This winter has been a blur with all the snow we’ve gotten.  I forgot to keep track of the big total, but we easily got several feet this winter.  While I still love the white stuff, even I got tired of it after awhile.  We also started saying goodbye to my trusty shovel that’s been through blizzards with us since 1996.  It hasn’t been buried just yet, so we’re holding off on the 40 pour.

The big stagecoach keeps on rolling, and it keeps sounding like I have a ticket to ride on it.  We’ll see for how long or if I even want to stay on it.

Ethan has really taken to preschool and is blossoming from his shell.  We were already seeing remarkable jumps from him prior to enrollment – now you’d never know we needed anything for him.

Garrett continues to excel in general – he does well in school and is popular outside it.  He may be the type where we’ll need to beat the girls away with a stick.

I remain proud and thankful for all the things Jennifer does for herself and for me.  I believe I wouldn’t be near where I am without her.

We’re enjoying the national post-season basketball run the Mountaineers are putting on.  With or without Truck (solidarity through bone breaks!) it’s been a fun run to date.

I’m also heartened to see the overall compassion coming from Mountaineer Nation, set to host the Huskies this Saturday.  We have a fan base whose overall impression is, um, less than stellar nationally, but this week has been filled with stories, posts, and thoughts about honoring Howard and the grief stricken team.  There will be a moment of silence, pregame embraces, and helmet decals aplenty.  I’m reading stories of students selling #6 armbands and sending the proceeds to Howard’s family, the Rubber U vendors donating proceeds, individuals making their own armbands, and I’m sure there’s much I’m missing.

Here’s hoping for a good and safe game Saturday, one to help take the Huskies minds off the tragedy of this weekend and escape to a different world for a few hours.

Our biggest regret is that We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye in time.

I haven’t always been the easiest person to be around, but Jen has been my advocate, my supporter, my fan, and my friend.  She has seen me at my best and she has seen me at my worst.  She has encouraged me, kicked my butt, cheered me, and jeered me when each was appropriate.  Despite me being the problem child I was, we married 12 years ago, had children 7 and 4 years ago, moved multiple times, and are back home together where we want to be.

Over time, with her help, I have worked harder to become the man, husband, and father I should be.  She has been through the hardest working times with me, so as I’m finally beginning to see real changes in myself it is only fair that she is here to benefit from the payoff.  I hope never to be the person I used to be, and I want her to share in nothing more than the man I’m supposed to be.  She’s earned it for putting up with me all this time.

The main benefits are touted as being more instruction equals more learning and better test scores, less downtime to forget what was learned the previous year, and a reduced need for parents to spend money on summertime childcare.   Key complaints raised so far include the economic destruction of the summertime tourist industry, not giving children a chance to take a break to recharge, and finding money to keep schools operating more days when education funding already sucks.

When I look at this I don’t take an economic viewpoint for once.  On education I think the problems we have are more societal than financial.  I see a system where a less than quality teacher can survive long enough to become locked into a position that may not be deserved (I’m avoiding the “T” word).  I see a system where too many children do not have parents involved with either their school or their schoolwork.  I also see a system where children are not taught to think critically and independently, but to learn the answers to standardized testing.

(I have a bunch of teacher friends, and I know that most of them are great teachers.  I’m not pointing the finger at you guys, but at the ones who give half-assed efforts in the classroom and then bitch about their kids in the teacher’s lounge.)

Until we make sure that sub-par teachers are replaced with quality teachers; until we can get parents or guardians involved and interested in their child’s schooling; and until we can teach children how to learn and improve their minds and abilities themselves, our schools will never improve.  All the extra days and hours spent in the schoolhouse won’t mean a thing until we improve the quality of the product coming through the doors when the bell rings.

Garrett was a whole different animal.  Wednesday afternoon he comes home and promptly goes to sleep on our couch – a big red flag.  After awhile we take his temperature and it’s 102F+.   He gets Tylenol, and eventually goes to bed early – red flag #2.  Around 7:30pm he awakens and comes out complaining of his left lower ribs hurting.  This earns the trip to the urgent care facility, where we were hoping for a simple answer.  Oops.  They take one look at his vitals and offer Jen the choice of going to the ER via either her van or an ambulance.  Based on his instability (a heart rate above 180 and O2 stats around 90%), they prefer the ambulance in case he crashes.

At the Ruby ER all hell pretty much breaks loose, not from Garrett’s condition but of being a Level 1 Trauma center.  I like Mon General hospital for the quickness and privacy, but it’s quiet because Ruby gets the region’s nasty cases.  If they had gone in without being in the ambulance they might still be sitting there today.  As it was, they got a bed of sorts and entered a land of confusion and missed notations, basically a combination of shift changes and traumas.  They had good staff initially, but ended up with a quack who tried to discharge Garrett and his still unstable vitals.  Once Jen stands up and says WTF, a previous order to send him to Pediatrics finally got executed and upstairs he went.

WVU Childrens Hospital is an entire world away from ER’s, traumas, and other medical occurrences.  It’s painted with soft but bright colors, made to look as little like a hospital as possible, has flat screens and DVDs in most rooms, and has a wonderful indoor and outdoor (on the 6th floor, no less) activities room & program.  Oh, and because Ruby is a teaching hospital, there was an abundance of doctors, nurses, therapists, and students of each program to check in on the patients.  During the day I doubt we went more than 15-20 minutes without seeing someone from the staff.

We’ve both play-by-played the illness & treatment progression on Facebook, so here’s the summary.  Garrett was diagnosed with strep-pneumonia (strep infection in the lungs) and tachycardia (very high heart rate).  From Thursday morning to Saturday morning he got several different antibiotic IVs and fluid bags.  His pulse rate reduced from the 180s to around the 100-120 range, most likely at this point caused by the fevers.  The fevers would eventually break and not return as of this writing.  X-rays continued to show fluid buildups in his left lung, but as each day passed the fluid buildup kept reducing.  Even though he’s home he still has antibiotics to take, and he has multiple devices to use for breathing treatments.  He’ll have several followups with our normal pediatrician to make sure the infections & fluid disappear.

The Childrens Hospital is nothing short of awesome. Sometimes the teaching aspects can fill the halls with a few too many people, but with the sheer number of staff the patients get a lot of attention.  Most impressively, they’ve done a good job trying to maintain a sense of normalcy for the kids.  The activity room is large and has a ton of toys from infant to young adult.  Books, drawing supplies, movies, games, crafts, video game consoles, air hockey, foozball, internet, etc…and that’s the inside room.  Outside on the exhaust/boiler/service roof they’ve fenced off an area and built a great playground where the kids can get outside in the fresh air, and have covered the surface with the soft foam.

This is exactly the type of facility that if I had money or a foundation, I’d help support it.  Should I ever come into money, the focus I’ve always pictured for myself is helping area kids.  Uniforms, equipment, fields, computer labs, tutoring, after-school, etc….if it was related to The Kids I would be interested in helping it.  Even without much donatable money, we can still support them by donating toys in good repair that our own kids have outgrown.  People can think what they want about WVU, it’s schools, or their experiences elsewhere in the Ruby system.  We’ve had several bad experiences of our own in the ER before this one, and we’re not impressed with Ruby’s maternity ward.  None of those, however, are reason enough for me or my family to want to wish the Childrens Hospital ill will.  Having experienced many hospital stays, I’d rate this as either 1a or 1b along withGarrett’s birth and Jen’s postpartum at Carolinas Medical Center.

Also, being so tight with the University and the Athletic Department specifically, Garrett got an extra treat when the Mountaineer came by.  She saw all the kids on the floor, and earned brownie points by remembering who Garrett was.  After seeing him the nurses disconnected Garrett’s IV so he could go downstairs and get some ice cream.  When he made it back to the floor Rebecca saw him and said something like “Garrett!  Did you get ice cream?”

We still have a long road ahead of us, but for now we think the worst is over and now it’s just a steady recovery of energy and healthy cells.  Still, we’re glad this part is over.

“Obama calls Kanye ‘Jackass’”

One interesting one is a gallery by InteractivePublishing.net, who compiled a collection of screenshots of the major news websites as the day unfolded. Obviously it’s interesting to watch the evolutions of the stories true and false as they broke, but there are other interesting aspects.  Many sites used low-bandwidth designs to keep the servers running under high loads, and the site designs would be considered old and retro today.

For those who still enjoy the smudge of ink and like to hold the news instead of view it, newseum.org has a collection of 9/12/01 newspaper front pages.  It’s a touch chilling to see the paper that landed on our doorstep that morning.

The Internet Archive has a very astounding collection -raw video streams from the major television news sources.  This collection is amazing both for it’s comprehensive coverage and for it’s memory jarring ability.  Most of us that day were watching one of these streams in our homes, our offices, our gyms, our schools, and anywhere else a live TV is playing.