Spokane, fishing, and flat tires

We went to Spokane this week and spent the night there, Simon had a couple of doctor appointments, and I had my appointment with a new cardiologist.  Simon's appointments went fine, just routine check up stuff.  My appointment went pretty good, I'm going to get a heart catheter in a few weeks to see about finding the cause and possibly fixing the tachycardia thing, I've got an extra node on my heart that could be sending wonky signals and causing the rapid heart rate, and if they find that's the case they can burn it off with the heart catheter.  The cardiologist also thinks I would be a good candidate for heart valve repair surgery.  Everything I've ever looked at for surgery was valve replacement, but he said if I got valve replacement neither him nor any cardiologist he knows would sign off on me fighting fire again.  So he's going to do some more tests like the heart catheter thing and maybe a trans esophogeal echocardiogram (they knock me out and shove a camera down my throat to look at my heart), then he's going to present my case to the group of surgeons he works with and see if any of them think my valve could be repaired.  If they say no he's going to refer my case to the Mayo Clinic.  He stressed it wasn't an emergency to get it repaired, but thought it would be better to do it in a non-emergency situation.  So we'll see what happens.  After the doctor appointment I took the kids to the mall while Faith went to Michael's (the craft store, not her boyfriends house).  The boys each had $20 to spend, and they insisted they were going to spend it all on video games at the arcade.  They mostly play games that spit out tickets that they can trade in for cheap crap.  I convinced them to go to a comic book store first that sells toys to see if there was anything they wanted.  We all decided to spend $15 on new wallets.  I got a Star Wars wallet, Simon got Batman and Dylan got Ironman.  Their wallets have chains, mine doesn't.  So then we went to the arcade and they spent their last $5 on games, got a bunch of tickets and traded it in for cheap crap.  Dylan got a paddle ball that broke before we even left the arcade.  Saturday Faith was going to go grocery shopping, and I was going to take the kids to the car races in town, but on the way home they saw that the movie "Brave" was playing in Colville, so Faith convinced them to go see the movie instead.  I went fishing with Landon to a place called Empire Lake.  I caught 8 or 9 fish, I lost track while we were trying to see the bear that was making weird noises at the edge of lake.  We assumed it was a bear any way, whatever it was was making "whumpf" noises really loud at the edge of the lake, but the brush was so thick we couldn't see anything.  We also saw a great blue heron getting attacked by a black bird, that was pretty neat.  It was cold and raining, so after 3 hours we decided to call it quits and got out of the lake.  I'd told Landon I wasn't sure if I was cold or if my waders were leaking, turns out they were leaking slightly.  It also turned out that my van had a flat tire.  It also turned out that my spare, while it looked fine when we got it out, was flat as well.  Luckily I had met Landon at the lake, so he gave me and my tire a ride to Les Schwab to get it fixed, then dropped me off at home, Faith and I have to go get it put on the van today.  That's about it, hope everybody's doing well.  I think I mentioned in my last post that my camera got stolen out of the van, so no pictures for a while.