Tuesday morning journal

–We have had a yucky inversion here for the last few days, cold that settles to the valley floor and is trapped along with smoke, smog, etc., for us to breathe. The temperature has been mostly in the high 20s, night and day. The sky is gray and we cannot see the mountains or the sun. A light frost has been falling and has accumulated enough to make things white. Part of the time the humidity in the air has made frost (rime) stick on tree branches and other plants and is kind of pretty. This picture from our front steps shows how it looks outside this morning.

Sometimes the Spanish Fork canyon wind saves us and blows the bad air back toward the north end of Utah County, but not this time.

–We took Ryan to the Salt Lake airport on Sunday morning to catch a plane to go home for the holidays. His plane was supposed to leave at about 9:25 am so we had plans to pick him up at about 7 am at his apartment at BYU. The phone rang at 4:30 am and Valerie was calling to say that his flight had been cancelled, and he was now scheduled on a flight that was to leave just after 8 am. So we go up, got ready, and picked him up just after 5:30 am. The going was a little slow because Utah County was foggy this morning. Thankfully traffic was light and we found a couple of taillights to trail up through the I-15 reconstruction. Salt Lake County had no fog, just smoke, so we dropped him off at the American Airlines gate at close to 6:30 am. Then we came home and had naps.

–Yesterday we got up early to go to Matthew and Kims to see the kids off to school, while they took Jeremy at an early hour to have a procedure to open up and clean out his infected sinuses. We arrived at 6:30 am and had morning prayer with the three big girls before they left, then later helped get Brianna and Josh up and ready and dropped them off at their elementary school.

–I had another medical adventure this past week. Last Monday morning we were headed for the Provo temple to meet matthew and Kim and do some couple sealings, but I wasn’t feeling so good, sort of achy and uncomfortable in the chest, and just generally a little miserable. As we got into Provo we were concerned that this feeling might indicate the start of a heart attack, so we diverted to Utah Valley ER. What it turned out to be was that I was having some arrhythmia. The ER doctor gave me some medication that got it back in rhythm and we went home after a couple of hours. I saw my cardiologist on Wednesday and things were still OK but he is keeping me on a small dose of the medication as a protection.

--A second thing that the ER doctor noticed from the bloodwork was that I was testing a little high for blood sugar. I saw my family doctor yesterday for some more testing and it looks like I have become borderline diabetic. At this point it does need treatment but we will monitor this (Wendy has the equipment to do the test) every few days to make sure it doesn’t get worse, and I am supposed to cut down on refined sugar intake and get regular exercise.