Jimmy Carter and the Black Death

The past week has been spent primarily dealing with the plague that seems to be sweeping through our town. After witnessing everyone at The Boy’s school and my work come down with the fast-acting flu, it was our turn last week. The Boy, The Wife and I all had our fill of producing incredible amounts of snot and feeling generally miserable.

We didn’t bother with the doctor. No, I’ve waited in gnarly waiting rooms and paid that $20 co-pay too many times to just hear “it’s a virus, I can’t give you anything for it” from The Boy’s pediatrician. So, we just opted to skip the whole song and dance and just load up on as much over-the-counter medicine as we could pump into ourselves.

The Boy seems to be overly sensitive to nasal dripping, or at least perceived nasal dripping. He sniffs and snorts and wipes his little nose continuously, but as far as I can tell he never really had much coming out. I guess he’s not used to feeling congested.

The whole thing would have been horrible if it hadn’t been for one of The Boy’s little quirks – he likes to clear his throat in a very over-the-top, melodramatic fashion. He sounds like ten old men trying to dislodge a small economy car from their esophagi. It’s really quite impressive.

It would have annoyed the hell of out of me, except for one thing – The Wife can’t stand it herself. In fact, she thinks it’s pretty much the most annoying thing ever. That, of course, meant that I found it endlessly entertaining. Good times.

Also last week, The Boy found another passion to obsess about – U.S. Presidents. He found a book about the presidents that I had in my study and once he discovered that they were numbered (as in order of presidency), he was hooked.

We now have to flip through this massive four-hundred page book each night before bed and take turns reading the presidents’ names and talking about what number they were. Sometimes we have to talk about what state they were from too.

For reasons that are known only to him, The Boy’s favorite is No. 39 – Jimmy Carter. He smiles every time we flip to that page and says “Jiiiiimy Carter” in that little voice that tells you that he thinks it’s really funny. I don’t know why. I haven’t even told him yet about the whole peanut farmer thing or brother Billy.

We were discussing his day at school in the car one day when he suddenly volunteered that he had been talking about the presidents during their indoor recess in the gym.

“Yeah, I just talk about Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan all the time.”

Lord knows what’s he saying to his classmates or what the teachers at his Catholic pre-school are thinking we drill into him at night. I swear it’s not us – The Boy seeks all this out on his own.

He seems perturbed that there isn’t a 44th President yet, or that I can’t tell him definitively when the future presidents past that will be elected. I tried explaining the whole election process to him, but I think he understands it about as much as most voters do.

V-V Day
In the sprit of V-J Day and V-E Day, I’m officially declaring today Victory over Valentine’s Day Day (catchy, no?). The Wife and I have decided to do pretty much nothing to celebrate one of the most contrived and invariably expensive holidays on the calendar. 

I can’t even begin to imagine how many hours and dollars I’ve spent throughout high school, college and first five years of marriage coming up with impressive and romantic things to do for the other person at the time. All for a day that just really is pretty much exactly the same as February 13th and 15th. Regardless of what happens on the 14th, I’m still the same bozo that won’t put my socks in the dirty clothes the other 364 days of the year.

So, this year, we’ve made a pact to just stick to cards and maybe something small. No overpriced dinner at a packed restuarant. No moonlight serenades by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. No fireworks displays set off by thousands of specially trained fireflies. Just an acknowledgement that we’ve been married for a while now, we generally get along and it would be too much of a hassle at this point to entertain the possibility of not being married. Put that on a card, you greedy Hallmark bastards.