Saturday, February 25, 2006

Saturday Night at the Infirmary

THEBOY is hanging in there. Basically, he feels kinda puny all the time, and every eight hours when the ibuprofen loses its effectiveness his fever spikes bigtime. He hit 103.4 at one point today.

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I hate it when they're sick, I really do. It's "just" a fever, yet it makes you wonder... is this one of those antibiotic-resistant superbugs? How in the WORLD did they deal with fevers back in frontier days? I mean, I guess the only option was to ride them out. These days a fever is something we have good, extremely effective treatment for. We're spoiled. Back then you'd come out of it maybe blind or deaf. Or dead.

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But it's a rainy, dreary weekend anyway. We're watching movies, napping, doing laundry... I'd hoped to catch the Texas Wesleyan baseball team this afternoon at 1pm, but between THEBOY's sickness and this weather it was not to be.

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I like oatmeal. I eat a lot of it for breakfast. I put in some fruit, a little artificial sweetener, a little sugar and after a couple minutes in the microwave it's a cheap, nutritional, tasty way to start the day.

But if you keep your oatmeal on the top shelf, make sure the top shelf isn't too crowded. Yeeeah. I was reaching for the creamer, and somehow it wouldn't fit back in the space it came from. Like most men, I thought--That's okay, I'll just force it.

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And so the 42 ounce can of oatmeal got squeezed out, and in fact, fell off the top shelf.

And as it fell, it did a somersault on the way down to the bottom shelf, where the lid popped off and half its contents poured forth everywhere. Shelves, floor, in the trash bag box, in the cereal box...

The Russian judge gave it a nine.

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It was one heck of a mess to clean up. But it prompted me to clean out the pantry a bit anyway. No telling HOW old that bag of animal crackers was.

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SO, Power Rangers Mystical Something or Another starts at 7pm. It's been hotly anticipated by THEBOY. I've got the DVD burner at the ready. And the ibuprofen.

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Class was good today. Better than usual for a stats-intensive class.

We wrapped up with an in-class essay. He gives us a couple questions, and if we don't like them we can think of our own. Our answer has to be impressive, of course.

And I had sort of a half-formed good idea, something I'd been mulling for a while. It was my best bullet, I thought it was time to shoot.

So I wrote two pages of well-thought-out ideas, only to conclude at the end that I was WRONG. That is, there was a fundamental flaw in my approach, something I overlooked.

Something we'd covered in class today, in fact.

Nothing like answering your own question incorrectly.

There was no time to start over. I scribbled something about how I'd suddenly caught my own error, and made a quick reference to the right answer.

Well, I've had all As on assignments until now. Had to hit a banana peel at some point, eh?

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Ya'll stay warm and dry.

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