Thanks for the call...

So I applied to be an EFY Counselor. It's like a week long camp which focuses on increasing the gospel knowledge, and boosting the testimonies of the youth in my church. That's the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

For those who are more critical of religion, you might compare it to a week long propoganda camp... JK

Anyways, I thought it would be a good experiance so I jumped the various hoops, and tried to get in. Finally they emailed me and we scheduled a phone interview. So I stayed home from work, and... They never called... I sent an email, but it's not looking good for our protaganist (That's me).

Anyways enough about my pathertic life, and I will now share with you my next Writing Exercise. The exercise is called "Hands". We were supposed to envision the hands of someone and take these hands from a resting to action, and eventually back to a resting state, or something weird like that. That isn't quite what I did, becuase I never seem to play by the rules... Except when I am playing board games, where I think the rules are sacred, and I only cheat when no one is looking.

Hands

As I entered the room a small voice cried my name and instantly sticky hands grabbed mine. The small hands, coloured by marker, and peanut butter from lunch guided and pulled me into the next room.

"Look, I got a new game!"

The hands left mine, leaving me to wonder where I could find a napkin to wipe off the remains of a well enjoyed lunch, that was not my own. The boys hand did not remain empty but grabbed the controller, the small and nimble fingers navigating through complicated menus, creating worlds, and performing difficult manoeuvres.

When the young boy found himself stumped by the game, he forced the unfamiliar controller into my hands eagerly asking me to get past a tricky part for him. I died several times in quick succesion, while the boys hands fidgeted in his lap, frustrated by my inability to play.


This is one of my favourite writing exercises I have done. It is based on a collection of experiences with my nephew Carson. For those who care, the game in the story is Little Big Planet for the PS3.

I love the way I did this exercise, and small things that define character, without looking an anyones face and hardly any dialogue. I will try to bring the tools I learned from this into my stories, to give my characters unique mannerisms, and to show compliacted emotions through simply physical actions.

The next writing exercise I post will be one on imagery.

Miracles

My dad is waiting for a Liver transplant. He suffers from Non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. There are a few complications though.

One of them is that he doesn't qualify to be on the liver transplant list becuase the pressure in his pulminary vein is at 55. The mortality rates with a pressure that high mean that no transplant team will operate on him. The solution for this is a heart lung transplant... which they can't do... becuase in order to recover from that he would need his liver to be working better... a lovely catch 22. To top it off, the pressure in his pulminary vein will kill him much faster than his liver will...

What they have been doing is giving him lot's of drugs to try and lower the pressure. It needs to be at a 35, but it was never likely they would get it that low. He is on three drugs that should help lower it, and each one might be able to lower it by about 5. One of these drugs is pumped directly into my dad's heart, so he has been at the hospital most of the time since it was started, becuase that is the safest place for him to be. If something fails in his pump, they only have 6 minutes to correct it before he would die. He also has been dealing with an infection. The point of all that, is that best case scenario from the doctors point of view was to get the pressure down to about 40. And then they would ask the transplant team if they would consider operating.

My dad recently had a blessing. I am LDS, Mormon, whatever you want to call it, and we believe that priesthood holders can give blessings to the sick. In one of his more recent blessings it was said that when they checked the pressures the results would be so dramatic that even the doctors would think it was a miracle. That has given us some more hope, and I was thinking that maybe his pressures might hit 30, that would have been a miracle to me, but I was way off.

Yesterday the doctors took him for some tests, and one of the results is that they can approximate the pressure in his pulminary vein. It's not as accurate as doing the heart catheter which is scheduled for the 23rd. But the test they did said that the pressure in his vein is probably around 10.

That is a HUGE change. 10 is in the normal range, towards the low end. It is such a postive change the doctors are now considering lowering some of the drugs he is on, becuase they don't want or need it to get any lower. This is far beyond any expectations the doctors may have had for him. This is a miracle. And it is only of the miracles that I have seen in my life recently.

I do believe in a God of miracles.