Image musings

Hi there, trusty reader of our blog!   Yes, you are one of about 300 different souls that come for a visit per month.  Welcome!  I’m guessing I probably know you, or we know somebody in common.  Or, you may have met me in an airport being all disheveled and sleep-deprived and I may have been all “What, you read my blog?  I don’t know how to respond?!”  Yes, so, hi!  (Yes, that’s you Iceland, and “Chatham”, and Copenhagen, and Bay Area, and Maryland, and Wisconsin, and South Carolina, and Ohio, and Minnesota, and New Zealand, and the rest of you that drop in more sporadically. 🙂 )

So anyway, I do know that you’re out there, and I’d like your input (gasp!) on what to do about images.  You may have noticed that on a couple of occasions I have linked directly to a Picasa-Web-Album containing pictures, instead of posting the images straight onto the blog.  Mostly I have done this to save time, because I use Picasa to curate and edit my photos on my laptop, and I can post them all with the click of a button.  (Yes, WordPress does have a “gallery-posting” option but I’m not a huge fan of the interface so I haven’t gone down that road.)

Most often, the Picasa-Web-Album images are considerably higher-resolution (1600 pixels wide) than what we post on the blog itself (660 pixels wide), but the flip side is that I rarely take the time to annotate the photos on Picasa.  Which raises the question:  Do you prefer

1. Pictures posted straight to the blog, low-res (660 pixels wide) but with descriptive caption
2. Pictures posted en-masse to Picasa, higher-res (1600 pixels wide) but with no description
3. Some combination of the two, i.e. “highlights” (1-5 low-res images) posted straight to the blog with a caption, and then a link to Picasa that may have many more images?

Please let me know in the comments!  I would be ever so happy to hear from you! 🙂

Status – three years later

I stumbled upon a couple of Bjarki’s medical status updates from 2007 the other day.  The first one, from 26 August 2007, listed the seven diagnoses he had on his chart at that time,  and the second, from 13 November 2007, revisited those diagnoses.  I therefore figured it was high time to revisit his ‘medical issues’ to see what had happened since.

1) Chronic Lung Disease: He was discharged from special pulmonary observation last June, having shown that he’s growing normally (he’s pretty much on the 50% growth line for his real age, slightly above for his adjusted age) and does not run out of breath even though he’s active all day.  It does take him a little long to clear coughing bugs but his (very probable) lung scarring does not seem to bother him on a day to day basis.  He does not seem to get sicker more or more often that any regular daycare-attending kid (knock on wood, as he’s currently at home with a fever).

2) Gastroesophageal reflux (GERD):  We finally stopped giving him anti-acids this past fall (September-ish) after keeping him on them pretty much since birth.  We did it as a trial to prep for a proper stomach acid/reflux test but when he tolerated being off the drugs so well (for the first time), we decided to cancel the test and wait-and-see.  So far his appetite is ok, and he does not complain of being in pain so we think the GER has finally resolved itself (around the age of three!).

3) Apnea of prematurity (AOP): No longer an issue, Bjarki’s brain now remembers to breathe.

4) Anemia of prematurity: No longer an issue, although it’s been years since his blood was drawn.

5) Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT): No longer an issue, and hasn’t been tested for years. No tachycardia episodes were seen at the hospital after he came off his medication.

6) Osteopenia of prematurity: Status unknown.

7) Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP):  The ROP resolved itself, but he ended up having surgery on both eyes to fix his strabismus (being cross-eyed) in April 2010.  The operation went really well, and we noticed straight away that Bjarki stopped moving his head rapidly from side to side when running (like he was sampling the road ahead with one eye at a time to get depth of field) and now he runs with a still head.  He also started liking being on the swings, but they were a source of terror before.  I guess having 3D-vision is actually quite important!  At his last eye check-up his vision was normal (may have a touch of astigmatism) and he does not wear or need glasses at this point.