Tuesday, October 24, 2006

News and All That Jazz

So a bit of good news today. My INR was 3.7. If you'll remember, that's the measure of how thin my blood is. We're shooting for 3.0 to 3.5. Two weeks ago it was 2.8. We've made an ever so slight adjustment and hopefully we've got this blood thinner mess worked out. It's taken a little longer than I had hoped/thought it would take, but we've finally gotten there.

It's now been 5 months since my surgery and I'm feeling great. I now feel better than I did before. I seem to have more energy, I definitly have a better appetite (as proven by my expanding waist line) and I've grown used to my clicking so that if I can't hear it, I'll sometimes stop and check to make sure it's still going.

I've been blessed beyond measure through all of this and I want to say thank you to each and every person who has been reading this blog. I think it's been a fairly sucessful endevor and I'm really happy with the way it's turned out. At this point, I think that what I'm going to do is archive this blog off and just start a new general blog about what DeAnne and I are up and what's going on in our lives. I don't know when I'll ever get around to this, but that's the plan as it stands now.

Till next time,

Paul

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Lord, I Was Born a Ramblin' Man...

Well, not really, but I did go on a trip last week. I went with my boss to Minneapolis to do factory acceptance testing on our new backup control center hardware. We left Tuesday and got back yesterday. All in all, it was a good trip. We tested everything we wanted to test and even a few things we hadn't planned to test, talked to our vendor about some new projects we might be doing and go to experience a little bit of an early winter. The highs were in the upper 50's most of the time we were there, so it was a good bit cooler than what we left behind in Alabama.

Everything went well though and I didn't have any problems flying or anything else. I had wondered if I would set off the metal detector, and actually thought it would be a little neat if I did, but I walked through and not a beep or a buzz sounded.

One nice thing was getting to see the trees up north. They had started to turn and were about a week or two away from being at the peak of their fall colors. Taking off coming back home was pretty awsome. Everything was a sea of gold and red and green. I'm glad we got to go this time of year. It's something you don't really get to see in south Alabama.

Flying also never ceases to amaze me and to put me in shear awe of creation. We had almost completely clear skies on the way home and I think it's the first time I've flown where you could see to the ground for pretty much the entire trip. The fact that we're able to do what we do just reaffirms for me that this world is no accidental result of an big explosion. Anyone who flies somewhere on a clear day and says there's not a creator must have looked out the window with their eyes closed.

Anyway, we're still working on getting my medicine level adjusted. We slowly inching closer to having it just right. I'm still getting checked once a week, but I think we're getting close to moving that out to maybe once every two weeks.

Other than that, there's not much going on. DeAnne's doing well. She seems to really be falling into a rythm with school and I think she's able to enjoy it more now than when school first started and everything was hectic and new to her.

I'll keep you posted on how the medicine is going. It's hard to believe, but it's already been four months since the surgery. Anyway, take care...till next time...

--Paul