Tales from the Steppes

2005-06-01

8:28 a.m.
In my mind, I'm gone to Carolina

I think I mentioned that the SU has now started IMing and on one of his first messages, he sent me a smiley. I explained that it really was not necessary to send me one of those and this was the sort of thing the EM would do. We bantered back and forth about this but the end state was that he declared war on me. To up his arsenal, he went out and downloaded a new set of emoticons. Unfortunately for him, it was from an unreputable source and it took him hours to ungunk his computer. It was like a Spy vs Spy cartoon. He did not completely appreciate my laughter but still insists on sending gratuitous little faces. If the SU was not using his laptop at work, I would hack it so something bad would happen every time he sent one. As is, I think I will have to go for a low tech salvo. I guess I could just find some really nasty smileys and bombard him but he will expect that. Better by far to do something in a completely different direction.

The weekend was mostly pleasant and uneventful. I had 3 tons of rock and 1 ton of gravel delivered on Friday so I could build my raised vegetable bed. I started work that evening, as I am already late in getting my garden started, and was hopeful that I would be completely done by the end of the weekend. Unfortunately, I worked a bit too late and ended up smashing the middle finger of my right hand between two rocks. This has seriously impaired my ability to work and so I am not done with this project yet. Almost, but still a few more hours.

My other goal for the weekend was to sleep in on one of the mornings. Hah! The SU said he remembered a day when I got to sleep in to 9:00 but I explained that 9am was not really sleeping in. So it was that I went to bed on Friday with high expectations of being undisturbed. This lasted until 2am when I was awoken by the EM, whose throat hurt and was hysterical. Some time later I got back to sleep only to have her wake me up several times more about this. At this time I explained to her that if it hurt that badly, we would need to go to the ER. So I got to sleep the rest of the night, but not past 9am. The EM slept off and on the rest of the day and the throat lozenges I got seemed to help. She was not running a fever so I was not too worried. But the following evening, she was running a fever and her throat was still hurting so I took her to a pediatric nightime clinic. She has a strep infection, only the second time ever, but so far her brothers have not picked it up nor anyone else she was exposed to. Today she goes back to school and hopefully life will resume normally.

One of the funniest moments of the weekend came in the car on the way home from some friends' house. The SU and I were talking about a mutual aquaintance and I asked where he knew her from. This may seem like an odd question but the fact is that almost everyone we know, we knew seperately, in different capacities. My college friend equals his squire, etc etc. So he said he used to cook with this person. From the backseat a voice pipes up, "You used to cook?" I laughed so hard as he explained that he did in fact know how to cook something more involved than chicken nuggets. I have never eaten any of this food but I am assured that at one time it actually existed.

I have decided to take the MM camping without his siblings. It occurred to me that I routinely reward the EM for things that the MM does routinely. For example, I am taking the EM and a friend to New York to see John Lithgow in the NYB production of "Carnival of Animals" as a reward for her report card. She did a fabulous job of bringing her grades up and that deserves recognition. But the MM consistently aces every test they have thrown at him and I think I have just gotten so I expect that of him. Which is not fair. So it is time to correct this injustice and reward him for his hard work as well as his being more responsibile and tolerant than I have a right to expect. The fact that the YM is still alive after all he has done to his brother is a testament to the MM's self-restraint. It is wonderful to see the MM get so excited about something and I know he will really enjoy planning this with me. The only question in my mind is will he talk constantly the entire time we are hiking.