Happy Resurrection Day

We had a wonderful day with awesome friends.

Witness

I was in all of our school plays in high school but my favorite by far was my junior year when we put on The Witness by Jimmy and Carol Owens.  I felt so privileged to be in that play and remember thinking "I wonder if we are impacting any lives" each time we took the stage.

I was so happy when a local theatre group decided to perform The Witness a few years ago. They do it every year right before Easter.

The play is the story of Jesus as told by Peter and mostly through song...although this particular director has changed a lot of the original script to add dramatic effect.

The crucifix scene is very touching and emotional. Several of the cast members actually shed tears. It is really very personal and realistic.

Several of the actors are children and parents from our school.  It is always great to see this right before Easter and remember God's great sacrifice.

Happy Easter everyone.  Celebrate our wonderful gift of everlasting life because of the suffering and sacrifice of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Seder Meal

This morning I walked in on the 6th graders having a Christian Seder meal.  

I knew nothing about it but learned quite a bit as I invited myself to stay and watch.

After the "mother" of the family lights the candles

There are some readings from the Bible and then eating of certain foods.

And these foods were not picked because they are tasty.

They, of course, all have symbolic meaning.

- The lamb bone symbolizes the lamb of sacrifice
- The lettuce (green herbs dipped in salt water) represents tears of sorrow shed during the captivity of God's people
- The bitter herbs (in this case radishes) represents the bitterness of slavery and suffering in Egypt
- The Haroseth (mixture or apples, nuts, and cinnamon) represents the mortar used by the Jewish people in building palaces and pyramids while in slavery
- The Matzoh, or unleavened bread, symbolizes the hasty flight by night from Egypt.
- The egg represents new life
-The wine (grape juice)

 The Seder Meal was celebrated by the Jewish people at Passover...so, this would have been the meal that Jesus was having with his disciples during what we Christians know as the Last Supper.

A Passover tradition that children love is "hide the matzah"

The tradition states that three pieces of matzah are hidden in a special napkin.  

The middle piece is broken half...half to be eaten later as dessert and the other half hidden for the children to find.

I am not sure if the napkin is called "afikomen" or the bread.  It seems to me that the teacher was using that word in reference to her special three pocket napkin...but on the internet I think they refer to the broken bread used as dessert as the afikomen.

Anyway, it was very interesting.  I always love learning new things.

It's in the Books

Finally, we had our first 40* day in March! 

Yeah, on March 27th.

The thermometer topped out at a whopping 42*! But that is still over 40* so it counts.

I am not digging March!  Bring on April.

All is Well

So...great news all around at the doctor this morning.

To briefly sum it up:
- I have a chronic inflammatory disease
- The most likely reason for the inflammation is rheumatoid arthritis which does run in my family (my grandma had it and my aunt and cousin have it)...but he said as long as the diclofenec is working, it is not necessary to explore the cause.  
- The diclofenec can be taken for long periods of time - even up to a couple years.
- It requires a blood test every five or six months to determine how it is affecting the kidneys.

This is great news because I thought this was a short term treatment and knowing that I can depend on this for a longer period of time is nice to know.  

The benefits far outweigh the risks (there are more risks than just the kidneys) and we talked some about quality of life vs. quantity of life. I most definitely want quality of life and would not want to go back to living life as I was - pain pill to pain pill.  

There is a chance that eventually the inflammation will increase and the diclofenec will no longer be as effective...but I am not going to borrow trouble and worry about something that hasn't happened yet - or may never happen.   


So for now...all is good!!!

It's All About My Comfort

If there is a blanket on the floor, Ollie will find it.  Always looking to lie down in the most comfortable place.

Friday

No server again today.  All classes had a free day and I got nothing accomplished again today.

Ollie comes to school on Fridays...he absolutely hates coming to school and here you can see why...

He gets soooo much attention at school...99.5% of the kids there just love him...and gush all over him whenever they see him.

He, in turn, responds by wagging his little tail like crazy and rolling over for a belly rub. Occasionally he'll give kisses and I am amazed how tolerant the kids are about that - I don't do doggie kisses.

There is another dog that comes to school everyday, but he is a service dog (diabetic alert) and the kids are not allowed to pay attention to him so as not to distract him from his "job".  He is a large standard poodle and so so cute but I feel so bad for him that he has to be ignored.  I think the kids like when Ollie comes because they can acknowledge him and shower him with love.

Anyway, Fridays Ollie goes to 8th hour drama practice...Toto practice.

My favorite is when he decides he's too tired (or bored) and feels the need to just lie down on stage.

Love the girl playing Dorothy...so much talent.

Computers Can Be Frustrating!

Today is probably the worst day I have had in a long, long time.

First of all, I had plans today to take pictures throughout the day of my classes in Computer.  It is my busiest day in there with 2 classes in the morning and four classes in the afternoon.

To make things smoother for me on such a busy day, it is generally a keyboarding day.  Keyboarding is something that is mostly self-paced and they generally don't need much help or supervision from me.

What they do need though is to log onto a different server than the computers normally use.  Not a big deal for them...they know how to switch from one server to the next.

6th graders came in first...at 8:15.  They know to log-in for keyboarding on Thursdays so...they did.  And we waited...and waited...and waited...and, yeah, waited. Ten minutes later, the settings were still not loaded.  There was no way to log off and task manager would not even work so every one had to manually shut down their hard drives (dangerous) and re-start. Okay...keyboarding was out...we'll do PowerPoint instead  Long story short...by the time they were finally able to log in using our usual server to work on their PowerPoints, there was only 5 minutes left in the class.

7th graders came in at 9:50 and their class went fine  because I just had them do PowerPoints right away instead of trying to do keyboarding.

All this time, my own desktop computer (which operates in the same server as the keyboarding server) was trying to load.  In the end, it took almost 3 hours for my computer to load and even then I got a message that it needed to load from a remote server.  

8th graders came in at 12:15.  My plan was to add images to their html documents and then copy their home page.  Yeah...that wasn't happening.  Being that I was using a remote server I had no access to any of my documents meaning I had no access to my html document so that I could demonstrate for them how to do this complicated step!  Free Day for them...instead of tomorrow.

I ended up cancelling the 5th grade class. I might make it up tomorrow sometime if the server is working tomorrow.  

1st and 2nd grade ended up playing with legos online.  The younger classes are easy to keep busy with meaningless things for fun.  

And that was it. So, by days end...my computer did load on a remote server but I was not able to do a single thing on it all day long!!!  

I am hoping our technical support guys are on this thing and it will be better by tomorrow.

Health Update and Etc.

This is going to be a long and heavy post with lots of brutal honesty...feel free to skip it if you want.

If you are a long time reader or know me well you know that I have always struggled with lung issues and cough. It seemed to get worse as I aged.  It was annoying - and puzzling - but managable. The sypmtoms would come and go and I would have lots of time in between when I felt completely well and normal.

That all changed about 18 months ago with the onset of symptoms that just did not go away - even after the usual 6-8 week mark.  After about 4 months straight of constant symptoms, I thought it was time to get serious about exploring a cause.

Enter the pulmonologist.  When the usual tests for asthma did not reveal a cause, we turned to more invasive tests such as the bronchoscopy.  When this also failed to pinpoint a cause or diagnosis, I was heartbroken and resigned to live with the symptoms.  That was in May.

Unfortunatley, in August the pain started.  It began as subtle pain that was just plain annoying but quickly escalated to what I would say was severe pain.  By October I was waking up with pain every day...everything was painful - washing my hair, getting dressed, even walking across the room caused pain in my chest, back, and shoulder.  I would watch the clock and countdown the minutes until I could take my first dose of pain medicine for the day (I never wanted to take it before noon).  Then, I would take another dose in the evening so that I could sleep without pain.  The medicine would only take the edge off the pain - never took it away completely. This is why I chose to have at CT scan in October which revealed lung scaring that we already knew about - but, accordiing to doctors, not enough to be causing the kind of symptoms I was experiencing. Great. Lovely.

This went on until January when I could feel I was building a tolerance to the level of pain medicine I was on and it was no longer as effective as is once was. Keep in mind I was on a pretty strong medicine (equivelent to lortab).  I was up to 2-3 tsps a day.  I DID NOT want to increase the dosage...I felt we were not heading in the right direction with this thing.

So, it was back to the doctor again.  This is the time he recommended the Diclofenec for inflammation. As I have said previously, I accepted that prescription with so much skeptisism and did not expect it to make one bit of difference.

The Friday I started taking it my husband asked me what time it was and as I turned to look over my left shoulder I experienced such intense pain - with just that one little movement.  By Monday...I could not only look over both shoulders but I could raise my hands above my head!  The pain was nearly gone...but not the symptoms that bring on the cough.

After two weeks...that was gone also!  I couldn't believe that I felt completely normal and that inflamation had been the cause of all I had been going through.

I began slowly weaning from the narcotic medication I had been taking.  To my surprise, things went very well!  In the past two months I have gone from the 2-3 full strength tsps I had been taking to a very diluted 1/2 tsp and have not experienced any return of symptoms (as long as I take the diclofenec). 

Here is the heavy part - I am stuck at a 1/2 tsp.  Physcially, I don't believe I need it anymore...but phychologically it has been such a part of my life for the past 18 months that I cannot make that comlete break from it.  I feel stupid confessing that. 

I have another appointment with the doctor on Monday to discuss this - among other things - and hopefully he will have some suggestions. 

I don't want to put the cart before the horse so to speak but I also want to discuss what are the options when I can no longer take the diclofenec.  It is a high dose anti-infammatory medicine and can cause liver or kidney issues.  It will require the completion of a blood test before each refill to test for these things. 

I tried lowering to just once a day over the past week but the pain returned over the weekend so that is not going to work.  

Please pray for answers on Monday and for God to give me the strength to get rid of this last 1/2 tsp that I cannot let go of. 

Our Sunday Afternoon Nap

SO OVER THIS

This was Friday night when I let the dog out before bed.

C'mon...seriously....it is the middle of March!

This has been an awful March - I don't believe we have seen a 40* day this month yet...and there doesn't seem to be one in the near future.

Add to that dreams of last year when it was 70* most of March and it adds up to sheer frustration. 

We spent most of the weekend inside down by the fireplace...but I am ready to take my little buddy on some walks again.

Back to my Bane

We are now back to our regularly scheduled program...in other words, I am back in my Computer Room.

On the positive side:
- I am back to my part/three quarters time schedule and back to having Mondays off
- this job is a lot easier with much more planning and prep time
- a lot more flexibility with my schedule.  If I want to run to the store during school hours I can.  
- I missed the interaction with the middle school kids

On the negative side:
- I am back to this

I know this is hard to see but it says 299MB of available space on this hard drive!  Seriously...not even 1 GB.  And I was welcomed back to not just one but THREE computers like this!  

So far I have only been able to free up significant space on one of the three computers.

My impulse is to wipe out everything on all the hard drives and then re-install the necessary programs...but my wishing mind keeps hoping we'll get new computers - or even external hard drives would be helpful.

In the meantime I am left doing disk clean-ups, de-fragmenting, getting rid of temporary files, and searching the hard drive for files or documents I can delete...

It is as time consuming as it sounds.

In the Car

Ollie loves going in the car...but only if mama is going to.

And the front seat belongs to him (or so he thinks).  Anyone already occupying the front seat is just a booster seat for him.

Guess Who Got Groomed Yesterday

Playing Sorry

Since C.J. left playing Sorry has been a nightly occurance at our house.  

Sometimes, when I am busy, I don't really want to hear, "wanna play Sorry."  But I wouldn't trade trade the time it takes to play a couple games for anything in this world.  I know someday I am going to miss this.

Ollie "helping out"  aka getting in the way