Hello friends and family! I’m hoping to update you all through this website while we are doing the whole surgery thing in Vail during the first week of November. Please remember to bookmark or whatever so we can keep you all up to date with what’s going on without needing to write a bunch of emails. And if things go according to plan we should have videos! Exciting! At the very least we will try to update this with some photos and a quick message every day or so. Things are going to be crazy there, as we know from Becca’s sister’s prior experience, but we hope to keep you all in the loop somehow. So, to start things off here are some of the milestones we have already reached.

• Rented a condo for the week - come crash on the pull out couch and help out!
• Reserved a rental SUV for navigating the mountain passes and transporting all the stuff we will be coming back with.
• Arranged physical therapy appointments for after the surgery.
• Dealt with a bunch of insurance stuff.
• Ordered a shower chair.
• Ordered a back brace for Tim! I’ll be carrying a lot of stuff, possibly including Becca.

We’ve still got stuff to do, calling, confirming, cleaning, and most of all packing, but we are starting to feel like the big stuff is going OK. The one thing I’m really not sure we’re gonna get to is giving each other hair cuts… I’m starting to look a little shaggy.

Anyways, it’ll be great to have Becca walking again, so this is still more exciting than intimidating right now. Thank you, everyone, for your help and your prayers.

Iv’e created this binder for planning out the weeks before, after, and during Becca’s upcoming hip surgery. Custom printed sheets from the DIY Planner site. And now I have custom sheets for packing checklists, medication schedules, rental car milage logs, shopping lists, and important numbers. We’ve been told this is a massive whirlwind of information and stress, so I’m making a project out of preparing for it. We only have 3 weeks to bring this whole thing together and I’m hoping this will help out. There’s really no equivalent reliable solution for this other than the iPhone and I just can’t rely on it for battery life and network issues in the same way that I can rely on a binder full of dead tree data capture sheets (they tell me it’s called paper).

This thread on the ubuntu message boards was extremely helpful for me. I’m using a server with Ubuntu 8.04. The short version of what I had to do was install libmp3lame-dev from the http://debian-multimedia.org/ repository (follow the instructions there) because it couldn’t be found in the Ubuntu repositories despite assertions on the message board that it’s part of multiverse. So, you get that installed. Uninstall ffmpeg. Then follow these instructions to compile ffmpeg from source (I didn’t do the x.264 stuff since I’m only encoding to flv). After all the install stuff is done, I still had to copy the newly installed ffmpeg binaries from /usr/local/bin to /usr/binin order to get the web app I’m using to find it. Best of luck to you all. It took me about 3 hours to get to this solution. Yay.

Step 1: Buy heavy whipping cream.

Step 2: Use it all for coffee in the morning.

Step 3: Buy some more heavy whipping cream.

Step 4: Put it in a bowl.

Step 5: Stir vigorously with a wire whisk for several minutes until it begins to get stiff and form peaks.

Step 6: Plop a bunch of it all over several pieces of fresh home-made apple pie.

Step 7: Take a quick taste test.

Step 8: Spit that horrible crap out and look up a different recipe.

Step 9: Scrape the nasty whipped cream off the pie and back into the mixing bowl.

Step 10: Add a bunch of sugar and vanilla. Whip again.

Step 11: Enjoy.

Making Whipped Cream from sirtimbly on Vimeo.

Great, but a little cramped.