nonBlog: January 2006

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Overnighting - Monday, January 30, 2006

Tom and I are perfecting the art of the 24-hour vacation. No, I take it back—our method is approaching the realm of science. We might even patent it.

The most important rule is not to vacate to a town more than an hour away. You can’t spend more than two hours of your 24 commuting to your destination, that’s just logic. And your hotel can’t be too swank, in part because the really swank hotels demand a two-night minimum on weekends and in part because you’re paying for 24 hours of perhaps multiple-child babysitting and you don’t want to spend your 24 hours thinking about how much the 24 hours is costing you.

It’s nice to have a dinner reservation for your one evening away because the idea is to vacate as many obsessive thoughts and worries as possible, even those of where in the heck to eat, but you don’t want the restaurant to be too very because then you have to pack an Outfit with a capital O. Well, the men wouldn’t think of it as a capital-O Outfit but women know what I mean, and Outfits of this type require forethought and planning. And you can’t get into that because one of the 24-hour vacation rules is not to have to Pack with a capital P. You want as few preparations as possible or the vacation isn’t worth the trouble it took to plan, with or without a capital P.

So we did all of the above from noon Saturday til noon on Sunday to celebrate my recent birthday which shall not be named, which followed last year’s even more unmentionable birthday and will subsequently be followed by nothing but unmentionable birthdays from now on. But the 24-hour vacay eased some of the pain. We went to a town we drive to often, stayed in our favorite lodge, ate at the nice but not ridiculously nice restaurant across the street, and otherwise did nothing constructive at all, unless you count fooling around, which is—naturally—the true objective of the 24-hour vacation.

The Polka Dot Kid - Saturday, January 21, 2006

Ava is covered with chickenpox, vintage 1970. I say this because I infected her when I came down with shingles recently, and the strain of chickenpox that's been living otherwise dormant in my spine all this time got there the year I caught it, on my fifth birthday. I wonder if chickenpox has mutated after all these years and the current strain is different from mine. Is 1970 chickenpox better or purer than 2006 chickenpox? Are there Good Old Days for viruses? Her version certainly looks like the nastiness I remember. If you've got the password for my family website you can check out a picture of her, or what you can still see of her in between the zostra, by clicking on eFlish.

I haven't had to put gloves on her hands or slather her in calamine yet, although I can't account for why that is. Except for the blisters inside her ears she doesn't appear to be itching. She just looks up with this what's wrong with me and why aren't you fixing it? expression all the time.

I got a call from a mom at Olivia and Greta's school yesterday asking if she could bring her girls over for a pox party so that they could all get infected. The mom has rejected the vaccine because doctors don't really know how long it will protect kids from the virus. While I understand her reasoning, the fact that most parents are constitutionally incapable of bringing their children to harm makes me think that the current pox party phenomenon is a little twisted.