This is the post that I hoped and prayed that I wouldn’t have to write. About an hour or an hour and a half after I posted the update last night, I got a message on Facebook to call Aunt Jane. That’s when she told me that Jason had died.

I think the best two words to describe how we are all feeling are shocked and devastated. We all knew that things didn’t look good and that he had a long road to recovery, but as he kept improving little by little, I think most of us started to hope for the best possible outcome. But yesterday he started bleeding internally, and they couldn’t get it stopped due to the blood thinners he had been on to prevent blood clots.

Right now, I really don’t want to hear about how Jason dying is all a part of God’s plan. Whether or not that is true is irrelevant. It’s just not the time. Right now, our hearts are hurting. Right now, I just want to be pissed off at how unfair life is.

He leaves behind a wonderful wife, a beautiful baby girl, and a large extended family who all loved him very much. We miss you already, Jason!

Well hello there! I’m still alive even if I haven’t blogged in a couple of weeks. I just haven’t had the mental energy to deal with it! Between Grandma being sick, and worrying about Jason who is still in Ann Arbor fighting for his life I just haven’t wanted to come over here and deal with the every day mundane things like linking to glucomannan or talking about how I’ve gone to work everyday and everything was business as usual. Plus in the middle of that, my modem went bad and I had no internet for several days until I was able to call Comcast and schedule a service visit.

Anyways. The last time I posted about Jason, he was in the hospital with a fever of 104. Things got markedly worse from there as his fever shot up to 107, and nothing they could do would bring it down. They ended up putting him on a ventilator and then into a medically induced coma to keep him calm and try and let his body heal. By the time they decided to airlift him to Ann Arbor to be put on a heart and lung machine, he was on full life support, his kidneys had started to fail, and the doctor here was only giving him a less than 25% chance of survival.

Thankfully things started turning around once they got him in Ann Arbor. He’s improved quite a bit, but there’s still a very long way to go. Even today, he had a very rough day and they had to take the ventilator back up to 100% before backing it off to 60%. They have him off the paralytics, and we’re all just praying that he continues to improve every day. As of right now, we have no way of knowing what kind of recovery time line he’ll be looking at, or even what kind of lasting damage he’ll be dealing with. They’re still trying to get him out of the woods.

Needless to say, your continued prayers would be very much appreciated. He’s got a wife and a baby girl, as well as a large extended family that really need him to recover and come home!

It seems like our family keeps getting the rugs pulled out from underneath us. Grandma is doing better, she’s at home, and we’re all on a 24/7 rotation to make sure there is someone there with her to help out if needed. She’s better, but there’s still a long way to go until she’s GOOD.

Then… my cousin Izzy’s husband Jason has been sick for about a week. Most likely the swine flu. But he just didn’t get better, and didn’t get better. Then Saturday night, Izzy took him to the ER because he wasn’t getting any better, and she was afraid his flu had turned into pneumonia. Turns out, it had. By last night, my mom called to tell me that they were putting him in the ICU and putting him on a ventilator. He had a temperature of 104 that they couldn’t get down and they couldn’t get his oxygen levels up. To sum it up in two words: it’s bad.

Izzy made a post on Facebook in the wee hours of the morning that there was slight improvement. Please pray that that improvement continues. They’ve got a 15 month old too, who thankfully shows no signs of getting the flu even though she’s been exposed.

Okay, obviously I didn’t take this picture today. Well, maybe it’s not obvious, but I did in fact take this picture yesterday, on my way out the door. I went over to my grandma’s to hand out candy to her trick or treaters. I live in an apartment with a locked lobby, so I’m fairly confident that I get zero kids coming by, or close to it anyways. So I dress up and go hand out candy at Grandma’s. I had at least one kid come up to get candy and yell “It’s Coraline!” so that was cool.

I noticed a couple of things though. First, what happened to manners? Except for the real little ones who were still holding onto Mom or Dad’s hand, we got very few thank yous. When I was younger and still going around, we all said thank you at every single house. Even handing out candy last year, the kids were very polite. Not so much this year.

Second… there was a house somewhere in the neighborhood handing out small cups of cider. Since when do parents let their kids have something like that? Did they buy term life insurance first? Maybe I’m overly paranoid… or just old enough to remember the horror stories around Halloween every year about things added to candy or whatever. My kids wouldn’t have been drinking the cider… and we wouldn’t have been able to drink it when we were young, you just don’t know! Take it to be polite, but throw it out later. I remember there was always an older guy in the neighborhood we trick or treated in as kids that would hand out Twizzlers. As in, peeled individually out of a regular package. We took it, said thank you, and threw it away at the next trash can.

Mom and I were the odd ducks out on that argument last night. What do you guys think? Prepackaged candy only for your kids from complete strangers?

I gotta tell ya, I had a hard time dragging myself out of bed this morning. After pushing the snooze button eleventy billion times, I did manage to convince myself that I did have to come into work to provide my call center services today. I was still disappointed that today is not Friday.

It’s been a long week. Not that it’s been a particularly stressful week at work, but it kind of has been at home. My Grandma was in the hospital from Friday until yesterday afternoon. For a good portion of that time, she was very confused, saying things that didn’t make sense. Generally worrying us all. She’s home now, and not confused, but she’s still got quite a bit of recovering to do.

The picture has nothing to do with anything else… just a picture I snapped on my phone over the weekend. When the trees were finally changed enough to take pretty pictures, and before we got the nasty rain that stripped all the pretty leaves off the trees!

Hello there! This is me earlier this afternoon before I headed over to Aiden’s birthday party. Don’t mind the crazy acne I’ve been dealing with all week. I had a pretty good weekend, even if I’m not ready for it to be over yet!! I got to hang out with one of my best friends on Saturday, and then got some cleaning done.

Then today, as I mentioned, I went to Aiden’s birthday party. It’s hard to believe that he’s 3 years old already! And that any of my friends are old enough to have three year olds! Seriously, weren’t we just in high school yesterday?

So… yesterday I was looking for something for lunch since my previous lunch plans were canceled. I opened my freezer, and you usually wouldn’t think that such an act would be fraught with peril. Oh, but you would be wrong!!

Since I am sorely lacking in kitchen storage space, I keep a lot of things on top of the fridge. Apparently, I didn’t get them pushed back far enough because when I opened the freezer door, things began to fall. I managed to catch the container of flour, but the 5lbs of sugar still rocketed towards the ground. I got my feet out of the way, but the sugar container attacked my broom and dustpan anyways. Sugar pinned dustpan to the ground, and well… it wasn’t pretty.

See the aftermath for yourself:

Now just imagine what that would have done to my precious little toes!! Who needs the best diet pill when the sugar attacks you? So, now I need to go buy a new dustpan. And punish the sugar… maybe into cookies.

Sunday again! They sure seem to come around fast, don’t they? Or maybe it’s just the weekends that speed by.

Friday night, my friend Amy and I went to Hacienda for dinner and margaritas. I may or may not have had an entire liter of Orange Creme Margaritas all by myself. I got home probably 8:30 or so, and crashed by 9:30.

I can’t really tell you what happened with Saturday… it was one of those days where I can’t really tell you what I did with myself other than have a real lazy day. I watched a bunch of things on the TiVo that had been recording all week, took a nap, that sort of thing.

Today I’m trying to be productive… who needs treadmills when you can go up and downstairs a hundred times working on the laundry? Plus the trips downstairs to take out the trash and the recycling. I was supposed to be going to Mom’s for lunch today but they’re all sickly over at her house, so I’m staying home. Except now I need to figure out my own lunch. Since grocery shopping was on the to-do list that I never got around to yesterday, that’s easier said than done! Maybe I need to call Papa Johns…

A week or two ago, someone posted a list of funny comments on their blog. Of course, I can’t find it at the moment, but one of the comments was along the lines of…

“Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don’t want to have to restart my collection.”

Can I just say, amen? I really don’t get what the deal is with the “new” bluray discs. Maybe they’re the best thing ever, I don’t know, and I really don’t care. The thing is, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 DVDs. I’ve finally managed to get almost all of my VHS movies on DVD. I sure as heck wouldn’t want to start all over again with another type of technology.

You want to change something? Start packaging all my DVDs with a digital copy! Other than that, you are only going to get me to switch to something else kicking and screaming!