We have Mom here now. Things are still very much up in the air, though, which is particularly unnerving for her. She and Dad lived in the same house from 1949 until 1997, and then have moved a dozen times (though sometimes just from one apartment to another in the same building) since then. Still, almost all those moves were from one rented retirement facility apartment to another, so all this stuff about putting up a new house from the ground up and all the associated business about getting a septic tank in, hooking up a brand new electrical service, running wires for telephones, etc., are very new to her. She is going to be staying at a motel for a few days while they finish with the house, although all her furniture and other worldly goods are already in the house. This weekend friends will help us move the rest of our incredible accumulation.

We sometimes feel like the Murphy's Law Poster Children. Example: there are over 100 lots in our subdivision, and we were lucky enough to get the one that somehow managed to not already have utility services run up to the box. Heck, there isn't even a box. I don't understand exactly how it happened, but apparently the property lines were shifted from the original plat. Suffice it to say that the guy from the utility company came Tuesday to set the meter and hook it into the system, and found that there was no place for him to hook into. They're going to have to bore a tunnel underneath our neighbor's driveway. So we're delayed with our move.

Whew! What a day! Surviving so far, though. The graduate class was great--refreshingly so, considering how tired I was going into it.

We're really looking forward to getting in the house. Zach was an amazingly good worker today--no whining or complaining, took only two break, both of reasonable length, and went back to work without complaining. He didn't get angry a single time that I could remember (neither did I). He wants to get into his new, bigger room, and he wants to get it arranged just right so that he can keep it looking nice, like it does now.

We're also greatly pleased to have my mom coming down. There will be a lot of adjustments, but I think it will be good for her and good for us, too. I wish we had Dad with us too, but that's not the way it worked out (for those who know us but don't know that development, he passed away on August 26).

Lots of things happening with us right now, obviously. Turning in another direction, though, what lies ahead this weekend is both overwhelming and exciting. On Friday I'll drag as much stuff of ours as I can manage (along with Zach's help) from our old house to the new one. On Friday night, I'll sit in a graduate class. On Saturday (all day), the same graduate class. On Sunday we'll drive to Jackson, Tennessee, and on Monday we'll drag Mom's stuff from there to the new house. I don't notice a whole lot of what passes for normal life in there, and it will be Tuesday before I can even start to think about catching up again.

Nevertheless, we are very excited about the new house. There is a lot of work ahead of us, but we really hope that it will be key to life becoming refreshingly boring. Pray for us.

As you may have seen below, we had a crisis over the weekend. Janet went to the doctor this morning (Oct. 15) and everything is fine! Whew! Still want to take it easy, but as the doctor said, "It just looks like to me you're going to have to have this baby [wink, wink]." (Originally posted 15 Oct. 2002.)

We had a scare last weekend. I went to the Ashland Annual Teaching/Learning Conference and did a presentation on Saturday morning (along with Anita Maddox, for those who know her). The presentation went fabulously. But the conference was rough. I went to the 8 a.m. general session and the 10 a.m. concurrent session on Friday morning (Oct. 11) and went back to the hotel room just to see how Janet and Zach were doing. Janet had been throwing up violently all morning, and was bleeding. Since we lost a baby to a miscarriage in March, we were very worried about both Janet and the baby.

We went to the Ashland hospital emergency room (Janet said at one point she wished the hospital ("King's Daughter") had another name.) We spent about six hours there. To make a long story shorter, Janet is OK, and the baby is OK, but Janet is now on modified bed rest. They don't know where the bleeding was coming from or what was causing it. She has an appointment with her own doctor at 8:45 on Oct. 15 for followup. Originally posted 14 Oct. 2002.

The latest news is that we have been to the doctor, gotten an ultrasound, and both seen and heard a heartbeat for a baby who should be born around the middle of May 2003. Here's his/her first baby picture! (If your screen is a little dark, the area in the middle right under the "Hi Mom and Dad" part is the baby.) (Originally posted 4 Oct. 2002)

Family newsletters can get to be somewhat self-indulgent and boring, but since hardly anybody sends long, friendly letters anymore, and since telephone calls can get both expensive and time-consuming (and thus don't get placed nearly as often as they used to in our hurry-up world), I decided to try a Weblog (or "blog", as the slang has it) so that friends and family would at least know we hadn't dropped off the face of the earth. Welcome to the blog for Donnell and Janet King and their family.