Tag Archives: pence

A stressful week

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This has been a stressful week. I have not felt up to writing blog entries for a while. On Wednesday when temperatures plummeted and we had some snow, we discovered that our furnace was broken. We were without heat until Thursday afternoon, when the repair man was able to replace the heat exchanger that had a crack in it. We made it through ok, but this incident helped us to remember to be thankful for things we often take for granted.

Cohen, Brinley, and Tristan have been struggling with chest colds for a couple of weeks now. ‘Course the cold temps didn’t help but they seem to be getting over it. After about 10 days of taking muscle relaxant and an anti-inflammatory (naproxen) to cope with the severe headaches I’ve been having, I was glad to report to my doctor that the medication had helped. This vindicated his diagnosis, that the headaches are caused by muscle tension. He said that many people who think they have migraines actually have headaches caused by muscle tension. The pain profile from muscle tension headaches is apparently indistinguishable from that of migraines. Anyway, my doctor prescribed physical therapy for 4-6 weeks and I had two sessions already. In addition to the therapy sessions I am supposed to do exercises three times a day. I think this treatment is helping.

On Tuesday a.m., Michele discovered that our dog, Maddie, had gotten ahold of an avocado pit and appeared to have eaten half of it. She noticed that Maddie had thrown up and decided to look up information about the situation on the Internet. She discovered that avocado pits are toxic to dogs, so we called a vet and asked for advice. The vet urged us to get her to the clinic as soon as possible. $160 later we thankfully found out that she was ok. It was a pretty stressful day for Michele since she had to go by herself with all three little kids, who were quite sick and crabby to boot.

Last night as I was going to the bus to start my commute home from work, I felt in my coat pocket and realized that I had lost my monthly train and bus pass (an expensive loss). I had to run back to my office to get enough money for the train and bus fares and in the meantime, missed the connecting bus. Unfortunately by the time I got to the Metra station, all trains outbound from Chicago were running up to 45 minutes late due to signal problems. I left work shortly after 5p and didn’t get home ’til after 7p.

First day of showing house

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The past 24 hours have been very grueling. We had tons of things to do to get the house ready to show and we had several showings scheduled for today. I also had scheduled an appraisal for this a.m. Fortunately (with very little sleep) we accomplished most of the things we needed to do.

Aside from the appraisers who arrived first this a.m., I showed the house five times, from noon until 6p. Michele took the kids on a day-long shopping trip.

We are really pleased by the level of interest in the house. At least 12-15 people have called to inquire about it. Tomorrow we have two or three more people coming. In a few days we should have the report from the appraiser and then (hopefully) have a better idea of the market value of the house. This will help us set a more informed asking price. No offers yet, but we’re hopeful that someone will make an offer soon.

It’s going to be an early night because we are exhausted.

Travails, er, Travels

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Well, we’ve had quite a time of late. First of all, Michele and the kids were gone all last week, staying with her parents in the Chicago area. I drove up there Good Friday to stay the weekend and then drive them back home. Michele had another seizure or trembling episode the night before, this time, pretty severe.

Saturday evening, I started feeling sick. I began throwing up a lot, and spent the rest of the weekend mostly in bed with nausea, a severe headache, and general weakness. I’m feeling better now but only about 50% of normal. Thankfully, we made it home ok today. Michele had another episode on the way home, and I was still not well the whole trip. When we got home around 3p local time, I lay down for a while and woke up feeling a bit better.

I’m thankful that I have this week off of work, for Spring Break. Hopefully we’ll do better this week than we did on Easter weekend!

Ice storm worries

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We have been hit today with a fairly severe ice storm. Employees were told to go home at 1p and most classes were cancelled. The big worry is a power outage. Everything is coated with a thick layer of ice and some of our trees (e.g. the birches) are bent nearly double under the strain. I hope that there won’t be significant damage to them. As I was cleaning dishes before supper tonight, the power flickered on and off for a bit and I thought, Oh great, here it comes…But so far, it hasn’t cut off completely or for any length of time. Events like this make you remember how much you take certain things, like electricity, for granted. I’m not sure what we’ll do if the power goes out tonight because we don’t have enough wood for the fireplace. I guess if it happens, we’ll all just bundle up and try to get some sleep.

Trip to Indianapolis to attend consortial meeting

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Yesterday was a pretty long day for me. Our library is part of the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium and we had a consortial meeting yesterday at PALNI HQ, which is at INCOLSA’s offices. (INCOLSA is yet another library consortium but one that has a broader, statewide membership.) The meeting was the first-ever meeting of a group called the PALNI Aleph System Librarians. Since PALNI libraries share an integrated library system (Aleph 500 ver. 15.5) and since a big load is borne by designated system librarians at each member library in terms of the daily management of the system, this was quite an important event.

The reason it was a long day for me was that I was asked to give a presentation on macro software (I’ve attached the Word document here Macro Express.doc) Taylor has already purchased for use with Aleph, and I hadn’t had a chance to prepare anything up until the last minute. I was up at about 4a, got to work at 5a, and worked on the presentation until it was time to go to Indy at around 8a. After the all-day meeting, I then had to work the evening reference desk until 10p.

Anyway, the meeting was quite a success, in my opinion. I finally was able to put faces to names as I hadn’t met most of my counterparts before in the 23 libraries that make up PALNI. I also thoroughly enjoyed getting to meet one of the PALNI systems analysts face-to-face for the first time, someone with whom I have spoken on the phone and emailed back and forth for a long time, but had never met in person. Plus we as a group came to some important decisions about the system and how we’d like to manage it. This is a great first step to leveraging the power of a group to addressing the many complexities and demands of our implementation of this new system.

Exhausted

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Today has been rather exhausting. I should be more specific…Today AND last night were exhausting! Brinley was pretty fussy last night, and Tristan clambered into our bed during the wee hours of the morning, so between the two of them, Michele and I didn’t get much sleep. Michele decided to ask the home healthcare nurse about some symptoms she had noticed in Brinley. The symptoms she noticed were that Brinley always cried when picked up or significantly disturbed in some way, that she seemed to favor her left arm, that her left arm wasn’t as active as the right arm, and most importantly, that she had noticed that there was a swelling near or by Brinley’s collarbone. So we decided to call the doctor and she said to bring her in right away. The appointment was at 11:20a and we just arrived home around 5p. Turns out that we were right to be concerned. Brinley has a broken collarbone, poor thing. We assume it happened during birth, and we know that it is a common occurrence. Some good news is that her bilirubin level may have peaked. Yesterday it was at a high of 17.4, and today it was down to 16.9, so maybe we won’t have to use the biliblanket for much longer. We’ll see. In other news, last night, Keegan and I went to his school to learn how to put together and take apart his instrument for band. He chose to learn the alto saxophone, and is really excited about it. Also, the Dutailier glider/rocker and matching ottoman that was our birthday present to Michele, arrived in the mail today. I’ve just finished putting it together and Michele is very pleased with it. Finally, we are so thankful that my mother has been with us during this sometimes difficult time, doing the dishes, cooking delicious meals, looking after Keegan when he got home from school today and we were still in Muncie at the doctors, etc.