Hopeful in 2008

The last couple of days have been pretty good for us. Randy has been feeling better and his breathing has eased. The challenge right now is to try to get him over this hump and onto the road to recovery, at least as far as he can recover. He is doing deep breathing exercises to try to rid his body of carbon dioxide and he has started to do a few arm curls with 2 lb weights in an effort to try to regain some of his strength. We would like for him to walk, but right now that is still too ambitious. The weather is also a factor at this point. Today's high is forecast to be 34, but we are very doubtful that it will break the freezing mark. Our overnight low last night was 20 and tonights low is forecast to be 13. It has also been very windy here and that makes it all the more miserable.

We are all having a hard time getting warm or staying warm. Each of us is dressed in layers, and we have a good fire going. It is just so cold that it's hard to get the house as warm as we would like it to be, and the heat isn't spread throughout the house the way it would be if we had a central heating system. For this reason it is very comfortable in the living room and kitchen, but the bedrooms are much cooler. To compensate for this we all have plenty of cover on our beds and each bed has some type of electric heating device. Each of the kids has an electric blanket and Randy and I have an electric mattress pad on our bed. Staying warm when in bed is not an issue, but it can be an issue during waking hours. Everyone seems to suffer from cold feet, despite wearing socks and either shoes or slippers. I'm sure this is in part due to cold floors. We intend to put up a skirting around the piers at the outside of our house's frame, similar to the underpinning on a mobile home. This should help a great deal, as it will stop all of that cold air from passing under the floors of the house.