This was the least of my concerns...

Does this give you an idea of what things have been like lately?

It all started on Saturday, January 20th. I taught two beginning sock knitting classes. Both were entertaining groups and I learned a lot about structuring the classes. I got home around 5 pm, pretty much worn out. I walked over to my parents' house to find them getting ready to leave for the emergency room. Daddy had not been feeling good lately but the doctors could not put a finger on the specific problem. Saturday the symptoms changed and it appeared that we were dealing with appendicitis. I ran to grab some knitting and went with them. When you are 70 and have a heart condition, you don't go just anywhere even for routine issues. We went to Crawford Long in Atlanta. It is about an hour and a half away and I had to drive them.

We got there around 7 pm. Around 4 am, the diagnosis of appendicitis was confirmed and Daddy was admitted to the hospital. I went to move the car from the Emergency Room parking to the regular parking deck. I accidentally lowered the back window instead of the driver's side when I got the parking time thing. The window would not come back up. Here I am, its 4:30 am and I am in a downtown Atlanta parking garage all by myself with a stuck window. I moved everything to the trunk, locked the glove compartment, and parked under a light.

Daddy asked the ER nurse for a roll of tape that they use on people and told me not to worry about it until one of my brothers got there.

Surgery was delayed since Daddy was on 3 blood thinners. While in surgery, he started bleeding and they had a hard time stopping it. After several days in ICU and then finally a regular room, Daddy is coming home today or tomorrow. Since I have their car, I'll be heading out to get them.

The rest of the window story...Armed with hospital tape, Brother H, Sister-in-law B, and I got the window in place. My brother wedged in a folded-up map to help hold the window. It held great...until about the time we were merging onto the interstate in downtown Atlanta. I told the T-man to turn on the heater and deal with it. We were not stopping there, and I needed time to think. We drove on to Hobby Lobby which was a previously scheduled stop (0f course) and I thought that surely they would have some plastic that I could use to cover the window. They did not. However, I bought some poster board which they put in a really big plastic bag. I asked for an another bag. Using the rest of the trusty hospital tape, I covered the window. Mr. T was very curious about how I would manage to cover the window and was impressed with my solution (especially since that meant lunch was the next stop, not Wal-mart to buy plastic). He said "Mom, you are smart!". Music to my ears since everyone knows that when you are 12, your parents don't know anything.

This has been a rough week on all of us, but God is good and we got through it all. It was a bad week for me to miss three days of work, but I still managed to finish up two major projects. I just have to catch up on grading papers and lesson planning. I was even able to teach the second session of the knitting classes that I started last week. Hopefully things will be more like normal this coming week.

Note to Anonymous: I didn't have the title just right. The card is "A Poem for Your Birthday: All About Farts" published by American Greetings. I got mine at Wal-Mart. The T-Man (age 12) thinks it is funny.

More on hospital knitting later. I have to get a shower and hurry up to wait on the doctors to decide when Daddy gets to leave.