BrianHursey.com

Well the last week was fun. Last week I when to Panama City with Katrina’s family. I was the only man on the trip. However who cares it is Florida and it almost cost us nothing for a week rooms in a rented house.  I had fun taking pictures and eating and lying on the beach in the morning.  I messed around with some long exposure sun set photos. I really enjoyed doing this. I mainly used a tripod and shot three separate exposures. See bellow

What I really like about vacations is the food. It is nice being able to go out to eat every night and try place you have not eating before. I have some suggestions for people who go down to panama city

-Boon Docks:

-Bayou Bills Crab House

I had some fun messing with photography. I decided to try and shoot sun sets I read that you can set your camera at f22 to take the photo. I did this and I noticed something on the results of the photos. My sensor was dirty. Now I have to find some sensor cleaners.

I hope everyone had a good easter. Katrina and I went down to visit family in Carroll county. It is always nice seeing every one.  We first went to our old church and went to the easter service.  It was very nice seeing everyone.  After that we ate lunch at Katrina's parents house, and got to watch my niece egg hunt. It was funny because some of the eggs did not have candy in them she would open them up see if there was candy in them then drop the ones that did not have candy on the ground. We had her pick them up and I put pennies in them for her.  I got to use my new 85mm lens. I really enjoy using this lens. We went to my moms after that and had a nice home cooked meal and got to visit. It is always nice getting to see her. BTW I love meatloaf…

This is a serious subject, but one I think about all the time. I have Cerebral arteriovenous malformation (AVM) it is defined as a malformed collection of blood vessels within the brain, characterized by tangle(s) of veins and arteries. Why is this a bad thing you may ask?  Well, over time the integrity of my blood vessels in my brain decreases. This can cause sort of like bubbles in the week spots. These can burst causing aneurysms. This can very easily kill me, or severely damage my brain.  I know it is scary but it was a realization that I had to find out at thirteen years old, that is when they discovered my AVM.  

You see I have epilepsy, I had my first seizure when I was 7 years old on a trip to my grandparents in Louisiana. I had a seizure and went face down right into my pizza. They originally thought that I had meningitis. However they never found any evidence of that.  I remember having the worst headache of my life while driving to my family’s house. Next thing we stopped at pizza hut in Montgomery and I remember watching mtv on a big screen. Next thing I knew it felt like some one was grabbing my head and shoving it towards the floor. It is a very weird feeling. I woke up with every one crying and looking very worried. It is interesting. It sounds like you are listening through a sea shell when you wake up. Hearing is slowly regained.  You wake up not knowing where you are and scared. It is a very helpless feeling. I spent the next 4 days in the hospital undergoing tests and I got to use one of the first MRI’s…. It was new technology then. Well I think I have had a total of 7 grand mall seizures I think they call them something else now days. I have more not as sever seizures in my life. This can include loss of time, to just seeing stars..  Well MRI’s slowly got better and better over the years. When I was 13 they saw white spots on my results. At first they thought it was tumors.. Ya 13 years old and you might have brain tomors. Kind of scary… Well they sent me to Gwinnet medical center to get an angio gram.  They then discovered that I have a AVM.  The interesting thing is, now this is not 100% proven, but when I was a child I was slow development wise.  Then all through school I had sever learning disabilities. This includes dyslexia, dysgraphia, and ADD or some people call it ADHD… I was a very hyper child. So I struggled all the way through school. People told me I would never graduate high school. Now I am a college graduate and I do unix support with EMC corp.  Well school was the hardest thing I have ever done, but with the support of family and friends I was able to succeed. So I think this covers most of the history behind my disorder. I might have missed something. However everything most likely revolves around my avm.

What made me think to write this post is I get head aches all of the time and the scare me.  Headaches for normal people are just a nuisance. However for me if I get headaches in the left back of my head that scares the crap out of me. This morning I was on my way to work and I felt a couple pulses of sharp pain from that area. The problem is I don’t know when it is severe enough to go to the hospital. I am not a big judge of that. I don’t like the doctor and I never have.  So its constantly a worry of mine and Katrina’s. I love my wife and I hope I never have a issue that she would have to go through with me.  

I also worry about treatment. You see it is a rare disorder AVM-afflicted people in the United States range from 0.1% to 0.001%, and there is only one place in Atlanta that can treat me.  The scary thing is to try and relay that information to the hospital when I get there. I may be completely out of commission. Emory hospital is the only place that can treat me. Ok now for the gross part they will have to drill a hole in my head to release pressure. Then they will need to life flight me to Emory and do angio procedure to send a catheter into my brain to cauterize or block the leak.  I am afraid that some dr at the local hospital will not know this and try to do brain surgery on me. This will probably kill me because you can not get to it that way.  So if any of my friends are reading this. If this does happen I need to be life flown to Emory.

So there it is my AVM post that I have never written. Hope I did not scare any of my family and friends. Its better to understand and accept the issue instead of hiding it. I know I will go to haven to be with Jesus. I just don’t want to leave my wife and family.

 PS: Ohh forgot one thing.. My seizures are under control by using Lamictal... 

Well it seems like life has been busy the past year I am not able to post as much as I want to. Well I think this is happening to every one the older we get. We get a more hectic schedules, more responsibility, more people relying on you. Well because of this things build up and I want to post about them, but I don't have time. Then more and more things build, then I don't want to write a big post. Well I am not going to write a big post, well I hope not. I am mainly going to have three subjects in this post family, friends, and photography.

Family:

I had the great opportunity to go to Washington DC in January to see my nieces first birthday. I do not get to see my sister and my brother in law often now since she lives in Washington DC. Even though she lives so far I always like going to her house because she is in the city. I like the city because of the photography opportunity, we will get to that later. Well its amazing how quick children grow, and what is it about kids that make you want to take so many photos of them. We had her birthday at Gymboree. That place is quite interesting, I think is is great place for interactions with other children and learning stimulus. Immediately it made me think of a Family Guy quote from “Saving Private Brian"

Stewie : B-Brian, wha… what are you doing? Gymboree is that way.
[pause]
Stewie: Brian, it's parachute day!
[pause]
Brian: I just want to swing by the army recruiting center and give a piece of my mind to that jerk who tried to brainwash Chris.
[pause]
Stewie: We are gonna be so late. I'm not gonna have a partner.
[pause]
Stewie: I'm gonna have to be partners with the teacher.

Friends:

Well this past week actually two weeks ago I got to go down to clayton state to eat lunch with all of my college friends. It was very nice seeing all of them. It is crazy how quickly things change in just under two years. We of course went to our favorite place moes. John, I promise next time I will come down on a Friday so we can hang out outside of work.

Photography:

I finally got to go and take a follow up comparison picture of photos that I took at the lake last march. It is amazing how drastic of a change that has happened. National Public Radio liked the photo so much that they put it on there webpage http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2008/02/growing_georgia.html

I also of course took some pictures while I was in Washington DC see the pictures below.

Did any one else go out and see the lunar eclipse? Well I decided to go out and take pictures of it. I only was able to capture an hours worth of photos, because the batteries in my remote died. It is interesting I learned something I never knew. When the earth goes in front of the sun. The light is blocked off however the read wavelength of light bend more than the other colors. This gives the moon a red tint because the light bends around the earth.

I need to start making posts more regular. I start putting off my posts because once I get past a few weeks I do not want to type a long post. Well the past few weeks have gone well. On October 27^th my old job had a get together. I worked at a help desk at my university so many of my previous co workers were good friends also. It was nice seeing every one and catching up. I had a comp day saved up so I went up their and hung out with every one at work. I walked around the lower library just visiting with every one. Dan(schools system admin) and I of course got into some EMC talk. It was nice being able to relate something with Dan. After that all of us went out to lunch at Moes. I miss doing that and I also miss going to long horn every Thursday night with every one. John and I went to his house and watch transformers. I got to say I really liked the movie. Katrina even watched it the next week. She really liked bumble bee.

On Saturday they had a cook out. It was nice visiting with every one. Chris almost caught the whole place on fire when he tried to throw frozen chicken wings in hot grease. It over flowed and lit up like a blow torch going about 15 feet in the air. The following pic is their second attempt. They had about 6 of us around them with our cameras ready. We really needed to have fire extinguishers ready.

There has sorta been a competition between departments for the spirit award. This is a award given to the department with the best school pride. Well guess who won it? My old depatrment “The Hub. Lets just say Debye teh director was quite happy.

Here are some more photos of the event.

Last weekend we had a ho down with my church. All I have to say is I never thought that it would be so much fun. Mainly it was because most of us never have done it and the professional announcer was teaching us. We were laughing so hard that we could not control our selves. I felt like I was going to pass out because I was laughing so hard.

Last Sunday, we had a grand opening of our new building dedicated to children’s ministry. It is a very large complex dedicated to children. Govoner Sonny Purdue was there for the grand opening. He gave a message of the woman and the well. He tied in the water christ and how we do not have to worry about that because god will provide. What we need to focus in is the water and life of christ to minister to people in our community to take Jesus into their heart. We are very blessed to have such a strong Christian Govoner like Sonny.

I know it has been a while. A lot has been going on in my life. Family events(camp out), Ga Power picnic at plant wansley, and work of course. So much has happened that I have been to busy to write a post about every thing so, lets start over.

Last week was nice I was in training all week. It was nice because normally we would get out of class by 4pm after lab. I really enjoyed the class it was over EDL EMC’s virtual tape library. This is a very cool system, it is a customer box with a clariion backend. As far as the host is concerned it is a physical tape library. Its nice because it is much faster than a physical tape library and more flexible. Plus you do not have to change anything on your current backup configuration. You can use the same backup processes as before. Also it can offstage to a physical tape library for physical vaulting also it can backup to a remote cdl. I really enjoyed lab time. We had some issues with our older cdl. You Service Processor of the clarion was bad and we got to trouble shoot and replace that. Then we had issues with the fiber fabric and the windows box seeing the drives. So we were able to reboot the fiber switch resolving the issue. I also had the chance to install a compression card into the cdl system. That was fun until my teacher told me how much the card costs. You can read more about edl’s at http://www.emc.com/products/systems/disk_library/index.jsp the largest disk library we have can scale up to 1.8PB of raw storage capacity.

We went to the north ga corn maze this past weekend with our Sunday school. May I say it was a lot of fun. I had us on the right track but of course I was to slow and we lost our bearings. Katrina had to take away the map from me. It was a lot of fun when we were just lost in the maze. http://www.northgacornmaze.com/

I am very excited about this weekend we are having a reunion at my old support desk at clayton state university. All the previous staff over the past 10 years is invited. That means that I will see some of my old co workers I have not seen in years. I am going down Friday to have lunch with a few friends their and then the event is on Saturday. I am also going to go buy my dads and finally pick up some of the rest of my stuff from the house.

This past week Katrina and I went to Louisiana to visit both sides of my family. While we were visiting my dad’s parents, my dad took us on a tour of Mandeville. It is a nice town, We went to a very cool grocery store called Rouses. http://www.rouses.com It was like a Cajun whole foods mixed with a publics. If you like good food and are in Louisiana I would suggest visiting one of them. Before leaving granny’s and poppy’s, Katrina got to try out blue crab for the first time. My dad spoiled Katrina by getting all the meat out of the crab for her, and I of course had to work at it on my own.

Tuesday night all of my cousins and their wife’s/girlfriends got together and went to see a movie, thank you Heather for organizing the event. We went to see Ratatouille. I really liked the movie. I definitely will buy it. If you have not seen it I would suggest you go see it. The animation was awesome, and the plot was great. Yes, it is designed for kids however I always enjoy pixar movies.

Now to the fourth of July—The 4^th is one of the main days that all of my family get together at my grandparents. I guess it is kind of a family reunion. Now that everyone is getting married there is even more people at the event. We had a great time. We went on a few boat rides, and had ribs. It was very nice being able to spend time with all of my family. I did not go swimming this year partly because I didn’t feel well, but didn’t really miss it. Now days I like to just sit and visit with everyone.

On Friday, Mom organized a day for us in New Orleans. It gave us all some time to spend together. Since we moved, we don’t see her as much as we would like. We don’t get to see Jen, Dan, and Ella much at all. This was Dan’s first visit to New Orleans. I got to play around with my warming filter. It brings out the colors more in photos. We went to Café Du Monde and had some Beignets. It was nice walking around Jackson square until it started raining so we went to Jens hotel. It was a nice hotel. It was an old house turned into a hotel called the cornstalk inn off of royal street. After the rain let up, David wanted to get a cigar. We went to find the tobacco shop near Bourbon Street. The funny thing is I have probably been to the French quarter probably 20 times in my life. I have never been to Bourbon Street. To tell you the truth, unless you only care about drinking there is nothing special about it. David wanted to smoke the cigar so we went to an Irish pub. I had a great time playing pool with David even though I lost. I have not won a pool game in years. Well I only play pool like one time a year anyways. After we picked up Katrina, Mom and Ella we went to eat at the Gumbo Shop off St Peter Street near Jackson Square. David treated us all. Thank you again for our dinner. I have wanted to go back since our last visit to New Orleans. It was not as good as I remembered, I still liked the crawfish etouffee though. I have a theory about this, maybe the old chef’s have left the restaurant since the hurricane. I had a great time visiting with my family. Thank you Mom for getting us all together.

It is amazing how much the neighborhood has recovered ever since hurricane Katrina. There still are a few signs of damage mainly some boats and some houses in their final stages of rebuilding. However compared to New Orleans, Slidell and surrounding areas have recovered much faster. When we went to New Orleans nothing has been touched, to me it is like no one their has the will to repair their homes. Looking at the difference between Slidell and NO that both had devastating damage and flooding. It is a real testament to the character of the people that live in the different areas. It takes a lot for those who have begun to rebuild their lives there. There are some people rebuilding in New Orleans and I applaud them. If someone is reading this and saying how do you know about this. All of my family live in Slidell where the eye hit and it had a 25 foot tidal surge that went seven miles inland, all of them had severe damage to their houses. The majority of them had a 8-4 foot surge go through the house. It took them a while to rebuild but they came back and did it.

Posted by Brian

While we were in Louisiana our puppy, Gabby, got very sick. She was in and out of the animal hospital, but was released for good 25 minutes before we reached Carrollton. It turns out that she has an inner ear infection. She can barely stand up and often loses her balance and tips over. She is slowly getting better. She sleeps a lot. She gave us a big scare, but we are glad that she is going to be ok.

Posted by Katrina

Well after a long first year of marriage, we decided we needed to spend some time together under the same roof. We went back to Hilton Head, SC because we just can’t resist a tropical storm. If we wanted to go somewhere sunny, we would have gone to Jamaica. Unfortunately, we didn’t save enough quarters during the year to go there. That is the bad thing about Debit cards, they don’t give you any change back. Despite the rain, Brian was happy to get to go to Wild Wings. Mohsin and John, if your reading this, don’t worry. I thought about you and brought you back a souvenir from that place. Some of you are probably wondering what is so special since there are Wild Wings restaurants here in Georgia. Well, I do not particularly like the place so Brian only gets to go on special occasions. Well don’t feel bad for us yet, because that was not even the best part of our trip. We got to watch a movie with a bunch of grandparents that should have been rated beyond R. The movie went a little to far beyond what we needed to see so much so that half the grandparents in the theater got up and left after the third OOOOO! Don’t get me wrong, the movie was funny, but would have been better with a little less of the F word and a little more covers.

The sun did come out long enough for us to go to the beach one day and play a game of miniature golf. I know that we agreed that winning was not important, but since I am being forced to make this post, I must say that I WON! Brian also got upset at me when I forced him to wear a windows shirt to the beach. What’s the big deal? It is a shirt right? On our last night, we went to a place that served all you can eat Snow Crab. Brian was very excited. I don’t eat crab, so I was not aware that it was an all night affair. If I would have know, I would have taken my pillow and a blanket. At least we got our money’s worth.

We had a really great time together. So great, I decided to move in with him permanently. On a serious note - I am so thankful that the school year is over and I can finally be here with him. This vacation was so nice, even in the rain, just being together. This first year has been so difficult. I would have never imagined a year ago today when standing at the alter taking Brian as my husband, that I would have to live apart from him so long. This trip almost felt like our honeymoon all over again. I am looking forward to another year. This time, with him by my side. Hopefully we will never have to be apart again.

My sister came down from Washington DC this past weekend with my niece Ella. It was so great being able to get to visit with my new nice and my family. My mom wanted to do a photo shoot of Ella we must of shot 500 photos.

I am excited that I also was given my moms Cannon A1 35mm camera. It is funny that I would get so excited about a 35mm when I allready have a Cannon Digital Rebel XT DSLR.  Im excited because I have 2 new lenses and filters. I have to buy some filter and lens adaptors to get them to work on my Rebel. However, this will help me learn more about photography.

This past weekend Katrina and I went up to Washington dc to visit my sister and my niece Ella. It was a great trip. Ella is so smart she was turning book pages at 3 weeks old. Ok maybe she was just moving her arm and the pages turned. That doesn’t matter she is very smart. I also got to walk around the neighborhood and take pictures. I really like old architecture, and photography. So, I put the two together and that is mostly what I take pictures of. I hope every one is doing well and I hope you all are having a good valentines day.