Pages from the Philips

Greetings from the home of hurricane Ike in about two days. We’ve been following this hurricane closely in the news over the last couple of weeks and it looks like it will be coming ashore right by Galveston and then on to Houston before coming to the North Texas area as a tropical storm. Right now we are forecast to receive about 2-4 inches of rain and tropical storm winds but it looks like it will all depend on when the hurricane turns to a northeast direction.

I received a page this morning on the disaster pager informing us that the first of the medical evacuees from Houston had arrived at 5 A.M. with them bringing about 40 people by airplane.  We are expecting most of the refugees to arrive in the Dallas area by tomorrow ahead of the storm.  Depending of how many people need medical help I might be working at the convention center on Sunday night to help provide medical care.  I think there is talk of making I-45 (the major thoroughfare between Dallas and Houston) into just one direction to help with the evacuation.  My cousin Benjamin and his family got a mandatory evacuation order in the Beaumont area and are one the way up here.   Our neighbor who has a sister in Houston said the traffic is so bad that the usual 4 1/2 hour drive will now take well over 12 hours!  I’ve posted two pictures below (the first is the IR satellite image of the hurricane and the second is the projected track which shows it going right over North Texas - this storm is just massive with it now extending over 500 miles and covering more than half of the Gulf of Mexico):

Thankfully it looks like it will remain a category 2 storm by the time it hits land but please keep the people of Galveston and Houston in your prayers as it appears that they will bear the brunt of this storm.  I think there will be some problems in Dallas with rain and wind but on the whole we should be fine.

In other news, we have been working on finishing our painting project of the upstairs area.  Melissa has worked hard on a daily basis to work on painting each room at a time over the course of the week.  We started off with painting Karuna’s room last weekend when Melissa’s parents were in town and have since then finished our laundry room, Luke’s room and our room and bathroom.  I think we are down to two rooms upstairs for us to completely finish the house painting project.  Luke and Karuna are both doing well with Luke especially working hard to learn new words.  He understands almost everything we tell him and lately he has gotten in the habit of saying “no” or “i don’t know” because he thinks its so funny.  They have both loved getting to spend lots of time to play with our neighbors kids and there is always lots of din around the house when all four of the kids are here.

Work has continued to go well with my third week on toxicology.  This was a week of presentations for us with each of us giving a talk on a specific type of problem and I gave my presentation on aluminium phosphide poisoning, the leading cause of suicide deaths in many parts of Northern India.  I’m sad that this rotation is coming to an end because my fellows and attendings have been great, I’ve learned a lot, and I love my schedule where I get to spend so much time with the family.  Next week is my last week on toxicology and I also take my Step 3 examination next Wednesday and Thursday so keep me in your prayers as I hope to endure 16 hours of testing!

Melissa is feeling a lot better than she did a week ago and so we are hoping and praying that she is through the morning sickness phase of pregnancy.  Her last checkup with the OB-GYN went well and the next one will be for the official ultrasound although we won’t be finding out the sex of the baby since we want to be surprised like we were with Karuna and Luke.  We also decided a couple of weeks ago that we will be joining as members of West Dallas Community church.  We have loved the community of people that are at the church and have especially appreciated Pastor Wilson’s solid biblical teaching.  It is also great that we get to be a part of a church that is directly working with the people in our community and we thought that by becoming members we would have a greater sense of ownership with regard to reaching out into our community through the church.

I also wanted to put up some new pictures. The first set of pictures are of our new kitten, Cuddles who joined our family about 1 month ago.  The second set of pictures were some pictures we took at the Dallas Zoo on a repeat visit at the end of the August.  I was able to get some great pictures of some of the birds at the zoo and of the kids playing in the water.  As always just click the links below to watch the slideshow or you can click on individual pictures below to view them one by one.  View slideshow of our kitten, Cuddles.  View slideshow of our trip to Dallas Zoo.  Have a wonderful and blessed weekend!