Tomorrow's forecast: flying monkeys.

Friday was hot.

(How hot was it?)

It was so hot that heading down to the Social Security office seemed like a *good* idea. Free government air conditioning! Cheery atmosphere! Friendly employees! Quality people in the waiting room! Posters of George Takei urging you to do your business online!

OK. I actually like George Takei, and he was the best part of the experience, after the ice-cold air.

Lest you think I'm filing for early retirement (ha!), I'm still in the process of changing my name everywhere. My ID says one thing, my credit cards say another. It feels slightly scandalous when cashiers compare the two. I'm a little embarrassed about how slow I seem to be moving on the post-wedding follow-up work. It feels like we just got back from our mini-moon, and we should still be in the middle of summer, not September. It's totally acceptable to send out thank-you notes eight weeks after the wedding, right? They're all addressed! And sitting on our mantle! That counts, right?

Anyway. Friday. Hot. The heat index was 103 or something absurd (for Michigan) and after Bob got home from work we all took a trip to the beach. (Which was lovely, until another family there decided it would be totally kosher to take their toddler's soiled diaper off and rinse it out IN THE WATER WE WERE ALL SWIMMING IN. Not okay, other family!)

Saturday it stormed. K's pool ended up in the creek. I decided it was more important to run out to the truck for my ipod than to, you know, stay inside and alive. (I like music while I cook!)

Sunday it got cold. K and I headed to the playground for some pre-fireworks cold-tolerance building fun. By the time the show started I had lost feeling in my fingers, and we huddled under a blanket where our thoughts shifted between, "hey, these fireworks are really pretty!" and "enough already, I'm freeeeeezing."

Today it's sweaters and blankets and fleece pajamas for Labor Day. Michigan takes this unofficial end of summer thing very seriously, it seems. (Low 40s tonight!) It's less hot dogs & cold beer and more of a hot tea & pumpkin-based dessert kind of day. I'm not sure I'm ready for that. I'm not sure the weather cares.

Hope you're all staying warm this Labor Day!

28 Days of Cruelty

Editor's note: This is the latest installment in Bob's The Geek Speaks series! (In other words, I've been neglecting Unlikely Origins so it has fallen to Bob to give it some sweet blog lovin'.) At any rate, here he is! 

In "The Waste Land" T.S. Eliot calls April "the cruelest month."  I have to respectfully disagree with him and proclaim the cruelest month to be February.  February is also the most taunting month, giving us  hints and glimpses of the spring to come by bring us the sun and temperatures even into the 50s.  A scant 72 hours after that the temperatures are back down into the low double digits and we're shoveling several inches of snow beneath skies the color of a poorly maintained battleship's hull.  If these things are not cruel and taunting, I'm not sure what would fit that definition.

I have lived in Michigan for my entire life.  Every one of my life's winters from 1965 onward has been spent under those leaden skies.  Every February I gain hope and joy at seeing the sun and being able to walk around in, at worst, a light jacket.  Then the mirage falls away and we are pushed down into the depths of the winter again.  It happened again to us last week.  We enjoyed a temperature moderation into the 50s and most of the snow melted away.  We walked around in shirt sleeves outside!  Karinya contemplated going for a run! (Ed. note: contemplated!) We could smell springtime in the air!

Then came Sunday.  It was a great morning; we were able to pawn the baby off on… err… send the baby to spend some quality time with her cousins and we got up late and went to have a nice breakfast and then home to watch some Big Bang Theory (I love that show, have I mentioned?)  We were in the bedroom, which typically has the blinds closed, and eventually got a call from my sister.

"Hey, is it snowing yet down there?" she asked. 

"Of course not!" I replied.  "It's just grey out but not snowing!" 

This was before Karinya opened the blinds in the bedroom.  It was not just snowing, it was SNOWING.  Crazy snowing.  And now I had to drive in it to get K from my sister.  What a cruel month.  The storm set down about six or so inches of snow and a nice layer of glaze on top of it.  Now, four days later, we're looking at another five to seven inches in the next 36 hours.  Cruelty indeed.

But I know that these are the death throes of winter.  I know that there is far less to come than there is behind and soon it will be March.  There is talk on the radio of the Tigers in spring training and the beginnings of discussion about playoff time in hockey.  Karinya is looking through her bridal magazines and is sharing interesting web sites for invitations and save the date and thank you cards.  These are all signs that spring will, well, spring and the crocuses will bloom and winter will finally melt away -- for eight or nine months, at least.  The smells of spring will soon be on the breeze and the wedding plans will proceed at a breakneck pace until the big day.  And winter -- and February -- will be a memory.  For a while.

February may be the cruelest month by my account but the joke is on it -- it's the shortest month and the last month of the deep winter.  There can be no despair when so many wonderful things are just around the dark grey corner!

I Hate the Smell of Resolve

*Resolve brand carpet and upholstery cleaner. (I'm cool with the word itself.)

I only bust out that red spray bottle of doom when something awful has happened. That something awful usually includes bodily fluids in places bodily fluids should not be.

Today it got a workout.

I feel absurd complaining about standard issue Mom-of-Toddler duties. I know lots of folks who are dealing with much bigger issues right now, whether in terms of overall severity or scope (I only have one sick little one, a friend is currently dealing with four children passing germs around!)

But I'm tired and grumpy, and this is my blog, and maybe if I internet grumble loudly enough the universe will take notice and say, "Yeah, we really have piled enough on her. Let's reward the way she bravely struggled by blessing her crew with eternal good health and a winning lottery ticket!"

K has had a little bug since sometime between Christmas and New Years. A sniffle here, a cough there. Pretty standard whatever-the-kids-are-passing-around-at-daycare cold stuff. I'm not a mom who rushes her special little snowflake to the hospital every time she sneezes. K is a strong kid with no underlying health issues and, for the most part, I trust her immune system to fight its own battles and get stronger as a result.

But then sometimes that little cold turns into a Big Scary Cold. A (relatively high) fever pops up where there was no fever before. The cough that was merely annoying before starts triggering the gag/vomit reflex. The lively little kid becomes a glassy-eyed zombie. Mom gets real worried real quick.

Sometimes it happens on a day when a major winter storm system is making its way across your area. Sometimes your doctor's office is an hour away because you haven't found a new pediatrician since relocating.

I'll spare you the play-by-play, but the highlight was driving home very slowly through the snow when K woke up from her nap (poor kid, she was exhausted!) to throwup three times in a row. In the carseat. In the middle of nowhere. I was like, look, K: I'm really sorry, but there is literally nowhere to stop other than someone's snowy driveway, and there's not much I can do for you now anyway, so -- here's a tissue. (Compassion, thy name is Karinya!) We were going to stop at the pharmacy before actually going home-home to grab the (sort of random) cocktail of drugs her doc prescribed, but I wasn't going to drag the poor girl around Target like that. I tried to call Bob to arrange a plan B.

My phone service had been "temporarily deactivated." You're killing me, Centennial Wireless. You know that, right?

Bitch, moan, whine, repeat.

Tonight it took both of us to hold K down so we could get the medicine into her. (She kicked the doctor earlier!) Even with a fever of 102.5, she will beat you up.

And now Bob doesn't feel good. (I seem to still be enjoying that temporary Mom Immunity. I usually *do* end up getting whatever K gets, to some degree, but it almost always holds off long enough that by the time I'm getting sick myself, she's feeling better and doesn't require as much care. I'd prefer to, you know, skip getting sick completely, but I suppose this way is preferable to playing nurse and patient at the same time.)

Tonight I'm camping out with K in her room. She's bouncing all over the place right now (though I don't know what is fueling this rally since she hasn't held much down today) and seems to be on the upswing, but the way this. . . whatever it is has morphed so quickly has me spooked, and I want to be there in case she spontaneously combusts or (more likely) just needs someone to quickly hand her a bucket. (Plus, you know, she's my baby and I like her and yadda yadda.) This will either prove to be a sweet bonding experience or a horrible, horrible idea ;-)

Good healthy thoughts this way, please, if you've got some to spare?

Midwestern Style Multitasking

I wasn't expecting today to be anything other than a nice calm  normal Tuesday. Wake up, cuddle with K for a bit, ship her off to daycare, get several hours of work work done while free from toddler distraction, pop a casserole in the oven (I wasn't kidding about the Midwestern thing), then go grab K before meeting Bob at the house for our first official family dinner in the new place.

What I wasn't expecting was tornado weather. It's late October! And yet --

Sesame Street kept being interrupted by National Weather Service bulletins. (Much to K's delight. Every time they stopped, she demanded that they "play it again!") When I made my way to the kitchen to heat up some leftover macaroni & cheese prepare a nutritious breakfast, I noticed that nothing that had been on my back deck the day before was there anymore...

After treating the neighbors to a show of pre-coffee-Karinya tromping pajama-clad through their backyards, I returned home victorious, having reclaimed both the baby pool and all various items of patio furniture that had blown away that morning.

The watch turned into a warning. The warning turned on my paranoid mom switch, and into the basement we went. The basement. Where all productive Tuesdays are spent.

It wasn't where I'd planned on spending the first half of my day, but -- you know, it actually wasn't too bad. The (one!) local radio station played David Bowie in between weather updates, and despite K's order of "No dancing!" (she's a puritan, that one) -- there was dancing. There was laundry. There was the filling of two trash bags with junk from the basement that won't be accompanying us to the new house.  There was the packing of several boxes of things that *will* be accompanying us to the new house. There was the realization that, no matter how good a deal I can get on it, I probably shouldn't buy any more tuna, because OH MY GOD I HAVE ABOUT FORTY CANS OF TUNA FISH IN MY PANTRY ALREADY. (Ahem. It was a long warning period. Taking an inventory of the foodstuffs that I purchase, throw in the basement, and then forget about seemed like a good idea.) There was a toddler meltdown, or four.

There was no actual work work done. (Sorry, clients!) But we did all of the above and avoided being blown away by a tornado, and eventually a casserole did get made.

Thanks for keeping things interesting, Michigan.