Thanks again everyone for your kind messages of support. Terri is feeling much better and we are getting over our recent disappointment. It was a very strange and wonderful sensation to think that we'd become parents after believing that wasn't going to be a part of our future, but we also feel that everything happens for a good reason, even if it's hard to see it at the time some sad or tragic event occurs. That's so often true when you look back at life. For instance, last September, my mother-in-law, who has a beautiful singing voice, came down with laryngitis that just wouldn't go away. She went for all kinds of tests and they could not find anything wrong with her. Eventually they told her that she had a paralyzed vocal cord. Well, what could cause that? This led to more tests which eventually revealed a mass on her lung pressing on a vocal cord nerve. Having lost her husband to lung cancer 5 months prior to that made it all the more shocking. But in my father-in-law's case, there was no health problem that had indicated he had lung cancer, just a slow health decline which, by the time any treatment was attempted, was too late. So in her case, losing her voice ended up being a good thing because she was able to seek treatment in time to find and shrink the tumor. Now, after 6 weeks of chemotherapy and radiation, they can no longer see the tumor! Her voice is still weak, but should improve with time. We are very hopeful for her full recovery.

It seems that blogging has been in the news a lot lately. There is a recent news article about the service we use (Blogger owned by Pyra) getting purchased by my favorite search engine company, Google, which I think is great news. I've been a member of some discussion groups that were bought by Yahoo! and now they are festooned with advertisments. We all knew that sooner or later these 'free' services would have to figure out how to make money since that's the whole point of offering the service. But Google does a very nice job at being very low pressure and has so far resisted the temptation to use banner or pop up ads. I can hardly make a move within Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Finance without having to play the a game of 'whack a mole' with the nefarious pop up ads. I really like the way Blogger works and I'm quite sure that if we find ourselves running for cover from a bombardment of ads, there will be some alternative that arises to allow us to carry on here in peace. The archives are safely stored on a separate domain so they're not going anywhere and perhaps being a part of the highly respected Google family, the service will continue to improve. One can always hope...