Are you ready for a God Moment?

One of the readers of my blog ( robbushway.blogspot.com )  is at the same neurology conference that Maggie’s doctor’s from St. Louis Children’s Hospital are at. They got to talking about Maggie and my reader gave them my blog address. The neurologist who will be over Maggie’s case started reading the updates on how bad things have been this week and sent me an email late last night. He was very concerned about what he was reading and how things were getting worse. We talked this morning and they have arranged for Maggie to be admitted to St. Louis Children’s Hospital this Monday morning instead of next Monday.

 

We will either be flying out on Saturday or Sunday.

 

Don’t ever doubt the Goodness of God, His Mercies, and His never-ending love for you! He has answered  our prayers from some of the darkest moments this week and He is providing at the very moment we needed to hear from Him.

Maggie’s status as of 9/29

Maggie had one of the worst nights with seizures that I can remember. The ramifications of cancer are far reaching. After her seizures passed last night, Maggie and I sang hymns together until she finally dropped off to sleep at 11:30pm. Her favorites: Amazing Grace, It is well with my soul, This is my Father’s World, and  A Mighty Fortress is Our God. Maggie has a lot of the words memorized from choir camp last year, and it is indeed such sweet music to listen to her sing.

 

They are moving her to Pediatrics ICU and will start a vercet (sp?) drip and treat her with general anesthesia should the vercet drip not work. She is still on a feeding bag, unable to eat much at all. She has several hours of really good moments and then they start back again.

 

At this point, it would not surprise me if Maggie stays in the hospital until we leave for St. Louis on 10/8. If that is case, Maggie will have spent about a solid month in the hospital.

 

Kathi and I are beyond exhausted. I can’t really describe how tired we feel and we have 3 more weeks to go with 2 more weeks of hospital.

 

At times, it feels like God is giving us much more than we can handle, but I know His Word says otherwise and its’ that that I need to trust.

It Is Well with My Soul

It Is Well with My Soul

Text: Horatio G. Spafford
Music: Philip P. Bliss
Tune: VILLE DU HAVRE, Meter: 11 8.11 9 with Refrain

---

1. When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
when sorrows like sea billows roll;
whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.

Refrain: It is well with my soul,
it is well, it is well with my soul.

2. Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
let this blest assurance control,
that Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
and hath shed his own blood for my soul. 

(Refrain)

3. My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul! 

(Refrain)

4. And, Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
the clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
the trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
even so, it is well with my soul. 

(Refrain)

OneNote 12 – Working as a team with shared notebooks

Chris_Pratley on shared notebooks in OneNote 12

Recently I’ve had some mail from various OneNote users telling me that they are using OneNote for team work – shared sections and folders of notes which every member of the team can read and contribute to, and of course search. I’ve also been reading blogs like this one. I like this post because sbreck describes exactly the type of scenario we are targeting OneNote 12 at. Of course, he is trying to do it with OneNote 2003, so he has a few issues. It works, but it runs into limits. OneNote 12 has had significant work done to make it a breeze to work in small to medium groups effectively and quickly. Allow me to drone on….

Weis honors dying boy by using his called play – Notre Dame Central – MSNBC.com

Very touching story…..

Weis honors dying boy by using his called play – Notre Dame Central – MSNBC.com

 

Eric Mack on notetaking

Eric is looking for an interesting note taking application – or a possible integration into either OneNote or GoBinder. I think he has some interesting requirements. I’ve got a couple of developers in mind who might be able to accomplish this. What do you think?

Eric Mack On-Line – www.EricMackOnline.com

I’m looking for an application that will allow me to highlight, organize, and retrieve specific selections of text – based not on what I write, but on what I highlight.

Many note-taking programs for the Tablet PC, such as OneNote or GoBinder, will allow me to highlight text in a variety of colors. Acrobat even allows this, though with a limited interface. I want to do more … It’s the retrieval part that is most important to me. I want to search and retrieve, not by text, but by the color of what I’ve highlighted.

The feature that I’ve been unable to find (or have missed) so far is the ability to ask the note-taking software to organize or show me all of my blue highlights or all of my yellow highlights.

In summary, I want the ability to:

• bring in documents into the program (PDF or Scan or Import)
• highlight text, using a pen, in a minimum of 6 color shades, ideally in a pallette
• retrieve, access, or organize that text on the basis of the highlighted color.

A quick update from the hospital

Well, its’ been a very rough couple of days for Maggie while in the hospital. They have not been able to control her seizures.  Maggie misses home greatly. No idea yet on when she will be coming home. The goal right now is to get and keep Maggie stable until we can get to St Louis. Her seizures are showing themselves in a much more visible manner now.

 

An MRI was done and it came back with a small questionable lesion / tumor where the old tumor bed was and about the same size as the original tumor. The MRI can’t differentiate whether it is scar tissue or tumor. We won’t know until we get to St Louis and the invasive monitoring is done, and a heavy duty MRI is done. This questionable lesion is in a very difficult part of the brain, so its’ not known what can be done surgically. With the temporal lobe now gone, they will be able to get a clearer picture of where the rest of her seizures are originating from. For right now, that lesion is looking like the most likely culprit for Maggie’s remaining seizures.

 

I was scheduled to attend the Microsoft MVP Summit this week I’ve canceled those plans.

 

We’re going to fight this with everything we have and will continue to pray that God would heal Maggie – whatever that might look like. I don’t pretend to understand what He is doing and why He is allowing Maggie’s suffering to continue on; but, He remains in total control of a situation that feels totally out of control to me.

 

One of the biggest things that God has taught me these past two years is that most of our life cannot be wrapped up in a nice little box. Pain and suffering is not very pretty. It brings out emotions and changes of lifestyles that most people do not like to acknowledge. We all desire for things to be wrapped up in a timely fashion so it can be put away and pulled out when needed. God doesn’t work like that. God will allow suffering to continue until His purposes are accomplished. God may not choose to heal Maggie in this lifetime. As of now, I’m not ok with that. But God is changing my heart to be in tune with His.

 

God also uses pain and suffering to bring out the best in people and we have seen that so evident in our lives. We have been so cared for that it would take me volumes to write about.  Thank you.

Good news on the LE1600 front

 As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the hospital with Maggie, getting a little bit of work done while she is sleeping recovering from 2 days of solid seizures.

I let my LE1600 Tablet PC dry out this afternoon after it enjoyed a glass of dark roast caffinated coffee. Just for grins, I decided to power up my LE1600 Tablet PC. 

No more screen flickers and all the hardware buttons are now working. So far, it looks like it has recovered. I’m going to keep an eye on it, but for right now, I’m going to take it with me to Redmond (if Maggie gets out of the hospital on Monday and is doing ok – otherwise I’ll be staying home). 

Owen Braun: OneNote 12

Here is another OneNote team member blog to read regularly: Owen Braun. He’s got screen shots, too! As the OneNote team slowly leaks out the feature set, its’ looking like a must-have app for notetakers, especially the tablet pc notetakers among us.

Owen talks about the new multi-notebook feature of OneNote 12. That is a great new feature. Thanks for the link, Warner.

Here is a sneak peak of his next entry: Next up… linking related notes together.

ahh…linking related notes together. You are going to love it!

One interesting request we’ve heard with some frequency is support for multiple notebooks (instead of having just one big notebook with structure inside it). This turns out to be one of those requests which, when made of a normal person, causes them to give a normal response (i.e., “OK”), but when made of product designers who have been obsessing over the design for several years, causes them to ask alarming questions about What You Are Really Trying To Accomplish. Which we did for a little while, because we weren’t sure whether this was a functional thing (i.e., “I can’t do X because I need feature Y”) or a concept thing (“I can do X but OneNote’s way is weird”). If you squinted, top-level folders within your notebook were similar to having multiple notebooks. And if we added support for multiple notebooks, would they in turn be contained inside some other new, top-level thing that you took with you? (What do you call a group of notebooks, anyway? “Shelf” or “Filing Cabinet” might be the obvious choices, but I’m sort of partial to “squadron”, a word which, based on its sheer oddness, deserves greater usage outside military contexts IMO.)

A major "Oh No!" moment

I was sitting with Maggie this morning helping her get through some big seizures. I had set my cup of coffee dow next to my LE1600 tablet pc.

After awhile, the phone rang and I got up to get it, accidentally knocking over my cup of coffee. I stayed on the phone for about 10 minutes. I didn’t realize until I got off the phone that I spilled the coffee directly on my tablet pc.

After recovering from my heart attack, I dried as much out as I could, turned it on and the screen is now constantly flicking on and off – not good.

off to Motion it goes. Unfortunately, I’m headed out of town on Tuesday to the MVP Summit in Redmond – with no tablet pc. I’m glad I have my backup Thinkpad laptop.