SoCal Thanksgiving

We visited Grammy and Papa for Thanksgiving this year. It was the perfect timing, too. While we were gone it snowed about 14 inches. But in Southern Cal it was warm enough to play on the beach. Yahoo. Our departure morning, from Spokane, there were 5 fresh inches of snow...the first of the year. We made it to the airport with not much time to spare. Before long, as you can see, we found sand to replace the snow. 

   Beautiful Sand and Sunsets at Oceanside

We wouldn't be doing this in Spokane. Fortunately, we had a local golf pro (Grammy) to provide a few pointers. And for a hard days work on the course...well we made ourselves 2 beautiful pies. 

After Thanksgiving, a harbor tour of Newport, with it's bazzilion dollar homes. I think this guy in the glasses must live in one of them. 

Playing electric trains. 

Last touches on Amber's quilt. Thank you aunt Linda and Grammy.

After relaxing away from home and work, the time came to head back. Wouldn't you know, we flew into a Spokane snow storm. There were piles of snow everywhere. Thank heaven for snow blowers and good neighbors. 

While on-call, I cover traumatic facial plastic surgery. Here's a patient that was cutting trees when a large branch fell on his head. No hard hat. Fortunate for him, he suffered no skull fractures. But, as you can see he avulsed a large portion of his scalp, down into the forehead. The ER called and said they had a hard time closing it because the edges wouldn't come together. I took him to the OR and cleaned out a large hematoma, controlled the bleeding and closed the wound. He has recovered well.

What do you get when you mix Anakin Skywalker with a little dutch girl? Well you get mayhem and a lot of candy. You also get some creative pumpkins.

The Week of S

I call this the week of "S" because my main activities involved buying clothes for Sunday, watching Soccer and removing Salivary Stones at work.

A few weeks ago we went in search of new church clothes. Every year, probably not as often as we should, we go through this ritual. Maybe we don't do it as often as we should because it's so dang hard to find dress clothes. Poor Spencer's toes were about to break through his old dress shoes. He started looking like the motley crew at church. It was time to take the plunge. We started at Macy's....nothing. Then Kohls...again, nothing. I remembered that we tried this last year and the year before. So it dawned on me that the only store which consistently has dress clothes was JC Penny. So over to Pennys we strolled. 

Here is the result of Clothes Changing Syndrome. It occurs in dressing rooms, when the motions of taking on and off clothes and showing them to your dad makes you crazy. There was, fortunately, a remedy. It's called bed time. Bed time for Spencer and bed time for dad. While I took Spencer shopping, Carrie took Amber. We had a successful shopping night. Doesn't happen this easy very often.

The next day was one of the last soccer games of the season. I think we were pretty lucky this soccer season, as far as weather goes. It didn't start getting cold and cloudy until the last week or two. Here's Spencer's team.

Later in the week, I took a young patient to the operating room to remove these stones from Wharton's Duct. Wharton's duct is a name for the submandibular duct. The submandibular gland is a major salivary gland, that usually can be felt under your jaw, one under each side. It is not uncommon for stones to form here, mostly made of calcium, like kidney stones. Stones this big don't usually come out easily. Fortunatley for the patient, these did. The procedure is performed by identifying the opening to the duct, which lies in the front of the mouth, behind the lower incisors. The openings to the duct usually appear as small punctum, one on each side of the small web in the middle, under the tongue, called the frenulum. Once the opening is identified, the duct is dilated and incised. The stones are retrieved and the duct is sewn open to prevent it from scarring closed. 

Summer's End

We are relishing the last few days of good weather here in Spokane. It was a short summer. Didn't really warm up until after July 4th. But we got some fun things done. In July we went to San Juan Island, camped, hiked and did sea kayaking, which none of us had ever done before. We watched the Orca whales from afar off. After San Juan we learned about Pikes Market in Seattle, ate some really good sea food and chowed on Pierogies. There was Taekwondo earlier in the summer. It was self soothing to release stress by yelling my head off and kicking the air. It was funner to watch my daughter and son do it. Wish I had some pics. There was a night with the Spokane Indians and 2 trips to Silverwood (pics above). The picture with the view is looking down on Saltese Flats and the backside of Spokane Valley. I was enjoying a ride while my family was away for a few days. Our house is off in the distance by the water tower. As short as it was, it was still a nice summer on Spokane.

First Day Blogging

Today is my first day with this blog. I am testing out the waters because 2 months ago I bought the new Droid Incredible. With its picture/video capability and web browsing, I want to try blogging from my phone. There are some tricks to doing this on the phone. Here is a picture that my son drew a couple weeks ago. We're going to send it into the Friend and see if we can get it published.