Emergency Room Visit

Well, it seems Katrina had a fall at school this afternoon, which resulted in a dislocated right shoulder. She was rushed to the emergency room by her friend Chaz and while on-route, Katrina called Luann to tell her what happened. Luann immediately called me and then, we were both on our way.

When we got there, the shock she was in from the impact was wearing off and she was in serious pain. Since this was the second dislocation she has experienced (it was her right ankle about 2 years ago), we knew what to expect.

And this is Chaz, Katrina's friend whom brought her to the hospital. After his good deed, he was chewed out by his step-mother for offering to help us out with Katrina's injury. In spite of this, we are very thankful that she has friends like him around her.

This is a view of the aftermath of the "Closed Reduction" procedure. There were two doctors, one that had a sheet wrapped around Katrina's torso and he was pulling from her left side, while the orthopedic specialist had a sheet wrapped around her waist and Katrina's arm at the elbow. After carefully positioning her arm, they pulled away from each other rather methodically, and I could see that Katrina's shoulder had settled back into position. Of course, they gave her a strong sedative to ease the pain but she still made some groaning sounds during the procedure.

Here she is, sleeping off the effects of the sedative. Luann stepped out of the way while they worked on re-setting Katrina's arm. Yep, the sedative part of this episode is the most scary thing because they had us sign a paper, which states there is a risk of respiratory or cardiac arrest, before they would work on her.

When she came to, she had no recollection of the procedure, just the prep-work when they administered the sedative, then the point where we were putting the sling/brace on (I say 'we' because I had to help raise her up and then hold her wobbly head to keep it from flopping around). At this point, the follow-up X-ray showed that the reduction was successful, so they were taking her vital signs every 10 minutes and she is not far away from being discharged. All in all, the job was much quicker than her ankle dislocation and now she has to work on doing things with only one hand...

The most interesting thing about this is that Katrina didn't take the bus home, and had decided that she was going to linger around school for a while, then 'hitch' a ride from a fellow student named Bradley. Turns out, she didn't clear any of this with her mother or me, so when I found out she didn't take the bus home like she was supposed to, I couldn't help but to point out that if she didn't break protocol, it is very likely that this whole thing wouldn't have happened. Yeah, I'm real popular right now.... but the facts are the facts...

Geocaching With Denny

We had some fun today, looking for geocaches with Dennis from work. He did real well, finding 3 of the 6 geocaches that we found.

Before we headed out to a park near where Dennis lives, we performed a little cache maintenance at our 1 Fish, 2 Fish & Dragon's Lair caches. Katrina got some really nice pictures of this Great Blue Heron on the way to 1 Fish, 2 Fish.

And after reading the weblogs for our Dragon's Lair cache, we saw that some seekers had spotted some tree frogs in the container. We just had to take some pictures of those little guys on our maintenance run.

Here we are, at the park by Dennis' House. At the first geocache we were looking for, we came upon this trapped little box turtle. He had worked his way over the top of a log, then slid down into some vines and couldn't back out. We picked him up and moved him back over to a nearby pond.

Katrina is keeping an eye on him as she is taking notes about the cache container Dennis just found.

And, on to the next cache in this park. We had to ford this little brook as we made our way to Dennis' next find.

On the way, we came across this speed-demon gopher tortoise, making his way down the path.

When we reached the spot where the geocache was supposed to be, we had a tough time locating it. It took some time until Dennis was poking around in the pine needles and he found something hard. "Clunk! Hey, what is that?"

We went looking for another one, but the best we could do was take a picture of this butterfly. Luann said this little guy was a poser and would stay in one spot, no matter how close she was from him. We finally gave up the search, because from the description and hint, the container was definitely missing.

So, we drove over to another part of the park and discovered this one. I pointed out to Dennis the difficult-to-see hiding spot that was up underneath this boardwalk.

So, on the next search, Dennis found the cache. Inside was a brand-new New York Yankees T-Shirt and one of our travel coins. We took the T-Shirt for Dennis and put a whole bunch of stuff in the container before it was replaced. Wow, what a find!

As we went searching for the final cache, we came across some really neat sculptures placed in the park. We only passed two of them, but from what we could see, somebody has a wild imagination.

The second sculpture we passed, was made to look like a mermaid, with her lower section made out of hands, on her back is an outline of the globe and her 'hair' is made of pine cones. Really neat.

So, now we find the last one in the park and this was a good chance to show Dennis that a feather rock made of volcanic pumice doesn't belong in the woods of Florida. Not a bad hide though.

After we left the park, we went back to Dennis' house, then walked over to a cache that was only 2 blocks from his house. Boy, was he surprised when I showed him that geocachers have planted a container, practically in his back yard. He has since registered as MediumVoltage and is beginning to log his finds.

Have A Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and family!

And, on to the pictures!

Since our holiday was going to be impersonal with just us 3 and Mark (close friend and Katrina's Godfather), we decided to 'mess with the menu', so to speak. We bought 10 pounds of stone crab claws, gave some to Uncle Frank and Aunt Martha, and used some of the rest for T-Day recipes. Luann chose to make a crab dip for chips and crackers, I made a leeks, crab and chardonnay white sauce over lingine. Well, that was different.

Here we are, hard at work in the kitchen. We're getting close as you can see the 'guest of honor' has freshly come back from his visit in the deep fryer (deep fried turkey is something of a southern tradition, I am told). Meanwhile, Luann is working on cracking open some of the crab claws with a hammer so we can make the dip and linguine. At the end of the day, we still had a few pounds of crab left, so we gave them to Mark to take home.

If anyone is curious, deep fried turkey is not oily at all and is quite juicy and flavorful. We just use an injector on the hapless bird to maninate for a day before his fateful dunk in the fryer. We've been making deep fried turkey on Thanksgiving for about 4 years now. After our first experience with a borrowed gas-fired monster, we decided to buy a thermostatically controlled electric unit that is much safer and convenient.

Here we are, all set up in the living room. There was more than this, but we couldn't get it all on this little table. We decided to do it this way because we wanted to introduce Mark to Jeff Dunham, a ventriloquist comedian, by playing a couple of DVDs of his we had bought. Since we had so much fun at a show he did in August (see here: http://thenieborgs.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html), we decided to buy tickets for all 4 of us to attend his new years eve show. What a way to ring in the new year, laughing all the way...

If anybody from my family is looking at this photo, you can see that we are continuing the family hors devoures tradition with the cheese, meats, pickles, olives and cocktail onions "on a steek". Jeff Dunham has a puppet called Jose Jalapeno - on a stick. And with his Mexican accent, it comes out as "on a steek". Funny guy. Funny, funny guy...

We did pretty well and it wasn't so crazy getting things together for this holiday, which was nice for a change.

Oh, when we visited Uncle Frank & Aunt Martha, we got to see their new RV. It's really nice inside and well-appointed. Now, this is how to retire in style!

We also saw how they were using these really neat racks to hold their DVDs, so we just had to copy their idea. You can see in one of the pictures above how we put them to work...

Just Cruisin'

Had some fun this past weekend, what with our usual geocaching (and catching a baby bunny).

When we had finished up a caching session in a park, we stopped by the restrooms and came across this poor, lost little 'feller'. When I caught the bunny and picked him up, the girls were quite surprised to find out that a rabbit can scream loudly when they feel threatened.

He calmed down pretty quickly, epecially with Katrina petting him gently.

We looked around for bunny-holes or any other place a rabbit might feel at home and there was nothing even close to where we found him. We finally chose a thicket that would offer him some security from other critters, something to eat and was near the pond. Good luck, little guy!

It seems like we're going to have an interesting holiday season, with my having to drive up to Indiana for work, then Luann and Katrina will fly up to Indianapolis and I'll pick them up from the airport and we'll head to West Allis, Wisconsin to visit Luann's family, then finally continue on to the big family Christmas get-together at Jody and Jenn's house in Minneapolis. Whew!! I'm so booked up with training jobs that I have no openings until mid-February.

Well, the weekend is coming up, so I hope to get things in order for Thanksgiving. And am also hoping to make room in the carport so I can wheel the Volvo in there and finish it up. I need to finish my own car so Katrina can drive the truck when her driver's license is upgraded to Operator's status.