This being called into the office to work on Sunday stuff would suck if it weren’t for the Internet access. (My home PC is still broken.)

If this is war, we should make some sacrifices, right? Adam has a good list to start with.

(Although I would add something snarky about young plutocrats who get nabbed with crack cocaine in rehab, and big software companies who issue software that fcuks up your hard drive when you try to upgrade.)

Oh, and I dreamed I was at the rowing club and some party was going on and I went behind the bar and there were these buttons like doorbells except they activated the locks on three rivers and I was wondering whether they’d cause flooding when the water was released or if it would be smart to release some of the built-up water so I pressed them to release a little and water levels started rising in three rivers – the creek outside, the Danube it flowed into and some fictional third river the Danube flowed into. And water started flowing backwards up the Danube into the creek and on up as the water levels equilibrated and I looked for the buttons to shut it back off before it flooded and they were no longer there, I guess someone had moved them, and the waters continued to rise and were washing all the bark dust off the banks of the rivers (?) and there was some big water-skiing and boating event going on and the Danube was hugely wide and high and people had to stand way up on top of the banks to watch the event. And I was all like, Uh-oh, what have I done?

Saw a van on the way to work that was a little bit mashed up in front, and it struck me how twisted wreckage just isn’t the same nowadays. Even some compact I saw last year in front of a local fire department, completely mashed, the holes in the windshield and the steering wheel pressed into the back seat telling their sad little narratives of post-disco mortality: just wasn’t the same as a ’55 Chevy creamed by a logging truck, you know?

And I thought, how many men my age are sustained by subversive 5-year olds and the Ramones; and I decided probably more than you’d think.

And in the city, an old man’s white Mazda had conked out on a corner I turn on driving to work. And I thought, someone should stop and help him, but I have to go blog, sorry old guy. Plus cars aren’t exactly my thing.

Kids sure have the capacity to scare the shit out of you, don’t they?

Thank you for the well wishing, it seems to have helped. Shelagh remarked in the comments to the previous post, “I’m sure she’ll be finding ways to embarass you horribly again soon.”, and she was right. You know the cartoons where someone accidentally brings a monkey, or lively space-alien, back to a suburban home and it bounces off the walls and generally takes the place apart? That image flashed through my mind when I got to the hospital after work, because Gamma was doing everything except swinging from the bar over her bed, and that only because she was too short to reach it. She was looking mighty genki, as they say in Japanese. Although, to our credit, she did have purple rings under her eyes.

She’d had a fever the previous night, and head and stomach aches, and vomited in the morning. We’d rather take her in one time too often (or a dozen times) than not go in the time we should have. This is why I’m all for nationalized cheap health care, because I’m sure there are people who can’t afford to take their kids in. Anyway. By the time Alpha got her into the hospital, noonish, she was feeling better. No encephalitis. No fever. Good appetite. The results of the blood test for Lymes will be here in two weeks, so she’s still on the antibiotics. She does have some infection, they just don’t know what yet. They gave her a chest x-ray to see if she has pneumonia. Negative.

The nurses and doctors were sort of looking at her, bouncing around, and at us, like, You guys worry a lot? And we were like, You should’ve seen her last night! Seriously!

Anyway. We now return to our original programming.

If something is going around, Gamma usually catches it. In the long run this is having a positive training effect on her immune system, I’m sure. Currently it appears to be borreliose (German name) which I guess is called Lymes disease in English, a bacterial (spirochetes) infection typically transmitted by ticks, and, now by our new-improved mosquitos. Things will likely go well, it can be treated with antibiotics, but my fear-the-worst mindset has me very worried, because it can, if not caught in time, move into the joints, or brain, where it is harder to fight and can, in a bad case, cause encephalitis. And now I just got off the phone with Alpha, who says they have to go into the hospital for a blood test because her fever hasn’t gone down. If the blood test comes back somehow, bad in some way, she may have to have a spinal fluid test, which is no fun. A pediatrician friend of ours is even going into the hospital today to check on the test, although he is on vacation right now, nice guy. So anyway, I won’t be writing anything funny today, nor will I be posting any 911-related rants. Maybe tomorrow.