Grandma's fight for life

Here are a few random thoughts ...

Grandma H was hospitalized just before Christmas. She had pneumonia and was unable to breathe. Apparently the care-takers were not providing her with clear fluids either and so she was dehydrated. To make matters worse, she was not eating.

The emergency room wasn't much help either. Their job is to stabilize and ship. It took a few hours of her body being monitored by several machines -- beeping and squeeking when her blood pressure would rise over 200 and then drop below 60 - in a matter of a heart beat before she was finally transported to a wonderful place in Turlock.

This hospital actually has employees who smile. The doctors even read her charts and history. WOW. It was a relief to know someone was going to take care of her.

Since this initial trauma, it's been a rough fight for Grandma. There are days she has not responded to questions and days where she indicates she is in pain.

You see - because she didn't eat right as a child (depression child who stood in lines for her one meal per day ... ) her back easily breaks. She's a very tiny woman -- who now has bruises up and down both arms from being needled.

So the pain is not just from not eating but also the back ... and then the coughing which causes her muscles to tense up and then strangle blood from her face and mouth as she chokes for air from the pressure crushing her lungs.

Grandma is a tough woman, too. She's only complained a few times whenever the pain has been too much. She usually just asks for a little help and then suffers in silence. It's difficult to watch this awesome sight.

The doctors and most of the family do not expect her to see 2004. While we are prepared for this ending, it is difficult to rise to the challenge of smiling. Relatives who live a great distance have been told (via phone and emails) to prepare themselves for terrible news.

The phone rang a few minutes ago ...

Dad explained that the doctor called. Treatment has not been working (the blood transfusions and the antibiotics). Hope is slowly moving to the past and Grandma's future may be short.

I hope her pain stops soon so that she can keep that smile on her face. It's a beautiful smile.

Tablet Questions

Traffic for the new tablet pc site has increased greatly over the last few weeks. December 25 now represents the most number of users on at the same time and the number of members also continues to grow.

Tablet Questions

Domain Transfers

The domain tuxreports.com is being transfered to godaddy.com. The renewal for register.com was due on January 2 and it is far less expensive to use godaddy.com. The authorization for the transfer was completed a few minutes ago and now it is nothing more than making sure the domain name servers point to the proper place.

Time

100 years ago today, 12 seconds influenced our lives. A simple plane moved through the ether and showed the world that air travel was possible. And in this miracle of the moment, we trivialize our own 12 seconds. Yet these seconds add to a treasured life filled with short intervals of time with their own significance. What flight of imagination have you taken today? Happy landings and take offs.

Singing Life's Worries Away

A student came into the classroom and ackwardly handed me the assignment due for the day. Tears were rolling down her cheeks and it was clear from her voice that she was on the verge of more tears. Her father died and she had just been told the news. In the storm of all that was important in her life, she was hanging on to everything she considered to be normal so that she could manage to piece the rest of the day together. In all of the tragedy, she just had to turn in her assignment. She sang a sad song at that moment of explaining how she might be absent for the next few days. And in her moment of grief, I saw a strength in her that is a miracle.

While singing a different tune this morning - I was happily photocopying some of the words to biology songs from Dr. Art - another teacher was airing a grumpy, grouchy, and out of beat tune. It sounded like cats screaming in the night. My tune sounded better to me so I just quietly listened and sang my song in my head. Nodding at times to indicate that I knew the person was in the room, despite my wishing them to leave it as soon as possible.

Our moods are certainly prone to people around us but their influence is solely dictated by our own powers to control ourselves. Keeping our own songs in our heads during tough times might actually help others sing in key and not out of tune.

Hmm... so if you are in need of some spirit ...

(To the Tune of Oklahoma)
Re---plication when DNA's copied in S-phase
Initiator proteins start, the strands are pushed apart
At the origin of repliciation, yeah !

Now helicase -- opens the fork, for (RNA) primase to prime with RNA
Then replication starts, DNA polymerase does its part
Builds from 5' to 3' all the way.

OKLAHOMA ... O.K. LA .. H .O .. M .. A ... OKLAHOMA !

Oops::

Notes About Dr. Art: My AP Biology class has been studying DNA Replication. The song is meant to help them remember the information. I hope it does !

What Muppet are you?

I just had to fill out the quiz and find out what kind of Muppet I am ... rotflol.

You are Kermit the Frog. You are reliable, responsible and caring. And you
have a habit of waving your arms about maniacally.

FAVORITE EXPRESSIONS:
"Hi ho!" "Yaaay!" and "Sheesh!"

FAVORITE MOVIE:
"How Green Was My Mother"

LAST BOOK READ:
"Surfin' the Webfoot: A Frog's Guide to the Internet"

HOBBIES:
Sitting in the swamp playing banjo.

QUOTE:
"Hmm, my banjo is wet."


What Muppet are you? brought to you by Quizilla

Pretty women scramble men's ability to assess the future

I'm not sure this is any news that will send shockwaves through time but we all pretty much would have guessed the results of the experiment.

See article

Notes from an eclectic mind

While looking for updates to Movable type ... I ran across the website Notes From An Eclectic Mind. The writing is simply wonderful. Chills ran through my spine as I was reading the post about the four cold rain drops finding their way to special places on the body. Wow.

Top Links

The red strip of links for the journal was added the other day to see what it would look like under different browsers. CSS is a strange beast to me and so I'm just trying out different things. Personally, good ole html was enough for this pea brain to learn. Now, it has to adjust to CSS. Oh well.

Many of the links do not lead anywhere. I'll put in real links later.

Google Ads

I'd have never believed that google ads would bring any money. They were placed on the Tablet PC Questions website and then Tux Reports and now some of the journals. They've made more money than the other banners. Guess they should have been added earlier. Doh !

CSS for Sites

Robert Scoble is working on his website css file. It's rather bland. However, he points to a website called Zen Garden. It is simply amazing. Click on the links to change the look and be prepared to say -- wow !

This is cereal is simply fantastic. No, that is the wrong word. Awesome. Yeah, that is the right word.

KDE 3.2 beta 2

One advantage of having Fedora Core 1 installed is being able to download and install the rpms quickly. It took less than an hour to download and install KDE 3.2 beta 2.

(1) Kontact is much faster !
(2) The ugly startup is still there ...
(3) Some of my older desktop icons were replaced with a default icon.

I'll keep in KDE for awhile and see what else I find.

Hamilton Website

I finally added a link to the College Office and Careers as well as the global studies pages. The classes database is now functional, too. People on the Claroline forum helped me change the word "categories" to "departments" and this makes more sense for the school website. It turned out that index.inc.php, a language file, had to be changed.

View changes

A Nice Long Break

I've had the pleasure of taking several days off from Tux Reports and Linux. It's been a nice break to reassess my interests.

Fedora Core 1 is sitting on my desktop for the simple reason that I wanted to install KDE 3.2 beta and it was easy because the rpms were available. However, I'm now thinking of the next distribution to review. There are several great candidates.

I showed a teacher at Hamilton High School a "hidden" feature of the "new" website I built several months ago. He started to use the feature and told me today that he had several powerpoint presentations online and really loved it. You can see some of his work is still definitely a work in progress. I'm just glad a teacher is using it !

Tablet PC Questions is slowly coming along. I'm writing a small series of articles for other teachers. It is slow going because the details need to be very precise. Otherwise most teachers will not use the material. I'm a firm believer that the Tablet PC form factor is the direction for the classroom and field activities for science.

I plan on spending the weekend putting up Christmas decorations for the apartment. I'm thinking of putting up a nice 3 or 4 foot tree and adding some lights and a few ornaments. This might be a bit overwhelming for the size of the apartment.

Thinking of apartments, I looked at 3 bedroom apartments online last night. There is only one place near my present location which offers them. They rent for just over $1100 per month. It will take considerable planning on my part to afford that type of rent. However, it might be worth it to have access to a washer/dryer hookup, fireplace, and a second bathroom. The units are just over 1100 square feet.

Tablet PC Questions

The site was updated to phpBB2 plus 1.3 so that other modules could be added easily. I tried to manually add some of the modules but it was taking too long. The update was fairly straight forward but I had to use a new template in order to get the new mods showing. This took some time getting the header and some of the blocks back to the way it was previous to the upgrade.

And thinking of upgrades for this site -- I tripped over a really nice example of the possibilities of hiding the fact the site is made of phpBB2.