Sunday, January 28, 2007

A Tale of Two Dentists

It was only a week ago I made my semi-annual trek to the dentist. I'm not a fan of going to "the gum butcher", but I go. Anyhow, the x-rays came back, and the dentist says that the "trouble spot" we were watching hasn't gone away, and I'll need a filling. Hmmm. Perhaps HE was watching a trouble spot - I was trying to think of other things! So at the end of my hour of torture, er, cleaning, I went to book my appointment. As I'm paying my bill, and booking my time, I notice something new in the office. There's a "comment box" on the counter. Only it's not just for comments. It's also for prayer requests. That's right - my dentist wants to pray for his patients! I was so shocked I forgot to fill out the request. I figured I'd do one on when I got my filling done.

Today in church, we heard about another dentist's office. This one was not as nice a story. An evil influence has come into their office, and the lives of the people working there are being systematically attacked. Like a cancer spreading through a body, all of a sudden there are several employees heading into divorces. We were asked to pray for healing, intervention, and protection for those working there. I'm seriously considering just stopping by my dentist's office to fill out a prayer request for them. I figure who better to pray for one dental office than another!

Oh - and I missed out the most mind boggling part of all of it. I got a phone call from my dentist's office shortly after my cleaning. They had "reviewed" the x-rays, and decided that a filling was not necessary, and would it be alright if they cancelled my second appointment! I have never heard of that happening to anyone else before! I was thinking that that was what I should have put in the box...

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Bikers and Telethons

This is an interesting time of year for us. The end of January brings with it the Vancouver Motorcycle Show. This is a fun time for us, and I took Doug there today. Whoever says that 4 year olds have short attention spans should have been there today. We arrived at about 3:00pm, and started to make the rounds. We bumped into friends (hi Roland and Mark), and checked out a LOT of new bikes. This year Doug was especially interested in the smaller "kid sized" bikes. He liked to try several sizes out before deciding which ones were "too big". Bittersweet. At any rate, we went hard for 4 hours of booths and bikes and bikes and booths before finally exitting at 7:00 in search of food. There was not a single moment during that entire time that Doug was NOT smiling. And he was spreading cheer everywhere he went - a big beaming smile and a black leather jacket will do that, I guess. Anyhow - it was a good break from the seriousness of life.

January is also the time where they start to hype the Childrens Telethon. There are frequent commercials about kids with disabilities that have been helped. In one way it is reasuring to see the outpouring of help from the community - yet in another it is saddening to know that one day our kid may be the one in the commercial. This is all comes as we approach another "anniversary" of his diagnosis. Highs and lows. Who ever said life would be boring.

Anyhow, that's it for today.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Long Time No Blog

I don't think you can really ever understand the self induced pressure that having a blog puts you under. I'll bet that 99 out of 100 people who start a blog lose interest and quit much sooner than they would ever admit to you. Worse yet, most of these people let their blog linger and die a slow death as they refuse to admit to themselves that they have failed.

I don't want to become one of them, but I must admit I'm finding this challenging. The times when I have the most "content" to publish is when I am in the midst of a struggle. That's when I'm experiencing the emotions, and living the experience. Unfortunately, that's when I have no time. Once out of the stress of the moment, I cycle into a completely drained time where I lack the energy to blog. You see where I'm going here?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that today's entry is more of a catch up of loose ends, and not to expect anything too deep here. Let's see, what has happened recently....

On the "home improvement" front
  • Main floors, baseboards, and crown mouldings are in
  • New couches arrived
  • Fireplace (!) installed (heck, it's all credit anyways)
  • Kitchen counters due in a week or two
  • TV blew up just in time for the Boxing Week sale, so we had to replace THAT too

On the "work" front

  • Everytime we have a meeting with a downtown client there is a major natural disaster that occurs. This notably includes several major windstorms knocking down 3/4 of the trees in Stanley Park, and popping BC Place. (we drove by the stadium 5 minutes after it deflated - having just joked about our natural disaster magnetism
  • Had to make a presentation "live via sattelite" to a potential client overseas - this is another stressful situation that I didn't realize I stressed out about until it was done

On the "home" front

  • Kids and Allison have all been sick. So far I've avoided it, but you KNOW I'm going to get hit hard once they're all better.
  • The foot and a half of snow that fell has NOT flooded our crawlspace, in spite of the large puddle at the end of my driveway that is working it's way up

There's much much more, but I figure I've probably bored you (and me) enough.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Testing

I'm testing an automatic blog change notifier from www.RSSFWD.com. Hopefully this will allow people to subscribe to my blog, and get articles in their e-mail as I post them. I'll likely evaluate www.squeet.com too, but that requires an account subscription. Both are free options.

This message is entirely for my own benefit, and I may delete it at any time.