoleon, disgusted, arguey, exasperated tone)

I didn't understand what his problem was with the demonstration of 6, so I asked him, "If that's 15, then what's 6?" Then he showed me and I busted up laughing inside.

UPDATED: The demonstration photos replace my late night stick figure attempts in Paint. The original stick figure art is available by request.

Update

Mom is doing okay. She slept and through the night her supplemental oxygen was able to be trimmed in half.

By the time she was discharged late yesterday afternoon, the staff felt that she was stable enough to maintain her own oxygen levels without any supplement (when she pays attention to her breathing).

My dad is following up with her physicians to pursue the reasoning behind the seeming underlying cause for her fall. In my opinion, her fall was symptomatic of something else.

She won't be able to bear weight on her left leg or foot and her right arm is braced well, though very tender following surgery. She's using a wheelchair at home, but the house wasn't built to be fully accessible. She's able to manage with my dad's assistance currently. He'll have to return to work after the weekend, so I hope that by then, she'll be a little more independent in her transfers. The wheelchair is supposed to fill a very temporary need as she should be able to begin bearing weight in the middle of next week.

I'll try to keep updating here, but OH MY GOODNESS! There's so much other stuff going on.

if you pray...

If you're one of the fabulous millions who pray to God the Creator, please lift up my mom right now. She fell this morning and broke both her wrist and her ankle - right and left respectively. She had to have emergency surgery to repair her wrist.

Unfortunately, for the entire time she's been in the care of physicians today, she has been having a hard time keeping her blood saturated with oxygen. Her sats are running in the low 70's when she's not purposeful about breathing...and that's with lots of supplemental oxygen.

I'm not convinced that she just fell today. I'm concerned that there's more to her fall and I'm trying to make sure that my dad pushes back on the doctor. She's been admitted overnight following her surgery. She's still not in stable condition, but they did release her from surgical recovery unit fully 7 hours after surgery was finished. It took more than 2 hours to wake her.

I've lost a lot of people in the last short period of time, and although on the surface this doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would take a person's life, my deep concern in the likelihood that there's more to it leads me to think the worst.

So, yeah, could you please pray with me for her? Thanks.