Hunter is on the honor roll, and I’m taking work off tomorrow to attend the awards ceremony. He worked his butt off to get to this point, and I am incredibly proud.
Tonight is his parent-teacher conference, and I’ve got my fingers crossed for Good Things(tm) there as well.
At every point in this process, I was sure something would fail, and the whole thing would fall apart. It took us so long to find a house that we both wanted, let alone one that we both loved enough to want to live in for twenty years or more. I was convinced, no, I was certain that such a house didn’t exist.
If the universe did break, and such a house did exist, there was no way in hell that it would be in our price range.
It took us months, but we found a house. Neither of us was turned off by it. Neither of us was “meh” about it. We both wanted it. Sure, it didn’t have the bigger kitchen that Nikki wanted, and it didn’t have the garage that I wanted, but what it had made up for that. More than. The price was even doable, though it wouldn’t be the improvement over renting that we had been hoping for. So, we got pre-approved, contacted our landlord about getting out of the lease early, and… we stopped. Our landlord considered “out early” as three months, not eight. We hadn’t communicated how quickly we might want to move, so we put ourselves on pause.
And then the price dropped. We were sure it would get snatched up.
And then the price dropped again. We were biting our nails and pulling our hair out and gnashing our teeth. There was no way someone wouldn’t buy it out from under us. It’s only a mild exaggeration to say that we were wailing and rending our clothes in preemptive despair. MILD.
And then the price dropped. AGAIN. We couldn’t wait any longer, and so we toured it again. Dad (Remember him? The superhero?) came out too, so he could point out things that we might miss through rose-colored classes. We found some stuff, he found some stuff, and we sent a list of all the stuff off to the owner, in hopes that he’d fix the stuff before we moved in. We got an affirmative response, and were off to the races.
We got it. The universe is well and truly broken, because I am once again a homeowner. The yard is a kid’s paradise, there are enough rooms so that everyone has their own, and there’s an office (read: writing room) for me and Nikki to share.
There’s still some minor things we need to fix (who puts a railing into plaster without anchors?), but they’re minor. The Bancroft house has been turned over to
the landlord. We really, actually did it.
What really gets me is that while Hunter will remember the house on Bancroft, the younger ones will only ever remember this house as home. I’m gonna do my best to make it a good one.
Monday, I was wrong. I was grumpy and tired, as I usually get when we lose an hour during the spring Daylight Savings Time adjustment. I vaguely remembered from somewhere in my school career that the clocks were changed for the benefit of farmers. And since I couldn’t remember exactly, I asked Twitter.
Can someone educate me as to why we still observe daylight savings time? #coffeecoffeecoffee
— David Crampton (@dcrampton) March 11, 2013
I got one response, and I couldn’t really argue with it.
@dcrampton in June when the sun is shining in my face at 6:30am instead of 5:30am I’m happy for DST.
— George (@revgeorge) March 11, 2013
My assumption was that DST was something that only the United States, and maybe a few others, still practiced. A backward, holding-on-to-the-past nonsense custom that we should really get rid of. You know, like our refusal to use the metric system.
Follow up question, is the USA the only country that observes Daylight Savings Time?
— David Crampton (@dcrampton) March 11, 2013
Turns out, we’re not. We’re not even one among a few. I found this article, and this map:
The blue bits are where DST is observed. The orange bits are where it’s formally observed. The red bits chuck it to the wind. If you count formal and actual observing, most of the world still observes DST.
So, I learned that one of my preconceptions was not only off, but completely erroneous. The origins of DST have nothing to do with farmers. Farmers lobby against it, in fact. It’s observed over quite a bit of the world. So, in about a year from now, I’m going to try for less grumbling and more coffee, ready at hand.
Chapters 12 and 13 of the Glass Crown are done. Not only that, but some brainstorming with the wonderful wife has driven me to actually come up with the details and the whys of the end. There was a lot of her asking “Why?” and me replying with generalities and hand-waving. And because she is the Nikki, she continued to respond with “Why?” until I came up with some actual answers. I never thought two- and three-year-old questioning processes could produce such useful results. ;)
Cian is four years old, as of this past Saturday. Four. Out of his Terrible Twos, making his way out of the obnoxious boundary-pushing of the Tribulation Threes. I may be verging on melodramatic, but after Aidan and now Cian, I can verify, with certainty, that three is worse than two.
His birthday party was Sunday, and he made out like a bandit. Two-tier Avengers cake, Avengers toys, the new Optimus Prime from Transformer Prime (everything’s so spiky, now that they’re being hunted by Predaking!), some monster truck Hot Wheels, books, clothes, Raphael of the TMNT, and punching balloons. The party was great. It feels better each time that our friends and family gather together like that, even if a couple of them only came it out of spite. ;)
Cian, of course, loved being the center of attention for the cake, the presents, and the playtime upstairs. Acelyn loved being the center of adult attention. Getting her to give Kia space will need some work. Ace treated her like she was the coolest teddy bear EVAR.
It still boggles my mind that all upcoming birthday parties, family gatherings, and shindigs will be at a different house, with a different vibe, and different ways of doing what we do. Here’s to hoping that Cian’s birthdays in the new house, may they be many, will be even better than this one.
The real kicker in all of this was that between her check-out from the hospital and her scheduled surgery, Nikki was in very little pain. During all of the crazy food at holiday parties, not to mention the stress of driving the family to and fro, her stomach and gallbladder behaved. She said to me, while we were waiting for her to be admitted once again, that the surgery had scared it into submission. I’ve yet to find evidence to the contrary.
The prep was quick and easy, for a hospital. They had her changed and on the table as doctor after doctor grilled her about what was going on, what surgery she was planning to have, and what medications she was allergic to. The nurse, as usual, collapsed a vein as she tried to fit Nikki with an IV. They all blow her off when she says that her veins are nearly impossible to get on the first try, and then scratch their heads when they blow the thing out. Luckily, the nurse stepped aside for a doctor that had been putting in IVs for about fifty years, and he nailed it on the first try. If only you could make requests when it came to geting an IV.
When they carted her away to the operating room, I headed to the now-familiar surgery waiting room. I checked in, and once again distracted myself with keeping everyone in the loop. There may have also been some Facebook perusing. MAY have been. It took me a while to get worried. The time that they’d given me was an estimate, and sometiems things took longer than anticipated. When it was an hour past the time she was supposed to be done, I got antsy. I couldn’t even focus on the most twitchy social network ever devised. Family after family had gone back to greet their loved onces, and I was still waiting.
Right as I decided to stand up and ask, the nurse looked at me like she’d never seen me before.
“Who are you waiting for?”
I reminded her.
“Oh dear. I just sent that other family back to her. That’s not good. Follow me.”
I clenched my jaw and stayed polite. She caught the other confused family and directed them to the proper place, and I ducked behind Nikki’s curtain. She was pale. Even for her, she was really, really pale. She’d been out of surgery for quite some time, and had been asking for me over and over. They’d kept her in recovery, because she hadn’t come out of the anasthesia very well. They weren’t wrong – it was taking her a long time to come out of it, and she kept dozing off.
She was in more pain, she said, than after any of the C-Sections. Only, every painkiller that they gave her slowed her recovery from the anasthetic. Every shot or pill made her more nauseated. She made me go and get food for myself (shrimp and rice gumbo) despite her limited menu of cranberry juice and peanut butter crackers. Looking back over the last few posts, I’m seeing a pattern…
Eventually, one of the nurses pushed Nikki into getting up and walking to the bathroom. Since that went ok, she had her walk down the hall and back. She pronounced Nikki ok to go home, despite her complaints of nausea. She made it out to the front of the hospital, just starting to get into my car, before the nausea got the better of her. I’m pretty sure that they either gave her too many pain meds, or the ones they gave her had nausea as a primary side-effect. Nikki thinks that she just wasn’t ready to be up and walking around yet. We’re both probably right.
Her recovery since has been stellar. She’s had nearly none of the nasty side-effects to the surgery that she’d found people complaining about online. (Quick, knock on some wood!) Her stomach issues have nearly disappeared, and she can eat a ton of foods that gave her hell for years. (Knock on some more wood!) If you have any gallbladder removal experiences, drop her a line over at her blog.
With all of these trips to the hospital, we really lucked out. (Knock on some different wood!) For both of us, things could have been a hell of a lot worse. In the end, we are thankful for that.
When we last left Nikki, she was tucked in to her hospital bed, I had relieved our sitter so that she could return to her husband and daughter, and I had finally crashed. I did not sleep well.
When the kids woke me up, I did my best to remain chipper and upbeat. I didn’t consider that me being chipper and upbeat was out of the ordinary enough to worry the kids, but hindsight tends to be 20/20.
They asked how Mom was doing, and I told them that she was still hurting, but the doctors were trying to find out why. It took me a while to get out of the house and back to the hospital. Peter had shown up to watch to the kids, but I had a strong sense that I was abandoning them when they needed me the most. Peter picked up on this, and shooed me out when I started to get unreasonable about it.
I went, and Nikki had been in and out of dozing for most of the night and morning. They had her pain mostly controlled, but she kept getting headaches from one of the meds. We found out later that they’d been giving her a medication that she was allergic to, despite having been repeatedly informed of the allergy. I still breathe a sigh of relief when I think about it. A headache was a mild reaction – it could have been much worse. Thanks to our previous night’s sitter, a nurse in training, for catching that one. At one point, Peter brought the kids by, and they were all happy to see Mom, and relieved that she didn’t look like she was in a lot of pain. It was hard for our oldest to go, but the younger ones got bored pretty quickly, so Peter took them back home. For all of the medical drama that our family goes through, I am glad that they bounce back from it as quickly as they do.
By the end of the day, we had learned that there were several stones in her gallbladder, but the symptoms that she was experiencing were common for both an ulcer and a malfunctioning gallbladder. So, they scheduled a scope for the next day, to send a camera into her stomach and check out the terrain. She would be sedated, at least partially, for the procedure, so it was going to take place in the surgical wing of the hospital. Once that was done, they’d have sure footing from which to proceed with a plan of action. One more day off of work, and one more time that our friends stepped up to watch our kids.
I got up and got the kids around and fed, and Peter came over to hang out a bit before I left. Just after he arrived, I got a call from one of our friends that had watched the kids the first night. They were taking her in early, and I needed to get my butt there ASAP. Off I went, at warp speed, praying that I got there before they took her back for the scope. I couldn’t let her go in without knowing that I was there. I couldn’t. Our friend met me in the lobby, guided me to the surgical prep area with the quickness (he has one hell of a stride), and I was able to hold Nikki’s hand for a few minutes before they took her back.
I spent a couple of hours trying not to agonize by keeping as many people in the loop as possible. It went by quickly, and I was called back to speak to the doctor. She had no ulcer, and had no signs of ever having had one. Her increasing issues over the past seven years hadn’t been IBS or an ulcer, but a slowly increasing number of gall stones that were doing their best to shut the gallbladder down. They’d been quite successful, and so it needed to come out.
We went home that night together. Having a diagnosis and a plan of action helped, as did the prescription for painkillers. We’d have a week of holiday celebrations, and then Nikki would go in for an outpatient surgery, and be out and home the same day.
To be concluded.
I did it again! Well, technically I did it back in November, but I still did it! Another journal bites the dust!
This one was given to me by my Mom and Dad as a way to record my adventures in Japan when I was sixteen. My school district had a Japanese program that I participated in during my High School years. We also had a sister school, and I spent a couple of weeks in a host family’s home. I was lucky enough to be able to return the favor the next summer, and show Nobu around Michigan a bit. Anyway, as I tend to do, I spent more time experiencing the trip than I did writing about it. So, when I rediscovered the journal, only a few pages had been filled.
Truth be told, it’s not even really a journal. It’s a planner for the 1993/1994 academic year. It wasn’t tough to modify – I just wrote around the date markers, the entries from my trip, and the various checklists. I made sure to leave some buffer space around my trip journal so that I didn’t ruin my scribbles for posterity.
At first, I’d tried to turn it into a gaming journal. Myst 3: Exile, Myst Online, Eve Online, and Everquest 2. That effort went the way of most of my single-purpose journal efforts, which is to say nowhere. I picked it back up when I’d filled up the last journal, and filled it with quite a bit of Glass Crown, some final Adam’s Name – Detroit edits, and the beginning of the Remembrance rewrite. Looking back, it feels like I stayed incredibly on task through the entire thing.
Five months to fill its tiny lines and thin, recycled pages.
On to the next! There are stories to be told!