Aunt Colleen arrived from Manitoba yesterday. She is already L’s favorite playmate. Here he is “helpfully” helping Colleen load the dishwasher.
Today we spent some time outdoors enjoying the beautiful weather. We went for a hike along the Holyoke Range in J. A. Skinner State Park and then enjoyed some campfire-style pizza.
The three of us celebrated Mother’s Day by heading to a nearby park for a cookout. L was mesmerized with the fire. Fortunately, we were able to keep him far enough away from it so that he didn’t get burned. Later, his Dad taught him how to throw stones in the river.
This story made me and my officemates laugh out loud. Here’s how I imagine this man’s internal dialogue leading up to the event:
Hmmm. I really could use a joint. But I don’t have any money. I’ve heard that some people write up fake cheques and then cash them. Sounds like a plan. Let’s see, I need a couple hundred dollars. I’ll write a cheque for, say, $500. That ought to cover it. Hey wait. While I’m getting money for free, why don’t I get lots of money for free. What’s a lot of money? Ummm, a number with ten zeros behind it sounds like a lot of money. Why don’t I write a cheque for 340 billion dollars? That way, when I cash the cheque, I’ll never have to write another one. I’m so dumb. I should have thought of this sooner.
Obviously, it never occurred to him that there are many countries in this world that don’t even have that much money, never mind individuals who walk through the door wearing tanktops and shorts. Did he come to the bank with a 3 ton truck? Or did he think he could carry out that much cash in his pockets. I can see the mental machinery at work:
This will be so cool. I’ll get to see some of those billion-dollar bills. I wonder what they look like. Oh, and I’ll be able to start that record company I’ve always wanted to start. Wait, how much does it cost to start a record company? I’d better make that cheque a little bigger. Why don’t I write one for 360 billion dollars. I hope 20 billion dollars is enough to start a record company.
Many of you know that I’ve spent the past month and a half stressing out about a paper I’ve been trying to write. The goal was to get it written in time to submit April 18th, but it didn’t happen. Contrary to some of the worries I had about this when I started working on the paper, my failure to submit it on the 18th will not end my graduate school career. Phew! Several conversations I’ve had with my advisers have assured me of this. But even though I missed the submission deadline, I still put in long hours last week. I wanted to get a draft of the paper to one of my advisers so that I could get some feedback on it and so that I could take care of some other business I need to look after before the semester ended in May. Finally, after staying up till 4AM on Friday, I finished the draft, attached the paper to an email, and sent it to my adviser.
I celebrated the finished draft by taking the weekend off–sort of. On a mere 4 hours of sleep, I joined a quartet of singers from church to sight-read some madrigals and perform them at a birthday party for one of the parishioners. Then I spent some quality time with Pam and L in the mall. Pam and I each needed to buy a pair of sandals for the summer. We also wanted to buy something to treat ourselves with, so we bought the ice cream maker attachment for our Kitchenaid mixer. (After the bowl spent the night in the freezer, we made some raspberry ice cream with it. Wow! Can’t wait to try some of the other recipes.) On Sunday afternoon, I sang in the second of the three concerts I’ll perform with Novi Cantori. We got a sitter so Pam could come to it. It was L’s first time with a sitter, and he was a very good boy.
I’m looking forward to a slower pace over the next few weeks. This will make it possible to see my family again. Woohoo!
L is nearly is old self. However, he still has to follow the doctor’s orders. A few times a day, he has to wear the “elephant” mask. Some medication (ventolin) is vaporized with some pressurized air and fed into the mask. L still associates the elephant with everything bad he experienced over the last few days at the hospital–poor kid–so he does his level best to find something else to do whenever it makes an appearance.
Otherwise, life is slowly returning to normal. Pam caught a cold in the midst of the excitement last week and is busy fighting it off. The paper I was trying desperately to finish by the weekend didn’t get done–some things are more important than others–so I’ll be working to finish it over the next few days. Maybe when I finish the paper I can take advantage of the nice weather we’ve been having and try out the golf clubs I got for Christmas at a local driving range.
L (and Pam) slept much better last night. L didn’t need any oxygen and he didn’t have to labor to breath, so this morning L was able to say ‘Bye, Bye’ to the nurses (tormentors) at the hospital in a more permanent fashion. We are all home now. L is still not 100%, but he is close to being the kid he was before the micro-organisms got to him on Tuesday.
The bug L caught two days ago has turned out to be a nasty one. Yesterday evening he came down with a fever. He got some sleep overnight, but not a lot. This morning, at his follow-up appointment, the doctor sent us to the hospital so that L could get his chest x-rayed. Turns out L has pneumonia. He’s been admitted to the hospital–they want to give him some antibiotics intravenously–and he will likely spend the night there.
Quick, what do Britney Spears and Luciano Pavarotti have in common? Haven’t been following the news? It’s lip-synching–you know, where a singer gets up on stage, acts as though he or she is singing a song, the people in the audience think the singer is actually singing the song, but really, the singer is moving his or her lips in synch with some recorded music, which is being piped through the sound system.
Spear’s lip-synching shenanigans have been well-documented, but Pavarotti’s lip-synching made the news only recently. It’s just come out that Pavarotti lip-synched his performance of Nessun Dorma for the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin. Although he now has something in common with Spears, the similarities between Pavarotti and Spears don’t run very deep. For one, Pavarotti lip-synched his performance because he was 70 years old and ill–he died about a year later from pancreatic cancer. There are only a few men in the world who can even sing the high notes Pavarotti could sing, much less sing them in the way he could sing them. If I understand the story correctly, Pavarotti recorded the aria he lip-synched at the opening ceremonies a few weeks before he “performed” it. The fact that a 70-year-old could even sing the aria well enough to record it is amazing in itself. Spears lip-synched her performance because, to put it kindly, she’s had trouble managing her fame. I’m sure it’s hard to put in meaningful practice time and be at the top of your game when you’re busy engaging in various sorts of self-destructive behavior.
Anyway, I was amused when I saw the Pavarotti story and made the connection with Spears. I thought I would pass it on.
So we’ve claimed that L is walking, but we haven’t proved it. Well, here’s the proof. Look at him strut his stuff.
Today, we decided to see some of the Civil War battlefields. We started with the battlefield at Fredericksburg. This was the scene of a lopsided victory for General Lee and the Confederate forces. After walking parts of the battlefield, it was easy to see why. Lee’s army was dug in behind the stone wall you can see in the picture. In addition, they had artillery set up on the hill behind them (off the right hand side of the picture). The Union army tried to dislodge the Confederates by charging across about a quarter mile of open field (off the left hand side of the picture)—I guess General Burnside, the man in charge of the Union army at the time, decided it would be a good day to let the Confederate army use his own men for target practice. The house in the picture is one of the few surviving houses from the time of the battle. You can still see many of the holes the musket-balls made in its exterior and interior walls.
After spending about an hour and a half at Fredericksburg, we headed off to the battlefield at Chancellorsville. Again, this was the sight of a victory for the Confederates. However, the victory came at a cost. Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops. After having one of his arms amputated, he contracted pneumonia and died about a week later. It started raining shortly after we got to the battlefield, but we were able to see many of the sights from inside the car. There were signs at roadside turnouts, and we could see many of the earthworks through the trees.
After visiting the two battlefields, we headed north, hoping to do some wine-tasting at one of Virginia’s vineyards. Our first stop, Piedmont Vineyards and Winery, was closed. The picture below was taken while we were on our way to another vineyard nearby. (No, I wasn’t actually driving while taking the picture.) We don’t usually make a practice of having L in the front seat with us; however, L was getting restless in the backseat and our next stop was only a few miles away. L has traveled amazingly well over the past few days. Hopefully, he won’t have re-occuring nightmares of being strapped in a carseat.
We had more luck on our second stop. The people at Chrysalis Vineyards were open for business. We tasted some of their wines and ended up buying a few bottles. The pictures below were taken while we were driving the Virginia back roads looking for the vineyards.
