Treats and tricks

We’re getting close enough to the longest, darkest nights portion of the year that the sky is only barely starting to get light when my morning train arrives in Crystal City. (And that’s when it’s not raining, this also being a pretty reliably rain-heavy time of year.) So of course I’ve been arming myself with as much entertainment as possible, because the commute may run through the dark but inside the train it is reasonably well-lit.

We’re also getting close to Halloween, obviously, and once again I’ve given over the entirety of October to the horror genre for my personal pop culture consumption. A week and a half in and so far I’ve read a comedy-sci-fi-monster mash-up novel entitled Go, Mutants! – which was basically one long game of “I see what you did there” but as I happen to be a big fan of that game, that worked out well for me – and I’m about halfway through Frankenstein. Amazingly enough I’ve never read Mary Shelley’s best-known novel before, and that particular book is doing double duty not only as a Spooktoberfest entry but also as a Classic Book I’ve Never Read, since crossing off twelve of those was one of my New Year’s Resolutions. (It will be number eight, so I’m a bit behind, but I remain optimistic about finishing the year strong.)

This time last year I was pretty much only reading books on the commute, but nowadays I’m rotating in plenty of tv and movies on DVD as well. Spooktoberfest would be an ideal time to continue working my way through Supernatural, but I seem to be a victim of my own good fortune precluding that possibility. Two of my buddies chipped in together to buy me a Blu-Ray player for my birthday, which was touching in its generosity even if it may have been motivated in part by their selfish desire to be able to talk to me about various shows and films they’d be happy to loan me but only have in Blu-Ray format themselves. To wit, one of those buddies presented me with his copies of seasons 2 and 3 of Supernatural on Blu-Ray along with the player. So since the first of the month I have, in fact, been catching up on season 2, but only at home since my portable player option remains exclusively DVD-oriented. (This has been yet another dubious silver lining in the ongoing saga of everyone in my household falling ill, except me: while my wife and kids have been taking convalescent naps, I’ve been watching the Winchester boys deal with creepy killer clowns and pacifist vampires played by Tara from Buffy. Good times.)

(Also despite, or more likely because of, how resonant any suggestion of debilitating illness might be for me right now, I have no plans to go in the direction of any plague/zombie-themed horror during Spooktoberfest. Too soon.)


So, falling back on DVDs, last week I watched the movie Drag Me To Hell which … was a moderately entertaining modern gypsy-curse tale, but it seemed a bit overstuffed with competing ideas that didn’t really add up to anything (except perhaps a running joke where Alison Lohman keeps screaming while gross stuff – blood, bugs, death-ooze, etc. – is coming at her and said gross stuff ends up in her screaming mouth.) I remembered it getting fairly good reviews, which is why I wanted to check it out. I used to love horror movies when I was younger, from classic monster riffs to z-grade gross-outs to psychological suspense and just about everything in between. But lately, like many a diversion from my youth, they’ve just kind of fallen off my radar screen. I figured with a theme-powered October and a Netflix account I still haven’t cancelled, I might reacquaint myself via more recent offerings. But either the movies have changed, or I have, or possibly (probably) both.

I’d love to exhaustively research the question, with multiple samples from 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s horror cinema, but it’s amazing how fast a month goes by. If I choose wisely, don’t miss too much work due to sick days, and generally things go according to plan, I can probably read one novel a week, Monday through Thursday, paired with one movie on Friday. Which means by the end of Spooktoberfest I would have consumed four novels and four movies. And on the one hand that’s great, and a lot more leisurely brain-candy ingestion than a lot of people can scrape out the time for. But on the other hand, I can probably name ten books and twenty movies I’d love to include in the horror marathon. It’s just that the commute-time math doesn’t work in my favor.

Around the end of the month I suppose I’ll have to give an accounting of what did and did not make the cut for the Spooktoberfest slate. Assuming the world keeps turning, there’s always October of 2012 to pick up where I left off.

Plague 2: Infectious Boogaloo

So sometimes apparently “turning the corner” really just means “starting the U-turn”.

Just when the kids were seemingly back in the pink, and my wife was over a bout of conjunctivitis, along comes the flu and … well, lands squarely on my wife, pretty much. So far (knock every available square inch of wood) she is playing the human shield for the rest of us, as the kids were both healthy enough to head to daycare today and happy to do it, and I made it to work with minimal complaints. My wife managed to secure the morning off for herself, but she was planning on making a go of it in the afternoon, which I believe is a combination of her genuinely feeling better and the fact that she hates feeling sick and anything that reminds her of being sick.

This latest malady began Sunday night, when we were headed home after a pleasantly sociable evening over at the house of some friends. My wife was feeling particularly worn down so I advised her to let me drive home and worry about getting the little guy transferred from car to bed while she saw to her own needs. It was a good plan as far as it went and we followed it to the letter, but by the next morning it was undeniable that it was going to be an unpleasant sick day for my better half. Which, funny enough, turned out to be one of those good news/bad news kind of things. The good news was that even though it was a Monday, I was around to lend a hand. When we had looked ahead at the calendar some time ago we had agreed that it made sense for me to use a floating holiday on Columbus Day, so that my wife and I could spend it together (since Mondays are always her days off). So I didn’t have to feel the slightest guilt or panic about calling out from work, as I had previously cleared the holiday anyway. The bad news was, so much for our spending the day together. I did some shopping, cooked some meals, tended to the kids as best I could (still don’t quite have the hang of that lactating thing), and generally kept the house from falling down while my wife spent most of the day in bed recuperating. At least the fact that it was Columbus Day allowed us to make some good jokes about smallpox-infused blankets and whatnot, but seriously, any day where the highlight is smallpox gags is kind of a rough day.

One of these days there will be other things in my life to talk about besides who is currently sick with what and how far from recovery they are! But considering that my wife and I share a bed, our little guy loves nothing more than climbing all over us (except possibly being picked up and showering us with adorable affection) and our little girl spends most of her awake time either nursing or playing in one of our laps … I’m not really sure how any of us are going to get off this crazy carousel of contagion any time soon.

Ah, nerts

As always, I realized too late that I spoke too soon. I was right about baseball season being just about over, at least. That Yankees loss was a difficult game to watch last night. Part of me, while I was watching it, was convinced that falling behind in the very first frame but by a surmountable margin and playing excruciatingly slow and incremental catch-up all night only to fall just short in the end made for the worst kind of loss. But honestly, would a different kind of loss have been any better? Would I have preferred a blowout? Or an early lead that crumbled? I suppose not. Ah well, football it is, then.

(I do have to note, while I still can, that it is still very strange to me that we are headed into week 5 of the NFL season and the Giants and Redskins are tied for the lead in the NFC East while the Cowboys and Eagles are struggling. What weird alternate universe have I stumbled into? Of course now that I’ve pointed it out I have activated the blog-jinx and the Giants’ days on top are numbered. I really should stop doing that.)

Post-baseball, amazingly, the night went further downhill because our precious little baby girl would not go to sleep on her own. Then she reversed her stomach contents a couple of times and we took her temperature to find she had a very slight fever. She finally settled down around 1 a.m. and this morning we took her temperature again, and it remained elevated, a little bit higher still, definitely over the line of normal parameters. So not only does that mean we’re still apparently a few days out from everything being back to the normal routine, but it means the mystery of how her brother could have spiked a fever while she remained hunky-dory has been solved: the bug was simply biding its time.

The good news is that we are headed into a long weekend and my government office is, as a direct result, closing early today so I can get home that much faster to relieve grandma, who was pressed into emergency childcare service via morning summons today. The little guy made it back to school for the first time in like a week and a half, so I’ll have to pick him up, too, but then hopefully we can all just settle in for some uninterrupted recovery. (And hopefully saying “hopefully” will negate anything which might be construed as an actual prediction the universe feels compelled to countermand.)

The Comeback Trail

It feels as though maybe, possibly, circumstances of this uncertain universe being what they are, my household might be on the verge of turning the corner on getting back to something sort of like normal. But don’t hold me to that.

There had been a very minor glitch in the final installation of our new hardwood floors, which I think I failed to mention hereabouts. Specifically the floor in the area right in front of the dishwasher was cut in such a way that the dishwasher door could only be opened about 40 degrees, a problem which my wife solved by detaching the dishwasher’s front kickplate and setting it aside and asking me to get the workers out to our house one more time. A rep did come to the house this morning and found that, actually, the crew had simply re-installed the kickplate upside down as they finished up the job, so he attached it right side up and demonstrated that the door did in fact open and close freely, and then he went on his merry way. So the whole new floors adventure is finally, totally a done deal.

The kids also seem to be mended, as close to 100% healthy as they’re likely to get during cold and flu season (and with my inherently flawed respiratory system as a component of their genetic heritage), so we’re anticipating that they’ll both be back in daycare as of tomorrow. Not that this means a great deal one way or the other to our infant daughter, but it’ll be nice for the little guy to slot back into his customary routine.


Yesterday was my mother’s birthday, and a week from yesterday will be my very Little Bro’s birthday, thus concluding the insane stretch from early September to mid-October that encompasses both my brothers’ birthdays, my son’s, my mom’s and my own. And as much as I love my family and love birthdays, it always comes as something of a relief to get past the point of constant gift-ordering, card-sending, and well-wish responding as summer turns to fall.

My wife’s work schedule has been a bit askew, and that actually continues tonight as she has a mandatory dinner to attend. On the up side, the dinner will satisfy part of her necessary Continuing Education requirement for the year, but she worked late Tuesday and Wednesday night, is going to be gone for about four hours tonight, and will be working late tomorrow night as well. It’s rare that we go four consecutive nights without at least being able to have dinner together, and we’re grateful for that when it holds true and a little put out when an anomalous string of nights like this crops up. But, again, after this stretch we should be back to the normal schedule.

And then finally, of course, there’s the deciding Game 5 of the ALDS tonight, at which point either the Yankees will advance to the Championship round or the baseball season will effectively end for me. So it’s probably just as well that my wife has an unavoidable professional reason to be out of the house tonight, and it is a similarly good thing that the first pitch is after the kids’ bedtime (well, the little girl still has many bedtimes throughout the night, but shares one with her brother, at least) so that I can pace around the den hyperventilating on my own. One way or the other, though, there’s a new phase about to begin. Probably? It really could go either way.

An oldie but a goodie

So as promised I spent the day at home with the munchkins today, and it looks like we finally may be out of the woods. The little guy was, at a minimum, feeling well enough to push against my parental "stop that right now" just to see what would happen, so that's a good sign.

Anyway, I tried to make good use of the unplanned time at home, particularly when one or both children were safely occupied or asleep. I made some decent headway on two interrelated projects: getting the scanner hooked up again, and filing a ton of statements and other papers. Said ton was perched precariously on top of the scanner, which is why those projects were interrelated; don't go thinking I was scanning mortgage bills and filing them electronically or anything ambitious like that. I just had to stuff sheets into folders in our filing cabinet, which not coincidentally is what the scanner rests upon itself.

You might recall that I was really excited about using the scanner specifically in conjunction with this blog, when I acquired it, but then of course shortly thereafter our old home PC died. Then we got a new PC, after having relocated the whole computer workspace from the old spare room/new nursery, and I just never got around to hooking up the scanner because I thought it would be a pain to dig through some other box somewhere else and find trhe drivers and whatnot. What I had failed to realize was I now have a computer made in this decade and all I had to do was connect the scanner and it basically installed itself. Sweet.

Anyway, to celebrate the resurrection of the scanner (and of course the fact that it's Wednesday) I dug out an old comic that's been on my mind lately so that I could share it with all of you. It's a Justice League issue from the summer of '84, which I bought on the newsstand at the age of nine. It hasn't been in my thoughts because of the recent "New 52!" relaunch of all of DC's titles, because other than the publisher there's not much connection. (It dates from a matter of months before the geek-touchstone Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline which happens to be the first time DC tried chucking the past and rebooting everything, and also features Supergirl, who would die a very dramatic death in COIE, which means when I was eleven or twelve I thought that this particular Justice League issue would someday be worth a lot of money since it featured one of the last Supergirl appearances EVAR. I had a lot to learn. Supergirl got a new #1 in the New 52, too. But I digress.)

Really it's just a few panels that had always been burned in my brain, and I will present a scan of them to speak for itself:


Click to super-justice-size!

As noted, there's Supergirl, talking to sorcerer-superhero Doctor Fate about how they have a million tons of leftover evil to dispose of after their most recent battle, and since they happen to be in Washington D.C. they can bypass the step where Doctor Fate constructs a pentagram-shaped vault in which to lock away the bad juju. (This despite the fact that apparently no one told the artist that in panel 3 he had basically drawn half an octagon. Details.)

Work hasn't been going that terribly lately but I have been getting more and more Pentagon-wide e-mails every day which have nothing to do with me, my job functions, etc. and it does sometimes make me wonder if the mail servers for the Pentagon's network are in fact buried undergournd along with some glowing black tumor of undiluted malevolence which has been gaining awareness since the mid-1980's. But questions like that are above my paygrade, as we say, so sadly, we may never know.

Immunity

So how are the two adorable little munchkins who live at the same address as me? They are both good, and yet both not-so-good, and (as may go without saying) manage to embody those inherent contradictions in different ways.

Let’s start with the little girl, who is growing like crazy and weighed seventeen and a half pounds at the doctor’s office yesterday and if I were still in the habit of handing out blogonyms would probably be christened Armbreaker McFrillybutt as a more or less permanent measure. She has reached the stage of grabbing everything within a one-foot radius that’s not nailed down and shoving it in her mouth, and she can pretty much sit upright and unaided indefinitely (or until she lunges at something and faceplants). She is also making the first limb-flailing overtures toward crawling which means we need to start planning on serious babyproofing soon. Note: this modicum of awareness will probably not prevent us from waiting until the first time she scoots over to a floor lamp and nearly pulls it down before we actually go ahead and perform said baby-proofing.

She is also babytalk-babbling up a storm and has decided that of all the pets she likes the kitten the best (although her big brother is still far and away the apple of her eye) and between that and all the aforementioned physical mass-gaining and motor control-refining she is doing quite well indeed. On the other hand, she’s a little under the weather at the moment. Not so’s you’d notice, not during the day at any rate, but she has a persistent cough which of course gets worse when she’s horizontal. So now, after months of managing to reverse-spoil her own parents by being an excellent sleeper, she is physically unable to stay asleep through the night, as she wakes herself up hacking up phlegm and gets understandably upset about it. That’s been a bit rough, much moreso on my wife than me since this started over the weekend and has stretched (so far) into my wife’s usual day off on Monday and an impromptu day off on Tuesday.

Because on the other hand we have the little guy, who is also a constant delight in his mad dash toward getting bigger and bigger but who is also stricken with some kind of viral bug that has given him a low grade fever ever since Thursday (with spiking monets of high-grade in there too for funsies). Our daycare has pretty strict rules about kids not coming to the center while they have a fever or for 24 hours thereafter, so the little guy didn’t go to school last Friday, instead staying home with me. Nor did he go today, and because he had a fever today it looks like he won’t be going tomorrow either. He usually stays home with my wife on Thursdays, so we’re hoping this thing burns itself out between now and then and he can just get back to his normal routine on Friday. It hasn’t been that difficult for him or us from the afflicted/nursemaid perspective, honestly: there have been stretches here and there where the little guy has clearly been a little off his game, including taking a three-hour afternoon nap yesterday (after seemingly giving up the practice of napping at home for good weeks if not months ago) and a couple of nights ago informing his mother and me that he was tired and wanted to go to bed as soon as possible, which was mind-blowingly unprecedented. But once he goes down for the night, he sleeps pretty deeply, as opposed to the insomnia plaguing his sister. And for the most part he seems like his usual self and when we ask him how he feels he either says “better” (if he remembers he’s supposed to be sick) or simply “great”.

My wife took both the kids to the doctor yesterday but got a very non-committal non-diagnosis. On the one hand, that’s frustrating, but on the other hand, it’s actually good news: something very specific could be very scary, but generic “childhood crud” is a reasonably benign condition that we know from experience clears up on its own. It’s just bad luck that both our kids seem to have gotten different germs which manifest in different symptoms (the little girl has yet to spike a temperature, and the little guy hasn’t coughed once) at the exact same time.

Tomorrow will be my turn to stay home with the kids (or kid, possibly, if it seems like a good idea to drop the baby off at daycare and devote all my attention to keeping the little guy from going bonkers stir-crazy) and I will check in if at all possible. But we all know my track record on that front speaks for itself (or not, as the case may be).

37?!?!

It’s true, I had a birthday over the weekend and am now 37 years of age. Not really a traditional milestone along the lifepath but nevertheless it does carry a certain sense of “OK, now. SERIOUSLY.” Maybe it’s being a mere three years away from legit point of reckoning 40, maybe it’s just me. But I do feel as though I may have crossed a line where I really don’t have as much time to put things off indefinitely. Getting and staying healthy, tending to my house and plot o’ land, figuring out what exactly I’m doing with my long-term job plans: these are things I need to get on top of before I can’t even see the top of them anymore. The weirdest part may be that this realization isn’t hitting me as a crushing thing. I’m not weeping and wailing (or even scuffing and grumbling) about how quickly the days of carefree youth went by. It’s more of a “yeah, okay, here I am, let’s figure this thing out”, which is really not so bad.

So part of that, as mentioned, has to do with work and making at least a token effort to put a little more into it in hopes of getting a little more out of it, which I’ve been attempting today as my first post-b-day week in the cubicle opens up. I’m also slightly in catch-up mode as there were one or two things I put on my Thursday status report which I expected in full good faith to get done on Friday, only to end up not going to work on Friday at all because the little guy got too sick for daycare on Thursday night (more about that tomorrow). So I’m still not quite up to full speed here. Hopefully by midweek that will have turned around.

In other words I’m a little older and still as slack as ever but maybe sort of seeing the first outlying indicators that I’ll be trying to be less slack in the somewhat near future? I think that about sums it up.