I have a million million things going on right now, and I feel as if I've hit the breaking point more than once.
Here's what I am/have been dealing with:
Scout weekend campout (see previous blog entry)
Wood Badge training. SIX DAYS of training, people! (Fantastic training though... I'll blog about it later.)
Working all the hours I can outside of six days of training
RIF at work
Another scout weekend campout
Trying to get 14 scouts registered for merit badge classes for summer camp
Planning details of an upcoming family vacation
Wood Badge homework including organizing a patrol project and writing my Wood Badge tickets
Helping a stressed-out teen and a stressed-out tween finish a school year
Older son will get his learner's permit in 3 weeks
Wrangling deacons for Fast Offerings
Preparing scouts for summer camp. (Things like the Totin' Chip they'll all need)
Visiting a urologist to find out why I am a stone producer
Finding people to fill in for me while I'm gone for Wood Badge training
Trying (likely unsuccessfully) to help my wife not feel like a widow
End-of-school-year concerts, graduations, dance festivals, class trips, and the like
Finding time to sleep. (Yeah, right.)
A 24-hour medical study
Ordering scout t-shirts for summer camp
Writing a blog entry (Probably shouldn't have, but oh well)
Did I mention a RIF at work? (I'm still employed as far as I know)
So if I seem to be missing in action right now, I'm sorry. It's not that I don't like you. I'm just overwhelmed at the moment. Life will hopefully calm down for me soon.
This time, I learned that I need to have a rule that if you transport boys TO the camp out, you have to transport boys home FROM the camp out. One of the leaders (the 11-year-old scout leader) had to leave after breakfast on Saturday morning. I had asked one of my scout's parents to come up and pick boys up at 2:00 on Saturday afternoon.
The camp out was a lot of fun. We were drizzled on until about 10pm on Friday night. But we stayed dry all night and the next morning. The rain started up again at about 10am. It wasn't bad until 11:30 or so when there were 3 or 4 lightning strikes. Then it started raining hard and steady.
Fortunately, we had broken camp. The boys came back from the closing flag ceremony/awards ceremony soaked to the bone. I had stayed behind to get lunch ready.
After a quick lunch, we were ready to hit the road. The only problem - the parental unit that had volunteered his chauffering services was nowhere to be seen and the rain was coming down harder and harder.
I decided to drive down to the entrance of the camp to see if he might be waiting for us there. As I left our camp site, I slid down a now muddy road to another dirt road that was quickly becoming a soggy, soupy mess. Once I got out of the upper area, the roads were better maintained and I was able to easily make it to the camp entrance.
No parent.
I decided that this parent's van would NEVER make it through the muddy mess to get to our camp site, so I dropped the boys in my car off (under shelter, of course) and headed back for the others. I didn't even attempt the last climb to the camp site. I knew I would be sliding all over the place. I left the car, walked up to the camp, and told the boys to follow me. We all climbed into my subaru and headed back to the camp entrance with road conditions worsening by the minute.
We wouldn't have made it without all-wheel drive. It was a little bit harrowing, but we ended up making it out just fine. I spent the next half hour trading off which boys were in the car with the heater so that no one would freeze. Just as I was trying to call to find out where my help was, he showed up and we were able to get everyone home.
WHEW!!
I learn a litte bit more each time I have one of these outdoor activities. I figure that in another year or two, I might actually feel like I know what I'm doing!
This morning, I came in to work to find a small gift on my desk. Because of an important software release, we're celebrating today. We're getting new (very red) shirts. They're feeding us lunch. It's a decent day.
Most Saturdays, we spend a part of the day deciding what we want to eat during the week so we can make a shopping list and head to the grocery store. Some weeks, nothing sounds good. Other weeks, everything sounds good. Both situations are bad because neither help us make a shopping list.
On Saturday though, I remembered a Food Network episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives where the host went to a sports bar in Vegas that had great stromboli. I don't know WHY I remembered that, but I thought stromboli would be good.
A quick search on the Food Network site resulted in a recipe for stromboli by Emeril Lagasse. It looked great, so I thought I'd give it a shot. It was fantastic. The best part was a combination of italian sausage, red peppers, green peppers, onions, garlic, and italian seasoning. That smelled HEAVENLY. So on top of the pizza dough, I put this mixture, ham, pepperoni, provolone, mozarella, and olives. This was all rolled up into a stromboli shape, coated with egg wash, and baked until it was golden brown. Wow! That was a winner. It tasted WAY better than a pizza from any pizza joint in town and in the end, it was a lot less expensive.
Then, on Sunday, we decided that we wanted au gratin potatoes. Another quick search on the Food Network and I found another Emeril recipe with red potatoes. Strangely enough, we had to figure out a main dish to go with this side dish and we settled on ham. These were really good au gratin potatoes. They were creamy and delicious and weren't runny.
So thanks Emeril!
For those of you that want to try these recipes yourself:
It's the 16th of April. Tax day has come and gone.
This morning, I woke up to this:
A Utah Spring
Unbelievable. My poor trees!
There's supposed to be more of the same today. I hope it warms up enough that the snow comes off the trees before more is added or my trees will end up with broken branches like so many globe willows in the area.
I finally found a theme that I really like and it's not blue. Ok, fine. So the right side is still blue, but it's not COMPLETELY blue.
I've been a bit wishy-washy about the theme on the site. Maybe I'll start to hate this one soon too. But for now, I hope you like this theme as much as I do.
Just a little more information about this, my seventh kidney stone:
My wife works for the office that bills for radiologists. She found the x-ray report from the x-ray of my sixth kidney stone. Number seven was there already. The radologist noted the 2mm kidney stone that was already on its way out of my right kidney. He also mentioned a 4.5mm stone in my left kidney. That's probably the one that's bugging me lately.
According to the web site of one group of urologists:
Roughly, the chance of a stone passing spontaneously is inversely related to the stone size in millimeters. A 1mm stone passes 90% of the time, a 5 mm stone 50% of the time, a 9 mm stone 10% of the time and so on.
So basically, if the kidney stone hasn't grown since November, I have a 55% chance of passing this one without an additional medical procedure such as a uretral stent or lithotripsy.
Yippee.
For now, I get to wait and wonder when the pain will come again. I have an appointment with a urologist in early May. Maybe it's time to shop around for a different one that can see me sooner, because I hate waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Late in the evening on March 25th, I had some pain that was suspiciously similar to kidney stone pain. I woke up the next morning and it was pretty much gone. I thought it was a false alarm. Later that day, I hopped in a van and headed to Southern Utah University to help judge some science fair projects. Only about a half hour down the road, the pain came back, just a little worse. I was terrified, but again, the pain went away.
I had mild pain off and on for the next couple of days, but then it went away.
It came back yesterday. This morning, the pain was gone again. Puzzling.
This morning, I had an appointment for a physical exam with my family doctor. He confirmed that there is, indeed, something going on in one or both kidneys.
This is my seventh kidney stone. I'm not currently in pain, but I don't seem to be able to really relax either, since I'm wondering when the pain will start up again.
The good news is that they still had my blood work from the hospital when I went to the emergency room with my sixth kidney stone back in November, so today, they didn't have to draw blood. My cholesterol, which had been a problem in the past, was normal, as were my blood sugar levels, so I'm not not diabetic either (which is one more thing I worry about.) So other than these blasted kidney stones and needing to lose another 20-30 lbs, I'm in pretty good health.
So what comes next? I think I'll be headed to a urologist and they'll probably want to do CT scans of my kidneys to find out what is going on in there. I hate it.
Yet there are much, MUCH worse things to have to deal with in life, so I'll be grateful for what IS going right.
Back in January, we bought a new Subaru Impreza. The next day, I called my insurance company and gave them the information about the new car, removed coverage for the car we were getting rid of, and changed the coverage on one other car.
Yesterday, we received our renewal notice in the mail. There was no mention of the new Impreza, the coverage hadn't changed on the other car, and the old beater Saturn was still listed.
<heart palpitations>
YIKES! Something had gone wrong and I had possibly been driving my Impreza around without insurance for more than two months.
Fortunately, it was a simple mistake, and not even MY mistake. My insurance agent had forwarded the information to the insurance carrier and someone had forgotten to enter one small piece of data, so the whole change hadn't gone through. There was enough of a paper trail to prove that I had done what I needed to do, so I would have been covered, but it still freaked me out a little bit.
</heart palpitations>
How bad would it have sucked if I would have been in an accident and there was no insurance to cover the damage? VERY bad. And mighty would have been the sucking thereof.
