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Forty Days to Forever. Brett’s special day to be featured as part of the Forty Days to Forever fundraiser was on Wednesday. If you missed this and would like to donate, click here. If you could pray for us to be able to find him a mama, I would muchly appreciate it.

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Kaia’s Kindergarten Fund. The Kaia’s Kindergarten Fund fundraiser kicked off on March 1st. If you want to participate, you still can. Details are here. I also have a printable sheet for any families with homeschoolers who want to count coins that they donate. Kaia’s adoptive mama just started a blog dedicated to bringing her home. The Saving Kaia blog will remain active however because I can use it to raise awareness for her and hopefully help to raise some of the funds to bring her home.

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Habemus Papam. I’m probably the only Protestant who was watching for white smoke on Wednesday when I got up and saw that there had been no black smoke after I went to sleep. (The morning votes in Rome were shown at 2:00 a.m. my time.) I was sitting at $tarbux working on devotions and flipped to Chrome where I saw the smoke. About 5 seconds later, I got a text from the Pope Alarm. After about forty minutes of waiting for them to announce it, I had to run to the bathroom due to the venti Cool Lime Refresher I was sipping on while I worked. Thankfully, I didn’t miss anything. I couldn’t understand the announcement in Latin because the microphone was echoing too much (I was watching the EWTN feed on my laptop) and all I could pick out after “Habemus Papam” was “Franciscum”. I knew that “Franciscum” was Francis so I was looking at the list of all the cardinals with that name until I heard them explain that it was Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. (I was able to go onto YouTube later and find a clean recording of it that I could understand.)

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My thoughts on Pope Francis. Truthfully, I’m happy. He has a commitment to social justice while also being committed to preservation of doctrine and a reputation for living simply. I was displeased when Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI because he had written some rather inflammatory things about non-Catholics in his pre-papal days but I respected him because of his office. Not so much with Pope Francis — I’m a fan. It’s a moot point because I’m Lutheran and he isn’t considered an authority for us but it’s still nice to have a Pope with whom I am enamored. And seriously… he’s a Jesuit — that’s a pretty long shot to become Pope because Jesuits are not supposed to aspire to higher office.

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Grumpy Cat. Tard the Grumpy Cat is at SXSW and has landed on our CBS affiliates in Sacramento because the anchors were amused by her. Friskies has done a photo shoot and filmed a commercial with her and I found this online tonight. It’s a parody of the backstage rider for Van Halen that is tailored to Tard herself.

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I’ll drink to this. Are you a fan of The Big Bang Theory? There’s a drinking game for you! Consider it’s on for an hour every day in syndication on one of our antenna channels in addition to the new episodes on CBS, I think I could get blotto drunk really fast if I actually drank alcohol.

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On a somber note. Ian, a friend of mine from college, is fighting leukemia. His wife posted this today:

I’m writing with tears streaming down. We just heard that they have diagnosed him with a rare liver disease associated with the transplant called “sinusoidal obstructive syndrome” or SOS. Basically, there are clots in the lining of the veins of his liver stopping the flow of fluid, and actually reversing the flow causing fluid to build up in his stomach. The ultrasound this morning confirmed this is the case.

Up until recently, there has been no cure for this and it’s an end game situation. There is a medication called Defibrotide they are very hopeful about via clinical trial that they are working on getting for him. It is only made in Italy and there are hoops to jump through but they assure us he will get it. It takes a week or two for response from the medication, and he will be on it for at least three weeks. In the mean time, things are expected to get worse and they may need to drain his belly multiple times to allow room for his kidneys to function. His stomach looks twice as big as it did last night and he hasn’t been able to eat or drink. He is in such pain and discomfort already, I can’t imagine two more weeks of this progressing… I’m still in shock.

Please pray they can get Ian in the clinical trial and receive the Defribrotide quickly.
Please pray he responds as fast as possible and it is completely effective in treating his liver. Sometimes people never fully recover even with the medication and need to have their stomach drained regularly for the rest of their lives. Please pray this is not the case with Ian.

So it seems the heat has been turned up a few notches. Please pray that when we walk out of this furnace we’d be like the young men in Daniel- glowing brighter with a testimony and not even smelling like smoke.

For more Quick Takes, visit Jen at ConversionDiary.Com.