With my dad still in the hospital, and understanding that this has been another “episode” in his ongoing battle with liver disease (which will only progress), my brother and I have been talking about suggesting to Dad that he move to an assisted living facility. This is obviously a major life change, and we are unfortunately approaching it with absolutely no information whatsoever about how the process works – how care is paid for, how “free to roam” a resident is once they live in the facility, etc. (If you have any basic information you could share, please comment below – I’d love to hear from you.)

We’ve also learned our first lesson: there’s no information to be had on the weekends. No open offices, no tours, nothing outside the normal Monday-Friday, 8-5 business hours. And very, very few facility websites with any kind of practical information at all beyond the pastoral photos and comforting (but very general) copy.

And so my first bit of constructive criticism for the senior living industry is this: you need to be available to concerned families when they are actively seeking information. This means being available on weekends for informational appointments and even facility tours; and it means being more comprehensive in the information that’s provided on your websites – if you even have one.

Ideally, I would like for my brother and I to be able to gather enough information to have an initial conversation with Dad, answer his most basic questions, and then take him on a tour so he can see first-hand that assisted living doesn’t mean living in a nursing home, which is something I know he fears. I would have liked to have had that information before he leaves the hospital, but since no one we called offers weekend tours and since he’ll likely go home on Sunday, it looks like we won’t have that opportunity.

Last Friday was our 16th wedding anniversary. We celebrated with a nice dinner out at The Big Steer in Altoona and then drinks with friends.

Our wedding in 1991 was a very casual event – we were married and had our reception in the clubhouse of a local apartment complex, with music by a local DJ and food prepared by us. We spent about a thousand dollars on the whole thing, and by all accounts everyone had a great time even without the fancy trimmings or elaborate procedures. To give you an idea of our tastes at the time, we “walked in” to the song “To the Aisle” by the Five Satins and “walked out” to “Beyond the Sea” by Bobby Darin. It was just a fun party, a perfect way to get all our friends and family together to celebrate the fact that we were taking our “living together arrangement” to the level of lifetime commitment.

Since that day, we’ve certainly had our share of ups, downs, sweet milestones and even natural disasters. I think what the last 16 years has taught me more than anything is that you don’t really don’t know anything about the world until you spend some time with a person whose life experience is much, much different from your own. I am so fortunate that my husband is the man he is: 12 years older than me, grew up poor in a hard-working family with four kids and a tiny house, hated school, served in Viet Nam as a United States Marine, held a variety of jobs including police chief, studio photographer, television engineer, auto dealer, married and divorced (more than once) with children, conservative, stubborn, pessimistic… yet selfless, honest, patriotic and true. You don’t spend 16 years with a guy like that and NOT learn that there’s more to life than just the way you grew up.

Steve has spent the past several years watching his sisters celebrate their 25th and 30th wedding anniversaries. I tease him that he has been married 30 years too, but his is a cumulative total rather than consecutive. (He returned the sentiment by giving me a giant tub of cheese balls as an anniversary present. Who knew that the traditional gift for Year 16 was “artificial flavoring”!?)

Hang in there, Honey… only 9 more years and you’ll get a real 25th anniversary. I love you more than I can say.

I found a link over the weekend to Tony Snow’s remarks as he accepted the 2007 Freedom of Speech Award from The Media Institute.

Snow is President Bush’s former White House Press Secretary and, prior to that, was host of a news analysis program on FoxNews. In his remarks, Snow links declining newspaper, television and cable news audience numbers to the notion that most of America no longer believes they are getting the “true scoop” from the mainstream media (MSM).

He lays out four distinct reasons why the mainstream press has evolved away from its original pedestaled position as “champion watchdog.” What I found most compelling, though, was how closely the evolution of social media has matched that of the traditional press. Snow offers this “recap” of how the MSM has evolved:

In the early days of this nation, the press was wild, untamed, and omnipresent. Papers sprouted everywhere, and not even Ben Franklin could resist the temptation to turn his printing presses into devices for spreading gossip, maligning political enemies, and entertaining readers with items ranging from the important to the grandly weird.

Then came a period of consolidation and gentrification. Moguls controlled major media outlets and a handful of elite institutions – the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the three television networks – shaped and defined not merely what counted as news, but what counted as acceptable opinion. The press lost its Wild West flavor and became what Tom Wolfe described as “a Victorian gent.”

Lately, we have returned to the Wild West, thanks to the advent of new media, and nobody knows quite how to handle it. Ideas and controversies are erupting from every pore of American society – from blogs, talk radio, internet news and chat sites, and online video forums. The rich no longer have a monopoly on distributing ideas and views; everyone can do it, and millions are.

But here’s the kicker: Snow’s new “Wild West” is already following the same path of self-destruction (or at least self-absorption) that the mainstream media followed, only this time the evolution is much more compressed :

1. “…wild, untamed, and omnipresent.” Blogs were new, social media were new, everyone could suddenly have a blog, comment on a blog, etc. It was exciting – there were no rules, those without a voice suddenly had one. And used it.

2. “…period of consolidation…”Google and Yahoo! are gobbling up new media sites as quickly as the sites can get launched. (Subscribe to Mashable for just one week to get an idea of what I mean.)

3. “…and gentrification…” There have just this year been calls by some bloggers to suggest to others that certain codes of ethics, certain guidelines, and certain “play nice” rules should be followed in blogging.

So while Snow thinks blogs and talk radio are the new frontier, I see the new frontier already being taken over by – and indeed becoming – the giant corporations (HuffPo, anyone?) I don’t know where that leaves “the people,” but the next big communication revolution better be coming up quick.