Lily's birthday continued...

Julia says this is a picture of her favorite person (she later volunteered that Gramma Pat as her other favorite person).

Summertime, and the living is easy...

First day of school...

Lily's birthday...

Bike ride to House Creek and environs...

Oh man, we're the grownups now...how'd that happen?

Trolls under the bridge

I have come to the conclusion that the only way out of our many environmental problems is $10 a gallon gasoline, but I don't know how to work towards that fast enough. I don't think I have it in me to be a part of a Monkey Wrench Gang. So barring that kind of radical activity, we should all be rapidly shunning the "easy motoring lifestyle" and all its trappings, and it seems that how we feed ourselves has the greatest impact there.

I cooked some farm-raised rainbow trout a few weeks ago. Tending to the fish over the burner, it occurred to me how many thousands of calories in the form of electric heat I was pumping into these fish, only to get a few hundred calories that were usable to my body. Then I went further to the air pumps aerating the farm ponds, the processing of the feed on which they were raised,the shipping, refrigeration, etc etc. On recent drives out of town for work I saw rolls of hay in farm meadows and wondered how many orders of magnitude fewer calories were contained in those hay rolls compared to the calories it took to run the harvester and baler. It amazes me that this system works, even in the short term. But for fossil fuels it wouldn't, I suppose. Earth receives a fixed amount of energy each year from the sun and its own internal radiation. We need a balanced budget amendment for energy. William Schlesinger at Duke hit on this idea quite nicely in a recent opinion piece when he said, in effect, that we must learn to live within "the sustainable economy supplied by nature." (The actual quote was "coastal citizens should realize that the sustainable economy supplied by nature will be with us long after the phosphate deposits are gone.")

So today I rode my bike to work again. By the end of the year I may have done my penance for the two trips to out of town this week.

"Pig" by Julia.

Happy sisters. 'nuf said.

At the risk of subjecting my child to inappropriate criticism (offensive content warning, grandparents!), I'll share this self-portrait by Julia, with peanuts in her tummy. The orange dots along the mouth are her teeth. She also points out that she has bangs and ears and that she is a little crooked. The day after she drew this, she exclaimed that she needed to add hands. She then asked me, "how do we draw a hand?" I held up my hand and said, "well, let's look at a hand. What do you think we should start with?" "The palm!"

Just a couple of pics I had knocking around on the computer. These by the stream are from back in October, when Lil McGill and I went for a bike ride on the greenway. We stopped at a creek a few miles from the house to have a picnic, catch a crawdad, and throw rocks in the water. The pic below is from about two weeks ago.

Equal time for Julia forthcoming.

And now for something completely different:

One of my co-workers just got back from Japan. His big token gift to everyone in the office was these little bags of real, unboned, dried minnows, lovingly killed, and fortunately not enrobed in chocolate. Too crunchy for my taste.

Mmmm. If only Lance sold these in the vending machines at our office...

I don't read Japanese, but I think the label says, "My co-worker went to Japan, and all I got was this lousy little bag of crunchy dead minnows."

Where to begin? At last check, I was recovering from a hospital stay (oh, and recovering from the incident that put me there too, but it's hard to tell which is more stressful on the body) and marveling over the Fantastic Voyage that had just happened in my gut. Since then, I've had a false-alarm trip back to the ER (that'll be $200, please), gone back to work, and have recovered much of my strength. My doc's got me on a course of treatment that I'm optimistic about, and I've had a second opinion that confirmed his diagnosis and course of treatment. We've also talked about taking out the defective parts (i.e., surgery), but the thinking is to try achieve better living through chemistry as long as I'm not actively bleeding out my keister. Should that happen again, it's Go Directly to Surgery, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200 Because We'll Just Get That And A Whole Lot More Back From You Soon Enough. I'm optimistic about the surgical route too, though, and hey, why not as long as I've met my out-of-pocket maximum for the year?

(Wow. Re-reading that, I'm amazed how quickly I went from grateful, humble, and joyous to snarky and cynical. It's nice to be back.)

On a more grateful note, the girls continue to amaze us and everyone else. A couple of anecdotes:
The other day, while I was helping Julia wash her hands, I patted her on the back and said, "Julia, you're a good kid." Without missing a beat, she replied, "Daddy, you're a good grown-up."

Lily is about to break through on the talking. She's had "bye-bye" (dye-dye), "thank you" (dakoo), and "bottle" (ba-ba) down pat for a while now, but now she's moved on to "ball" (bau), and finally "Mama" and "Daddy." She's also a real pro at "Hi," which comes out as "Huh-Huh-Hi-eee" because our nanny has been teaching consonant sounds to Julia. Best of all, though, is "bow wow," which to hear Lily use it, is the universal sound all animals use to communicate across species and genus. "Look, Lily, a pig!" "Bow-wowww!" "What does the kitty cat say?" "Bow-wowww!" etc. But what's so great about it is how emphatic she is about it. First, there's the deep rasp she puts into it. I've heard lifelong, two-pack-a-day smokers with voices less gravelly than the one she puts on for "bow wow." Then there's the emphatic nodding for each syllable. She really takes the song "Talk with the Animals" seriously.

For a few weeks now, Julia's been able to spell her name with any pre-formed letters. She has two letter puzzles, and j, u, l, i, and a are always the first ones in and the first ones out. She also spells it with magnetic letters on the fridge and recognizes it when she sees it written down.

Tonight we gave Julia a new cup at dinner. It has a cartoon print of a large T-rex sort of dinosaur and a much smaller pteradactyl sort of dinosaur. Julia remarked that the large T-rex was "a capital dinosaur" and the pteradactyl was "a lower case dinosaur."

There's more, but I lost my head of steam on the snarky and cynical update about me when I should've saved my energy for updates on what really matters:

The fabled PillCam:














Actually this is just a dummy capsule the nurse gave me. I'm not so much of a nerd that I'd actually fish the thing out of the toilet.

I am, however, enough of a nerd to really get a kick out of the PillCam's slogan: "Expanding the scope of GI." Get it? Scope? Yeah, I know...

While I was in the hospital, Debbie sat down with Julia to write me a card. After much interrogation, here is what Debbie got out of Julia:

Dear Daddy,
I love you, Daddy. Max(1) is the best doggie, but you’re the best man. Daddy fixes something. I like to have breakfast with you, Daddy, every day. You make me oatmeal, and maybe cake. Daddy cleans the table after breakfast. Sometimes Daddy takes me to school. He takes me to the grocery store to see the bull(2). (A bull is kind of like a cow, Mommy.) We miss you (and we miss Jessica). Come home soon!
Julia & Lily

1: Max is Gramma & Papa’s dog
2: Three months ago, I took Julia to a grocery store near here that has a big bull, woven from straw, over the butcher shop. She hasn’t been back to that store since, but remembers this tiny detail from the trip. Shows what we each consider important - what I remember from the trip was the great selection of fish that this store has.

Debbie wrote me a card of her own, which I'm keeping to myself. Suffice to say it was wonderful and sweet and just what I needed to read in the midst of all this.

Just got home from the hospital. What a relief to be out of there - and alive too!

For 25 years I've had Crohn's disease. It's been an on-again, off-again thing for me, and never all that serious compared to what some "Crohnies" deal with. On Saturday, I had been feeling absolutely fine when around 6 pm, I suddenly had an onset of intestinal bleeding. I won't go into the really gory details here, but basically, late Saturday night going up the basement stairs to the kitchen caused me to have to lie on the kitchen floor in order not to pass out (at which point, after lying down, I did actually pass out briefly). Then I knew I had a problem.

(What followed immediately after me passing out was actually kind of happy scene typical of the way Debbie and I calmly tackle problems together. It was 11:30 pm and we needed to find someone to come stay with the kids or take me to the ER. I just laid there on the kitchen floor and we brainstormed over who was most likely still awake, able to take me, etc. A real happy domestic scene, paradoxically!)

Anyways, I stayed in the hospital til this morning, getting stabilized and investigated. The GI doc on call said I had lost about half my blood volume. I nearly had a transfusion. Had a colonoscopy, which showed some increase in ulceration from the one 3 months ago,but didn't show a smoking gun, so that was followed by "capsule endoscopy," wherein I swallowed a tiny camera that then took 50,000 pictures as it traveled through my guts and transmitted them to an array of receivers on my abdomen (I'd say "belly" but I'm too skinny for that to be accurate). Felt like a real-life Jules Verne novel, or better yet, as a friend suggested, like that Martin Short movie, "Inner Space."Ever the nerd, I thought this was really cool. Still waiting on the download from that. I hope it shows a clear culprit. Maybe I can get them to burn it to a CD for me and I can post it as streaming video here. Just kidding. I have a dialup connection, and nobody wants to see that.

Coming home was wonderful. Sitting on the living room floor with my three girls tonight after dinner, I felt too lucky and too happy for words.

OK, since everybody and her brother has a blog, I guess it's time we added our (my) logorrheic discharges to the internet too. And when you consider that we finally feel like we're getting our lives back from back-to-back babies and moving, it's really important for me to waste more time on the internet than I have been previously. Especially when you consider that we have a blazing fast 48kbps internet connection, and are such luddites we don't even get broadcast TV, much less cable. (For those of you young enough that broadcast sounds vaguely similar to broadband, it's not. Broadcast television is a mid-20th century technology in which television shows are transmitted through the air, for free, of all things. Kind of like radio. Except not quite like XM.)

OK, so it begins - and maybe ends. We'll see how long I can keep up at this. At the very least, maybe I can finally keep in touch with family here.

To start us off, here's a picture of said back-to-back babies, appropriately, back-to-back: