avablog

Leah’s taking Ava to the doctor’s office this afternoon to have her checked out. She’s had a very low-grade but persistent fever for the last couple days, and she has some little sores in her mouth. The sores, as you might guess, make her hesitant to eat some of the things she usually eats. Leah suspects Hand-foot-mouth disease, which usually runs its course in five to seven days. Another little viral gift from daycare, no doubt.

I stayed with Ava all day Monday and part of the day yesterday, and we had a good time hanging out. Both days we walked downtown to get her a “coffee” and sit on the plaza to watch the traffic go by. She loves yelling at the brazen sparrows who hop right up close to our bench looking for bits of food. She also loves drinking her coffee, which is really only a frothy cup of steamed milk. But it gets her drinking her milk, which is good.

Yesterday, she was sitting next to me on the bench when she started waving at passersby. If they waved back, she’d look at me with a surprised expression and say, “They said ‘Hi’!” It was a very cute game.

Ava’s spirits are pretty good, overall, though she can get a bit crabby around mealtimes lately. Once the mouth and throat sores clear up, I suspect the crabiness will clear as well. Until then, we wait…..

So we’ve a little insect drama going on at our house, and I figured I’d present it in pictures:

It showed up on the edge of one of our hibiscus planters the other day and worked its way around the drip shelf five or six times.

It finally found a spot it liked and started fastening an anchor to the edge of the drip shelf.

Once it had the anchor done, it spun around, attached its butt, and just hung there.

It’s amazing how fast this happened. I don’t know much about monarch butterflies, but I always figured it would take longer to make the chrysalis. Nope. I swear it was only a matter of an hour before everything was sealed up like this.

And this was all that was left of the caterpillar. It’s like a snakeskin crunched up and left on the ground.

I wanted to bring the planter in and set it in front of my webcam so I could get some footage of the butterfly emerging, but Leah says, “Oh just leave it in its natural environment.” Whatever. Natural? On my porch on the edge of a plastic planter? OK.

Sometimes I feel like I’m surrounded by style addicts. I live with a woman who, along with her sister, wears (knockoff) designer sunglasses on a pontoon boat in the boundary waters. It’s like vacationing with the Hilton sisters.

For the most part (OK, heck, for the whole part), I’m entirely oblivious to fashion and style. I enjoy looking at people who’re dressed to the nines, and once in a while I’ll even dust off my own fancy threads for a night out with the little lady. But as I write this I’m wearing a pair of shoes I’ve had for…hmm…at least four years now, and which I keep at the office and only wear at work. And let’s not even talk about my pants.

[Read more →]

It can’t come as a surprise to any of our friends and family that Leah and I are planning on trying to have another kid.

Just writing that sentence gives me the willies. Not because I’m dreading another three sleepless days in the hospital. I’m worried about what we’re going to tell Ava about her new sibling.

[Read more →]

Fittingly enough, yesterday they began installing the speed humps on our street.

Here you can see the two guys who got stuck with the job of staying all day until the humps cooled enough to apply paint to them. The fellow standing is holding a styrofoam coffee cup filled with tiny reflective pellets that get spread over the paint as it’s drying.

I heard a couple cars blaze up our street early this morning, but I didn’t get outside fast enough to see if they hit the new humps very hard. I figure it’s not going to take these kids too long to figure out they need to slow down or risk futzing up the suspension in their dad’s car. After all, City High students do have the highest ACT test scores in the state…. (Take that, Waste High!)

Pictured above are some tasty treats from my garden. In the foreground are a couple Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, and in the back is a Sunsweet F1 cucumber. The Sunsweet was a surprise; I’d never seen one before, and at first I was sure we’d been sold some mutant seed. But they’re actually very good, once you get past their odd color and shape.

Eating the Sun Gold tomatoes is a pure joy. They have a bit of a citrus taste to them. I imagine I could go through a couple pounds of them before I even noticed what was happening.

Tonight for dinner I cut up a nice white onion, a couple of the Sun Golds, some standard cukes, and a big, beefy red tomato, and mixed it all in a bowl with some olive oil, sherry vinegar, pepper, and sea salt. Man, that stuff is good. It’s like eating spoonful after spoonful of summer.

Here’s a shot of my brother-in-law Kevin from one of our hikes in Grand Marais last week:

And here’s a shot from one of our hikes in Grand Marais back in 2003:

Rachel, Kevin’s wife, has now threatened to do away with the t-shirt featured here. I anticipate a major battle shaping up. Kevin’s stated he’ll still be wearing the shirt on hikes in G.M. ten years from now, which is exactly what Rachel is afraid of.

…to do this to you right after lunch, but this* is what happens when stitches pull out of an incision.

Here’s what it looked like pre-separation.

They can’t stitch it back up now, so it’ll stay like this until it heals (a week, the doc says).

* I’m not kidding: Don’t look at this link if you’re at all squeamish.

Pictures.

More later.

XOXO,

Us

I call them “buzzer bugs” when I ask Ava if she can hear them. I don’t know if it’s been the warm weather or what, but I can’t recall the cicadas being this loud…ever. I was out in the yard the other night, and the racket was nearly deafening.

I’ve been finding these spent shells all over the front porch. I reckon the cicadas like this spot because the bricks give them a good footing while they squirm and push out of their old casings. I bet it’d be cool to shellac a couple of these and glue them on various of our house plants.

Our city council last night approved the installation of speed humps on our street, which is awesome.  The vote was 7-0.

[Read more →]

We’re no YouTube or MySpace, that’s for sure. As long as someone keeps ending up at my site when searching for “hair technical,” I don’t care if that’s the only hit I ever get.

I went and signed up for a beta test of the new online word processing application from Google.  I haven’t played with it yet, but it looks great.  I’m eager to try creating a document and sending the text to this blog, which is one of the cool features you get with an online word processor.  And the interface is so much cleaner than Word (not surprisingly).

I wonder how Ava is going to express herself by the time she’s ready to head off to high school.  That’s 11 years from now.  In 1993 I was browsing the nascent WWW using Mosaic and my old Mac SE.  It’s only 13 years later, and it’s difficult to imagine my present life without the Internet.  It seems likely, with the way things are going, that Ava won’t be using computers at all, at least not computers as we know them today (I imagine her and a friend stumbling across my iBook in the attic one cool fall day and marvelling over the relic, daring each other to turn it on).  I’m already preparing myself for the day she comes through the door and knows more than I do; hopefully I have some time to get ready for that.

Some _ _ _ _head came in in the last seconds of the auction and outbid me.  Fine.  He can have them.  I wasn’t going to spend more than $20 on them anyway.

I hope they split up the crotch.

So, here’s a shot of just one of my surgery sites from the Great Mole Removal 2006. This one is on my left shoulder, just under the clavicle. I think there’s one other shot in the public photos in my flickr stream, for the brave. There are also pictures of pretty horsies from the parade we watched on Saturday.

So the mole extraction went well. Pretty much exactly what I was expecting. My range of movement is a little limited today, owing to the five sets of stitches I have on my chest and back, but everything is otherwise fine.

And this happy outcome is due in large part to the wonder drug Lidocaine. From Wikipedia:

Lidocaine alters depolarization in neurons, by blocking the fast sodium (Na⁺) channels in the cell membrane. With sufficient blockade, the membrane will not depolarise and so not transmit an action potential, leading to its anesthetic effects.

I’m here to tell you, that stuff works. I barely even felt the tugging on my skin when the dermatologist was hacking away at me with a pair of scissors. For those of you who’ve ever trimmed the excess skin and fat off a piece of chicken with a kitchen shears, you have a pretty good notion of what it’s like to be on the giving end of this procedure. And I have a pretty good idea what it’s like to be on the receiving end.

Leah had a removal some months back, and she made the mistake of looking down just as the nurse was lifting her recently-excised flap of skin into a collection container. Not a good idea. I made no such mistake. Still, I could hear those scissors cutting through me, even though I couldn’t feel a thing. It would’ve been nice to have had headphones or some other aural distraction while the procedure was going on.

I go back in a week from today to get one last mole removed and to get the stitches out of the five that were taken off yesterday. As you might expect, I’ll be uploading pictures of the stitched-up wounds to my Flickr account as soon as these bandages come off tonight.

It is a great unwritten rule that as soon as you find a great thing, whether it’s a food item, a television show, or a picnic spot, it’ll be discontinued, canceled, or paved over just as you begin to love it.

Some years ago (could it be 10?), I picked up a pair of men’s shorts from a local sporting goods shop. I was looking for a pair that afforded a good range of movement for biking, were the right length (just above the knee), had no buttons or zippers, and were durable. What I ended up with was a pair of shorts made by a company called Moonstone, which I understand began as a maker of outdoor gear primarily for women. These shorts have been amazing. I’ve biked hundreds and hundreds of miles in them and have subjected them to pretty much every manner of stain known to man. They’re showing almost no wear and are still as confortable as the day I bought them, if not moreso.

Natch, Moonstone isn’t making these anymore. I can’t find them anywhere. The closest I’ve come is this pair of shorts on eBay, which I’ve bid on. I’m no clothes horse, and when I find something that is comfortable and relatively affordable, I like to stick with it. I really hope I win this auction. These shorts are a different style than the ones I have now, but they’re the right size (pretty much) and are made of similar fabrics, so I’m all in.

In other news, today is mole day. In just about two hours, I’ll be going under the knife in my dermatologist’s office to have five of the little mofos removed. Then I’m taking the afternoon off to stay home with Ava, who is still feverish. Thank God for Tylenol.

I stayed home with Ava this morning, as she’s presently under quarantine from her daycare for having had a fever yesterday.

We had a really nice time.  The wonderfully paradoxical thing about this 24-hour-fever-free rule at the daycare is that infants rarely have fevers that last for more than a couple hours (if treated promptly with Tylenol or Motrin), so most of the time we end up spending with Ava on these vacations is fever free and lots of fun.

I was particularly eager to be home with Ava today, because it’s the day she got her new Richard Scarry book from Amazon.  It really was like Christmas in July.  We opened the box together, and she immediately sat down on the floor with it in her lap and started flipping pages.  There is a lot of stuff to look at in these Scarry books!  The one we got is particularly good, because it places names to just about every item under the sun (including the sun).  There are numbers and colors and tools and machines and professions and kitchen items…it seems like it never ends.

Also in this package was a book I got for myself, since I was using a $25 gift certificate.  It’s John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise (see also).  I sat next to Ava and started reading.  Not halfway through the first page I was already laughing out loud.  Ava looked up from her fancy new book and said, “What laughing at?”  I explained that daddy had a new book, too, and that it was funny.  That was all Ava needed to hear.  She snatched the book out of my hands, sat back down on the floor, and opened the book on her lap.  “Mines,” she said, patting the pages.

I love it that Ava enjoys laughing.  She’s an amazing, vivacious little girl.  Why, just yesterday, the pediatrician described her as “verbally precocious.”  I could say the same about Leah.  :)  At least we know where Ava gets it.

There’s been a lot in the news for the last couple years about how being married or otherwise socially engaged is good for one’s health.  Without reading the stories very closely, I’d always assumed that the constant stress of a relationship helped condition the heart and other vital organs.  Turns out I was wrong.  People in close relationships (marriages are cited most frequently) tend to feel more supported and are thus more likely to seek out medical attention when something goes wrong.  Basically, people become dependant on each other and tend to try to keep the other person around and healthy.  This health benefit is realized most acutely by men, I suppose because it means they don’t ever have to worry again about doing dishes or washing their clothes.

There’s a downside, of course.  Turns out there’s also research out there claiming that sharing a bed with another person makes a man dull.  As someone who’s 1) married and 2) a man, you’d think I’d be more aware of all these phenomena.  I feel fairly healthy, but I admit I haven’t had an EKG lately.  And as far as being dull goes, I suppose that’s true.  Though I don’t know that I was ever terribly exciting in the first place.

Ava’s building quite a little library for herself. She must have close to 100 books already, and she can’t even read on her own. A lot of her books are ones that I had when I was a kid. Where the Wild Things Are. The Giving Tree. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Blueberries for Sal. The Story About Ping. And lots more. Some are books that Leah enjoyed, like Pat the Bunny, the Frog and Toad books, and The Velveteen Rabbit (I loved this book too).

[Read more →]