Harvest

Last night our honey was returned to us. There is an entire process to harvesting honey from the hives. The extra boxes filled with frames (or honey supers) are taken off the main box. The bees are left an entire super to keep them in food over the Winter. These boxes are then opened up and the frames removed. Each frame is then gone over with a hot knife to remove the wax that caps each cell. The frames are then placed in a machine that spins them and causes all the honey to be ejected from the cell. The frames are then reused for the next year. It takes six times the amount of nectar to make wax than honey so we want the bees to be able to reuse as much was as they can. The honey is then filtered and given back to us along with the cap wax. We then repackage the honey into quart jars for sale and melt down the cap wax for hand balm and soap.
Last night it all came back to us but it was a difficult year for the bees. Where last year we had around 12 gallons for our hives this year was only 5. It was just too hot for them. Oh well, harvest time means we are getting close to taking it easier for the Winter then getting ready for Spring when the babies come!

C-c-c-cooooooold!

30

It was 30 degrees this morning in Benjamin. Man, that is cold! After a fairly warm Summer, I am just not ready for this!

Heck, the biodiesel in the Jeep this morning gelled a bit on the way to work and I almost didn't make it. I am going to have to get a warmer jacket to make it through this, I think!

Gargh!

Sometimes I find computers to be so frustrating!

I'm been through the list before of what it takes to put out a blog or message from RCC. It's somewhere in the back posts here. One of the tools I use is SmartFTP.

Now, one of the things it does to me is stop working every 40 days or so and make be download the new version. I don't really care about what the new version does, the basic stuff I use it for remains unchanged, but they make me by not working any longer.

So last evening I have prepared messages for being updated, fire up SmartFTP and sure enough it's dead again. So I download the new version 2.0 stuff and it doesn't work. Yep, I install the new stuff and it does not work. The old stuff does not work. I try the new stuff again...no workie. Download it again and reinstall. Still no workie.

So at this point, I get too frustrated with SmartFTP so I go to Kim Komando's website to see what other options I have. She offered three different programs, so I grabbed the first one, installed it, went through the initial setup junk-ola and blam I'm working again, right?

Uh, no.

This thing takes for-ev-er to upload one stinking file! I mean where SmartFTP would do it in ten minutes or so I'm pushing an hour and only about 70% done.

I just wish it would work!

Outside

Wow, almost a week without an update! Whoops!

I've been outside.

A lot!

Since my back is feeling better, I have been trying to catch up on various projects that have sat around waiting for me to get them done. Right now, the Jeep needs some work so that it is ready for Winter so the kids and I have been sanding, welding and painting furiously to get it done. The new seats and belts are installed now after sitting around for a couple of years and we should have the drivers' door finished tonight. I have until the end of the month to prove to my wife the blade for the riding mower will work on the 4-wheeler. If I can do that project we don't purchase a snowblower. I've really enjoyed this time outside, but I forget to do some computer work like update the blog. I'll work more diligently to have this updated now.

Back Status

I need to start this post talking a bit about my pain. It started in February of 2005 for no known reason. My back just started hurting. Standard meds didn't do anything for the pain and I had some leftover pain pills from a previous surgery so I cut them in half occasionally and that would help. When I was taking a half twice a week, I decided to do something about it and asked around at work for a recommendation for a chiropractor that would help not hurt me. Armed with that information, I went in and it helped for a day or so. I made a weekly appointment but after a few visits, it was clear this was not going to fix it so I went to my primary care physician. He sent me for an x-ray to determine if there was something grossly wrong and that showed nothing. He scripted me more pain pills and recommended physical therapy (PT). PT helped a little but the bulk of the pain was still getting worse. So I was sent to a physiatrist. This is a medical doctor who does manipulations like a chiropractor. I went to this guy for quite a while being manipulated and attending his PT right there in the office. Once again, it helped for a day or two but never fixed anything.

During this time, I received a lot of help from the folks I worked with. They made recommendations and ideas for how to combat the pain. They recommended acupuncture. I'm' not a big fan of needles being jabbed into my body, but if it could help, I am all on board. Acupuncture did nothing for me. I could barely understand the person doing it and I received no relief at all. I was then recommended massage. Now, I hate anybody besides my wife touching me, but I gave it a shot. Ahhhh, massage is good. But like most things the help only lasted a couple of days. At this point, my doctor told me he can't keep giving me pain meds and I will need to go to a chronic pain clinic for that.

What the heck?! Isn't it my doctor's job to diagnose then repair the problem so I don't have to take pain meds for the remainder of my days?! I was in tremendous pain at this point, though, so off I went to the pain clinic. My first visit was promising. They evaluated my pain level by asking me to rate it on a scale of one to ten. On this scale, ten is the most horrific pain ever felt in the world and one is a pat. Now in my nerdish mind I have only felt a ten on the scale once in my life when I was certain death was upon me, so I would not pick that, but I was living around an eight even with the pain pills. This evaluation was great because they were willing to mediate me to the point that I could handle the pain better and not live in constant horrific pain. The doctor also had a great idea where he would burn the nerve root which would turn it off for a year or so he said. The procedure is called RF Lesioning and basically they send a little microwave emitter that is sized like a needle right into your back to the nerve root and once it is there, they turn it on and microwave the nerve root. Of course, this does not occur right away. They need to know they have hit the right spot by injecting a numbing solution (like the dentist uses) directly into the space the nerve root occupies. Now all of these injections and RF lesioning procedures are done when you are awake. For some people this is tremendously bad and freaks them out, but I am interested and want to know what is going on. I knew the pain was on the left side so that was the plan for the first trip...inject the short-term numbing stuff into the nerve root areas on the left side in the middle of my back (T7-T12 for spine people). I knew immediately when he put the needle into the joint that was the problem, I could feel that it was the right spot and told him, so he gave me an extra push of numb juice into that spot.

It worked! Oh, glorious day! I was without pain! It was fantastic and I gushed when they came into the recovery room to discuss how the procedure went and how much relief I was seeing. It was great, I was happy, let's keep doing...wait a minute. The pain is coming back. Five minutes relief was all the procedure would afford me. Then I was back to normal pain levels. Uh, hang on, nope, abnormal pain levels. It seems the needle being inserted ticks off the tissues there and you pay for it with another week of elevated pain. So like your shampoo bottle says, lather, rinse, repeat and another round of numb juice was scheduled for a month out. After that worked for it's glorious 300 seconds I was scheduled for the RF lesioning procedure. By now I'm an expert at laying on his table with my gown opened, swabbed with betadine, squeezing the racquetballs (for the pain) and preparing for the needle. There I was waiting for the sweet relie--OW! THAT HURTS! Ahh, yes, you can feel the microwave lesioning the nerve roots and your nerves are not happy about it. So I sucked it up and made it through that nightmare when they tell me it will be a month before I really start feeling relief from this procedure. A month later I felt nothing from the procedure and they changed my meds to help me more.

At this point in the process I am becoming depressed and wondering if I will spend the remainder of my life in pain. I have changed some. My personality has changed and my family doesn't seem to like who I have become to handle the pain. My wonderful wife, though, has stepped up and made me an appointment with two new doctors. One is a neurosurgeon and he won't see me for three months, the other is an orthopedic doctor who I go to see soon. He wants to try prolotherapy. This basically involves injecting saline solution along the rib where the pain is to irritate the tissues and cause my body to heal up and make it better. At this point in time, I know my pain is in my thorasic spine between levels nine and ten in the facet joint on the left side. With all of this information, he still wants to shoot me eight to ten times so we go for it.

Nothing.

Okay, prolotherapy was worthless for me, let's suck it up and get to the neurosurgeon. All this time, I am still going to the pain clinic and they have a new plan. Since the RF lesioning didn't work properly, they want to inject phenol into my back right into the space the nerve root is in. Phenol is supposed to do exactly what RF lesioning did, but even better. So about a week before the neurosurgeon appointment, that is injected into my back. The pain flared up and then got better for about 30 days. So much for phenol. However, during this time I also saw the neurosurgeon. He got me an MRI and CT scan as well as myelogram (headache for days!). After all this testing, I sat in his office while he told me he has no idea why my back hurts and his only plan to do anything is to fuse me from T8 to T10 (your back is cervical 'C' at the neck then thorasic 'T' in the middle and lumbar 'L' at the bottom which turns into your sacrum). So basically this guy wants to make it so I can't move the middle of my back and hope that does something to cause the pain to subside. It was at this point, I told the doctor to either fix this because the pain will kill me or just kill me on the table. This surgery occurred in April of 2006.

I walked out of the hospital two days after surgery faster and in less pain that I walked into the hospital in. I was hopeful again and excited for the possibilities. I pushed hard in PT and working on my farm...maybe too hard. For the first three months, I felt better and was able to reduce my meds I was taking. Then the pain started coming back hard. Now it is September of 2006 and I can barely function. I would get home from work and lay on the floor of my office with the door closed so my family could not see me and just wait to die because I could no longer handle this pain. My pain clinic stepped up the meds and put me on a patch that was designed for terminal cancer patients, but at least it gave me some relief that I can function a bit.

Now, you should know that all these pain meds really mess with your brain. You end up living in a fog and trying to think through it. You can see the posts I made at these times and see how bad and sometimes incoherent they are because keeping a single thought for a moment is a difficult task. I despise the pain meds but I know they were necessary to live.

Back to the neurosurgeon to tell him it didn't work and I just want the nerve chopped out and tossed away. He calms me down and suggests we redo the fusion on the left side only and extend it another level to T11 to make sure it is solidified and include a partial facetectomy to increase the size of the joint. He wants to make absolutely certain beyond a doubt that my pain is in the T9-T10 facet joint, so I go to see his choice of doctors to do another diagnostic injection into that space. He guides the needle in and I let him know when he's there, injects the numb juices and sweet relief! I asked him to leave the catheter in so I can just go around injecting myself, but that is not an option.

January 2007 finds me going in for my second back surgery to try and make things better. My neurosurgeon was "aggressive" in his words in attacking the problem and he said every fusion in my back except the T9-T10 one on the left side was good and solid. The one over the pain area was "spongey." So we went through that nightmare again, started PT again after three months of recovery wearing a brace the entire time. I am able to move down on the pain meds and move down and move down--WHOOPS!--that was too far. I am trying to get off the patch and I am unable to function without a small dose of the patch medicine.

This takes us to August 2007 when I posted the opinions post here. My pain clinic is high on the intrathecal pump and my neurosurgeon wants to try the spinal cord stimulator. These are both depressing since they both offer another surgery and a constant thing I have to deal with for the rest of my life. I have already accepted the fact that pain management will be something I have forever, but I'm still frustrated about it. Two and a half years ago I'm a normal person doing my thing and for no good reason my back explodes! No car wreck or huge trauma, it just gets mad at me and starts shouting.

Fast forward to 21 August 2007. It is around 2300 and I'm sitting in my chair watching something on my iPod when the main source of my pain, the nerve, stops. That's right, it just stopped as if a light switch was thrown. At first I was too afraid to move and I sat there...listening...nothing. The nerve is no longer shouting at me. I move a little. Still nothing. I stood up, walked around and still had nothing. I have prayed for the pain to be removed and others have prayed for me for a long time. I have been annointed with oil and prayed over and I have had phone prayers and I have friends praying for me and that night a miracle happened with no bright lights and no fanfare it just stopped.

Do I still hurt? Sure, they put these giant screws into my back! But I'm off the patch completely, I'm just on some pain pills. The neurosurgeon tells me the surgical pain can last a year so I'm holding out on that. The neurosurgeon also encouraged me to keep praying that it stays stopped.

Thanks to all for your prayers!

I would go see this!

If you do not know who River Tam is let me make a recommendation. This is only for those who enjoy the science fiction genre, though. Purchase the Firefly series that was on television, then after enjoying that and getting to know the characters, watch the movie Serenity which ties up some loose ends after the series was canceled from television.

It's cold

I mean really cold. Wear-a-jacket kind of cold. I can't sit outside sipping my morning coffee without a jacket and probably a hat any longer. Now, before you all go yelling that I'm a wimp, check this link out. There, you see? In Benjamin this morning when I left to come to work it was 42 degrees! That is cold! So I bundled up on my motorcycle and came in to work. My head was fine and the thinsulate lining on my jacket and chaps did its job. My fingers were cold though. I'm going to need warmer gloves to ride the bike in September. That sounds wimpy even to me, but it's true! 42 is cold!

Single parents...

have it rough.

This really came home to me on Saturday. My wife had to take off for a few hours so I was home with the boys until late afternoon. My eldest had to do his chores (feed and water the chickens and water the pasture critters) and sweep up after I did his job of mowing the lawn. That's it. It really doesn't seem to be all that difficult to me.

But I was wrong. And my eldest was going to show me.

I'm in the shop with the youngest running around underfoot asking me every question that pops into his brain when my son tells me he's done and wants to go to his friend's house. "Did you water the critters?" I ask him. "Oops, I forgot," he says. So off he drags himself to actually turn on the water...that's all it takes, turning the knob. While he does that, I glance out the shop door and see grass all over the driveway. I tell him about the grass and off he goes.

Time passes.

He's back in the shop wanting to head out now...again. "Did you turn the water off?" I ask him. "Oops" he answers again and I mention that the driveway is still covered with grass. "Whadda ya mean?" he asks me. So, I set down the tools and walk along the driveway showing him the grass. "Well, that doesn't sweep up," he says. What in the world does that even mean?! I encourage him to use the leaf blower and remind him we do have a walkway up to the front door.

More time passes.

He's back ready to take off. "Did you take care of the chickens?" I query. "Oops" is once again the answer I hear from him. How in the world can you oops two of the three things you had to do and not actually do the third! While he's going to the chicken coop, I head out to the driveway to see it covered in the same grass it had before. Now, please remember that I already mowed the lawn for him and trimmed it. He had to merely remove the loose blades of grass!

It was at this point I was ready to blow and immediately turned to my wife...who wasn't there. Thankfully I waited for her to come home and help with the incident before the kid completed his evil plan of driving me completely insane. Anyway, this was a huge illustration to me of how hard single parents have it. There is nobody to turn to when the kids are winning. They have to try and keep themselves in control on their own without help. That's tough.

Training

Last night was the host and facilitator training held by the Grandjacksons. We do this each year to kickoff the start of connection groups. This training isn't usually a bunch of new stuff for people, but rather a review of why we are doing this and some thoughts on how to run a meeting. The most important thing I was reminded of was the same thing we work so hard to teach on a Sunday morning. This idea that church is not an oasis...church is not an island or a separate entity. Rather the church, the body of Christ, is in this community. What we teach on a Sunday...what we talk about in our connection groups...is all about recognizing God in our daily interaction with people rather than bringing God into our world and interaction with it. All too often, there is a church facade we put on to act holy and proper while we attend church, but here at RCC we work very hard to teach and show the fact that God is everywhere. We just need to recognize that fact and possibly sometimes pointing it out to others. The Real Estate agent doesn't leave God at home and can go out lying to people about what they are selling...rather the agent recognizes God is with them always and hold themselves to a higher level. Ditch digger? Nerd? Candy maker? God is with each and every one of us...we just need to recognize that. Sometimes, during the day, as we go about it, we need to stop for the three seconds or so it takes to read Psalm 46:10 "Be still and know that I am God"

The World's Best Thumb Tack

The other day, my daughter needed a thumb tack to put something up on her board. When she asked her brother for one, he was clear that all of his tacks are currently in use and he had no tacks to spare. So, mostly to make him jealous for being mean, I went to the shop and made her a couple of thumb tacks. I had a bit of brass stock around, so I chucked it into the lathe, made the pointy part then turned a bit of a design a little further up. Here's the results