We have a walker
Colleen took her first tentative, Frankenstein-ish steps earlier this week. She is just so proud of herself!
I also need to try out some newfangled HTML5, so let’s kill two birds with one stone:
(Straight HTML5 with JW Flash Player fallback)
Seven years and counting
Seven years ago today, I was an emotional wreck. I knew something was wrong. The thing I had dreaded and feared since my dad got sick and died a few years before was now a reality.
I didn’t have an official diagnosis yet, but I knew. A few weeks prior I had been at the Y, really pushing myself. What felt like a good workout quickly turned into a severe pain in my lower abdomen. As I was poking around trying to figure out what was wrong, my hand grazed something hard that shouldn’t be there. I immediately recognized what it was, but didn’t want to admit it to myself.
Cancer.
It took a couple of weeks of sleepless nights before I made an appointment to see the doctor. Even then, I was too afraid to bring it up, instead asking for something to help with my insomnia.
Finally, the Thursday night before Memorial Day weekend, it came to a head. I could no longer ignore it – I either had to face the truth, or it would kill me.
I don’t generally believe God speaks to us in an audible voice – at least I’ve never experienced that. But as I prepared to call my mom to let her know what was going on, I felt His presence in a way I haven’t before or since. If I could put words to that presence, it would be “Don’t worry – I am with you. We will get through this together.”
I won’t go through the whole ordeal again, as I’ve blogged extensively about it in the past. But I feel compelled to document where I am around my cancer anniversary every year. While there are other days I could celebrate – the last day of chemo, the first day my tumor markers dropped to the normal zone, the day I was given the all-clear by the oncologist – I choose to celebrate the anniversary of my diagnosis. It’s the day that changed my life permanently – I became a cancer patient, and eventually a cancer survivor.
Going through a serious illness has a way of bringing your life in laser-sharp focus. The week after my first round of chemo, I was at a neighbor’s pool (oblivious to the fact that chemo makes you much more likely to get sunburned… but I digress). As I was trying to relax and ignore the waves of nausea and heartburn, I was thinking about my life and what I wanted out of it. I always wanted to be a husband and a father, but at that moment it became my primary goal. As I am realizing more and more every day, life is short. But it’s too long to go through alone.
I think back to that day, and look at where I am now. Seven years later, I’m a couple of weeks away from celebrating my first Father’s Day. I am blessed with two of the most amazing girls one could ask for – my wonderful wife and my adorable daughter.
Life is good.
It’s March already?
My last blog post was your typical apology for not blogging more often. And I followed that up with a three month silence. Oh well.
2010 has had no small share of excitement, for lack of a better term. December was very busy at work with the typical end-of-the-year rush as everyone attempted to get their slates clean for the Christmas break. Then we had Christmas in Columbia, followed by New Year’s in Chicago.
Sadly, while we were in Chicago, my grandmother passed away. It wasn’t a huge shock, as when we saw her on Christmas Eve it was obvious she wasn’t doing very well. But it was still very sad, and we’ll miss her greatly. Emily lost her last surviving grandparent in 2006, and now I’ve lost mine.
The next week, the earthquake in Haiti struck. While natural disasters have always meant “all hands on deck” at my job, this one was particularly exhausting. There were UMC executives caught in the quake, and this marked the first “big” event since a staff restructuring that was supposed to facilitate faster and more numerous updates to our website (but with fewer staff members to share the load). It was stressful to say the least.
Colleen is doing great – just growing and learning every day. She’s sitting up on her own, her first tooth is coming through, and she’s starting to talk – in a manner of speaking… she’ll say “dada” without much prompting, but she doesn’t associate it with me – yet! Her personality is really coming through, and every day is a new adventure with her. She’s now seven months old – hard to believe she’s closer to being a year old than she is to her birth date. Where does the time go?
And we’re back.
Seriously, Daddy? That is not a hat.
After quite a bit of shuffling around, the blog is back. Long story short, I started noticing some odd files showing up on my site a few months ago. I deleted them, but then in late October I noticed they were back with a vengeance. Nearly every page throughout the various sites I host had been affected by what I believe was an include file injection. So the easiest option was to burn everything to the ground and start over again.
So here we are. Whether or not I can actually be bothered to update it is another story, but it’s such an interesting and exciting time in my life and it would be a shame to not write about it. Our first baby – Colleen Alexis – was born on August 5th, and is an absolute joy for both of us. She is healthy and happy – we couldn’t ask for anything more.
So with Christmas vacation approaching, I hope to be able to fix up the site a little (the current template leaves much to be desired) and start updating more regularly than I have over the past couple of years. Social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter have made it so easy to shoot off quick thoughts and opinions without having to sit down and really develop them into a decent blog post. Which is sometimes nice, but at the same time, there’s value in actually taking that time to really “unpack” those thoughts and get them down on paper. Er… screen. Um… you get the idea.
Hopefully there will be more to come soon.
Watch this space
We are in the final hours before Colleen’s arrival. We have to be at the hospital at 5:30, which means getting up around 4:30. But I doubt either of us will get much sleep.
In less than 12 hours she will make her appearance!
The babymoon… she is done.
Emily hates this photo. I think she looks cute.
This afternoon we have to leave Hilton Head for the drudgery of home. We’ve had a great week of doing absolutely nothing! Hanging out at the beach, reading by the pool, and eating lots of seafood (and ice cream). Probably the first vacation we’ve had where I wasn’t itching to get home after a few days. It’s also the last vacation we’ll have as just the two of us – though I can’t wait to take our baby along on the next one!
Tax filing for free
Posted by Lane in Uncategorized on March 20, 2009
Though April 15th is coming up quickly, many people have not filed their tax returns yet. Every year I’m appalled at how much of my income is taken out to go towards worthless government spending (e.g. “pork”).
On that note: Does anyone else find it odd that so much attention is being given to the whole AIG bonus controversy? $130 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the recent stimulus package that was passed, yet it seems to me that even more attention is being given to this comparatively small infraction. If only Congress and the media were so thorough with the entirety of the nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill.
Don’t get me wrong – these bonuses represent more money than any one of us will see in our lifetimes, but to put it into perspective: Imagine you worked long and hard to earn $10,000. If you somehow lost just one of those dollars, would you expend the same amount of effort to find that last dollar as you did to earn the initial $10,000?
I’m no financial genius (or are I?), and I’m not disputing that it’s pretty lousy how our hard-earned tax money is going towards these ridiculous bonuses so soon after AIG begged to be saved by the government; but the amount of coverage given this issue by the media and congress seems… disproportionate.
OK, back to your previously scheduled programming:
On top of the thousands of dollars taken out of our paychecks throughout the year (and potentially having to write another check to make up the difference), the last little twist of the knife is having to pay to have your tax return prepared – via an accountant or with tax software. The good news is that there’s a way to do it for free.
Short Answer:
TaxACT – http://www.taxact.com
Long Answer:
Doing your own taxes can be scary, particularly if you have a lot of income sources or investments. The good news is today’s various tax software packages do a good job of walking you through the return and asking pertinent questions, taking a lot of the uncertainty out of the process.
The two primarily well-known tax preparation packages are H&R Block’s TaxCut and Intuit’s TurboTax. In the past, you had to purchase the software up front, and then use it to prepare your return. More recently, both services have been made available online:
Unless your tax return is a very simple one (only a W-2, for example), you have to pay for their upgraded services in order to file. But the good news is that you can go through the entire process first for free, regardless of the complexity of your return. You don’t pay until you file.
There is a third online filing service, TaxACT. And they let you file for free – sounds pretty good, right? It is.
So why bother even bringing up TaxCut and TurboTax? Because the ability to doublecheck your work is always a good thing, especially when money or a potential IRS audit is on the line.
For example, last year I was working on my tax return with TaxCut. As I approached the final stages, TaxCut said I owed much more than I anticipated. So I went to the TurboTax website, entered all my information there, and realized that I had neglected to enter my state sales tax deductions – while the option was there in TaxCut, it wasn’t as obvious as it was in TurboTax.
I eventually found the appropriate section in TaxCut, adjusted my numbers and all was well. Being able to doublecheck my work saved me several hundred dollars.
I still had to pay $40 to file my tax return though. $40 isn’t going to send us into crippling poverty, but it will pay for a decent meal out.
This year I went through the entire process with both TaxCut and TurboTax’s web-based programs, checking my work with each program, then did my actual filing with TaxACT. So I was able to have another set of eyes look over my return, if you will, and it didn’t cost me a cent to file.
Pretty good deal, if you ask me.
A quote
Posted by Lane in Politics & Religion on November 6, 2008
“The greatest evil is not now done in the sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.”
–The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
Lucky 21
In early 2007, Emily and I were thrilled to discover that she was pregnant. It was particularly unexpected, because although we had been trying for a few months, the odds of it happening naturally were slim due to my chemo in 2003.
Sadly our little "Peppercorn" didn’t make it past the eighth week in the womb. So after a few more months, we decided to start fertility treatments. A year’s worth of IUIs were unsuccessful, so at the beginning of the summer we started IVF – In-Vitro Fertilization – and the real fun began.
Six years ago I was needle-phobic like you wouldn’t believe. I had often thought to myself that given the choice between dying from cancer and going through chemotherapy, I would pick the former option. Little did I know that would be stuck dozens of times myself, and that I would actually end up giving shots to my wife. But here we are, some 40+ injections later. At the beginning of July Emily started on Lupron (which halts the ovulation process), and a week later Follistim (which hyper-stimulates the ovaries), all in an attempt to create as many eggs as possible for fertilization. With regular blood tests, she was getting stuck 3 and 4 times a day. Even with my newly-developed tolerance of needles, if the roles were reversed, we would be adopting 
She’s a stud.
Anyway, yesterday was retrieval day – we went to the fertility center and they removed all the developing eggs – all 21 of them! The average number is between 12 and 15, so to have that many was a big relief. A call this morning revealed that 19 eggs matured, and of those, 13 were successfully fertilized. Now, that doesn’t mean we’ll have 13 embryos to transplant, as some will not survive. But on Tuesday we will implant two or three strong ones and hopefully there will be a few more that we can put in cryo-storage for implantation at a later date.
At which point will begin the longest two weeks of our lives as we wait to see if Emily is pregnant again…