As many of you may already know, I have been hospitalized since last week with a mysterious illness that has been dragging on for several weeks. I returned home last night after 5 days of playing the role of lab rat to a handful of specialists including an infectious disease doctor, oncologist, surgeon, pathologist, general practitioner, hemotologist and the usual array of anethseziologists (sp?), radiologists, etc.

I spent saturday night in ICU. Started mondya morning being told I would be starting Chemo next week and ended Tuesday with the Oncologist telling me there, in fact, is no cancer in my blood – and the infectious disease specialist telling me I didn’t have Lymphoma, rather a very unique and rare form of… Mono.

So, we’re still waiting for the FINAL results. I spent Saturday night and Sunday in ICU. It’s been an emotional roller coaster. And We really still don’t have a 100% answer, but it looks more like a weird form of Mono at this point. I still feel miserable and have a handful of drugs to take. My spleen is twice it’s normal size and all of the incisions from the biopsy and other testing have made me very sore – so it’s difficult to get around.

I have my first follow up and should have final results from the biopsy sometime next week.

In the end, I am blessed to be able to spend the holiday with my family. I am blessed to have the family, friends and neighbors that I have. I want to offer my sincerest gratitude to all of our great neighbors here in Providence Village. I always knew we had it good here, but it’s times like these that the absolute beauty of true community shines through in all it’s glory. THANK YOU TO YOU ALL! You will never know how much your support has meant to us over the past couple of weeks and as we continue to sort through my health issues.

First We want to thank everyone who came by and enjoyed the show this year – especially those who were able to contribute to the North Texas Food Bank – we’re in the final stages of calculating the final tally, but it will be sizable donation on behalf of our community!

We also want to thank the members of the media who took the time to tell our story this year including WFAA News 8, KERA 90.1 FM, WBAP 820, The Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star Telegram, 380 Guide Magazine and Friscoonline.com.

We’re already planning for next year and will have a few surprises and an even larger display!

We started dismantling the display tonight – but first I wanted to test each circuit to see what my AMP draw has actually been at 1441 (not sure what Dave’s was at 1451) – to my surprise I had one circuit maxing out at almost 17 AMPs on a 15 amp circuit – ooops. The total load this year was 40.25 AMPS. Just enough that in order to add more lights next year I’ll need to rethink my power resources!

We need… more…. POWER!

Happy New Year Everyone!

As I reported on December 14 – one of my videos from last years display (Transiberian Orchestra Mad Russian) had about 17,000 views as of November 27. By December 14 it surpassed the 100,000 mark and as of about 5 minutes ago stands at 227,731 views. That’s over 10,000 viewers per day; more each day than I had in all of the first 11 months of 2007 combined!

Gotta love viral marketing!

Take a look for yourself here: http://vaderfamily.info/christmas-2006/20/ 

Santa visited the display over the weekend and TONS of folks young and old came out to say hello and make sure that Santa knew exactly what they wanted to Christmas.Playing the role of Santa is not something to be taken lightly. It taking on this role we set expectations for children that absolutely have to be met. The childlike nature in all of us comes out vibrantly when staring into the eyes of a child who carries such great expectations. I felt privileged to have been there to help make their holiday exciting – they made my holiday exciting too – and we all had a blast.

This display is the single most important thing I do all year long and visiting with the kids (and kids at heart) is the single most important part of this display.

I can’t wait to see you all next year!

We’ve met quite a few folks that intend to build synchronized displays next year and look forward to sharing ideas with them. Dave and I have also seen others here in the neighborhood who already have the beginnings of very cool synchronized displays and invite those of you who we have not met to pop in and say hi. We’d love to get together – maybe even start our own holiday lighting club to share ideas and tips as we begin working on next years displays!

Hope to hear from you!

We’ve been wondering why our grocery bill has gone up so much for the past month or so that Santa has been staying with us – and why it seems like we’re running out to get a couple of gallons of milk every morning! It turns our that Santa eats a lot of cookies and drinks a lot of milk while he’s here with us!

how much you ask?

760 chocolate chip cookies
95 gallons of milk

This represents an intake of 1 cookie and a 16oz. glass of milk for every 15 minutes that our display has been running.

Happy Holidays!

Just a quick note to say thank you to everyone who came by to see us this year! With special thanks to those who were able to make a donation to the North Texas Food Bank. We’ll be collecting donations through the January 1st so if you haven’t had a chance to make your donation yet and would still like to, please do so before the 1st. The last show of the year will be on New Years Eve and will run until midnight.

We will post the final tally soon, but estimates look like we’ll be able to make a donation on behalf of Providence to the tune of about 500-600 lbs representing about 500-600 items. THANK YOU!

Just a quick apology to the folks who came out last night expecting to see Santa in person and were let down. The weather contributed substantially to the situation (Santa gets cold too!) and Santa ended up feeling very under the weather in general.

We’ll try to get Santa back out for personal visits tonight and maybe Christmas night as well.

I’ve spent a lot of time visiting with the folks that have stopped to see the lights this year and noticed a large number of cheery folks who love our display, but didn’t know that it was synchronized to music! Thats the best part!

If I saw out light display and didn’t know it was dancing along with the music I’d just think whoever put up all those insane flashing lights was a nut-case

So, this little note is a reminder to all of our new friends and visitors that if you tune your car radio to 107.3fm you will hear the music that the lights are synchronized to – it’s a very cool experience!