Luke’s Notebook

I kept pretty busy today with scoping a couple of depositions. The case is actually pretty sad, as it’s about a man who died as a result of a pipe exploding in a factory. So the depos I scoped were kind of disheartening, as the deponents were related to the man who passed away. The total page count was nearly 140 pages, so that was good that I was able to go through all of those pages.

Other than the scoping, I ran quite a few errands today in Belleville and Swansea. I also worked out in the family room (it’s about time!), and I watched the Mizzou/Kansas game. #3 Kansas ended up winning, but Missouri gave them a run for their money. Tomorrow night, Illinois plays again! Let’s hope they can keep their undefeated record intact as they visit Michigan State.

I’m going to end this, because I want to make another entry, kind of recapping the entire month of January.

This Saturday night, we’re planning on hosting another game night party at our house. We’ll be playing pool, ping-pong, foosball in the family room. We might play cards, possibly board games or word games. Who knows! These things just kind of develop on the fly, depending on who shows up and all that. Whatever the case, we’re ready to have a lot of fun. We had one of these parties about two months ago, and it seemed that everyone had a blast then.

It’s Sunday, and where Sunday is there is volleyball! We played at 8:30 tonight, and we won all three games. The past two Sundays, we’re 7-2. Not too shabby at all. We don’t play volleyball this Wednesday or Sunday, though, because of the Super Bowl, I guess. I’m not exactly sure why we don’t play Wednesday. I just looked at the schedule. Seems we simply have a bye week.

I’ve been wondering lately just when, if ever, we’ll be able to get wireless Internet out here. It appears that our house is on the verge of being able to receive the signal from a nearby tower, but as it stands now we might just be barely out of range. So… I wonder what we can do. The guy from the wireless ISP may be coming out this week to look things over again and to possibly give suggestion as to what we might able to do in order to receive the signal. Here’s the possible scenarios I can think of:

Scenario A - There’s a chance that a new filter that will be installed on a nearby tower will improve the signal and thus enable us to get service.

Scenario B - There’s a slight chance (I would think it’s a very unlikely chance) that our chimney is high enough to receive the signal. I doubt this is the case, but the chimney is pretty high, so there’s a small chance.

Scenario C - We have some tall trees down bordering our property, and we may be able to mount the radio to one of those tall trees. If this is the case, we would have to run a CAT-5 network wire from the radio to the house. That would mean down the tree, we’d have to bury it in the ground (possibly in some sort of conduit; I’m not sure), and then find a way to get it to our basement. It wouldn’t be extremely difficult to make this run, I wouldn’t think, especially with it being a one-time thing and with the CAT-5 wire being pretty small. I’d say this is a fairly likely scenario.

Scenario D - There’s also a chance that we would put up a telephone pole or some very tall pole and that would suffice. If this is the case, we would, obviously, need to make a CAT-5 run from wherever the pole was to the house. Again, probably not terribly difficult.

Scenario E - A man up the road from us has the wireless Internet, and he may be installing a 55-foot pole of his own to essentially allow the company to rebroadcast the signal to people in his area. And if he does go through with this, then there’s a chance we would be in range of him and be able to receive the signal.

So as it stands now, I think we’re extremely close to being able to get this Internet. It would be so great if and when we can get this, because with us being kind of tucked away in the country, there’s definitely no cable or DSL available. It’s either dial-up or satellite. We’ve had the satellite for 13 months, and it’s been very problematic. So we are just hoping and praying for a solution, and there’s a chance that this wireless ISP will be the answer. I sure hope it is!

Mom was able to return home this evening, and we couldn’t be happier! She was in the hospital for a second time for about 24 hours because she wasn’t feeling good at all. Evidently, the antibiotics she had were making her feel especially bad, and on top of that she was becoming dehydrated. So basically, the doctors gave her a different prescription, and she is feeling so much better now. Thank God for that! We’ve all been praying for her, and we’re so thankful that she’s back home. She’s not quite 100%, but she’s the best she has been since last Sunday, and she seems to keep improving!

This afternoon, I was following the Minnesota/Illinois college basketball game. Illinois really trounced the Golden Gophers, winning by 24 points or something. So they’re 21-0 now! The Fighting Illini face another tough test in Michigan State in a few days. Hopefully they can get another victory.

Tomorrow night I have my last volleyball game until… February 9th. So actually, my last game as a teen! And now that I think about it, this volleyball session is coming to an end, with just a couple more Wednesday and Sunday games. I hope my team will be playing one more session, because I don’t want to quit playing just yet. Or maybe I’ll have to become a free agent. =)

This afternoon, I went to Best Buy. The reason for going was to buy a video capture card for my computer, which would allow me to connect almost anything (VCR, DVD player, Xbox, old camcorder, etc.) to my computer and could record video onto the computer. Best Buy was offering a pretty good deal on the card, so I went ahead and bought it. Well, as I’m at the store, I think, “Hmm… I need an open PCI slot for the card? Hah, surely I have an open PCI slot. Lots of computers have plenty of empty ones!”

So I get home, open up my computer, and I find… no such open PCI slot. My motherboard has two PCI slots total, and they are both in use. One slot is occupied by my all-important firewire card, which allows me to connect the digital camcorders to the computer so I can do all my editing. The other slot is used up by the EIDE card, which is where I have a couple of hard drives hooked up to. Both of those cards are quite important with what I do, so I can’t afford to yank either of them.

As of now, I can’t use this neat new capture card. Paul may have a use for it, or, if not, I ought to be able to return it. It’s frustrating to not have an available slot, though. A lot of motherboards have lots of PCI slots — three, four or even five, sometimes. Mine has a measly two. It might be smart for me to buy a new motherboard sometime down the road so as to give my computer more room to grow. Until now, though, I’ll just have to be patient. But I think I’ll go do some research on motherboards…

Keep praying for Mom, please. This evening, she had to go back to the hospital. I’m not entirely sure what the reason is, but maybe the doctors are just wanting to make sure that they had, indeed, found the problem. I think she’s been in a good deal of pain, though not as severe as Monday morning, when she initially went to the hospital. Anyway, it looks like she’ll definitely be spending the night there, and beyond that I don’t know what we’re looking at. But please pray that God would heal her and give the nurses and doctors wisdom as they diagnose her and treat her. Thanks a bunch!

It’s been such a busy week that I forgot to report some terrific news! We found a buyer for our house on West Main Street in Belleville. It’s under contract now, and the official closing is February 11th. After that, we’ll only have this house to maintain and take care of. And since it’s new, it should be relatively simple to stay on top of things. So I thank God for the house selling!

In other news, today I bought a network hub on eBay. It’s a 24-port 100 Mbps (megabits per second) hub, and I got it for a great price $29 after shipping. What good is such a hub, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. For one, the speed is 10 times faster than the 10 Mbps hubs we have in the basement now, linking everything together. Reason Number Two: Note that I said hubs. Up ’til now, we haven’t had a hub with enough ports to support the computers (and Xboxes). So we have had to link a few hubs together. It ends up being a bit of a mess, simply because you have wires going from one piece of hardware to another, rather than having all the wires going to one hub. So this hub should do the trick. The only functional difference for the time being would be the big upgrade on the speed. Now, this won’t make our Internet connection faster, but it will make our network connection faster, meaning faster computer-to-computer stuff, such as file browsing, copying, et cetera. I think it will make a big difference! By the way… we don’t have 24 computers that need to be hooked up. I figured I might as well get a hub that could support many devices, though, because you never know what’s going to come out in the future.

Mom came home yesterday, which is definitely terrific news. She is, however, still in quite a bit of pain. So please continue to pray for her, that she would be healed completely and would be able to get back to normal soon. It is really nice to have her home.

Last night, I had a volleyball game at 8:30. We lost the first one, won the second and lost the third. They were all relatively close games, and we were playing against a really good team. It was fun.

Well, I’ve got plenty of work to do, so I need to get going on that.

Thank God!

John and I just returned home from the hospital, and Mom came with us. She’s still definitely not 100%, but she is much better than she was Monday and Tuesday. Now the plan is for her to just rest and rest as she continues to recover. It’s so great to have her back home, though. We really missed her.

I just happened to be visiting her at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital this afternoon, when the nurse and doctor suggested that she might be able to go home, if she takes it easy here for a while.

Thanks for all the prayers, and please continue to lift her up. She has improved a lot, and I’m praying that soon she will be completely healed and pain-free. Thanks!

I’m on the laptop again tonight, but this time I just brought it across the room so I don’t have to be at my desk to type.

I want to give an update on Mom. Dad talked to her this evening, and it sounds like she has been able to get by with receiving less or lighter doses of the pain-killers. It’s still too soon to tell whether or not she’s actually starting to heal up and thus not need the pain-killers as much or if it’s something else. I think tomorrow will be very telling as far as that goes.

The family has been doing pretty good in the absence of Mom. Obviously, everyone misses her, loves her very much, and can’t wait until she comes home, but the chubs have been happy for the most part. One sad thing is Wizzy, who turned eight earlier this month, was pretty upset tonight as she was missing Mom. I talked to her for a bit and basically told her what the setup is like in Mom’s hospital room, how I put roses in her room, how she is on the same floor as a bunch of newborn babies. I also assured her that Mom should be coming home pretty soon and suggested that we should have a celebration when she returns. That seemed to kind of help Mary. I don’t blame her, though. I’m 11 years older, and I miss Mom. But I’ll just keep praying and trust God that she will be back home very soon.

Mark is spending the night with her tonight, so my room is unusually still. Not that Mark makes a lot of noise, but for the time being I have the room all to myself. It’s not often that this is the case, and it definitely feels different. For the most part, I think it’s nice to have a roomie, especially now that our rooms are plenty large in the new house. Space isn’t really a factor, and it’s cool that you don’t have to be alone in your room. There are, obviously, times when it would be nice to be secluded — say, for privacy reasons or quiet or something — but for the most part, this works out very well.

A little bit ago, I got home after spending a few hours at the hospital with Mom. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to be feeling much better than she was yesterday. Mom was still feeling pretty tired, and the pain is still pretty bad without the pain-killers, which kind of cause her to be a little light-headed.

Please continue to pray for her. I doubt that there is a serious problem, but still it’s kind of unnerving that she hasn’t really improved much. And we all really miss her back home, too. Hopefully, she’ll be able to return home in a few days. I think tomorrow the doctors are going to kind of get a better idea of what’s going on.

I brought her a few things from the house — such as the mail and then some roses we had bought for her birthday on Friday. She’s glad to have those in her room. Dad arrived a little bit before I left, and he was going to do some computer work there. Mom slept for a good portion of the time I was there, so I decided to do a little bit of typing on my laptop, and I also went down to the cafeteria and got a salad.

Well… I guess that’s it for now. Even though there’s no real reason to be concerned, I’m still just kind of worried and would feel much, much better if she was improving. Hopefully that will happen real soon.

Keep up the prayers! And feel free to e-mail me if you’d like. That certainly never hurts.