Memorial Day Weekend

We had heard that Kim was coming up from Hialeah to the Tampa Bay area to visit and Frank William was coming down from Alabama too. Unfortunately schedules being what they are, things didn't work out so that we could get together. We will have to make a STRONG concerted effort to meet up for the 4th of July...

As for ourselves, we spent Saturday night taking Katrina out to Arigato's Japanese restaurant as a personal happy birthday event, and to introduce her to a different style of Japanese foods. Dean and Brenda (thanks again for the sailboat, guys!) joined us after a day of kayaking, and we had a pretty nice time. The only surprise came from Katrina having some difficulty with breathing after we were about halfway through the meal. At first it was kind of hard to say what could haver triggered it, because she has had shrimp before with no ill effects, but then we realized that there was a lobster that was on the grill and the extra iodine from the shell may have kicked things up a bit. It was no big deal, just a quick 'breather' on the nebulizer and off she went, good as new.

The rest of the long weekend was dedicated to working on the sailboat.

Katrina began by scraping off all of the stickers, numbers and vinyl stripes from the hull.

I began by filling, scraping and sanding down a bunch of score marks caused by being moored up against some pilings.

As we worked we realized we needed some cover over our heads, so we took the tarp we were covering the boat with and suspended it from the trees. This worked out well.

This is a shot after the bottom paint has been applied and the upper hull prep work was done and ready for a coat of primer.

This is a view of Before and After, to show the old bottom paint vs. the new bottom paint. I like the blue bottom paint better. The winch is out-of-kilter because we had to loosen it to remove the crutch that was pressing against the bow. I just threw the bolts and nuts on without aligning the winch and tightening them down.

This view shows the hull with the first coat of oyster white paint on it. Oyster white is a light, tannish-yellow which is nearly an identical match of the original factory hull color. If you look closely, you can see our black cat Smokey, perched on the deck in the upper-right of the picture.

A rear view of our handywork and a closer look at Smokey.

At the moment Blogger.com is still having trouble with uploading pictures and such, so I had to write the HTML code and load pictures from a separate storage site to get things to work for now. Talk about dedication to the cause...

A Little More News About Mom

We got an email from Treesie and she said Mom had her PET scan done. The findings reinforce what had been reported earlier, the cancer has metasticized to the liver. Now that the PET scan is done, the oncologist is working out what will be done with her chemotherapy, then the uphill struggle begins. Treesie is looking into changing her work shifts into some long, hard hours over the weekends, just so she could take Mom to the doctor's office for the treatments. The problem is though, if she opts for this shift, there is good possibility that she will have to do it for 3 years. Talk about taking one for the family...

Uncle Frank has been calling Mom every couple of days to check on her diet and blood sugar levels, and he is happy to report that Mom's levels are steadily dropping into the normal ranges and even Dad has been eating better and reducing his sugar intake too. Hopefully, they will both enjoy continued progress.

Katrina's Birthday Party

We celebrated Katrina's birthday party at the go-kart track we had been to before, and as I had mentioned we were going to in a previous post. She invited several of her friends (8 to be exact).

After several family members and friends and their kids arrived, we found we had packed the party room and fought the air conditioning system to a standstill. It just couldn't keep the room cool enough.

After a while, we were given wrist bands for unlimited admission to the goofy golf and go-kart track.

The next thing we knew, the kids were gone...

The competition on the go-kart track began between Katrina and ("we're just friends") John.

Unfortunately, she didn't fare too well. She lost 3 of the 4 races between them and the one she did win was due to a technicality (the track crew waved John in and Katrina went one more lap, so he finished one lap down to her).

Meanwhile, I headed up the goofy golf session with some of the smaller kids in tow.

We sat Katrina's friends down for one more picture before they all left.

C-U Later!

Graduation Time

We stopped by to celebrate both mother's day and Jordy's upcoming graduation. Since we were going to meet up with Uncle Frank and Aunt Martha at Karen's place, we decided this would be a good time to give him the blue crabs we had stashed in the freezer (crabs mentioned below).

We also got Jordy a couple of gifts. After a little recon work to discover he has a serious interest in the game of chess and a casual interest in the TV series; The Simpsons, we decided to get him a chinese chess set (with instructions printed from the internet) and a Simpsons Operation game too. I told him the Operation game is to help him develop steady hands so his opposition won't be able to anticipate a questionable move from his hands shaking...

Here we are, discussing some of the finer points of the chinese chess game.

After hanging out at the townhouse for a while, the group moved to the pool nearby. This is a shot of all of the kids hitting the water at the same time.

When the pool became a bit boring for the kids, the group then moved over to a nearby water slide park of which Karen is a member. We bothered the kids for another group shot again. Hey, what's with the funny hand signals?

Hi Karen! Congrats on Jordy's Success.

And last but not least, hello Sharon. Have I got a story about little Janie (probably didn't spell that right) and a can of Sprite soda that grew legs and took a walk around the house. Too funny...

Feeling A Little Crabby

While in Arizona for my mother's medical problems, I had talked to Uncle Frank and Kimberly (mentioned below) about the times we had gone fishing for blue crabs. I checked the tide charts and then asked Katrina if she wanted to go to one of our favorite spots that we hadn't been to in about 2 years to try our luck. I also talked to Chiu, a friend from work about it, and he said he would like to try it, so we agreed to meet there at 8:30, just before sunset.

The tides were right, but unfortunately the water temperature was too cold, so there weren't many of them out there. Katrina and I picked up nine of them, but threw one back because it was too small (we don't know how many Chui picked up, he had to leave early before we could say goodbye because he had to work on Saturday) . When we felt that was the best we could do, Katrina and I began cleaning out the canoe to put it back on the truck when she asked me a very good question. "What are we going to put the crabs in to take them home?"

Well, it seems I forgot to bring a bucket to put them in, so we grabbed the net I had used, dropped them into it then wrapped a large plastic trash bag around the whole thing. That worked just fine. When we got home, another problem struck. No container to put them in either. We ended up just dropping them directly from the net into the freezer. Hey! It was midnight and we were tired... Luann wasn't too pleased when she was greeted this morning by 8 frozen blue crabs that had free-ranged in the freezer, found a comfortable spot, then froze like that.

And they made a mess too. Guess who was volunteered for the cleanup...?
Well, it seemed like a good idea at midnight.

Don't they look cute snuggled up like that with the bag of frozen vegetables?
Nah, I didn't think so either.

Could I Be The Son Of Geronimo?

Dad said he decided to let his hair grow since he and Mom had gone on the cruise with us last July. Uncle Frank, Kim and I all agreed he looked something like Geronimo. I suggested that maybe he should check in with the Bureau of Indian Affairs...

This is when I asked him to 'strike a pose' in the kitchen.

And you can really see what I mean from this picture I took while we were hanging out in the hall at the hopital.

Mom Has A Medical Problem

Uncle Frank , my cousin Kimberly and I had to rush out to Arizona because my mother had to have emergency surgery to repair a hernia that was affecting her colon, and when they performed the surgery, they discovered that she has colon cancer and had to remove about 40mm of the colon and then perform a colostomy. Things didn't look too good. Tests have shown that the cancer has spread to her liver and since it has invaded both lobes of the liver, it is inoperable.

Uncle Frank, Kim and I had to show up to help out in dealing with the surgeon, the oncologist, the pulmonary specialist and the cardiologist and then explain what was going on to Mom, Dad and the family. When we finally got Mom home, we had to set up her oxygen pump system (and keep the kids away from her for a bit so she could rest) while Uncle Frank worked on her diet counseling to help stabilize her diabetes. The oncologist said that after about 3-4 weeks, she will have a PET scan as a baseline, then he will start working on her chemotherapy.

According to the oncologist, the prognosis for recovery from colon cancer at the stage she has is about as generalized as he could make it. It is not curable, the best one could hope for is to fight the spread to a stand-still with a continuous onslaught of medication but it will always be there.

He said the average life expectancy for a person with this disease who remains untreated is about one year. If treated, the average lifespan is about two years. Of course, these are the averages, some do worse, some do better. He did note that it is possible that she could go longer than this but it would be a direct result of stumbling upon the chemo-drug cocktail that works specifically in her instance and that she takes extraordinary measures to keep her diet and diabetes in check. Otherwise, things won't work out as we would prefer.

Here is a picture of Dad, May (a friend of Mom's) and Uncle Frank.

And here is another view that shows Uncle Jimmy and his wife (sitting down) with Kimberly in the foreground.

At the time of this writing, Mom is at home, looks fairly good and seems to be doing pretty well under the circumstances. She drags her 50 foot oxygen hose all over the house and sometimes she doesn't even need it. Unfortunately though, she doesn't seem to grasp the depth of her problem and is acting as if this is no big deal, so this is our main concern. If she takes this issue too lightly, then she might start slacking off in her treatments.

Road Trip To Georgia

I had to drive up north of Atlanta, Georgia on April 25 and 26th to perform a startup of one of our electric motor soft-starters there.

The motors our equipment is starting are 2500 horsepower and use 2400 volts to run. Just a bit higher voltage than the 110 volts that comes out of the wall at home!