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Showing posts from February, 2008

Health & Welfare

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It's official. I'm tired of coughing. Or Marge is. As is probably anyone who has been within 50 yards of me since, say, two weeks ago? I'm long since past contagious, but I don't sound it. Marge sounds like hell. I almost felt bad for the guy in the seat next to me on the flight home from Seattle. Almost. Until he unearthed a massive onion-filled tuna salad sandwich from a greasy paper bag and proceeded to eat it. And then silently but stinkily belch for the next two hours. He also felt he needed to share his newspaper at full width rather than doing a polite airplane origami. I complimented him on his sharing skills (after all, I have a four-year-old), but asked him to figure out the concept of personal space before his paper ended up in little wads seven rows up and three rows back. Actually, my phrasing was much nicer. Gosh, I really miss those monthly flights to JFK. Wait, no I don't. Someone should do a study on how many people eat burritos the night before a ...

Marge in Seattle

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I've been introducing myself as Marge on conference calls this week. I sound like a 67-year-old smoker with a two-pack-day habit. I got tired of people saying, "who is this?!" So I now have a sister. (No, I haven't actually always wanted one.) Unfortunately Marge doesn't have the same respect for health as I do. My abs are rock solid, not from exercise, but very active coughing. But here I am in sunny Seattle working with some of my favorite co-workers. Had I known that my lungs would have felt better as checked luggage, I wouldn't have boarded a plane. I thought the fever had been the worst of it, but I keep hearing estimates that the cough lasts six weeks, maybe just four. WHAT?! The Seattle office is adjacent to Seattle Center and Space Needle, walking distance to the Music Experience (going next time!), strolling distance to the Seattle Art Museum sculpture garden (so cool!), and within a few blocks of all sorts of good restaurants and such. They claim it...

Ready, Set, TWEET

I haven't set foot on a track with the intent to run around it since sometime in college. Soccer fields? That's a different story. I've run around, through, across, up, and down hundreds of those gopher rut-infested grassy havens. But @ wants to run. Suddenly the track is no longer that overly prescriptive circle of monotony it once was. Despite coming off the heels of a cold that kept me in bed all day Thursday, x and I took @ to the track on Friday after school. He wanted to race on Saturday, so I wanted to introduce him to the bounce of the all-weather surface, the concept of lanes, and the basic idea of running in circles. Teach a four-year-old to stretch before running. It's a blast. You don't just touch your toes, you make your fingers into spiders and crawl from your knees to your toes. Deet deet deet deet. (The sound of spider toes reaching little boy toes...) We went twice around the track. He wanted to go more. I woke up at 2a with a 102 degree fever... Sa...

Trouncing the Odds

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Four years ago, @ had been home from the hospital for less than a month. He was 4.5 months old and maybe weighed 7 pounds. He was attached to an oxygen tank and sat monitor 24x7. (It beeped. We jumped. ) We gave him breathing treatments 3x a day. He saw at least three doctors a week. He took more meds than the average octogenarian. We had to track his feeding, meds, and diapers on a spreadsheet to ensure he got enough calories each day, that the input & output matched, etc. When he threw up, we had to estimate how many calories came back at us. The kid could puke for distance. That was then. On Sunday @ and I took a two-mile hike in the hills. He walked the entire way. He found deer tracks and we saw deer. He met a horse. We talked to the chickens in the 4H coop at the park. Later, I worked in the yard and he practiced running. After the hike. Keep in mind, he's not yet three feet tall. Those little legs took a lot of steps. We had gone to a track meet to see a friend's dau...

Slam Books

I was recently up at my dad's house and decided to bring home some things I'd stored up there. It was an interesting excursion into the past. I had shoeboxes upon shoeboxes of letters from summer-camp friends. Another box from my first boyfriend, who lived across town and went to a different school. (Never mushy teen melodrama, just two sarcastic smart-ass teenagers writing their views of the day back and forth.) I also found "slam books " from the pre-teen era. Each page has a question and each person has a line and answers the questions. In the end, you have a microview of preteen life, trends, and the occasional nasty sniping comment about some other kid. The current equivalent of the slam book now arrives via e-mail as spiffy little chain-letter question sets you're supposed to answer, then send to ten friends, while cc'ing the person who originally sent the list to you. For some reason, I'm still entertained and fascinated by this concept of shari...

Yah Cat, Yah!!!

I took today off of work after a particularly challenging few weeks of cat herding for a major product launch. I've worked on launches for several years now, some bigger than this one. But this one? It kicked my butt. Even as I carefully left the catbox at work each night, little furballs would find the way to follow me home. Strange little IM messages. Random e-mails entitled "Oh Crap..." (imagine this with a British accent). Ringing mobile phones. But I kept most of it at bay, which has not always been my habit.

Stepping into a Cliche

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I went to the courthouse today to file more paperwork related to my divorce. I stood in line with several other people, handed over the papers, got them stamped (ca-chunk, ca-chunk) by the clerk , and ta-da... yet another step in the process is now complete. It's a rather clinical. Then... I went shoe shopping. I had to laugh at myself. Multiple times. Oh look, here I am indulging in an oh-so-cliche form of retail therapy. How weird does this feel? Oh so very weird! Oh so very funny. Then I thought, where would a guy in the same situation go? A Corvette dealership? P.S. Yes, I bought more than one pair. :-) P.P.S. Do a Google image search on "midlife crisis" -- amazing how many Corvette pix pop up! Or maybe not amazing at all.