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.

On the principle that things are the opposite of what they claim to be, I’m thinking the Internet has brought information starvation and not information overload. Say a website amounts to 1MB, and you can spend an hour reading it, or a half hour. That’s roughly what a 3-minute song amounts to on a CD, roughly, for the sake of argument. I’m just saying, the information you process in five minutes, in analog, when you walk through a garden or watch a butterfly (fucking butterflies) fly across your yard, and hear the icecream truck’s bell jingle in the distance, and the splash of a kid across the neighborhood jumping into a pool, is vastly more than what you process in hours spent sitting at the computer. The smell of a rose – some roses at least – sending that over the Internet, if you could, how much bandwidth would that use? How many hours a day do some of us spend totally divorced from all of our senses except sight and hearing?

You must be careful. You must please mom and dad. Cause you never know. You can’t be too careful. They take you on lots of trips, they could just leave you somewhere. It would be so easy. Just forget you. Who knows what they talk about when you’re in bed and they’re still up? Sure they love you. So far. Just stay bland and good. Just be good. Don’t feel anything. You can feel at night. You can punish yourself then for bad stuff they didn’t catch. You can feel sad. You can tell yourself your mom’s in the hospital dying, and make yourself cry.

And so, at 43, I catch myself stuck in traffic, imagining my daughter’s funeral and crying. Sure she’s sick, but she’ll be okay, that has nothing to do with it. It’s just fucked up.

Driving home Sunday with a prune tree, two rose bushes, some flowers and a 5-year-old crammed into the Dobl

Summer is over. This weekend was warm, but there was still an autumnal nip in the air. I got some work done around the house, and instead of crawling into a corner with a bottle of Jamesons and a cello concerto I took Gamma to the gardening center and we bought some stuff. I planted two rose bushes and a prune tree. Alpha and I went for a 10k run and I didn’t injure anything. We took the kids on a long bike ride along the Danube and had lunch at a restaurant a few towns away, in a grape arbor outside.

We noticed, at some point, a red ring around one of Gamma’s many mosquito bites. This is a symptom of Lyme disease, which used to be transmitted only by ticks; however our new, improved post-flood mosquitos now transmit it as well. All I can say is, Let’s hear it for antibiotics. She’s feeling rather tired, but the antibiotics should catch it.

Also, if any of you are considering upgrading your operating system from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, be sure and back up all your files first, because it could trash your hard drive if you are a moron.

I have this Japanese friend, I think I mentioned him recently, he’s a nice guy, lives in Austria. Sometimes a little hard to understand, our conversations sort of jump around between English and German sometimes as we seek a channel of communication. He’s the one who recommended I upgrade, as I had complained my PC was crashing way too much. He put me on the phone with his neighbor, who is a Computer Programmer.

Computer Programmer: You’re having PC problems?
Me: Uh huh.
CP: You really should b-b-back up your files before upgrading to Windows 2000 because there’s a big dif-f-f-f-f-erence between 1998 and 2000, whereas 2000 and XP are not so far apart, and don’t usually have such problems.
Me: I was hoping I could get away with it. I neglected to burn a CD.
CP: Heh. P-p-p-p-p-people should always arch-ch-ch-ch-chive their f-f-f-f-f-fffffiles regulary.
Me: … Yeah, well.
CP: B-b-b-b-basic-fffff-ly you can do t-t-t-t-fffff-two things. Reformat your hard drive, or pfpfpfpfpfffff-install a se-e-e-econnnnnd drive and [technical blah-blah].
Me: I’ll t-t-try to get a friend at work to do that.

And so on. On certain rare occasions, when I am nervous or tired, I stammer, and this guy was getting me started. I was afraid he’d think I was making fun of him. Anyway. I’ve got a friend who’ll look at the hard drive this week. And I’m making the most of my computer free time, doing freaky stuff like hang out with my family.

Curious why someone from Germany visited FL three times in quick succession via kinky google searches, even going to the google cache, I looked and found out why.