A short update...

Greetings!

It is Monday, Feb. 13th as I write. Today was our recon mission in Iowa City for Caleb's palette repair.

Before we left this morning, I fed the beast (that's our dog, Rosey) and put her outside to perform her morning rituals and noted that there was a thin coat of snow on the ground. Hmmmm...

By the time we left, roughly 35-40 minutes later, it was snowing pretty good and we had about an inch. "This is less than optimum", I thought to myself. The side roads were quite slick, but as we crossed University Ave on our way to I-80, Uni was decent looking so we had a little hope for the interstate.

We negotiate our way thru the metropolis known as Altoona and prepare to launch our vessel onto the interstate. A snow plow had turned onto the on-ramp just prior to us, so we're following him in the local blizzard that only the back-end of snow plows can create. I'm trying to pay attention to the snow plow while also observing the rear-view mirror to judge any traffic that is already on the interstate while not knowing the condition of the roadway yet. A heady task, to be sure.

About the point where the on-ramp lane merges with the right lane of the interstate, we hear this noise... kind of a metal on metal sound but something else too. Hard to describe. It's a sound that could be coming from behind us, either side of us or in front of us as well. Again, hard to tell... that's when we spotted a quad cab pick-up pulling a fifth wheel camper, probably 30ft of one, bouncing off of the cable safety barrier between the lanes on the interstates West bound lanes!

We took that as a pleasant and cheap, to us anyway, reminder that we should be careful! Duly noted.

I drove about 50 - 55 mph for the first 75 minutes until the snow let up some and the lanes cleared a bit. I still wouldn't have wanted to go much over 60 but that seemed pretty comfy and we didn't have any problems although we saw many cars that experienced different degrees of woe and a semi on it's side laying on the top edge of a pretty good embankment.

So we get to the hospital in Iowa City and little Marvin McNutt immediately detects that something is up. He isn't fully bent yet, but he ain't happy either. The second they called his name out though, he started the wailing. This went on for pretty much the entire day. When we'd get him calmed down in one room, they would move us to another area and he's start up all over again.

At one point, the good doc wanted to get some of the wax out of his ears so three of us held him down... kind of... while she went mining for gold. And gold did she find! Man, I wouldn't have bet that his ear was big enough to hold the amount of crud that she pulled out but we witnessed it all with a ringside seat!

We met with the doctors who would be doing his palette repair and they explained the process to us, how long we would be there, what he's allowed to eat afterwards and stuff of that particular nature.

Long story short, if we end up having the procedure done there, it will be in early May. He'll likely be in the horsepital for 1-2 days and then in our care for the remainder of his recovery.

We have an appointment with a newer office here in Des Moines on Wednesday so we can compare notes and make our final decision.

That's about all for now. Talk at ya later.