StumpTown Blog

Just a quick note from the hospital. My Dad had his surgery today. It went well. They were able to go in with the scope, so they didn’t have to open him up. The surgeon feels good about how it went. There were no other tumors visible which was a pleasant surprise. It went as well as it could have. Praise God. Thank you all for your prayers.

Two 13 year old boys have been charged with breaking into their school and attempting to rape an assistant principal who was working at the time. 13. 13!!! It makes my stomach turn and makes me sad and angry and disappointed. It also makes me wonder, are we doing all we can as a society to keep things like that from happening? One of the heavy burdens we have put on our legal system is the responsibility to mold society. Our legal system punishes unwanted conduct for the sake of justice and compensates the injured in the name of fairness, but as much as any other goal, our legal system is designed to motivate certain behavior we deem desirable. In the regulatory arena, that is the primary goal. We fine companies who pollute primarily because we want them to stop polluting. In the civil and criminal arenas controlling behavior is only one of the three goals (at least 3) that I mentioned above. But it is with that goal in mind that I find myself wondering, when should parents be ...

We interrupt this blog inactivity with some news/information of actual importance. It has been a while, but I think I should post an update on my Dad’s (pictured above in a very cool old picture my wife unearthed recently) health situation. This will just be a brief summary, so if you would like more details, please feel free to email me. If you are new to the blog or to knowing me, you may not know that my Dad was diagnosed with a relatively rare form of cancer a couple years ago. Successful surgery removed a tumor the size of a nerf football (sorry to be graphic, but it still blows me a way to think about) from his abdomen. Unfortunately, all too soon, the cancer returned. My Dad has been living for several months now and maybe more like a year now that I’m thinking about it with multiple tumors on his Liver and one in his chest. There is a drug that has proven to be effective against this type of cancer that my Dad has been taking and the regular CT scans had been showing that the d...