Friday, July 18, 2008

Heavy hearted

I am not sure if the news I received today would have hit me as hard before I had Elijah but I know that now as a parent this completely broke my heart. There is a little boy who lives in our complex that we have known for years. Our neighbors before they move away son was this boys best friend. This boy was often behind our house and around so we knew him pretty well. He was a bit of a wild child and trouble seemed to follow him although he had a good heart and tried to do the right things. He just wasn't supervised well and was often left on his own. One Halloween he came to our door with his hand bandaged because he had tried to make himself a milk shake and lost several fingers on the blades of the blender. He was a happy kid though and from what we could tell his parents loved him wholly and were doing the best they knew how. I don't know how else to describe it other than that. Earlier this month the boys father took him on a road trip. The boy was asleep in the backseat and the father was driving and apparently fell asleep at the wheel and got in an accident and overturned the car. The little boy only 11 years old died instantly.

This poor little boy never really had a chance to live. I have been thinking about the choices we make in our lives and how they effect us. I am sure all of us at one time or another have driven when we were a little too tired just to make it a little further or to arrive a little earlier. Maybe we couldn't afford a hotel room, or maybe we were almost home, whatever the reason we continue to drive and never think about what could happen. I am sure that this father will for the rest of his life regret not stopping and resting. He can never undue that decision and has to live forever with a stupid choice he made. I am writing this here to hopefully remind everyone to think carefully about the decisions you make especially ones that put others at risk. A hotel room is a lot cheaper than a funeral.

Even though this was just a kid in the neighborhood that we knew and not one that we were very close too, I am so sad by this. I guess it is always sad when a child dies but when you know them it is so much worse.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

How Mac won my heart forever

Last night as I was playing with my computer it froze up and then died. It would only get a white screen and I knew that wasn't good. So we made an appointment at a Apple store today and went to see what was wrong. It was probably one of the worse things that can happen to a computer complete hard drive failure. So they would have to replace the hard drive. Now normally this news would have reduced me to tears, all the pictures I have taken of E are solely on this computer, but you see this computer is backed up. Apple in their wisdom created a thing called time capsule that would back up your hard drive every day as long as it is hooked to an external hard drive. They make this even easier by selling a wireless router with a hard drive called the airport extreme time capsule. We have this so my computer is completely backed up. So they changed out the hard drive and we came home with my lap top. Brad hooked it up to the time capsule and two hours later my lap top was handed back to me as if nothing ever had happened. Even the wallpaper was how I left it. When I came to sign in here it had even replaced my cookies. What a relief to not have to remember all my sites and passwords and try to get everything back. While it sucks that my hard drive crashed it was all covered under warranty and so all this experience cost us was 5 bucks for parking near the Apple store. After this I have decided I will never go back to a pc again, it just isn't nearly as easy.