Depressing

I have had two of my friends recently tell me how depressing my blog is! I wanted to shout at them that it's not depressing, it is good stuff!

Then I started thinking...if they think it's depressing it is because I wasn't able to get my thoughts across properly. Things are going so much better for me now. The back doesn't hurt as much and I'm getting better.

An example this week came up with my wife's computer. A few months ago she had asked me to fix something on it and I went to work on it and just couldn't get to the bottom of the problem. I was super frustrated because I knew I should be able to get to it, I just couldn't get my brain to work right. The other day I was able to solve the problem because with the pain and meds going down, the old melon is starting up again! I'm excited! Things are getting better!

What a week!

I actually had to go to work this week! Man, couple that with a couple church computers blowing up, a difficult setup for a meeting using two video sources and two outputs and me doing normal stuff and I'm exhausted! I've put the kids to work to give me a break, though. The biggest boy is setting up some bales of hay for us to have a pellet shooting range and we'll go out in an hour or so and test it. WHEW!

It's work!

It is work having kids in Club KP. They are now learning the books of the Old Testament. And believe it or not I don't know them all! So in my house before breakfast, during the shower, at dinner and before bed we are all chanting the books of the Old Testament. We're up to Job now and it is getting harder and harder with all the names!

I'm baaack

Wow, after six weeks off recuperating, I am now back at work! The day didn't start too well with me forgetting to plug either of my diesel outfits in so I had to borrow my wife's car but I made it and I'm working and I'm back! WHOO HOO!!!

Happy Birthday!

Today is my wife of 17 years' birthday. I did pretty good this year with gifts with the kids. My wife received one girly item, one item she asked for and one stranger item (like I usually get her). Happy birthday, honey!

Dear Heavenly Father...

my son prayed tonight as he led our family in prayer before bed. It is just an amazing thing to see this boy begin to grow up and start to show what kind of man he will be. I'm very proud to see how this kid is turning out. He thinks of others in his prayers and remembers people who didn't necessarily ask for prayer but had a cold tonight. Yeah, some of what we are teaching them is getting in there!

Being intentional

On Sunday, Pastor Dean talked about raising our children. How the way we live our lives will show our children how to live rather than what we tell them about how to live. This is very important to me. I have not always been the best father. That's not saying I'm the best now but I certainly am a lot better about being a dad. I am intentional about it. I try to make time to do stuff with all of my children. I talked about it at my connection group as well, but the hardest for me is my little girl. She is definitely a girl and doesn't enjoy welding with me or working on the lathe like the boys do. Now she sometimes forces herself to do that with me because she wants to be with her dad, but she certainly does not enjoy it. So in order to be her dad and not force her to do stuff that I like I work at intentionally doing stuff she likes. I have colored pictures with her and tonight we played CandyLand. I lost, but we had a lot of fun!

An epic battle

The battle was worthy of Peter Jackson putting it on the screen. This was like the battle of Helms Deep! Thousands of soldiers left the safety of their home to try and repel the giant marauders. The creatures attacking were easily 100 times larger than those they attacked, but the soldiers fought bravely. After all their queen was inside along with their Winter stores and they were not going to lose those without a fight! Unfortunately, my bees lost and the racoons tipped their hives over and stole their honey...more Wintertime farm life fun!

Three and three

Yesterday another one of our sheep lambed. She had a pair and they looked completely different! The larger was a boy and all white while the smaller girl had a white head, black rear and Churro brown on her sides. She was a pretty little thing and we were considering keeping her.

Until this morning.

Unfortunately they died overnight. They were tucked nicely back amongst the trees like mom put them there. The girl died before the boy and there was no sign of an attack. We got to discussing it and we never saw either of them eat off of mom. Our thought now is this was mom's first time lambing and she didn't know to let them eat. We should have watched closer to make sure they got colostrum and held mom so they could eat if necessary. She stuck with them the whole time, but maybe they didn't eat.

So we have three living babies (two girls and a boy) and we've lost three so far this year. Not our best time at doing this, but we continue to evaluate and hopefully will become better shepherds as we go along.

Doctoring

Well, we just got back from a round of doctoring the critters on the farm. All the babies need some doctoring and everybody needs type C & D perfingens injection and tetnus so they don't get it. The good news is we found that two of the three babies are girls. Yea! It was fun doctoring, but dirty...a little bit of sheep dip all over us, but we did the job.

A kick in the pants

So there I was on Sunday with my back feeling better than ever when I met somebody who is currently where I was about seven months ago. Ugh. It just reminded me how hard it was then dealing with the pain and the depressing battery of tests the docs want to put you through before they can find anything wrong that they might be able to fix. I was satisfied with my feeling sorry for myself and how slow my recovery was coming along when I had to be kicked in the rear with this poor person who is going through the exact same thing. I'm just glad I was able to give some encouragement and let them know how the process is going to look. Just knowing what is ahead of us makes it a lot easier to endure, doesn't it?

Good days...and bad

There are good days and bad in my recovery. After Sunday I felt pretty good and pushed myself a bit hard on Monday. We did some farm stuff in the morning trying to help the mother sheep in distress, then went on a breakfast date with my wife. Had a lunch meeting in the afternoon and I was beat come evening. Tuesday came and I was hurting bad. That scared me. It scared me a lot. When you are in constant pain, you meet with the pain doctor every two to four weeks to assess how the pain management is doing. This is done to make changes to the medicine and try to get people functional again. The pain doctor uses a pain scale from one to ten. One being standard scrape and a ten being the worst pain imaginable. The goal of pain management is to get a person to around a four or five so they can function. I have lived the last six months around a six or seven on the scale. At that level, it is very hard to think through the pain. I struggle to concentrate on anything other than hurting. On Tuesday, I was there again. After leaving the hospital, I was around a four or five, but Tuesday was bad around a six or a seven and that scared me. I was so afraid of causing a problem that I spent the day on Tuesday in bed. I was not even able to attend my Connection Group but I did recover nicely and I'm feeling a lot better today. Whew!