Camping and a Close Call

I had a few days off at the start of this week so we loaded up our camping things and headed out to our favorite spot. Heather's family were coming out to join us so we started out by finding a couple of nice sites in the nearly empty campground.

There was a deer at the end of our campsite but once it started to walk away I turned my back on it to talk to Heather and didn't realize that Orco's leash wasn't locked. The next thing I heard was the loud sound of hooves hitting the ground and Heather screaming. I turned around to see the deer stomping our little dog! Orco had walked under the picnic bench and approached the deer to say hi.

I pulled Orco back to me and he slid over on his side with his legs stuck striaght out and his neck arched backwards. He seemed paralysed and was drooling and making a scary noise in his throat. He also had a lump above his ear which seemed to be puffy with fluid. The family was gathered around him and crying and I was certain that he was dying. I apologized and said that it was my fault for not watching him properly and the kids, through their tears, tried to tell me not to blame myself.

I set the timer on my watch and we left Heather and Ella at the campsite while us boys jumped in the van and headed to the city and the closest open vet clinic. One of my officer coaches once gave me the advice, "Don't drive your personal vehicle like you drive a police car; but also don't drive a police car like you drive your personal vehicle". I admit that I may have broken that council, but we got Orco to the vet in record time and staff took him into the back room.

The waiting was difficult but it gave us a chance to offer a few more prayers. After the xrays, the Dr. gave us the almost impossible news: Orco had sustained a small skull fracture and a scrape to his toe, but had no other broken bones or injuries. He stayed at the clinic overnight and was well enough the following evening to come home with us. Eveyone is overjoyed that this little yellow dog survived and I am so relieved that I didn't have to break the news to the kids that their dog had died.

Orco is still taking some pain medication but is almost back to 100% of his old self. Everyone is spoiling him and he has been getting salmon for supper with his medication, is sleeping in our bed at night, and Heather is even using baby-talk when she speaks to him, something that prompted Deacon to say, "I like it when you talk to Orco like that." I feel that Orco is our family's once-in-a-lifetime-dog that we'll never be able to replace. I am glad that we didn't lose him after only two years.

After we knew that Orco was going to be alright, we had an awesome camping trip with Heather's parents (never thought I'd say that), and her sister and her daughters.

We only had time for one camping trip this year but it was an emotional experience that brought us closer together and showed us the power of prayer. But the biggest effect it had on us was to remind us that if we could feel this way for a fraggle of a dog, how much more important it is to keep each other safe.

C

 

Afternoon fun

It has been a really hectic month for us. Most of my days off have been filled with extra work or travelling and it was so tempting today to just laze around the house. Instead we went out and made some new memories. After a delicious breakfast of johnny cake, scrambled eggs, and bacon, we put the leash on the dog and went for a long walk up to the splash park.

It was nice and hot today so everyone appreciated the chance to play in the water and cool off.

Almost everyone. Our next stop was the river where I put Orco in the water to see if he could swim. He can, but he didn't seem to enjoy it; and it probably didn't help that I put him in the water a second time because some members of the family didn't see him the first time. After that, he did a lot of sitting on a towel in the sun.

Tyson found a fossil in one of the rocks lining the river. This may not be a big deal to some of our cousins who are routinely unearthing T-Rex skeletons and stuff, but he was excited about it.

Deacon was whining a bit to go home but he changed his tune when we started a competition to see how many times you could hit a metal flood-debris pole with a thrown rock. Deacon's count by the end was 72!
The sun and the water and the walking took its toll on everyone. We are back home and the dog is already asleep at my feet and I'm just about t

Test Post with Blogsy.

After 15 years of talking about it, our family is finally travelling to Thailand next month. I can't figure out how Heather and I managed to go there on our honeymoon. The way I remember it, we just bought two tickets and jumped on a plane a couple of days after the wedding. There was no other preparation or planning and even when we landed in-country, we didn't know where we were going. I wandered into the back of the train station office and asked the administrators for advice on where we should go. I settled on one of their suggestions and went back to the front of the office where I bought the tickets that would take us to within a ferry ride of Koh Samui. Koh means "island" and is not pronounced with a K but rather a G sound. With its glottal stop, the word sounds exactly like if you were saying the word "got", but cut the word short before pronouncing the T. The confusion in the english spelling comes from the fact that the corresponding Thai consenents have different sounds depending on whether they appear at the start or at the end of a word. Just like the ubiquitous noodle dish, Pad Thai, is actually pronounced "putt Thai" (like a golf putt). Anyways, the two weeks we spent on Samui were so wonderful, we continue to draw on those memories and those experiences 15 years later.

This trip is shaping up to be very different from that carefree adventure. First off, we have gotten immunizations for hepatitis, typhoid fever, and rabies and have an appointment to get everyone a prescription for malaria. And I am still worried about possible illnesses. When I was on my mission I contracted dange fever and was hospitalized for two weeks. If Heather or the kids caught dange fever, it would ruin our vacation. And if I caught it a second time it can be much more serious, resulting in internal bleeding. Instead of winging it, I have booked all of our accommodations in advance - and not easily either, owing to the fact that there are six of us. I have also been pouring over the best way to carry money, something that we didn't need very much of last time, but that we don't seem to have enough of this time. Amongst all of this planning, I was also trying to come up with a way to post on our blog and preserve as many memories as possible. We will be travelling light so I wanted to use our ipad to compose the posts and upload them whenever we find ouselves with wifi. My searches led me to the app Blogsy which is reported to be the current best solution to blogging on the ipad.

It was a $5.75 purchase at the App Store but I thought it would be worth it if it allowed me to easily insert and resize photos, something that the free Blogger app did not do. So far I am impressed with what I see. The above photo is a test of the sort of work flow I anticipate. I snapped a photo of my breakfast of avacado/tomato/ham eggs benedict on homemade focaccia bread and then transferred the photo wirelessly from my camera to the ipad. I then opened Blogsy, hit the "+" icon for a new post, and started typing. I tapped on the icon to insert a photo from my library and dragged the picture to where I wanted it in my post. There was some confusion initially becuase I got a "Problem" message telling me that the photo I was trying to use was copywrited, or that my blog was set to private, or that I was offline.

I was worried that I would have to confess to Heather that I'd just wasted $5 - this in the same week that I paid the vet to check Orco for strange sores in his arm(leg)pit, and found out that it was just acne and that our stupid dog is now a teenager. Anyways, I figured out that the real cause of the problem is that I was trying to import the photo from my Photo Stream which involves the cloud and some complications that I don't really understand, when I should have been dragging it from the Camera Roll. That aside, the process was easy and relatively quick, and double tapping the photo brings up the Image Settings dialogue, which allowed me to adjust the size with a slider. In this process I am not cropping or editing any of my photos and I dont want to use another app to edit because that will just slow things down even more. Fortunately, Olympus jpegs are so lovely that I have no reservation using them straight out of camera (ooc).

Here's a photo I copied from the Internet and posted at 85% of its original size. Hopefully it will show as a smaller photo in the post, but show full size when clicked on. It also shows what I should have done with our money instead of a trip to Thailand (Honda Valkyrie if you are interested).

Up to this point, I have done all of my work offline. I will now post it to the Internet and check to see how the spacing and photos turned out. While I'm doing that, here a picture taken with the ipad's built in camera:

And I am also going to experiment with the alignment on this one.
Deacon took this photo while we were driving somewhere.
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Ok, I am pleased with how that all worked out. The spacing of the text next to Deacon's photo was a little weird, but I usually centre my photos so it won't be a problem. I think this program is going to work great for our needs and I have encountered only two real problems:

1. If I accidentally hit the emoticon button on the keyboard (easy to do because it is right next to the shift key), it evidently causes a rift in the space/time continuum and a Blogsy "emojis not allowed" dialogue box pops up and can't be dismissed without closing the app and restarting.

2. For some reason, using the ipad to blog makes me more long winded and rambling. Sorry about that.

- C