Summer and Stuff

The blog until recently has been pretty slow. Sorry about that. Here are a few things we have been up to:

• Matt is working framing chicken barns. He is preparing to go to college to study music and worship arts.
• Kassi is playing a ton of soccer for the Fraser Valley Action soccer club this summer. She is also working at Decades as barrista.
• Levi is currently at Creation fest with his snowboarding buds, Rob and John. He has a budding lawn mowing buisness going to fund his interests.
• James finished his first season playing baseball and he is a ton of fun to have around.
• We spend a week away with some good friends at a cabin on a lake. We had a great time.
  
• Patti's family is starting to arrive. We have a family reunion on Mon-Wed.
• Heartland continues to thrive. We are in summer mode, but I'm working on plans for the fall.
• We are going to redesign the youth ministry. We learned a ton last year by the mistakes I made and we are looking forward to the best year yet.
• Our office space lease has been up for over a year now, and we continue to search for new office and ministry space. Tough to find something within our budget that will be sufficient for the next 5 years.
  
• I'm working on a series for the fall, you'll hear more about it later.
• This spring and summer I've been doing pre-marrital counseling for 5 couples. That means four weddings this summer (the other one is while I'm on vacation).
• I'm teaching a "going public" class for students that want to profess their faith this summer. It's been a great class.
• I'm now officially on holidays until after the long weekend.

Walter "the rack" and Dorothy

Patti and I just got back from visiting Stan and Dorothy at Vancouver General Hospital.

It was so good to seem them. Due to being out of town and a massively busy weekend, we have not been able to go see them until now. They have been there for about 2 weeks now. Dorothy looked good today. Her "levels" are still very low and she does not have any immune system right now as a result. They are predicting the levels will begin to rise in the next few days. They have been saying that by Monday or Tuesday she will be out of the woods. That will be 10 days after the stem cell transplant.

We continue to pray for Dorothy, Stan and the family. They are in good hands.

She is on the 15th floor and they have a great view of false creek and the Vancouver skyline. The world class fireworks are tonight and they should have a perfect view of the whole show.

She introduced us to "Walter." Walter is a rack full of bags of stuff that slowly get dripped into her system. She doesn't go anywhere without Walter. Yesterday, with the blood transfusion, there were a few more bags on there. Stan says he can live with Walter for now, but he must go soon :-)

Update On Dorothy

Just a quick update from Stan and Dorothy (from Linette):

Dorothy’s blood levels are very low right now – she had her first blood transfusions yesterday of platelets and hemoglobin so hopefully that will give her a bit more energy today.

She continues to struggle with painful mouth sores (from the chemo) that are difficult to heal due to the low white blood cell count and she also has a low fever which they are watching carefully.

Continue to pray for strength and healing and for the blood levels to start climbing. The days are passing slowly for Dorothy right now, but each day is one day closer to her blood levels starting to climb!

Once again, thanks from the family for all of your prayers, support, cards and emails!

For those who are helping with housecleaning on Thursday, we will meet at Stan and Dorothy’s around 9:00 am. Bring buckets and rags please. See you then!