Infections, flowers and stalkers

Well, the plan was to relax this weekend. We may have accomplished that, but I’m not sure.

The weekend started off early with a phone call from the day care – apparently The Boy had started crying incessantly after he was dropped off Friday morning. The Wife picked him up and took care of him until I could come home in the afternoon. A trip to the doctor confirmed our suspicions: an ear infection was the cause of our son’s pain.

I was pretty thrilled to get that diagnosis. After all, we did go through the whole ear tube surgery ordeal…twice. But after chugging some antibiotics and letting some ear drops soak in his head, The Boy was up and running again Saturday morning. Hooray for modern medicine.

As it turns out though, our weekend was destined to be book-ended by childhood infections. The Wife got her semi-annual bout of near-fatal pink eye Sunday night. She’s been treating her crusty, goopy eye with some eye drops that expired two years ago, but predictably, they’re not working. I think she’s going to try to squeeze a prescription for some new drops out of the pediatrician when we take The Girl for her check-up tomorrow morning.

Precious memories

On Sunday, we figured we’d better head out and get some photos with the plentiful wildflowers in bloom before they all disappeared. Like most staged photos involving my children, this turned out to be a complete disaster.

The Boy didn’t want to be there. He didn’t like the tall grass touching his pasty little chicken legs. And posing for pictures with flowers isn’t very manly.

The Girl can’t sit up on her own yet, so the perfect picture of her sitting in a field of flowers all by herself was out of the question. It turned out, however, that we couldn’t even get her to look at the camera. She was so captivated by the colorful flowers that she just kept staring at the ground the entire time.

Ah, good times upon which I will look back fondly decades from now when I can’t really remember them.

Stalkin’ on a Friday night

This weekend was the annual Parents’ Weekend here in Aggieland. That meant that thousands of middle-aged people were here bugging their kids and generally messing things up around town all weekend long. I figured we were pretty safe out here in our neighborhood… but I was wrong.

Friday night around 10 o’clock, the doorbell rang. As someone who was comfortably dressed in his pajamas, was trying to keep his two small children asleep and wasn’t expecting any company, I was naturally both confused and perturbed.

I opened the door to find an older woman wearing an “Aggie Mom” t-shirt. With a complete lack of eloquence and a minimal amount of comprehensibility, she stammered out that she was trying to find someone who lived on our street. Someone named Debbie…or Angela…or something. They had gone to school together back in the day and she figured since she was in town, it was the perfect time to start knocking on random doors in the middle of the night in an effort to re-connect.

After some confusion, we finally figured out that she was trying to find a woman who lived by herself, of which there is only one on our street. So we pointed her in the direction of our single cat lady neighbor and hoped for the best.

Actually, I did go out and pretend to look for something in the car so I could make sure that the lady-on-a-quest wasn’t murdering our neighbor. No murdering took place and our neighbor seemed to recognize her. That’s what passes for mystery, intrigue and danger on our street.

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• Congratulations to our local Radio Shack stores, who have chosen to no longer carry IEEE 1394 cables. Sure, they still have antennas for fifty-year old ham radios, but apparently they don’t think their customers might want to connect their digital camcorder to a computer.
• It’s good to know that no matter how bad the Astros might be, the Rangers are still always worse. The record may not reflect it, but the Rangers have to be the crappiest team in the history of organized sports. I love baseball, but it pains me to have to sit through a Rangers game. To quote Homer Simpson, “They are the suckiest suck of sucks that ever sucked.”
• We’re nearly half way through the month and our dinner schedule seems to be working. We’ve had to shift some things around, but The Wife and I agree that it’s been a success so far. For both of us, the hardest part of making dinner each night was deciding what to make. Now that the decision has already been made, we can make our dinners each night like happy little pre-programmed automatons.
• I am oddly captivated by the Subway $5 footlong commercial. It doesn’t make me want to buy a sandwich, but the song does make me zonk out for a couple of seconds each time it comes on.