Posts in category Family and Friends

The Heart of Virginia

Feb05
2009

Written by Rob

update 4:00pm PST: They’ve woken her up, but she’s still on a breathing tube (so she can’t talk) and the surgeon hasn’t removed the arterial balloon yet. That should be coming up in about an hour. She’s still stable and I haven’t heard of any complications.

2/6/09 update, 10:31am PST: Latest news is that she’s made it through the night and is stable. She’s out of anesthesia but still heavily sedated. The important thing though is that she’s stable and didn’t encounter any serious complications overnight. So no news continues to be great news. Will update as we hear more.

Virginia (Kristi’s grandmother) is out of surgery. For those of you who didn’t know, Virginia had a heart episode of some kind last Thursday night and was admitted to Memorial Medical Center here in Modesto early Friday morning. She’s been needing a heart value replacement for several years now, things finally went from bad to critical, and so circumstances made the decision for her: today she finally got the new valve.

We got home a couple hours ago, after spending the day in the cardiac waiting room. She’s still out; she won’t wake up until sometime late Friday afternoon. According to the surgeon, the valve went in smoothly, but due to some thickening in the heart walls (due to living with the valve condition for a long time) they had some difficulty getting her off the bypass unit. Her advanced age adds an extra layer of risk. But Virginia got through the four-hour open heart surgery and she is now stable and in post-op recovery.

The surgery is half the battle; most of the other half is the first 24 hours. If something goes wrong, it’ll likely go wrong late tonight. But if she can get through the first day and night, odds are she’ll have a long and difficult recovery but that she will recover. The doctors say that this new valve will last her over twenty years.

We’ll update as we know anything. In the meantime, please keep her in your thoughts and prayers. Thanks.

One Facebook To Rule Them All

Jan13
2009

Written by Rob

Facebook is insidious.

See, here’s how it works. It starts when a friend tells you about his or her recent experience with Facebook: they just created a page last week, and out of the blue was contacted by someone they went to high school with in 1987. And they’re way weirded out by it, but strangely intrigued then to see who else is out there. And they get sucked in. Finally, out of curiosity or pique or just plain boredom, you ask your friend, is it worth my time to create a Facebook page?

Probably not, they say. So you shrug and let it go.

But then they go on some more about the recent Facebook contact from a college friend, the most likely to succeed kid, who turns out to have dropped out of college in 1991 to become a sidewalk balloon animal artist in San Francisco.

You create a page and figure, what the hell, it takes two minutes and probably won’t amount to anything, but we’ll see what there is to see.

As they say, the first hit is always free.

Two months later, you’ve bookmarked your Facebook page as your browser’s home page. By this point you’ve come into contact with at least a half dozen people you went to school with, marvelling every day at the discrepancies between the memories in your head, the photos as they actually were at the time, and the people they became. It’s like a freakin’ high school reunion, only without the cover charge, airline fare and bad music. You scour the network for the Facebook pages of absolutely positively every single person you’ve ever met. You send friend invites left and right.

Somewhere along the line, you discover Facebook applications. At first, it’s just stupid stuff. Send your friend an email drink! What 80’s movie are you? That sort of thing. But sooner or later you get to the better ones, the games, and then it’s all over: you never have to leave Facebook again.

You become obsessed with your Pathwords score.

You spend your evenings marauding with grenade launchers, raiding fellow players for small fortunes in Mob Wars.

The PS3 collects dust. Your pets keep pointing to the empty food bowl in desperation.

And so it eventually comes down to this: friends of friends posting on your wall, you posting back, begging and coercing each other to join your respective Mobs, running across the girl that you had a killer crush on in the 11th grade who apparently grew up to be a complete ditz, chatting with the high school acquaintance that wouldn’t give you the time of day in 1989 but seems to think you were best friends, spending almost as much time with Facebook mail than with regular email, using Facebook IM more than regular IM, using Facebook more than you’re using the phone, posting photos, looking through your friends’ photos, commenting on their photos because they commented on yours and what the hell my GOD your hair looked so bizarre in 1989 what the HELL were you thinking, yeah I know it was a hot style in 1989 and yeah I thought so at the time and did you see what this guy does for a living have you read his blog there’s a comment there to comment on and he asked people on his Wall go to read his blog and comment on it and..

*HEAD EXPLODES*

Robert Frost was wrong. It’s neither fire nor ice. In online social networking shall the end visit upon us all.

Posted in Diversions