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Dear family, friends, and others,

Every year, we receive wonderful cards and Christmas letters from others and I always think it would be nice to do the same and send out some written Christmas well-wishes and deliver a year’s worth of news about our family. Well, this is it, folks. I’ve finally gotten around to it.

Merry Christmas to you!

Great! Now that’s over with. Let’s talk about us!

2010 was a terrific, momentous year for the Bartons. We moved into a new house in Herriman, about a mile southwest of our previous home, on December 15, 2009, just in time for last Christmas. We purchased the home as a short sale and got a wonderful, luxurious home for a killer deal. The house was entirely finished so, unlike with previous homes, we were not faced with any challenges of finishing basements or anything like that. Instead, we’ve had to do some work on the yard and furnishing the extra space inside.

In February, a client that had been giving me the majority of my contract work let all their employees go. They continued to keep me busy managing their servers for the next couple of months, but I could see the writing on the wall. I started looking for other work— even something that was more like a “real job.” Christine hoped I could find something that let me work from home doing software development instead of I.T. work.

In April, I flew to Pittsburgh, PA to interview with Grant Street Group for a position as a software developer on their TaxSys product. The interviews went well and in May, they asked me to come on board as a telecommuting software developer. It’s been a very challenging job for me as I haven’t had a “real” development job in about eight years, but it’s all been great experience for me as I’ve learned and grown a lot.

Also in April, I ran in my first running race and first half-marathon, the Thanksgiving Point Half Marathon. This was a major accomplishment for me as I’d been running to get into better shape for several months prior and really had no idea if I could do it. I ran a 5K in September and am planning to run the Thanksgiving Point Half Marathon again next April.

Maya, Lucy and Eli changed schools in the Fall because we moved into a different elementary school area and because Maya started the seventh grade. Maya took an special algebra class over the summer to qualify to be in Pre-Algebra in seventh grade and had no problem passing the tests. She’s doing very well in middle-school and brought home her first report card with straight As.

Maya is also now in the Young Womens program in our church and loves it.

Lucy is in fourth grade and her classmates in our neighborhood frequently inform us she is the “smartest kid in the class.” Lucy is also doing very well in piano lessons and on the non-competition swim team at South Jordan’s recreation center. When the new Herriman Recreation Center opens in February, we’ll probably be looking into signing Lucy (and Maya) up for swim team practices there.

Eli is in second grade and got straight As on his first report card. Eli started piano lessons this year with the same teacher Lucy has and is doing well at that also.

Christine has been at Sorenson Communications for almost six years now and is the manager over the quality assurance department where she has about 50 employees working under her. She recently got a new boss who is shaking things up and taking a hard look at how things are being done. Christine is enjoying the excitement, challenges, and new directions her job is taking her in.

On Sunday, 19 September, we came home from having dinner with my parents to find the mountain near our home covered in flames and our neighborhood being evacuated. After we hurried and packed a few belongings into our cars, we could see the wall of flames, stoked by strong, dry winds, moving down the north slope of South Mountain toward the homes on our street. With firefighters nowhere in sight, we had little confidence our home or others around ours would survive the fire.

You can read more about our experience here, but to make a long story short, what happened that night was nothing short of a miracle. Elected officials, police, and firefighters felt the fire would destroy dozens, if not hundreds, of homes. The final tally the next morning was 3 homes. All of the homes in our neighborhood emerged intact, some with charred brush right up to their yards.

It was a humbling, spiritual, and emotional experience that brought neighbors closer together and reminded us that nature is what it is.

Also in 2010, we lost Christine’s paternal grandmother Elna Nielsen. I knew her for years before I met and married Christine. She was a vibrant, loving, wonderful woman who definitely left her mark on the world.

We recognize and acknowledge many of our friends, neighbors, and family members are struggling these days with employment and other economic woes. It is our hope that new congressmen and local elected leaders, with a fresh appreciation for the U.S. Constitution and the philosophy of our Founding Fathers, can steer us in the right direction and back to being a productive, successful people.

With that being said, Utah does seem to be one of the best, if not the best place to be right now.

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! Thank you for your kind indulgence and have a happy New Year!

Sincerely,

Doran, Christine, Maya, Lucy, and Eli.

A lot of people have written up their thoughts and their experiences about going through the Herriman “Machine Gun” fire 19 September 2010. I’ve had some friends ask me to do the same. One friend asked me to specifically to highlight the preparedness aspect of our experience.

We’ve lived in the Herriman area for about seven years. During that time, we’ve seen a handful of fires on the hills south of us, usually ignited by lightning. These have usually been small fires and quickly contained by firefighters. So when we heard there was a fire burning in the hills Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t terribly shocking news.

When we came out of church after 4:00 p.m., the sky was considerably smoky to the point that the light from the sun had taken on an orange-ish hue. That was remarkable, but it still didn’t really concern any of us. We carried on with our plans just as most everyone did.

We had been invited to my parents’ in West Valley City for dinner. I decided to drive out there on the Bacchus Highway instead of using the usual route on Bangerter Highway. I wanted to see if the Bacchus route, with fewer stop lights, would be as fast, despite having to drive further to get to the artery.

I drove down 6000 West to 11800 South and then went west toward the Bacchus Highway. As we headed west, I looked south and was really taken back by the visual of the smoke plume coming off the mountain. It was suddenly obvious to me then there was a potentially serious fire burning on the mountain.

We continued to my parents’ house and had dinner. My brother had driven from Utah County and remarked on seeing the smoke as he drove north on Interstate 15.

The smoke was obviously affecting many in the Salt Lake Valley as the winds carried the smoke north. Christine got on the computer at my parents’ house and read a news story about how residents in The Cove were being evacuated and the amount of smoke was causing problems because it was limiting visibility. We decided to head home after 7:30 p.m.

As we drove south on Bangerter Highway, our level of concern began to elevate. The mountain was no longer encompassed by just a plume of smoke, but there was also a prominent red-orange glow that become more and more prominent as darkness set in.

After we turned onto 12600 South to head into Herriman, we began to notice throngs of people pulled over to the side of the road and out of their cars with cameras, video cameras, cell phones, and binoculars, gazing southward at the fire on the mountainside.

It was a spectacular sight, nothing like you’re ever used to seeing at the south end of the Salt Lake Valley. It evoked memories of the visuals of Mordor from the Lord Of The Rings films. One of my neighbors later wrote he had been joking Sunday he was living near “Mount St. Herriman” in a reference to the Mount St. Helens volcano eruptions in the early 1980s.

So far, the fire was merely an intriguing spectacle. Traffic was heavy for a Sunday evening, but it seemed the extra traffic was due to spectators. As we drove up the hill to our home, things were more chaotic. Residents and spectators were visible in nearly equal numbers as well as law enforcement.

Mandatory evacuation

We stopped at a close neighbor’s home where there was a gathering of people. There we learned of the evacuation order that had just been issued. One of our neighbors was starting to panic. “What do we take with us?!” he asked.

As we drove home, I started pondering the possibility we might need to evacuate. In my mind, I considered what we should get out of the house. Our important documents (social security cards, birth certificates, bank account information, etc.) were in a small Sentry fire safe. All our digital photos and lots of other valuable data was stored on our Linux file server in the basement.

When we got home, we told the kids to hurry and pack a day or two of clothes to wear. I went to our storage room and got the 72-hour kits we’d put together a couple years before, one for each member of the family.

Being an insulin-dependent diabetic, I carry fast-acting insulin with me pretty much all the time, but I also inject a long-acting insulin analog in the evenings, so I packed that with my basic toiletry items.

We put our dog in the van.

Our oldest daughter was worried about her pet rats she keeps in a cage in her room. I wasn’t really that concerned about them, but she and my wife convinced me we should take them to a friend’s house who could take care of them temporarily. Our daughter called her friend who agreed to take the rats.

We decided not to do anything about our two cats as they were free-ranging and, we figured, they could get away from the house if the fire got to it.

I disconnected our file server and took it to the garage and fetched our safe as well. My wife grabbed a box from our bedroom closet that had family pictures in it. We packed our clothes and items we were “saving” into the back of our van and the trunk of my wife’s car.

The entire time we were running through the house gathering items, police officers were driving up and down the road in their patrol vehicles running their sirens and talking over their PA horns saying, “Evacuate now! The fire is here!”

There were no firefighters in sight.

It took us about ten minutes to get everything gathered and packed into the vehicles. After I had pulled the van out into the driveway, I got out and quickly took a picture with my phone of the fire advancing toward our house from the west. My kids, especially my younger daughter, was hysterical inside the van that I would delay our escape to take a photo. As you might imagine, tensions were running a bit high.

Here’s the one photo I took of the flames advancing on our neighborhood.

Because we were taking the rats to our daughter’s friend who lived in a nearby neighborhood, we didn’t take the major artery roads out of our neighborhood. As a result, we didn’t run into any of the congestion others reported having to deal with.

After we dropped off the rats, my wife and I convened outside our vehicles for a few minutes to decided where we should go. We didn’t have any family close-by. My parents already had my brother and his son living with them, so there really wasn’t any room there. We considered the possibility we might be out of our house for several days and we’d want to be somewhat close to Christine’s work and able to get the kids to school. In the end, we decided to go to Sandy where there were several hotels.

We drove to Sandy and listened to the news on the radio as we went. Of course, the headline news was the fire in Herriman, but there wasn’t any information being broadcast that we didn’t already know.

We checked into a Residence Inn in Sandy and they offered us a special $65 rate because were evacuees. We got a room on the third floor with a window that afforded us a view of the South Mountain burning. There were others there at the hotel who were in the same situation as us. While the hotel allowed animals—and several evacuee families had animals with them—I called my parents and asked them to come get our dog.

We stayed up late, me later than the others, watching the news coverage on television (ABC4 and Fox13 did the best jobs). I was also online following the #herrimanfire Twitter feed, Facebook, and listened to a Utah Highway Patrol radio feed provided by RadioReference..com.

We heard a couple of our neighbors on the TV news, answering reporters’ questions via cell phone. Our neighbor Jody told ABC4 he could see our houses from where he was and he could see water being sprayed by firefighters either one the houses or behind them. In any case, he could tell, at that point, our houses were still okay.

I chatted with a couple of our neighbors via Facebook. One of them told me her “cop friend” had been in touch with her and let her know that all of our homes were still okay, save one. There was one home at the top of Friendship Drive, she said, that was burning.

(Thank goodness that story turned out to be false.)

I chatted with one friend on Facebook who lives a few blocks away from us outside the mandatory evacuation area. His family had left their home, but he stayed behind. He told me he could see a home in Sol Vista Circle that sits to the west of our house and it was still okay. This home is the only house in that circle and is surrounded by mountain terrain. I think everyone expected that house to burn just because it’s isolated and surrounded by fuel. My friend told me there were several firefighter vehicles in the circle and they had unloaded some heavy equipment to create a firebreak to the east beginning from that circle.

I found these photos on Facebook, taken by Greg Cutler, that shows the heavy equipment working behind the homes above Rose Summit Drive.

My friend said there had been looters out in the neighborhood, but they had been dealt with quickly by law enforcement patrolling the streets. He also took a few pictures and uploaded them to Facebook for us.

I called a couple of our neighbors and exchanged information with them. A couple of them were still in the Herriman area. Several other neighbors and friends and family of neighbors also exchanged information with me via Facebook or Twitter. The online communities were being well utilized that night.

I finally went to bed around 4 in the morning.

Thoughts and perspective in hindsight

Looking back, there are lots of things I’m glad we did or wish we had done differently.

Planning ahead as we approached our home was smart. Having our 72-hour kits ready to go and having all our important documents in one place (the safe) was also good.

We probably should not have left our cats behind. In the end, it worked out fine. When we arrived back home, the cats were snuggled in the garage just like they would be on any normal day (except the garage smelled like a campfire). Salt Lake County had set up a shelter for pets and other animals which would have been a good place to take our cats until we were able to return to the house.

Our 72-hour kits consist of basic hygiene items, water, food, and a “space blanket.” We didn’t really need any of these things for this event and it made us wonder if we should have a couple different kinds of 72-hour kits.

While Christine grabbed a box of family photographs to take out of our house, there were still several photo albums and another box of photos that were left behind. In a day and age where photos can and should be preserved digitally, it makes sense that all those photos should be scanned and stored on a medium we can take with us.

I regret all those times I passed up CERT training or HAM radio training. Fortunately, Herriman City just happens to be doing both in October, so I will be doing at least one of them so that I can be better prepared the next time an emergency like this occurs.

Herriman City did an excellent job of getting information out via Twitter and Facebook. Other methods, such as “reverse 911” seemed to have failed miserably.

While I was able to get in touch with several our neighbors in the hours after we were evacuated, we were out of touch with most of them. It would have helped greatly if we had cell phone numbers for all our neighbors.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this write-up, we really didn’t think much of the fact there was a fire on the mountains behind us until it was very obviously barreling down toward our house at a high rate of speed. In hindsight, knowing there was a fire on the mountain, relative humidity was very, very low, and winds were gusting upwards of 60-70 miles per hour, should have caused a lot more concern.

Insurance

Going through this experience gave us an opportunity to to think about our homeowners’ insurance. Our home was purchased as a short sale and, because of this and because the housing market is depressed at the moment, if our house were destroyed, a policy payout for “market value” would probably allow us to rebuild, but we wouldn’t be able to rebuild our house. We’d have to settle for something less than our house. For this reason, we’ve been talking about discussing changes to our policy with our agent so that if our house were destroyed, it could be replaced.

Staying behind

We’ve heard a few stories of people who stayed despite the evacuation order. For the most part, I think this is unwise. However, there were some residents to the west of us whose homes basically sit between our house and the three homes that burned. They saw the flames heading down the mountain toward their street, saw there were no firefighters on the scene to protect their homes, and took matters into their own hands using garden hoses to soak the areas around their homes to try to save them from the fire.

(Read more about this in this Salt Lake Tribune story.)

Upon learning about this from the online news story, we talked about it and decided, if we had to go through a fire like this again, I’d stay behind, as long as there were other neighbors doing it too, and try to set up a defensive position against the fire. Obviously, this is dangerous business, but if there are no firefighters there when the flames arrive, you either walk away and consign your homes to complete destruction… or you do something.

Like I said, I wouldn’t do it alone— that’s just not smart. But, if there was a group of us working together, I’d stay and fight the fire, at least until the professionals arrived.

Misinformation

In any emergency situation there is bound to be a lot of misinformation, if any good information at all. We were fortunate to have Herriman City sending out tweets as new information became available.

Herriman City did a good job of only sending out valid information. The media, on the other hand, was all over the place. They had varying reports on different stations saying that churches had burned, that dozens of homes had been lost, and more. I remember one station was actually carrying the governor giving a statement about the fire from the command center and when we changed the channel to another station, they had no idea the governor had even arrived in Herriman.

It seems the news media got their best information from Twitter and from cell phone calls from residents in the area (when cell phones worked.)

The problem of misinformation is another motivation to set up a reliable network of information sources ranging from online information and people’s cell phone numbers. I think, despite the problems with voice communications over the cell phone network, most text messaging was working.

Thanksgiving Point in Lehi held their first annual Thanksgiving Point Half Marathon today and I participated as a runner. This was my first long-distance race ever and I’m pleased to say that I finished and not only did I finish, I ran pretty much the entire course. I crossed the finish line at 2:27:40. Not bad for a first half-marathon!

Thanksgiving Point is using the marathon to raise money for a new children’s museum: The Museum Of Natural Curiousity. They plan to raise $500,000 over the next five years and started by raising over $30,000 with this first marathon.

I have very little knowledge of running dos and don’ts, but I tried to incorporate what I’ve picked up into my preparation for this race. I dialed down my training regimen over the last week, only running twice and for much shorter durations. I ate well the day before the race and had a bowl of cold cereal before heading to the race this morning.

About twenty minutes before the race started, I walked around for about five minutes to warm up my legs. Then I went inside, found a place to sit down, and tightened and stretched my shins so that I wouldn’t get shin splints during the first part of my run. Then I did some wall push-ups to make sure the backs of my calves were loosened up.

It was about 35 degrees (Fahrenheit) when the race started at 7 a.m. I had a long-sleeved shirt on under my technical race shirt. I pulled the sleeves down over my hands during the first part of the race because my hands were cold, but it wasn’t long before the sun was out and my hands weren’t cold anymore.

The course for the race started at the Thanksgiving Point water tower and followed trails around the Thanksgiving Point golf course, their tulip gardens, and then along a trail next to the Jordan River up to a park called Willow Park in Lehi. Then the race followed some surface roads back to Thanksgiving Point’s “Electric Park” where the finish line was.

The organizers had a nice number of volunteers along the course route to provide drinks, other aid, and direct traffic. There were 7 aid stations which featured water and sports drinks. Some also featured energy gels, energy bars, and fruit.

I spent Thursday and Friday flying to and from Pittsburgh, PA for a job interview. On Friday, I walked about 20 minutes in downtown Pitttsburgh in my dress shoes, and then in the Pittsburgh, Phoenix, and Salt Lake airports on my way home. When I got home Friday night, I had a nice blister on the ball of my left foot. I was worried about how that was going to affect my race. I didn’t know if I should “pop” it or what. I soaked it in some warm water before I went to bed and it felt a little better in the morning, but it was still there. I ran the race on it and while it was a little uncomfortable, it didn’t cause any serious problems. I had some aching in my left knee and groin muscles, maybe because I was favoring the foot that didn’t have a blister.

At the finish line, there was plenty more food to eat and even some massage therapists available for post-race massages.

After the race, awards were given out (I didn’t get one) and then they had some raffle prizes which included running socks, energy bars, Timex Ironman running watches, and two Garmin 405 GPS training watches. The Garmins were the last items to be given out and the last number they read off was mine!

So, it was an awesome experience. I got to say I completed my first half-marathon and got a Garmin 405 as well.

I don’t know when I’ll be doing another one of these races. Right now I’m just happy it’s done, but maybe in a couple weeks I’ll start thinking about doing it again.

Thanks to my family (including my parents and in-laws) that came out to support me as I crossed the finish line. I’ll have to get some pictures posted as well.

Anyone who’s been through some sort of big deal in their life is familiar with the annoyance that comes from dozens of family, friends, and other people asking for the latest on whatever it is you’re going through. I’m sure anyone who’s been divorced, had a loved one in the hospital, going through divorce, had a family member or close friend be involved in a big court battle, etc. knows what I’m talking about.

Our family has been going through a frustrating situation, but I haven’t really talked about it much, but those who do know about it have been calling me, e-mailing me, etc. to get frequent updates on the status, so I’m blogging about it so I can just say, “Go look at the blog.”

For the last year or so, Christine and I have been thinking about buying a larger house. We bought our most recent house in 2003 when the housing market was experiencing a low period. The house was a HUD repossession and had been trashed — or never taken care of — by the previous owner. We recarpeted, repainted, and repaired damage throughout. Over the years we finished a couple of bedrooms and an office in the basement and put in a yard with a watering system.

That house has served us well, but Christine and I had been looking at some of the houses in the newer developments near our house and wondering if we should upgrade. In fact, we made an offer on a home last year which was accepted. After the offer was accepted, we got cold feet and withdrew the offer because we realized we just were not prepared to commit to short sale moving into a newer, larger house yet. We hadn’t done anything to sell our house so we’d have to pay two house payments until our prior home was sold and who knew how long that would take.

After backing out of that, we finished our family room in the basement and made other minor improvements to the house. We still weren’t complete sure we wanted to sell the house because the family room was a nice addition and gave us a lot more breathing room.

Come Summer, we started seeing a larger home as a wise investment decision. Many of the larger homes near us were being listed at steep discounts by owners that simply could not afford them anymore. We began looking around at what was available and walked through many homes. Christine saw a nice house that caught her eye listed, but when we talked to our agent about it, it had been pulled off the market. Our agent said it hadn’t been sold so it might be relisted. Christine kept an eye out.

Finally, a couple of weeks later, Christine found the house again. It had been relisted a couple of days before. We talked to our agent, got a showing, and decided to make an offer on the house. Our offer was accepted. That was in August.

During the time we were looking at homes and making the offer on the nice house, we put our house up for sale. We had an offer in about three weeks and a closing scheduled for late September.

The closing for the house we were buying was scheduled for mid-October. Christine and I had a vacation scheduled at that time and had it moved to the 22nd of October. As the date approached, the messages we were getting from the selling agent was that they weren’t ready to close.

A little background: As we dealt with the selling agent, the house really started sounding like a short sale because there was talk about them having to get banks to sign off on the sale. But, they never represented the sale as being a short sale. If it was, there would have been additional paperwork, specifically a short sale addendum, involved in the contract.

Well, as 22 October approached, the selling agent indicated they would not be able to close. He blamed it on the bank (or banks). We had arranged to rent our older home from the new owners for the month of October so that we would have a place to live until we closed on the new house. If we didn’t close on the newer home, we’d have to make new living arrangements because we had to be out of our previous home by the end of October.

Nothing happened on 22 October. We gave them a few more days to surprise us with a closing and then proceeded to move everything into storage units. One of Christine’s coworkers said his in-laws would let us live in their basement while we waited for things to come together. We were hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but in the end it did.

We’ve been living in a basement, out of suitcases, since 31 October. We extended the closing until 13 November, but as of today, the selling agent has said they will not be able to close then.

The good news, if there is any, is that the selling agent said today they have written approval on at least one of the banks involved in the selling (apparently there’s stuff between a first and second mortgage that has to be resolved).

So, we’re extending one more time, to 25 November. The selling agent expressed confidence to our agent we’ll be able to close before Thanksgiving.

Our theory is this: The sellers we’re dealing with is a third party to a short sale. They’re working directly with the bank to buy the house in a short sale at a price lower than what we’re offering. As a result, when the sale is completed, they’ll make a few thousand (or a few tens of thousands) in profit. So, technically, we’re not involved in a short sale, but the people we’re buying the house from are.

Should this be legal? Maybe, but I think they should be required to provide full disclosure. It’s a little unethical to paint the sale as not being a short sale when in fact it is. Short sales are historically difficult because the banks involved generally take a long time to move.

We’re very grateful to the Hancocks (the older couple whose basement we’re living in) for their benevolence and hospitality. We’d be in a much worse mess if we didn’t have their basement to call a temporary home.

We’ve been looking at other houses on the market, but nothing really compares to the house we’re set to buy.

We’ve considering renting an apartment in the interim so that we’re not taking too much advantage of the generosity of our hosts upstairs. If this looks like it will go beyond November, we may do exactly that.

In the meantime, we’re crossing our fingers (once again) for a closing sometime before 25 November.

Maya and Lucy started school today. Our neighborhood elementary school, Foothills Elementary, is on a year-round schedule, so that is why they're starting so early compared to traditional schools. Maya started fifth grade and Lucy started second grade. Eli will be starting kindergarten, but he'll be on a traditional schedule as he is attending an all-day kindergarten program provided by our day care provider.

Christine went with the girls to school this morning and took a camera, but it had dead batteries, so I went this afternoon and got some pictures after school. You can see those at <http://picasaweb.google.com/fozzmoo/MayaAndLucyStartSchool2008/> or enjoy the embedded slideshow below.

"Hello!" to the couple of people who actually visit my blog and to the hundreds of people who accidentally read it in syndication.

Our family just got back yesterday from southern California. My parents took everyone to Disneyland and we did some other stuff as well. This was my first time to Disneyland since I was five years old and the first time for my wife Christine and our children.

Weather was an issue while we were in California. A tornado warning was in effect on Thursday -- the night we arrived and flood watches were in effect on Saturday evening. We were fortunate to have pretty decent weather on Friday and Saturday, the days we actually spent walking around inside Disneyland. Being that this time of year is about as off-season as Disneyland gets, we were able to visit a seemingly maximum number of attractions within the park due to short or non-existent lines.

The kids got their mouse-ears hats with their names embroidered on them, and got to spend a lot of time with their cousins. On Sunday, we drove down to Long Beach and walked through the aquarium exhibit there and then, between torrential bursts of rain, drove up the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) and visited a beach so the kids could see the ocean. Unfortunately, the weather didn't really lend well to actually playing in the water. Oh well. There's always next time.

When we returned to Utah Monday afternoon, our flight was delayed over an hour due to blizzard conditions in Utah. All in all, however, it worked out great and we all had a relatively good time.

Yesterday, our 8 year-old daughter Maya broke her arm playing on monkey bars... again.

See, she broke the same arm, but it wasn't really all that serious. She thought she had merely sprained it (which she had done before... again, from playing on monkey bars), but it kept hurting. When we took her to the doctor after two weeks of not getting better, he X-rayed it and determined she had a hairline fracture. At that point, the healing had already begun and he said a cast was optional. Considering how active she is, we opted for the cast to be on the safe side.

Well, yesterday she was playing on monkey bars and fell. We're guessing she landed with her hand outstretched. The force of the fall broke her upper-arm bone just above the elbow. The medical term is "type-3 supracondylar humerus fracture." It is apparently a common fracture in kids.

Here's a site I found that explains a lot about it: <http://www.dynomed.com/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/pediatric_orthopedics/Supracondylar_Fracture_of_the_Humerus.html>

Maya went in for surgery around 8. Christine called me right around 9 and the doctor told her the surgery went well, but that Maya's break was pretty bad. He indicated there was a splintering of the bone which they had to use an extra pin to compensate for.

The fracture is a type-3 because it is the worst classification of displacement. If the fracture were only type-1 or possibly type-2, she would not have needed surgery at all.

Before the surgery, the doctors did some tests to make sure Maya's nerves were not affected by the fracture. They did things like touch her fingers while she had her eyes closed to see if she could identify which finger they were touching. They asked her to do different motor actions with each of her fingers as well. She did well on everything except lifting her fingers up from a clenched state. The doctors said this probably means there was a stretching injury to her radial nerve, but that there was a small possibility of some nerve damage due to the fracture. Only time will tell.

You can read about radial nerve dysfunction here: <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000790.htm>.

Finally, over the next 4 days or so, we need to watch closely for swelling in her arm. If it swells too much, a syndrome may develop in which the swelling compresses nerves and/or blood vessels, thereby causing complications.

Maya stayed at the hospital last night for observation. She came home this morning and is feeling pretty good. The doctors said her motion had improved as well.

Maya will not be going back to school on Monday. Next week is her last week of school (year round school) and there's a possibility she will be absent for all of it. If she does go, she will need to keep her arm elevated-- perhaps using a pillow at her desk--and she won't be able to go to recess.

Just uploaded some highlights from our Memorial Day weekend vacation to Bryce Canyon to my Picasa site. Check it out. I think we took some good pictures.

How's that for a record amount of time of not posting anything to my weblog/journal/rantpage?

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving came and went. Christine and I went to her parents' house this year. Adam and Melissa switched their schedule so they'd be going there this year too. Seemed like almost everyone else was there this year too, so next year it will be crickets.

The Colorado tour

The week before Thanksgiving, I accompanied Sons Of Nothing on a four-date tour across the mountain region of Colorado. Stops included Steamboat Springs, Edwards, and Breckenridge.

We were excited about Edwards and Breckendridge because it was the start of the ski season. While the performances were "on," the audiences were thin -- probably due to lackluster promotion.

The two shows in Steamboat Springs were well-attended. The last show of the tour was at Mahogany Ridge in Steamboat Springs. We had never been there before, so we had no idea what to expect. It was, essentially, a bar/restaurant with a raised, carpeted platform at one end of the dining room. They had a faiirly decent sound system, but no lights. Apparently, they expected us to bring our own lights with us, which we didn't understand. Wal-Mart saved the day and we hung three clip-on lights with colored party bulbs in them -- just to get by.

This tour also marked the return of Derek "Goozbach" Carter to the roadie crew. Derek was, as always, great fun to have along and was a hard worker. When we arrived in Breckenridge, we had some extra time, so he hit the slopes to do some snowboarding. It seemed like he had a lot of fun, except for when he hit a patch of ice and caught himself with his left temple. After that, he just looked like an abused, unappreciated roadie.

During this trip, I finally got around to writing some automation for the visual aspect of the show. Up until this trip, I was typing commands into an SSH session by hand to start and stop each visual presentation on the screen(s). For example:

The most automation I'd had prior to this was creating macros for running mplayer and xine (like that vid macro shown above, which runs mplayer fullscreen).

My ultimate goal has always been a system with a database backend that stores cues for each song and a CLI frontend for triggering cues. I figured I could make it extensible enough it could be used for visuals, audio effects, and lighting (via a DMX controller). Because of this grandiose goal, I didn't really make any progress toward it.

On this trip, I got fed up with having to remember all the parameters to the screensavers I was using. So, I whipped up a couple shell and Perl scripts to macro-ize the screen savers so I could sstart them up and stop them with a single command. I also created a shell interface for the system as well. It made things so much easier. The audience at the last show at Mahogany Ridge were privy to the best visuals to ever accompany Sons Of Nothing. It helped there wasn't much light to distract them from the screen. :-)

It is somewhat ironic I also decided I'm removing myself from touring with Sons Of Nothing after this trip to Colorado. It's for a million reasons, it seems, I came to this decision. Some of it has to do with my family missing me when I'm gone. Some of it has to do with my growing tired of being around really drunk people. In the end, I've had a great time doing it and I'm ready to start up a new hobby, probably with my family, to try. Maybe paintball (/me winks at Jayce^). Maybe experimental rocketry. Maybe agility trials with our new dog.

I'm still going to be involved with the band and might still show up to do visuals and effects at a show if they need me, but I plan on concentrating on the band's website and the marketing/promotion side of things. Who knows?! I might continue to record my unique style of spoken word on future SoN recordings. :-D

"RRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrip!"

Recently, a close friend of mine wasqdivorced from his wife of ~15 years. Learning of this and helping my friend deal with the thick stew of emotional upheaval he's found himself in has been a difficult experience. Honestly, I really dislike seeing people -- especially people I care about -- go through something like this. I've been through a handful of divorces as a close bystander and I know it takes time, more than anything else, for someone to get through it and get back to being a stable, productive individual.