She's Home, Yay!!

Saturday was a very odd day for me. I was home alone all day long. That almost never happens. Sure, I'm alone often when I travel but not ever in my own house, at least not for the entire day. Sarah is the statistician for the school's wrestling team and they had a tournament today. I was planning on driving her but when I learned that she needed to leave before six in the morning I suggested that she find a ride. I am so grateful that she did. Her ride picked her up at 5:45 and I promptly went right back to sleep.

Alex is in basketball season. I may have mentioned earlier that he is coaching a fifth grade team, he plays on a team and he is a referee. He headed out the door at around 8:30 and so when I finally dragged myself out of bed at nine the house was empty. I honestly can not remember when that has ever happened before. I'm sure it has but I can't remember it. I spent the day puttering around and cleaning up preparing for Lisa's return. I've managed to get the kids to keep the house "relatively" clean for the last ten days so there wasn't too much to do but like every Saturday, I have a ton of work to catch up on. I can't do anything during the week so Saturday is it. Sarah showed up a little before six and Alex finished his day around eight. All day long I've known that Lisa's flight lands at 10:05 but for some reason when the time came to go get her I had 10:35 in my mind. I timed my shower and all based on that. I climbed in the car at 10:00 to head for the airport and I thought I'd better check that her flight was on time. When I looked at my Treo there it was. Her flight was scheduled to land in five minutes. As I'm navigating San Diego's freeways at 80+ mph I'm calling American Airlines only to learn that her flight is early. She'd landed at 10:01. Now all I could do is hope that her bag is the last one off the plane but no such luck, hers was one of the first. I did make it remarkably far however before I got a call. Did I get a soft "honey, I'm home" from the one I've missed so dearly? Nope, instead I get a, "if you haven't parked the car yet don't bother, I'm waiting out front". I had to sheepish tell her that I'm still on the I-5 but I'll be there in 10 minutes. I was there in 15.

Today was a wonderful (and pretty much normal) sabbath day. Alex is on the stake youth council. In case you don't know, our stake is a group of seven wards and four branches and consists of a few thousand people. The youth council represents all of the youth in the Stake and they plan all of their activities. Tonight there was a Stake Youth Fireside and Alex had been asked to give a talk on the "word of wisdom". Also, in case you didn't know, the word of wisdom is the revelation given to Joseph Smith where we are advised not to partake of alcohol, tobacco, coffee or tea. Less well known is that the word of wisdom gives us much advice on what is good for man to eat including advice to use moderation in all things. We had a bit of a concern however, in Alex's last game (he actually played two) a kid put an elbow in his face driving a couple of teeth most of the way through his lip. The lip was chewed up pretty badly and he's been ripping pieces of flesh off of the wound all day. Not long before he was to go and give his talk his speech was quite slurred and the pain was driving him nuts. I gave him a blessing however and by the time he gave his talk his fat lip was not nearly as swollen and as he gave his talk the pain subsided quite a bit. He did point out that as soon as he sat down it started hurting again. The chapel was filled to capacity and had some where around 200 people there and Alex gave a wonderful talk. He was loud, very natural and spoke from the heart. He spoke for ten minutes and related some personal stories from his own life. That always makes a talk much more interesting. He also wrote the talk mostly himself with very little help from me.

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Did you know that scientists have successfully put a dog into suspended animation? It had no heart beat and was not breathing for over a day and its body temperature fell to 2°C above room temperature. They then revived it and it was perfectly healthy. Apparently all animals have this ability and it is triggered by low oxygen levels. The problem is that in animals like humans, low oxygen levels kill us before we can go into suspended animation but if you can get low oxygen levels (<0.01%) fast enough then you will go into suspended animation with no damage to your cells. They are quite confident that humans can do this as well but so far they haven't had any volunteers. They will probably try it first on transplanted organs to lengthen the time they can survive with no damage before they are used. They then plan to try it on trauma victims who will die before they can get medical attention. Can you imagine that they could have several days to repair severe arterial and nerve damage?

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