Category Archives: Friends & Family

Mom’s Obituary

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Priscilla C. Walker

Priscilla C. Walker, 22 year resident of New Port Richey, Florida, formerly of Jamestown, NY, lost her battle to cancer Saturday(February, 17th 2018) at home with her family.

She was born April 2nd, 1951 in Frewsburg, NY the daughter of F. Enos Johnson and C. Barbara Adams Johnson.

She was an animal lover who enjoyed spending time in the sun and reading Fantasy books.

She played on pool leagues in Jamestown and worked at several bars over the years in the area.

She worked at WCA for many years before moving south to Florida. She worked as a Radiology Technician for more than 25 years between WCA and her place of employment in Florida.

Priscilla is survived by Steven C.(Kathy) Birt, Travis R.(Emily) Birt, Michael Q.(Tiffany) Birt; 9 grandchildren and 1 great-grandchild; 3 siblings, Karen Wingate, Susan Johnson, Leroy Johnson.

She was predeceased in death by her parents.

She asked for and received a private family Celebration of Life on a beach in Florida. In lieu of flowers, you can donate to the American Cancer Society in her honor.

Losing my Mom. :(

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Been really hard for the last couple of years to watch my Mom slowly lose her fight with Cancer. 🙁  She, being the private person she is, told all of us we were not allowed to talk about it. So we have been dealing with this quietly between all of us. Just the immediate family.

It all started in March 2016 when we went out for dinner with Aunt Susie and Mom.  Aunt Susie told us that my Mom had mentioned having some problems since January. We asked Mom about it, and she said she was getting ready to call the doctor to make an appointment. The problem had been going on for 2 months by then. She finally got to the doctors at the end of April, and they discovered cancer.  They scheduled for June to do Surgery, a full 6 months after she started having problems. 🙁 Never let anything that could be cancer wait this long. 🙁

By the time they did the surgery to try and remove it, they were to late, it had already spread.  Then due to complications from surgery chemo was postponed as well for like 3 months.  🙁  It finally started in like October.  She finally had the chemo rounds and then the radiation which took about 5 months and they finally did another scan. At that point they discovered it had spread. 🙁 She had already had the limit of radiation, and they decided they would try another type of Chemo as a last resort to try and buy her time. They told her the best hope was just to try to control how fast it spread. 🙁   Around the end of the year, they told her there was nothing else they could do.

 

We stopped over around my birthday to see her, and she had started to lose weight already from getting the flu and fighting that also.  Well, in visiting her, I managed to get the flu.. So it was 2 weeks before we got over again.  I then got a call from my brother telling me I needed to start stopping over regularly, because she was going down hill quick.  I was unsure how much could change in just 2 weeks, but we of course went over the next day to see how things were going.   Just 2 days shy of 2 weeks since I had seen her, and it brought tears to my eyes seeing my Mom in that condition. 🙁 It is horrible to see someone you care about take a down hill dive like this.  We are basically left waiting for her to die.  She does not have any hope left, and she has given up.

 

As much as I do not want to think about this, or really have to look at this regularly, I do feel that the warning should go out for people.  If you think there is even a chance that you have something wrong with you, do not put off getting checked. In 2 years, my mother went from being reasonably healthy for her age, a few aches and pains, but nothing serious, to laying in a bed, barely moving, and it hurting horribly to move, just waiting to die.  For the sake of those you love, and those who love you, please do not put off getting checked.

She passed peacefully in her sleep with Aunt Susie by her side on 2/17/2018. 🙁

Looking forward to our Tucson visit!

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Starting to look forward to our visit to Tucson and Emmy’s family!  Will be the first time in several years I been back there and I look forward to getting to know all of them again.  I also enjoy seeing Tucson.  I think it is very pretty landscape.  Emmy of course feels it is pretty to visit, but she would not want to live there. Which is ok, but I enjoy the barren landscape and beautiful sunsets framed by the mountains surrounding it.  I will have to try and get a picture to post while we are out there.

We are also planning a trip down to Mexico while we are there.  We have went down to Mexico everytime we been there and always have a good time.

We are actually going here in Mexico:


View Larger Map

We will also try to go horse back riding in the desert and check out some of the sights.  Emmy has seen them all, and I have seen a lot of them several times, but Bleys is going for the first time.  Should be a lot of fun!

Woo! Go Obama!!!

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Ok, so I am thrilled that Obama was elected!  Unlike so many of my friends, I do not see this as the end of the world.  I am really getting a kick out of the Conservative Right acting as if Obama will be the end of Capitalism in our Country.  Isn’t it Bush’s Government who is bailing out Insurance Companies, Mortgage Companies and anyone else who needs money that day?

I really do not see what all of my Conservative friends are throwing fits about.  Have they actually read the plan?  Obviously not.  Obama plans on Taxing those making over $250000 a year more.  Not one of my friends that have been doing all the complaining makes anywhere near that.  In fact, they will probably make out very well with Obama’s tax plan.  Yet they whine like there is no tomorrow.  “Oh no, he will turn the whole country socialist!”, “Oh no, these idiot liberals do not know what they are doing!”.  This from the same bunch of people who elected a studdering idiot to lead the most powerful nation in the world.  Come on people, he makes up words.  He can not balance a budget to save our lives, and he has sold your childrens future worse than any Democrat ever dreamed of!

The other thing that bothers me with the whole thing is, they are all crying about socialism and how Obama will take all the money from those who worked for it….. but the working class is getting a whole lot of breaks from Obama.  If they are going to whine, I wish they would at least be informed.  Instead, they just make a bunch of ignorant blanket statements that make them sound as dumb as the last president they elected.  Many of these friends have either gotten help at some point from the Government, or a family member of theirs has.  Isn’t Public Assistance an evil thing as far a the Conservatives are concerned?  Yet, they will take the help when they need it, they just do not think it should be there for others?  Sigh.. Stuipidity at its finest!

Busy!

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So the last several days have been very busy!  Wednesday I fixed a laptop for a guy that had a monkey that knocked it off the desk. Cute monkey, but into everything! Loved my ponytail.Thursday a friend of mine went into the hospital for an operation, had to have him there at 6:30am. I am not a morning person.  He is doing great, but we been getting down to visit him daily which takes some time.  I have also been doing a lot of Computer repair the last several days. Actually, more just helping people work out the kinks on new systems and tweaking them to be the way they want then actually fixing I guess. It had been kind of quiet, then all at once I got several people at once needing stuff.. Always the way it goes I guess.

On top of everything else, my sons former Stepfather came down for a visit that has been planned for more than a month.  Has been kinda fun.  My sons half sister which I had never met, came down with him, and I want them to keep a family tie, so I figured this was an important visit.  So my son has been running around with them, Emmy and I have been running to the hospital, and I been running to help with computers.

Now, tonight, some friends want us to go out to dinner, which we just could not pass up, we always have a good time with them. We also have a UFC fight night on tonight which we are excited about, and we bought the Allifiction “Banned” PPV.  All of which should be awesome fights!  It is Afflictions first fight card, and it is stacked, so it should be awesome!  I just hope it runs smoothly, without to much time between fights, and without to many problems.  Always hard to tell with a new Promotion.  We have high hopes though!

Well, time to go visit my friend in the hospital! Later!

Went and got Grandma & Aunt Susie

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So I flew to Michigan on Thursday, and saw snow for the first time in like 7 years.  Yuck!  I hate snow!  I had to go up and get my Grandmother and Aunt who had decided last June that they were sick of Florida and going back to Michigan and never coming back to Florida.. Well, it started getting cold, and their attitudes were completely adjusted, so they called me and asked me if I would come get them.  I didn’t really want to see the snow, but have never been able to refuse them much of anything.

So I flew up on Thursday, got there at about 6:30pm. Saw my cousin Dani, and met her newest daughter, and her new husband.  Also got to see my Uncle and Aunt that I had not seen for awhile.  Well, we then left on Friday morning at 8am.  I then drove for 23 hours straight to arrive on Saturday morning to surprise Emmy. 🙂  Was great to see her shock and surprise!  I really missed her.  She really is the love of my life!

Wild morning…

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Ok, not so much wild, as lots of “wild” animals in the park.  Saw 4 rabbits, 5 cranes.. The second couple would not actually come over to where I feed them, but was over by the tower.  I also saw all 5 chickens, plenty of squirrels and cardinals.  Great morning!  I love seeing all the wild life.  And it sure beats the wild dogs Emmy is carrying a stick to fend off.

So I realized yesterday I did not say how I installed Debian.  I used their net install disk and downloaded the majority of my setup from the net.  I picked a server that is fairly close to me and got great speed.  Did not take very long at all.  I just wish they gave the option(maybe they do, but it was not obvious) to pick and choose my packages more.  I basically had like 5 options to choose from, and it installed the “standard” packages for what you wanted to do.  Kinda cool, but kinda a bummer too.  Some of us like to shave off what we do not need or want on an install.  Like I said though, who knows, they may have the option somewhere that I missed, although, if they do, it was not obvious.

So the net stuff turned out to be no problem with Gnome.  I figured it out, and you can book mark stuff and everything.  Pretty cool.  My major obstacle has really been trying to figure out which applications I should use to do what, as it is different in KDE.  Not a big problem, just minor annoyances for the most part.  For example, I have to use Firestarter instead of Guarddog for my Firewall program.  Has a different interface, and I am still not sure what I think of it, but it has the monitoring of the firewall built right in also, which is pretty cool.

I have been learning more and more about the Gnome equivalent of Konq.  It is called Nautilus. It seems rock solid.  I been having fun setting background and panels up with nifty neato tiles.  I used my grey brick and white brick tiles, and I think it looks pretty solid. 😛  Runs solid too!  I am becoming more and more impressed.  I will continue to play with this and when Emmy gets back, if I am still impressed, I maybe trying to talk her into switching over to Debian also.  One of the cool things about that is, it would allow her to use CNR again eventually. Not that I think she needs it at this point, but I think she might like options. 🙂

So I had Pidgin IM on last night as I compiled it and am running it on here.  If I was willing to run Debian Lenny instead(the testing branch of Debian) I could have just installed it with apt-get, but since I wanted to test the stable etch out first, only Gaim was available.  Since I have had several family members start using Myspace IM, I figured I would installed pidgin, which gives me access to that, as well as my normal ICQ and Aim lists.  Much easier to keep everything in one place.  Anyways, my Mom happened to message me last night and ask what we were all to.  I told her that me and Bleys were just watching some TV, and I had no idea about Emmy as she was in Tucson.  Hehe, kinda surprised her.  Anyways, after she got over the surprise, she suggested we go out to dinner tonight.  She wants to go out for Mexican, which I have been very under whelmed with in Florida.  I sure envy Emmy and her trip to Carolinas in Phoenix.  Hope it was good Emmy!  No clue what we will be having as I kinda told my Mom I had mostly been disappointed with the Mexican here.  We will see though.

As I had planned on fixing Japanese at home tonight, I pretty much figure the food has to be better to lure me out, ya know?   Ah well, we will see what happens.  Love you Emmy!  Tell everyone out there I said hi, and sorry I could not come.  And give your brother and Jeannie congrats from me.