Hi everyone. Here I am finally. I know it's been a long time. I'll try to cover everything since I wrote last, at least briefly. Spencer went to New Zealand and Australia on Jan. 3. Even though he wasn't going to be gone very long and I didn't want to go to those places with him, I missed him right away, as I was walking back to my car at the airport! The next morning I went with my parents for brunch. I LOVE brunch. And it was delicious. I would like to have brunch be a bigger part of my life. The next day after that, I drove to California. It was a fine drive, and I got to go straight down I-5 (the fastest way) because there wasn't any snow in the Siskiyou Mountains (at the California-Oregon border), so that was good. It was nice to go for a drive. I also tried out my new bluetooth wireless phone headset thingy. I bought one since in Washington and California it is now illegal to drive and talk on the phone while holding it. Eventually Oregon will be like that too, I imagine. It didn't fit me very well, but it worked fine, as far as the sound goes. It seems like the person you're talking to shouldn't be able to hear you, but the people I talked to could hear me just fine, so I don't know. My problem with it was the ear hook, but I fixed that when I got to Petaluma by putting a fuzzy pipe cleaner on it! Now my earpiece is comfortable AND stylish. I think that instead of being sold with those hard plastic hooks, they should all just be sold with pipe cleaners. That would be cheaper, too.

I spent a couple of days in Monterey, so that I could get my computer fixed. In order to do that, I stayed with Melinda in Santa Cruz. It was great to see her of course! I also stayed with Megan for most of the rest of my stay in Petaluma, which was also great! Since Megan is a knitter now, we spent our free time just yakking and knitting. That was fun. I also had a meeting with Karina, spent some time working and talking with Bill, and made a trip with him out to Bodega. I was able to surprise some people out there who didn't know I was coming, which was fun too. I returned to Oregon on Wednesday the 14th, and at sunrise, on my way away from the Bay (rhymes totally intended there), I stopped to take a photo:


I was back at my parents house for a day and a half, and that Friday Mary (my sister-in-law) called. She's due to have the baby anytime, you might remember. But she was calling because Chris (my brother) fell from his skateboard and was being taken to the ER by ambulance. Other skaters at the skatepark found him unconscious and bleeding from an ear, and called 911. I drove my mom right away to Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU-- one of the best hospitals around) so we could see him. It turned out that he got multiple skull fractures when he fell. We had a very nervous period of time while we waited to see if his brain was going to swell, and he was sent to the trauma ICU. Luckily, no pieces of his skull broke off, nothing was pushing on his brain, and his brain didn't ever swell. He had gotten a hole in the membrane around the brain though, and the drainage from his ear was the brain/spinal fluid that normally floats the brain. That night he was ill, which is common with people who have head injuries. On Saturday morning the leaking was bad enough that his brain was beginning to rest on his brain stem (not floating anymore), which was causing his heart rate to slow, because the heart is controlled there. I was in the room with him for a while, and as the monitor beeped alarm and he started to drift off, I called his name and nudged him awake to talk to me and keep his heart rate up. This was the scariest thing I've ever experienced in my life. Exposed shore waves in the Postelsia zone has nothing on standing there wondering if I was going to watch my little brother's heart stop.

His heart rate eventually stabilized and he was moved out of the ICU to the orthopedics department (because of his skull fracture). He was there for a couple of days, but his leaky ear wouldn't stop (it had to be stopped for 24 hours before he could leave the hospital). They eventually sent him to the neurology department, so they could install a drain that would drain the spinal fluid out through his lower back. The way this helps is that if the fluid drains out down there, then it won't put any pressure on the hole in his brain membrane, giving it a chance to heal up. He was in that department for a couple of days, and then was finally released from the hospital last Friday, one week and a couple of hours after arriving in the ER. I was there at least part of the day every day, missed work for a week (now I am very behind!), but I got a whole lot of knitting done.

The other thing that was very hard for me was that the whole first weekend of this going on, Spencer was hiking out in the bush in Australia, and I couldn't talk to him. Although my family was around, of course, I still felt lonely. I talked to him on that Sunday night finally, and he returned on Tuesday. After he got back, it was easier for me, just having him around.

Since going home, Chris is still in a lot of pain, but he's happy to be out of the hospital and he's getting some more sleep. The baby is still due any minute! He'll be able to go to the delivery, which was something we were all concerned about (him missing it) while he was in the hospital.

So that's the story of my last three weeks. I hope you all are doing well. I will try to write more regularly from now on, and hopefully very soon I'll show you a photo of my new niece, Mae!