Surgery Date

Well I finally got my surgery date, it will be Tuesday, December 16th. It has been difficult for me to be patient through this whole process but I am very thankful for the thorough care that I have been receiving from all people at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

My Oklahoma trip at Thanksgiving was very good. Lots of highlights including a great Thanksgiving meal with lots of family members, fun playing games with my family, and a really good time seeing my best friend and his sons for breakfast one day. My family does the Thanksgiving meal in a big way with turkey and ham, multiple potato/rice dishes, stuffing made a couple of ways, a giant relish tray, corn-on-the-cob (real popular with my younger daughter), and plenty of pie and pumpkin roll. I am sure that I have left out half the contents of the "buffet" line.

For games, my family has a long history of playing a domino game called "moon". The game is similar to spades in cards though the "trump" in moon changes each hand and is called by the team that wins the bid. My grandfather and great-uncle Louie were great "moon" players as is my dad and a number of others from his generation in our family. My cousins and siblings and I all learned to play the game at an early age at family gatherings at my grandparent home. Now my generation is playing and teaching the game to the generation below us. It was fun over Thanksgiving playing with my brother-in-law as my partner and taking on my nephew and my niece's husband. The game is in good hands with these young guys though we handed it to them on this occasion. :)

The other game that the family played was a game called "Personal Preference" which is a fun non-competitive large group game where the objective is to correctly predict the preferences of the rotating person who draws 4 cards in a general category (e.g. food and drink) and has to secretly rank-order them. The game is a lot of fun as you get to learn things about each other and everyone is sharing how they would rank the same items. The family had a lot of fun with about half of the people playing the game for the first time. The funny part is when spouses start arguing about which of two equally bad items is really the least favorite for one of them.

My last thought today is that OU made it into the BCS championship game after handling Missouri pretty easily in the Big 12 championship game. I am keeping my fingers crossed and hope that they can beat Florida in January in the National Championship game. Up until now it has been very important how the team looked in their wins as the rankings are very subjective and based on how well you played. This is over - in the final game they just need to win and it can be of any variety. Here's hoping!!! Boomer Sooner.