Family
Hannah’s purchase
When Hannah turned 6, we decided to start giving her an allowance, so that we could better teach her about money. The other day she went to an OXXO (convenience store) and made her first purchase (not including church offerings) – a Kinder Surprise. Here’s the receipt to prove it. It cost about CA$1.25.
The Bible spends a lot of time talking about money. God knows it’s an area where we need a lot of education. How do you teach your children to handle money?
Jim’s Dad is home
My Dad got home from the hospital this afternoon (and he sent me this webcam photo to prove it was really him). 🙂
Basically, he’s out on parole. He’s supposed to take it easy for the weekend (he actually had the weekend off from preaching anyway – but I’m sure there could have been better ways to spend his week off), and then go back for more tests on Monday.
Tests, tests, tests – he’s had a lot of them. This is what he wrote to me today:
As the tests grew more numerous, the needles got bigger. (I said at one point, "Why don’t ya just hook up a hose?")
They said today, "You’re a very lucky man. Most times we find this condition with an autopsy."
Well, there’s no doubt that the Lord was taking care of him – this problem has likely been progressing for weeks if not longer. I’m just glad that the doctors are finally taking some of these things seriously.
Incidentally, my Mom has been dealing with health problems as well. She just found out she has some osteoarthritis in the spine. They’re concerned it could affect the spinal cord in the future.
In the end, none of this is really new – what’s new is that the doctors are taking it seriously and we may actually be getting some answers. So that much is a good thing. Here’s hoping that the future tests will shed more light on the situation. Thanks for your prayers!
Jim’s Dad – health concerns
We would appreciate your prayers for my Dad’s health. I mentioned concerns about his health before. We were particularly concerned because he was having trouble breathing. After a swarm of tests, the doctors still had no answers.
He had been having some pain in his leg at one point. Going to have this looked at yesterday, they discovered that he had a blood clot. The had him go to the hospital right away, where he was last night.
He had been waiting to be scheduled for a CT Scan because of his breathing problems, but when they discovered the clot they got the scan scheduled for this morning. They discovered clots on his lungs.
Here’s the current situation in a nutshell:
- He’s doing fine and in good spirits in the hospital
- He’s expecting he should be able to return home tomorrow
- He’s taking medication which he will need to stay on for the next few months
- They’re still not sure what is causing these clots, and so more investigation will probably be needed
- We’re still not sure how this will impact day-to-day life for them – my Dad will certainly need to avoid some strenuous tasks
We still have a lot of questions, of course, especially since we just found out about all of this yesterday. I’ll try to keep you up to date if there’s any significant change or news, but as far as we know he’ll be home soon, probably tomorrow. I haven’t had time to write until now, or send out an email update to those who get it – I’ll be doing that next. Thanks for your prayers!
Photo updates (and RSS feed)
I’ll bet you didn’t know that our photo gallery had its own RSS feeds. Actually, you can be excused, because for a while the feeds disappeared. I went looking for them today, and discovered they were missing, and reactivated them.
I’ve updated the Recent shots… album with pictures from Taxco, a nearby trout farm, and more. Here are the most recent photos that are in the album (brought to you by the wonders of the RSS news feed):
Each album has its own RSS feed. To find it, go to the album you want, then look to the left of the page. What most people will want is the newest photos, so to find those use this news feed
You should already know that Finding direction has its own news feed, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/findingdirection. And if you’re a real CottrillCompass.com fanatic, I created a MASTER feed that will show the latest entries in both the photo gallery AND Finding direction:
Don’t even know what an RSS feed is? An RSS feed is a specially formatted feed that updates whenever something at the source it’s updated. It’s read by news reading programs. It’s a way to always keep up to date with the latest. Some programs that read news feeds include:
- GreatNews (I use this a lot)
- Thunderbird
- Firefox
- Internet Explorer
- Google Reader
- My Yahoo!
- BlogLines
And of course online services like:
One more thing, and this is really nifty. You can use Google Photos Screensaver to automatically add our most recent photos to your screensaver! I had a little trouble getting this to work with the normal album screensavers, so just to make things more complicated, I made a new feed just for use in the Google Photos Screensaver. Use this one:
The screensaver will show the latest 50 photos (I think!), along with the titles. You can click a link to go directly to the photo online to read the description.
Now you have more information than you ever wanted. But if you want to learn more about news or web feeds, check out this article on Wikipedia.
Health report
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A few days ago we sent out an email update* highlighting some health issues of family and friends. So I’m here to give you a bit of an update, and to add some new prayer requests to the mix.
First, I asked for prayer for my parents, who live in Saskatchewan, Canada. Their health is an ongoing prayer request. However, my Dad went for tests this past Thursday. He’s been having some health issues, including increasing difficulty breathing (breathing is needed for preaching on Sundays, but it has other uses as well, like day to day life!). You know how tests go – they lead to more tests, and more questions, and more waiting! So the good news is that so far it doesn’t seem to be a heart issue (which was suspected), but we need to wait a couple of weeks for more information.
Our fellow CAM missionary, friend and supervisor in this area is Toby Casteel. Toby has had some heart problems, and went in unexpectedly for surgery this past week. He is doing much better, and the doctor has given him the go ahead to go to Houstan, USA for a family vacation today. However, as you know heart issues refuse to be brushed aside, and I know they (Toby and his wife Marilyn) would appreciate your continued prayers as God guides them through these things.
Another CAM missionary family has been here in Cuernavaca, where their son was competing in a national gymnastics competition. He injured his knee, and had to go in for surgery last night. We praise the Lord that he is expected to make a full recovery (and his team came to the hospital to give him his silver medal!).
Please pray for this family as well as they have a lot of travel planned over the next few days.
There are always lots of health issues around, but I wanted to specifically write this time, because sometimes it seems to be one thing after another.
And here on the home front? Well, we’re all doing ok. Hannah and Nathanael have had some mild stomach issues, so we’ll see if that improves, and if not, we’ll take some action. But they still have the energy to play hard, so don’t worry too much. I’ve had quite the swollen throat the last few days, but other than that and being a little tired, Shari and I are fine. We have a lot on our minds these days, a hundred little things, and so we’d appreciate your prayers as we prepare for school to start again next week, and as we get ready to party next weekend to celebrate Hannah and Nathanael’s birthdays (if you want to get them a gift, check out their wish list on the bottom right of this page or here.)!
* (What? You don’t get our email update? If you want to pray or be involved in some way, the first step is to make sure you get our newsletter, and if you get that you have the option to get our email update as well! Sign up here, and be sure to check the box in the Stay current! section.)