The end is near

Friday Oct 5th is this blogs birthday (1 year old now). It was also the day 3,000 hits were recorded. Kind of neat, I suppose.

But this will also probably be the blogs last entry. My final post.

This blog was to be about my experience with live liver organ donation. I wanted to let others know what it was like to donate an organ. It was started because the local hospital, where the transplant was to take place, wouldn't allow this areas largest newspaper to do a story about me and my donation experience. I wanted to get the word out in case I wasn't able to donate my liver. Which was what happened.

I also used ambiguous, yet obvious pseudonyms for the characters in and around me. Because of this blog, I received a pretty large amount of flack from people that didn't like what I was writing about. All of which can be found here, on the blog.

Because of that, I chose to stop putting in personal accounts and observances of the characters so I could comply with those few that were unhappy. And, because of that, the only thing left was to regurgitate information that was already available to anyone that can perform a Google search. I can't do that anymore. If it's not personal, it's not what I want to do. The blog has become old, stale and stagnant.

I want to thank most of you for stopping by every so often and supporting me over the last year when there was real honest content on the blog. It was a wonderful ride.....

I end with today's numbers:

Waiting list candidates as of today 11:09am
All	97,504

http://www.optn.org/data/

It's been a week

First off, I got bored with the blog look so I changed everything. I still like the black background best but it's not the best for reading. I will stick with white until I find the right combination of text and color.

I am back from Nashville TN and wasn't all that impressed. Granted, I only saw Stones River civil war site and was downtown on Broadway during the day. At night with the sights and sounds, I am sure it's a much better place. I ate at a dinner theater restaurant that started to serve breakfast and lunch. Wellllll, lunch specials are last nights dinner covered in gravy. Probably would have had a better sandwich at Subway. It would have been fresher for sure.

In another post, I mentioned a bit of chaos in our lives.....good God was I right. After three days away, I came back to a house that looks like something you would see in a reality TV show. We have SEVEN people living on our rental house right now. Five adults and two kids. I am not hammering on anyone, it's just so many people and so much stuff. There just isn't anywhere to put it. We have bags of food on EVERY counter. The refrigerator....well, I am OCD when it comes to the kitchen. Everything has a place and dammit, make sure everything is in it's place. When I opened the door this morning, things fell out and I was about to freak on all who could hear. There was medicine, half opened bottles (with lids) and containers falling out. It was all I could do to not literally throw EVERYTHING AWAY and start over. I was not in a good mood at that point. Sooooo, I followed suit and picked the crap off the floor and THREW it back in the fridge. I didn't care who, or what. If you are missing something that is supposed to be in there, find it your self. It's probably in the back under what ever you put in there before that isn't supposed to be there but somewhere else.......DAMMIT!!

Okay, I have vented and the next post, being a few days late, will be regrading organ donation and the One A Day project.

Where is my compass

Normally, I try to plan things out so as to cover anything that might arise. Of course, I don't get it all right all the time. Heck, I probably don't get it right even part of the time. It's probably more that I think I am in control, yet nothing is controllable.

When I was starting on the journey of being a liver donor I know I was going to document the process in some fashion. I thought about keeping notes, then a book, then the blog now it's the blog that will be a book. I wanted to keep it on the blog rather than a www.yourwebsite.com thing. I thought having the blog would be a better way of keeping things simple. Then when the newspaper thing never materialized, I decided to photo document it myself. That's where the flickr site came into play. Honestly, I didn't want the photos on the blog for some reason. Again, it might have been simplicity. I wanted the flickr site to be photos only and the blog to be words only. When I put together the business cards I only put the flickr site on the card. Of course, from there, you can see the link to this blog.

Lately, I think in my attempt to be simple, I have seriously undermined that attempt and harmed my desire to be legitimate as well. Now I know the blog is fine, but by separating them into two very different objects, I think it has caused a serious division and of course, has ceased to be simple. I now have two sites to update (technically three when you add in the wordpress mirror of the blog).

.sigh.

Ch, Ch, Ch, Changes

Okay, I tinkered with the template and layout.
There will be some more changes as I figure out what the heck I am doing.
Leave me a comment let me know how I'm doing.

To find an older post, you can see the archive view has changed. Scroll down and on the right you will see the posts. Click on a year, then it expands the month then you will see the post.