Lutz, FL

At last, a week without major crisis -- indeed, with some forward progress. However, this means that in terms of our activities, they were -- well, let's admit it -- boring. And at this point, we are thankful.

It has been hard to realize we are connected to the rest of the world. While we occasionally have heard of winter storms to the north of us, here the weather for the most part has been balmy, sunny with occasional light rain, a little on the warmish side for us and especially the dogs. Where Ohio has been reporting temps in the teens, 20's, and even single digits, our highs have been 75-80. In the morning, even a light sweatshirt usually is too much.

So we have pretty much ignored the outside world, and feel better for it. We have fallen into a routine: up between 8 and 9 AM, walk the dogs, have breakfasts and pill call, check email, have lunch, walk the dogs again, correspond or just surf. Scott and Lew have taken long walks some afternoons, but Bobbi has continued her obsession with the Indianapolis Colts. After the standard 6 PM supper we have socialized with the grandchildren (Scott and Su too), surfed a bit more, and gone to bed between 10 and 11. And the next morning, we started over. The single bump in the routine was on Sunday, when everyone except Bobbi (she got to dogsit) went to Scott's church service.

One outside event did impact us. Lew's aunt Irene had emailed him to the effect that her brother (Lew's uncle Theo) had been hospitalized after being found unresponsive. She said that CVA had been ruled out, but could not be more specific than that. So Lew phoned his aunt Aggie, who lives near Theo in San Antonio. She had more details: he had been in the hospital 13 days, initially they thought he had a CVA, but MRI's and other data were negative. So the next diagnosis they picked on was meningitis, and they put him in isolation. But after four days they took that back as well. Finally they decided he had pneumonia, and that was the story up to the weekend.

Our own single item of news is that yesterday (Wednesday the 30th) we took Smokey back to Maitland to have his sutures removed. It went off without a hitch, and the vet reported he was doing very well, wound looked fine. She meticulously instructed us how to begin exercising his muscles, so we did not tell her that he already had been walking, bearing considerable weight on the leg, and in general trying to do more than he was supposed to do -- we pretty much had to restrain him. So we feel he has passed a major milestone successfully -- but we still are anxious parents.

We have another appointment to take him back for x-rays on the 14th. Assuming those are OK, we'll hang around a few more days and finally wend our way,, slowly and too early, back north.