Bragg Family South

Forgive me if this look odd, but this is Hope just providing a brief update on Don's surgery. On Thursday Don and I drove to Pine Bluff to await his surgery. After a long wait for the doctor, he had a modified laminectomy. Basically they relieved the pressure on the nerves around one of his vertebra. He is doing as well as can be expected, and we brought him home Friday afternoon. The kids have been very good so far, although Beth wishes to be picked up and can't figure out why she can't be held right now by Daddy. Don has been walking about a 1/4 of a mile each day, and by the end of the week the doctor would like him to be walking a mile a day.

I (Don) will be undergoing back surgery this next week to repair a condition that has long troubled me, and will therefore not be updating this blog for a while as I recover. Rest assured, this is nothing serious, and I should be back on my feet quickly. Mom and Dad are planning on driving down to Arkansas to visit and help Hope with the kids.

It's been almost a month since our last post. Things have finally settled down enough from our travels over the Christmas-New Year's season that we needed to update this blog. Although we enjoyed our travels up north, we hope not to have that experience again!! This is because of the waves of illness that swept over our family (and many of yours, as well). Lil' Beth got sick on the drive north, and soon her flu passed to mom and dad, followed by Kenny and Hope's parents (and eventually Don's brother Bill). We all seemed to shed the flu quickly, but both Kenny and Beth had nasty colds, and Beth's even became a slight case of pneumonia. Kenny also seemed to be having problems hearing us, so when we got back to Arkansas, we took him to his doctor, and she said "ear infections"!! Both of the kids are largely over their illnesses, and energetic as ever. Unfortunately, these illnesses kept us from visiting as many of you as we wanted to, and we are sorry for...

Here is a photograph of our recently repainted and reorganized office room. Those of you who have visited our home may remember this as our "red room", located in the front of the house off of the dining room. The previous owners had used a very dramatic brick red pain in this space, which was noticeably louder than we would prefer. So, we finally got around to repainting this space a color called "sea turtle", which is something like a light blue or seafoam green--much milder to the eye... We have also removed much of the clutter from this space, and placed the computer up by the front window. These changes happened since the Thanksgiving visit of Bob & Lisa & kids. We are preparing for our Christmas visits, so expect somewhat of a lull in postings for a while. We hope to see as many of y'all as we can!

Life is slowly getting back to normal after a hectic Thanksgiving week. We had an enjoyable visit from Bob, Lisa, Mikey, and Emma from Tuesday until Friday. They ended up heading north a day earlier than planned because snow was forecast for the Madison area, and Bob needed to be available for snow removal work. Bob and I got out and canoed the Saline River on Wednesday, which was a beautiful day. Unfortunately, low river levels kept us from canoeing as long as we had planned. We had a fanatastic Thanksgiving day feast, courtesy of Hope, and I think all enjoyed the balmy weather and company. The only thing we didn't do as we had planned to was we forgot to draw names for the Christmas gift exchange, but Lisa and Laurie can handle that... Kenny had a birthday party on Friday for his upcoming 4th birthday. Six of his little friends came over (Mikey and Emma had already left for Wisconsin), and they played games, opened presents, and ate cake for a couple hours during the afternoon. K...

For whatever reason, I have had problems uploading the Hurricane Katrina photos, so I will try to get them online later.

I just returned from a short trip to southern Mississippi with my boss. We were asked to use our experience with storm damaged and otherwise understocked forests to help local foresters make better decisions about recovering their timberlands from the damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina. We drove to Jackson, Mississippi by Tuesday evening (Jackson is in the center of the state, about 2 hours from where we gave the workshop, but it was as close as we could find decent hotels). We arrived in Jackson during a fierce thunderstorm (I believe it was the same system that gave you that snow in Wisconsin). The following morning we drove south and toured portions of the hurricane damaged region, including parts of the DeSoto National Forest, which provided the picture given above. The forest damage in the areas we saw was more scattered and patchy than we expected, but the losses were still quite extensive. I think a preliminary estimate of timber lost to Katrina alone was over 5 billion cub...