Septoplasty

Yesterday was a different kind of a day from the normal grind. We all got up at the same time except my wife who woke up 30 minutes early. Since it was senior day for our son who was graduating from public high school, he decided to drive himself to school for the first time ever. They let the seniors out of school early after lunch and I told him we would not be home early to pick him up. We left the house a bit earlier than we expected and arrived at the hospital 30 minutes before the scheduled time of 8:30am. My wife was due to have her septoplasty at 10am and we began the waiting game. I took me Apple MacBook so I could spend the time either writing my book or learning Hindi. When we sat down in the general waiting area, I tried to see what wireless networks were available. There were two secure and one open wireless and so I was all set with internet access to learn some Hindi using Live Mocha. My wife was a bit nervous so it helped that I was not trying to talk to her but acted as if it was a normal situation. She had been given a paper that had her number on it and periodically an announcement was made but the numbers seemed to be totally random and unrelated numbers to the others we heard being called out. Finally she heard her number and after just a couple of minutes the initial insurance forms were complete. We then moved to the other side of the general waiting area at the front of the hospital. It was more like a huge room decorated like a high end hotel waiting area as the chairs were very nice to sit in. I know my wife did not notice such things, but I was in that area for the next six hours! At the desk on the other side of the room at the entrance to the surgery rooms, we were given a buzzing handheld device like is done at restaurants to notify you when your table is ready. It buzzed many times throughout the hours to tell us we were needed for certain events. It was just a great experience overall to make the best of place where no one wants to be. The deviated septum was fixed without any complications and we arrived home before 3pm. Our daughter was waiting to help in what ever way possible, so that was a pleasant but expected surprise for my wife, who needed the attention and help through the rest of the day. She had to sleep in a reclining chair all last night but they gave her really strong medicine to knock her out. I have to go find out how she feels...

relaxing weekend

Friday was one of the worst days I have had at work in a long time. It seemed like everything I touched failed to work correctly. I tried to fix one problem and and would cause another. My co-worker was on vacation and obviously could not provide me with the wisdom I needed to solve the many problems I was causing. I was very frustrated by the time I got home. Plus I was running out of options in finding an audio engineer for the upcoming Aradhna concert. At least when I got home and checked my personal email account, I found a couple of people offered to help with the sound, so by the end of the day I had good news to make me feel better about my bad day at work.


Just last weekend it was snowing and was under 20 degrees, but this weekend the temperatures rose to 80 degrees. That was quite the 60 degree temperature difference in just a few days time. That meant it was time to get outside and mess around. I cleaned up the garage to celebrate the warm weather and then washed both of our vehicles. Not too exciting, but then the big event came on Sunday afternoon. I finally took the time to mount the painting of the children on our living room ceiling. We put it on a wall so the kids would not have to see it all of the time but my wife and I could look at it as often as we wanted to. Since it is so large we did not want it to be in our faces all of the time. It looks very nice up around 10 feet from the floor on the wall I filled in. I took a photo of the painting on the wall with our new $17 Logitech webcam which we used to talk using Skype with our son in Korea last night.

This is the meaning of the words on the painting:

Prema milana ko nai-na tarase
The eyes long to be united in love
Ghaayala mana tori nagari aawata
Wounded hearts come to your city
Saba eka chana mei swaagata paawata
All, in an instant, find welcome

Kwangju, South Korea

This is a blog about the place in South Korea where my wife grew up. Her maiden name is Dietrick:

Kwangju, South Korea

This is the house where my wife grew up:

Valentine's weekend

The last two days seemed like a long weekend, but in this case it was a good thing. At lunch time yesterday as I was talking to a friend I have known for almost 30 years, the mail woman rang the doorbell. I initially ignored her as I was on the phone and I thought someone else would get the door. Then she knock on the door leading to the garage in desperation. I walked out the front door and found her in the garage. She said I had to sign so she was determined to find me. She had the painting of the family as it arrived from India on Valentine's Day! I handed it to my wife and on opening it we noticed the painted was folded and had creases in it, which was the only thing wrong with it. Everyone had to make comments about it as they all saw the canvas laying on the floor. This morning I searched on the web to figure out how to re-stretch the oil painting to fix the creases. I found a useful video by artist Michael Bell which was on this wikiHow site. I found a couple of sites that sold canvas stretchers, which are really specialized pieces of wood. Then I found this site that explains how to make your own. My middle son and I followed these and now we have a stretched canvas, which is still creased, but at least it is mounted properly.



Yesterday afternoon my wife and I went to see Billu Barber for our anniversary entertainment. Since it had Shah Rukh Khan, we expected to be entertained. We have recently had no such things happening as we watched rental Indian movies. The new ones coming out are just not that good. This one on the other hand had us laughing like crazy near the middle and crying at the end only like King Khan can do. Plus it had a a couple of great points. Billu was very poor and felt ashamed to bother the famous movie star who was his childhood friend. Everyone else wanted to take advantage of them both. Billu's family had to decide if it really matter whether they met the famous movie star when they would always have their father. As usual I would much rather see a movie with a point than just be entertained. I feel like I did not waste my time every time we leave the Indian movie theater. I cannot say the same for other movies.

Famly Painting

For my wife's birthday this year, I had a movie poster artist in India paint the children through a friend of mine who is living in India. This is the resulting painting which is 6 ft x 4ft.

adrenaline rush

Only twice in recent memory has my heart raced so fast I thought it was unhealthy. This past week was one such occasion. At around 3am one night my wife sits up with her back absolutely straight and says "What's that?" loudly. That obviously woke me up and I start to think what she could have possibly heard. Was there a fire she smelled? Was one of the kids coming home in the middle of the night hurt? Was it her woman's intuition kicking in or just a bad dream? It turned out to be a mild anxiety attack, but my heart had already picked up the pace as if I was running for my life as the adrenaline rushed through my heart. That is such a crazy feeling.

The last time my heart saw massive amounts of adrenaline, we lived in San Antonio. At about the same time in the middle of the night, I saw lights in the living room being turned on and off. Our master bedroom was on the first floor and it was right next to the pool on the outside and the living room on the inside. At first I thought it was a bit odd as the kids typically turn them on to get something to eat but don't turn them on and off. I initially woke up as I thought I heard someone walk by our window and brush up against the bushes and make some noise. So when the lights kept being switched on and off, I immediately thought a thief had broke into our house. Off to the races went my heart beating much faster than normal. I kept wondering whether I should get up and check on it or not. One of my middle son's friends was beat up by a local gang down the road from our house, so I also knew there were bad elements around that I did not want to see. If only I had a metal baseball bat under our bed I would feel better about going to see who was testing our lights. By the time my heart calmed down the phone rang. Now that was odd turn of events. I was so happy as I hoped that would scare away the burglar. Sure enough the lights stopped flashing. After waiting a couple more minutes I went out to see what was going on. As I entered the living room I saw police car lights flashing in front of our house. Now I was saved as the cop must have caught the intruder who was wasting my electricity! He came to the front door and rang the doorbell. I look out and I see one of my sons in the back seat of the car with handcuffs on. I was so confused my head was spinning. Such harsh treatment for switching the lights on and off! Turns out the story was just beginning to get complex. I asked the policeman if he saw anyone turning lights on and off in our house. He said he did not. I asked him how long he had been there and he said a few minutes. That was odd. He then said he was writing my son up with a warning for being out after the 11pm curfew, which existed for everyone under 18 in San Antonio. They do this since there is so much gang activity at night that they don't want good kids getting involved I suppose. He goes and gets my son and after unlocking the handcuffs brings him to the front door. As I close the door I learn even more facts.

Sometimes life is much stranger than fiction as I have learned from our two years in San Antonio. I was very angry at my son but glad he was safe. I asked him if he saw the lights being turned on and off and he said the policeman handcuffed him to the car so he did not run away. He then went around the back of the house and somehow entered the back door. For 30 minutes he was going through our house! He told our son that he was checking for a photo of him to prove this was his house. I had read many stories in the San Antonio newspaper of dirty policeman, because of all of the drugs and gangs. I guess I had just met one. He had no right to come into our house, but he had denied being in it to my face. Just one of many extremely odd things that happened to use when we lived there.

Of course the real story as to why my son was out that time of the night was only amusing looking back at it. A mutual "friend" of two of my sons was, as I would find out later a drug dealer and generally a very weird person. He had come by to get my son since he knew he played the guitar. He knew where a bunch of skateboarders hung out at night and wanted to have a rock concert for them. He broke into an abandoned grocery store, let all of the skateboarders in so they could skate around on the floor while being entertained by music. The was all premeditated as for weeks he had smuggled in sound equipment. My son was like the rock star, showing up for the concert with everything ready to go. The problem was they turned the amps up so loud that a policeman getting gas at a nearby gas station heard the noise and investigated. All of the skateboarders fled by running into a nearby field. My son and another one jumped into the car belonging to the bad "friend" and turned on the car and tried to escape. By then a bunch of cops were there and they could not escape the parking lot, so they got caught. This bad "friend" showed up at our house a couple of nights later and I asked him about what happened and banned him from our house in the future. He said he crawled up into the air vents and stayed there until the next morning. The police confiscated his car and all of his sound equipment. I did not feel sorry for him in any way. That was not the last we heard of this bad "friend" as my oldest son attached himself to him for some strange reason, but that story will have to wait for another day.

25 years

I wish I could say that is how old I am, but it turns out that is how long my wife and I have been married. I think it must be unusual in the USA to have been married only once and to have lasted for 25 years. We have seen many good and bad times together and still like each other, which has to be even more odd!

We met under the most unusual circumstances. I was a volunteer with a Christian group in India and Bangladesh for two years. I was not too keen on returning to university, but the leader of the group I was with in Bangladesh suggested I finish my degree and then go to the Middle East since my degree was in Geophysics. The summer I was to return, I went to visit an elderly couple one more time who I frequented since they were the only people I knew personally with A/C. He was a medical doctor and had spent many years in South Korea and had recently moved to Bangladesh to start more clinics. He suggested I visit a man named Mr. Dietrick, who was well known at VaTech (see an earlier post), as he had worked with his son in the same hospital in Korea for many many years.

Upon arriving at VaTech that fall, I went back to my home church to see who was still there that I knew. It is common in a university based church to see tremendous turnover, and I fully expected to arrive as an unknown. On the first Wednesday I arrived at our weekly home meeting, I was greetly openly by people I never met before. It turns out that my monthly letters were read in that home so every one had gotten to know me that way. I asked if anyone knew where Mr. Dietrick lived and he lived just down the street and his grand daughter was there visiting in this very house that evening. She fully expected me to be some old man she had been hearing about in far away India, but was pleasantly surprised to find me to be her own age and quickly offered to take me to see her grandfather.

Things progressed quickly and even though another girl really liked me as well, I decided Sarah would be a great choice since she had lived her whole life overseas in South Korea. It was really a mutual feeling I came to find out. Each Saturday a group from the church, including Sarah and I, would go to the local nursing home to visit elderly people and just be friends with them. We started spending time together in many different settings. We even played tackle football and she still liked me after my aggression raised it's ugly head on the field as we were on opposite teams.

With Sarah's family still in South Korea and my family was split apart from a divorce when I was 14 years old, we really had no hope of a family get together for a wedding. My mother said she would not come if my father came, so after many days of contemplation, we decided to take the leap and elope. We thought Valentine's Day would be cute, but it was during the week, so we planned for Friday, 11th of February 1983. We had a big problem that day as it snowed 18 inches the night before. In desperation, I walked all the way to her house a few miles away and spent a couple of hours digging her car out. That certainly was an interesting way to start 25 years of marriage.

The next decision we had to make was where we would live. We decided we could just live in my room in our two bedroom apartment with my roommates. They had grown up with none brothers in their family so it should not be a big deal for them, or so we thought in our unclear thinking. They were so graceous for a several months and then "helped" us find another place nearby. I must say that first year certainly was interesting as we were two very hot headed people clashing frequently. I can truthfully say that it was all GOD's grace that we lasted 25 years together.

We have lived in different homes in places like Texas, North Carolina, and Saudi Arabia, the last of which is a story for another day. We have travelled to many different counties like England, Amsterdam, Turkey, Hong Kong, Singapore, and India. We have seen our kids go through many changes. One thing is constant, we are still together and learning what the word love really means. I am glad we got married.