I have been pretty silent as of late as Karin’s dad was quite ill.  Peter had prostate cancer for a number of years, and it was expected that it would eventually enter his bones.  He had bone scans every 6 months in order to detect when this occurred, and was warned that once it did he should be prepared for severe pain.  Once the cancer was in his bones, the prognosis was for no more than a year left.

Despite his ill health and onsetting dementia, my father-in-law still made his annual trip to California and Arizona for a month at the beginning of this year.  Upon his return it was obvious that his health had worsened, and his next scheduled scan confirmed that the cancer had progressed into his bones.

Even with his pain and rapidly declining health, he still showed his strength through his determination to be at family events.  Many of us did not expect to see him at his granddaughter Angela’s wedding, as he could barely sit up for more than an hour each day during the preceding week; but he showed his resolve by attending both the church ceremony in the afternoon and then a large portion of the evening reception.  This took a lot out of him, however, and he did not leave home again.

My mother-in-law Gertrude was faced with the fact that she would not be able to keep him at home much longer, even with several visits a day from palliative care nurses, but Father’s Day was approaching and she hoped to have one last day with the family.  Again he showed his resolve and sat in his easy chair in the living room all afternoon as his children and grandchildren gathered, but again it took much out of him and he did not leave his bed again.  We did not even see him during a several hour visit the next day, during which we visited the hospices in Langely and Mission, met with one of the palliative nurses, and made our decision to move him to the Christine Morrison Hospice in Mission.

He was transferred the next day, and just in time.  The facility is lovely, and it allowed Gertrude to stay with her husband 24 hours a day while he received pain management and care from nurses around the clock.  The facility even took great care to make sure that Gertude was cared for also, with meals available to her at any time, shower facilities for her, and even professional massages to help with stress.  Within a couple of days, the nurses told her that she should make sure that the family all knew that they should come say one last goodbye.

Peter Nickel passed away at 5:07 pm on Sunday, June 22nd.  It was a grey, lousy day all morning and afternoon, but once his suffering stopped the clouds parted and the sun shined down.  We all gathered at the hospice to say our goodbyes, and then we spent the past week planning and holding the funeral.  We laid him to rest on Thursday.  While it was a sad time for the family, we all were relieved to know that his pain had now ended.

Instead of documenting the events that were occurring, I was busy offering my support to others in the family.  I will miss Peter and value the time I did have to get to know him, but of course my loss is nothing compared to his wife and children.  If you want to know more of the events that occurred, both Karin and Waltrude blogged during Peter’s struggle. I would only ask that you not fill their blogs with comments offering your condolenses as they have ended their tears and are moving onward.

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WordPress made it fairly simple to transfer over all my Blogger posts and comments, but did not import other items; such as the list of blogs I follow, otherwise known as a blogroll. I could simply recreate the list in a 15 minute typing session; however, I decided a better idea might be to rebuild the list by sharing with everyone just what attracts me to return to each blog, adding each to my WordPress blogroll as I go.

I’ll start with the family blogs.

Karin’s Blog

My wife writes a blog called Self-Medicated (apparently, she does not like it when I medicate her). Like this blog, she began on Blogger and then moved at the same time as me to a WordPress blog hosted on a subdomain of our new site, PlayaParadise.com. She blogs about family, interesting life events, things she finds on the web, and all the other elements that are generally part of the class known as the Personal Blog. I follow her blog for obvious reasons, such as not wanting to ingest poisons inserted into my food by a vengeful, angry spouse; but also, as I’m the sweet loving person that I am, I do want to know what is happening in my honey’s life while I’m away at work and to know what is on her mind. Her posts as of late are updates on her progress towards creating a private section of our site for the family, which requires her to first learn to use Joomla, a content management software package. I just don’t have the time right now to help her much, but she’s doing great with it.

Matthew’s Blog

My stepson Matthew has his own blog with the exciting name of Matthew’s Blog . He is not a frequent poster, but generally you know that he is either extremely happy or very frustrated if he has posted, so it’s a good way for me to keep tabs on whether it’s safe to venture to his area of the condo. Lately, they seem to be happier posts, so that is good. Interestingly, his World of Warcraft character Rasgar blogs more often than he does. However, since Rasgar is not family, he’s has yet to earn a spot on my blogroll. Maybe if Rasgar showed me a little link love….

Cynthia’s Blog

Karin’s niece Cynthia started her blog before any of us, and encouraged the other members of the family to start their own. I had been thinking of starting one, but I have to give her credit for getting off her butt and doing it first. She has self-titled her blog Will-I-Ams (a play on her last name) and also writes a personal blog. Come to think of it, all the family blogs are personal blogs, so I guess I can quit categorizing each one separately.

Cynthia is a young mother who has a good portion of her day dominated by chasing after rug-rats; and as such her perspective is quite different from most of the rest of the family blogs. Reading her blog, I’m constantly amazed at all the events, functions, get-aways and activities she manages to attend while taking care of her two children. She has a lovely writing style, and I quite enjoy reading her adventures even when I don’t know the people involved.

Waltrude’s Blog

Waltrude is Cynthia’s mother and Karin’s sister. She and her husband find themselves bouncing between older parents that are beginning to rely on their children for care, and her own children dropping the grandchildren off to visit Oma and Opa. She therefore calls her blog The Sandwich Generation . Waltrude is deeply involved in her church, but also likes to sneak away for vacations with her husband. We might even have them convinced to come to Mexico with us this fall. She has not had much time to blog because of her commitments as of late, but now that the major ones are over we hope to see more from her soon.

As the oldest sibling in Karin’s family, she remembers much of the family back in Brazil and also is able to communicate with those who’s primary language is Portuguese. This is likely why she has taken on the role of informing everyone of happenings in the extended family, at first through email and now through her blog. Fear not, there are interesting items for those who are not family, an example being her recent trip report of a cruise she and her husband took from Los Angles to Vancouver.

Lucy’s Blog

Lucy is married to Karin’s brother Berto. At any family event, she’ll pull out her digital camera and be sure to document everyone that was there. If the event is at her house, she’ll have a blog post complete with pictures before you can get home. Even though my main hobby is photography, I don’t pull my camera out much at these events as I know Lucy will have grabbed group shots. She’ll need to watch out, though; I’ll likely be at it again after I get a digital SLR in a few months.

As so much of her blog is about family events, she has appropriately named it Our Family and Friends . Her latest post shows our Father’s Day get-together, in her pictures I’m the only one who didn’t feel the need to put on a coat and am therefore fairly obvious in my bright orange shirt.

Now that I’ve covered the family, expect to see reviews of my favorite blogs as I add each to my new blogroll, starting with local blogs.

Just a reminder to all the family, and anyone else that might have my on their blogroll; please update the link to point to this new blog!

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Once again I have fallen greatly behind. I guess most would just abandon blogging, but I do enjoy it and do want to work on improving my writing skills, so I won’t. I’m also surprised by the number of people that have discovered my blog on their own and either return or subscribe to the feed, and I appreciate their interest and don’t want to disappoint. There isn’t a huge number of such people, but just one or two is enough to appreciate, and it is more than that.

What is up in my life that has me so busy? Well, let’s just look at what I’m looking at right now:

• There is my full time job, of course.
• The summer semester of school has started, as books arrived yesterday for two out of three of my courses, and I actually read one for 20 minutes in bed last night until sleepiness made it incomprehensible. The first weekly assignment isn’t due for a while, but I need to get ahead now if I’m going to do 3 courses in the shortest semester.
• I have a spring semester course for which I need to schedule the exam, which will depend on when I figure I can fit in studying for it.
• I still haven’t squeezed in finishing the taxes. Ours are complicated by the fact that we have enough medical expenses to qualify for the deduction every year except last year, and you can make your “medical expenses year” be any 365 consecutive days that end in 2006. I have to figure out the best 365 days between Jan 2, 2005 and Dec 31, 2006; looking for the maximum deduction while at the same time leaving the maximum I can for next year. I found an extra couple of receipts from 2005, so I might have qualified for the deduction after all and might be refiling my 2005 return.
• In the meantime, Matthew has given me his paperwork to do his taxes and my dad is bringing his by today. We all have refunds coming, in which case the April 30th filing deadline in Canada doesn’t apply. The government is nice enough to give you unlimited time to file if they owe you.
• I also am behind on keeping our Quicken files up to date and either filing or shredding paperwork and receipts.
• Karin’s brother Carlos’ computer is having software issues again, and they will be dropping it by today or tomorrow. I think they are hoping for a speedy turn around.
• My dad and I are going to Vancouver today to get the parts for me to build him a computer. I’ve planned it out already, and will be very jealous of his machine until we finally get now ones here. I’ll therefore be spending this weekend and probably my evenings all week assembling and setting up his computer. I need to also pick up some parts for Rudy, another of Karin’s brothers, and find time to swing by his place and install them.
• The Canucks continue their playoff run, and I am watching those games out of the side of my eyes while doing other stuff. This is my one “luxury”, but even then I am multitasking because of all the other items I have going on.
• Matthew is living with us right now, and in addition to his taxes, I need to get him properly tracking his expenses in Quicken, help him prepare for his driver’s test next week, and other little things. I think I’ve got our wireless internet situation properly set up, so that is one less thing to work on.
• Sorting through all our old computer parts and either junking or selling what is not needed has ended up on the back burner each week; but needs to be finished as we don’t have the room for extra parts right now.
• It’s spring, so we need to clean up and organize our deck soon.

I know that almost everyone has a busy life, but mine was busy enough with just work and school. I have a little too much going on right now, and things like a social life just don’t fit into my days right now.

I have numerous posts that I have started, but due to all the other pressing items I still need to finish them. Some I will just have to abandon, they are simply too old. I see that a number of people end up on my blog doing Google searches from far off lands for Canucks playoffs information; so I won’t abandon those posts, but will combine them into just a few posts and then I’ve resolved to be good about posting after each game going forward. I can understand that if a fan is stuck on the other side of the world, reading blog posts about a game would make one fell the excitement a lot more than news articles. I plan to be living in Mexico one day, and while I can probably go to a sports bar there to watch a game, I’ll likely be reading blogs also since I won’t have friends, family and co-workers saying “How about those Canucks?” all day.

Also on my “Do Not Abandon” list will be restaurant reviews, as my feeling that there are not enough unbiased information about local eateries has been largely proven by the number of people that come to my blog through Google searches for information on specific restaurants that I have reviewed. Many of those people might never return to my blog, but I know I appreciate when I can find information ahead of time as to where to go and where to avoid. There are several places that we have stopped at this year that I have yet to post about, and so I will finish those up. After all, what does it matter to if I ate there yesterday or last month, a review is a review.

This has turned into a lot bigger post than I intended, but I think that is partially why I am so far behind; I leave things too long and what could have been some quick, short posts get combined into one long post quite often. So I apologize for once again getting so far behind, and I also apologize that there will be some dated posts coming up; but I will be keeping more up to date by posting more frequently from now on.

Well it’s Good Friday today, which is a holiday here in Canada; but when your job is working with Americans you then ignore the Canadian holidays. However, this is fine with me as it means I’m sitting at work, getting paid 2 1/2 times my normal wage times 10 as I work 10 hour days, and it’s a pretty slack day. I need it as the week has been pretty hectic until now.

So I’ve been a bad blogger lately, hardly updating; but it’s not just here that I am behind. Matthew has been having the financial troubles so many of us have when young, exacerbated by tendinitis in his arm that has messed up his employability. We have therefore had him move back in with us, which will be interesting in a one bedroom condo. Luckily it is a large condo with an area that we can give him as his own, other than the fact that we have to walk through it to get to the laundry/storage room. So far everything is working out.

There was a lot to do in order to get ready for him to move in. We had just done a major spring cleaning/purging a few weeks before; but now we had to make room for a third resident. I believe he appreciated the effort, because as soon as we were done he moved in; which was a week early. Next I had to buy and set up a wireless system so he could get his computer online, as he is on the opposite side of the condo from where our computer area is and we did not want wires running across our entire home. As soon as we were done that, Matthew’s computer began to act up. He had been complaining about issues for quite some time, but they would never manifest themselves when I looked at it for him. They finally did so for me, which was not necessarily a good thing, as after two days of troubleshooting I had to come to the conclusion that it was the hardware and not repairable. I therefore spent the next day building him a computer out of spare parts I have. The result is not a very powerful machine, but it will do him for now as we are all on a budget.

And that will be a large part of the theme for a while; we will be helping Matthew learn budgeting and other basic life skills. He is definitely not lacking in brains, but unfortunately he was brought up by his stepfather; who taught him that money grows on trees, work is not a 40 hour a week thing, do what you want when you want, etc. Matthew does realize this doesn’t happen in the real world, but the real world’s life skills are still not something that were ever taught to him, as our public schools leave that to be taught in the home. Luckily, we are poor… and so we can show him how to live poor but still get ahead.

Add in that work is busier than normal, I’ve had a lot of appointments to attend for my dental implants, school is ramping up for me again, and I never did get to finish the taxes or clean up my desk at home; and I begin to wonder if I’ll ever catch up. With regards to blogging; I have three posts that are all over half complete, and I plan to make time to finish them all this weekend. Hopefully I’ll get another couple out also, though I may hold them in reserve until I’m sure I have even more to say; I don’t want to make five posts in two days and then have writer’s block until next weekend. I’m also thinking that I need to reconsider the focus of this blog, as I had intended this to be part tech tips, but have really not had time for any so far.

So that’s my quick post for the moment…. more soon…..