Since writing my last column, Diane and I took a drive down Highway 15 into southern California, and more specifically to Carlsbad, for a long weekend visit with daughter Holly and her family.

We celebrated her two girls’ birthdays on Saturday. (Brooke turned 13 on Sept. 16 and Addy will be 11 on Oct. 11.) Both girls are heavily into dance. They both have lessons six days a week (just as their mother did when she was their age.) Brooke was wearing an orthopedic boot when we were there. She broke her big toe in two places while doing a leap in one of her ballet classes. With competitions coming up in a few months, (including two solos) she is taking special laser treatments on her toe to make it heal quicker.

Holly’s husband, Bruce, has recovered from one Achilles tendon surgery, but now he is facing a second surgery on the other foot. It’s tough being an outdoorsman and surfer when you’re in your fifties, Bruce.

We did get to taste the result of his outdoor skills when he prepared a wild halibut dinner that they caught in Alaska. He prepared them with various seasonings and the meal was nothing less than gourmet quality. And proving she could do more than dance, Brooke made some delicious brownies for dessert.

For you newcomers in town, my daughter, Holly, was a Broadway dancer for 15 years in New York City. Her accomplishment (a six-foot dancer from a small town in the southwest has been compared to a junior college football player in North Dakota making the roster of a National Football League team).

She was in the casts of “The Will Rogers Follies,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Fosse,” and the leads in “Contact” and Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out."

A fun position she had was as one of the Late Night Dancers on the David Letterman show,

She and Bruce met in Tokyo, Japan. She was on an international tour with “Movin’ Out” and he was there on business.

In 1995, she won the Best Actress award from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for her role in “Movin’ Out.”

Upon her retirement from the Broadway stage and move to the west coast, she married Bruce and got a role as one of the Singing Bee dancers on the primetime game show.

She was also in the Mel Brooks movie, “The Producers.”

My son, Brent, who has been doing a fine job as publisher of The Times since I retired, recently drove to Las Vegas for a weekend visit with Diane and me.

He drove himself to The Strip in the morning. That afternoon, Diane and I showed him Fremont Street, where you never know what you are going to see.

His visit was in question earlier in the week, because I suffered a fall at home and ended up in the hospital.

The fall caused me to have extreme pain in the right side of my abdomen. The doctors that examined me at Spring Valley Hospital said two cat scans were inconclusive on the injury.

They wanted to do an MRI on me to see if the pain was caused by re-injuring an old injury I had about five years ago when I crushed the L-1 vertebrae in a fall in the back yard of my Lema Circle house. That fall reduced my height by three inches.

The other possibility was it could be a new injury where a bone chip could have become dislodged from my earlier spinal injury. The bone chip could be jabbing me internally as I turn or make a twisting move.

I told the doctors that I couldn’t have an MRI, since my Deep Brain Stimulation doctor at the Mayo Clinic discovered I had a loose lead in my brain. It probably disconnected in a previous fall, he said.

The pain in my abdomen has subsided considerably, either fix would require surgery. One doctor told me, “Any time you do a surgery involving the spine, it is a serious proposition.”

Maybe I’ll just live with the dull pain that remains.