Say a Prayer

Mom has surgery tomorrow morning to replace her pacemaker with a pacemaker/defibrillator combination. The last time I wrote about this I'd said that her doctor didn't feel her heart was strong enough for this procedure but he's decided to go forward with it anyway. I don't want to look at this as being a last-ditch effort to resuscitate her life but considering how weak her heart is, what else can it be? The surgery is a risk, there's no question about that. The doctor was very clear with her when he told her they lose people in her condition on the operating table. Still, it's about quality of life and should this turn out successfully, she'll have a return to her old self; the indefatigable, independent older woman in her green '97 Ford Escort wagon running around town and occasionally jumping on the freeway to blend with 70mph traffic.

I want her back to her old self as do we all.

One thing that has caused me to pause and take notice is her attitude. I admire the way she's facing up to all of this, putting one foot in front of the other with hopes of improving her quality of life while taking the ultimate risk in the process and understanding that if it's not meant to be then that's fine as well. She's a Christian woman with a strong faith; one who has no doubt about where she's headed when her time here is done and it shows. All too often we Christians are more aligned with the everybody-wants-to-go-to-heaven-but-nobody-wants-to-die crowd. Earthly survival is at the core of our DNA.

Say a prayer for her if you're so inclined.

Tammy is heading for Rochester this afternoon to spend the evening with Rachel. It's part of a surprise birthday gift from Rachel to her mom. She doesn't know it yet but Rachel has tickets for the Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker at the Mayo Civic Center. As I mentioned in my previous post, Rachel has a love of the Nutcracker and dance. This will be a great show for them both.

They're also getting together with the head of Chi Alpha Campus Ministries at UMR for dinner at their home. Tammy had talked with Rick on the phone over a year ago and he mentioned then that he was looking to being an outreach to UMR as there was nothing in place yet. I can't even remember how Tammy got Rick's name but we quickly lost touch with him after Tammy's computer crashed and she lost his contact info. Anyway, early in the school year Rachel and Elsa went to an Assemblies of God church in Rochester and connected with their youth group. Through the youth group, Rachel has connected with Rick once again. We're going to shift some of our support from our home church to help support their ministry. It's been very easy to see God's hand in bringing this all together.

Obama has stated that he intends to freeze federal workers' pay for the next two years. I don't necessarily have a problem with that as they should be doing that and more. I'm a federal employee but considering my pay had already been frozen 3 of the last 4 years by FAA management there's talk that we air traffic controllers won't be caught up in this proposal. Our dispute was resolved in arbitration and I'm hopeful that our contract will work to set us apart from the workforce at large, much the same way the postal service is. It's really the only fair approach considering we are the only government entity (13,000 of us out of 1.8 million federal workers) who've already had their pay frozen.

I've been down in the shop for the last few days making some nice progress on panel 5 of 6 for our entertainment center. It would be nice to wrap this one up this weekend if I'm able to and get busy with the final one. I knew these were going to be labor-intensive when I began doing them and I'm fine with that, it's the sort of work I prefer but I'm ready to do other stuff; possibly another lamp. These have been two winters in the making.

I've been in a Gordon Lightfoot music listening mood lately. I think I'll queue him up and get busy.