August 14, 2006
Life is what happens when you're making other plans
Yeah, that headline there? Totally saccharine and goofy and pointless. Yes, I know it's cribbed from John Lennon, so what?
Anyway.
The "life that happened" was a sudden and unexpected gall bladder removal for my wife last week. Yeah, I know—Wha?!? She went to the doctor on Wednesday, confirmed that she had gallstones, and they wanted to take the gall bladder out either that night or Thursday. We opted for Thursday, so I spent most of that day at the hospital and the rest of the weekend taking care of, er, everything. So I've been busy.
You know what's crazy? They treat gall bladder surgery (formally known as cholecystectomy, in this case laparoscopic) as basically outpatient; my wife was able to come home Thursday night.
Okay, this is even crazier, and creepy (from that Wikipedia article):
Gallstones are, oddly, a valuable by-product of meat processing, fetching up to $900 US an ounce in their use as a purported aphrodisiac in the herbal medicine of some cultures. The finest gallstones tend to be sourced from old dairy cows. Much as in the manner of diamond mines, slaughterhouses carefully scrutinise offal department workers for gallstone theft.
Wow. And "ew."
On the other hand... no, I won't even go there.
July 6, 2006
Don't you hate that under the weather feeling?
So I'm fighting off the advances of a summertime cold, picked up from my son. It's that tickly sore throat, run-down feeling and if it doesn't get nipped in the bud right away, then it'll turn full-fledged, and we don't want that. Hence, I've been dosing up on echinacea, Airborne, vitamin C, and Ricola. And tea. So far, I seem to have halted the advance, but I won't know if the tide has turned until the morning after a (hopefully) good night's sleep.
Last night's sleep was not good. At 4:20 in the AM we (as in, the entire household, kids, animals and all) were awakened to the sound of digital beeping. Loud digital beeping. After scouring the house and finding nothing out of the ordinary, my unconfirmed suspicion is that it was the new humidifier we had set up in my son's room. After that, it was sporadic sleep interrupted by the cat pouncing on my feet every 53 seconds.
On a totally unrelated note, why on Earth are so many MySpace pages so bloody ugly? No, I know the technical reason they are—because somebody actually thought it would be a good idea to give users that much control over their page—but holy Corona, don't any of these people have any sense of aesthetics at all? I don't get it.
