Geek Habitat

Please continue to hold Joel, his wife and their baby Nathaniel (Nathan) in your thoughts and prayers.  A donation of nearly $1,000 was collected by Joel’s friends and co-workers and hand-delivered to him (that’s “the collection” referred to in the quoted email.) Additionally, blood platelet donations in Nathan’s/the Ziegler’s name are also still encouraged so the platelets are available at the moment any surgery can be done.

Hug your friends and loved ones and let them know how much they mean to you, every single day, every single time you see them.

Love,

- Shannon Moore

Justin and I are no strangers to folks stealing our copyrighted works (photos, writings) which we’ve posted online. I’m sure at this very moment there are blatant copyright violations of our photography and writing that we are not even aware of, such as this one I stumbled upon a month or so ago thanks to my logs in WordPress. The text on that page is mine, originally published here on GeekHabitat.com on March 3, 2006; the images advertising my WildTexas.com site are server redirects I put in place–the site was originally hotlinking images directly from our servers, thus not only stealing our copyrighted work, but our bandwidth as well.

If you are able to donate blood platelets, this is an urgent request to do so. The newborn boy of one of our friends, Joel Ziegler, was born on Monday with a life-threatening congenital condition. To learn more about the kiddo, you can read my blog entry calling for prayer requests/positive thoughts — http://geekhabitat.com/1056/prayerpositive-thoughts-request/ — it includes a link to a brief description of the condition.

Baby Nathaniel needs several surgeries, and per Justin’s email below, every blood platelet donation we can muster would help this little one and his family at this difficult time.

A dear friend of ours, one of Justin’s co-workers, is going through an ineffably difficult time right now. His son, Nathaniel, was born at 5 AM yesterday with a life-threatening condition called congenital diaphragmatic hernia.

Out of respect for the family, I am not posting any more specific information right now; they have enough people champing at the bit to get “the latest” information, and they have respectfully asked that for a minimum of contact so they can focus their energies on each other and their newborn son.

• If you pray, please pray for Baby Nathaniel and his parents.

So, we’re parked in a McDonald’s drive thru lane waiting to pull up to the drive-thru window. WHAM! A Dodge RAM pick-up rear ends my Ford Escape Hybrid. It sounded bad and was a good hard jolt, but Sara slept through it and we were all still in our seatbelts and fine.

Justin gets out to inspect the damage and get the rammer’s insurance information (another insured motorist, thank goodness!) It takes a good 7 to 10 minutes with our two vehicles blocking the drive-thru lanes, and the gal at the McDonald’s checkout window peers out at the unfolding “drama” periodically. (We were in Bastrop, Texas, so it’s not like there was an influx of traffic, for McDonald’s eats or otherwise.)

Justin, Sara and I are packing up and heading out tomorrow for a couple nights at a Texas State Park. We’re playing it safe and staying in a “mini-cabin,” which we just discovered doesn’t have a built-in restroom–not like Sara needs one, yet. We will have air conditioning, running water, a mini-refrigerator and microwave, so we’ll hardly be “roughing it.”

Technically, this isn’t camping, but it’s a good safe start to camping with Sara since Justin and I don’t have a clue what we’re doing yet marrying up our still relatively newly-minted parenthood with our almost two decade’s long shared love of camping and the outdoors…