Pictured at right: Mr Bunches playing a rousing game of Leaf with me on Sunday. "Leaf" is a complicated game in which one person (generally me) picks up a handful of leaves from the stairwell. The other person (generally Mr Bunches, with an assist from Mr F at times) says "Ready, Set, Go," at which point I throw the leaves in the air and they rain down on us.Sometimes, Mr Bunches steps out of the stairwell and makes me throw the leaves on my own head and all I can think at that time is "I wonder how many spiders I just dropped onto my face."
To shake off thoughts like that, here's my 3 Good Things from yesterday:
1. The Boy is OKAY! We had quite a medical scare yesterday, as The Boy had to be rushed for emergency treatment that Sweetie and I cruelly tried to deny him because we don't care.
The Boy plays rugby, and about a week ago came home with a large bruise on his leg that he iced up for a while. It's an ugly bruise, but it's just a bruise. (Or so we thought...) Since getting the bruise, The Boy managed to (a) go out with his friends, then (b) play the entire rugby game Friday night, then (c) go out with his friends on Saturday, then (d) rake our yard on Sunday and go out with his friends... all of which led us to continue our uncaring/cruel (choose one) belief that the bruise was just a bruise.
But yesterday morning, at 8 a.m., Sweetie got an alarming phone call from The Boy, who reported that his friends, at school, were telling him he should get his leg looked at because (in The Boy's words) "It might be blood poisoning."* (*Note: Not a real thing.) Sweetie cruelly/uncaringly (choose one) opted to not excuse The Boy from school but instead said she'd make a doctor's appointment for him to have the bruise (or so we thought) looked at.
But that could be weeks away -- maybe months, if Obama gets his way and the Death Panels gear up -- so The Boy took matters into his own hands. Following the obviously-more-knowledgeable advice of his friends (the medical expertise of your average high school senior is unparalleled) he went to the school nurse, and then reported to Sweetie in the afternoon that "the nurse said he should go to a doctor," because The Boy had what he reported to be "something starting with an h."
Sweetie, who was (as I understand it) very busy not caring about whether or not The Boy lived or died, told The Boy to go to Urgent Care. The Boy drove himself there (heedless of the potential consequences of driving a car when his leg had "something with an h/potential blood poisoning"), taking time on the way only to call in sick to work (because of the potential danger to his leg, remember), and got in to see a doctor, who finally -- Thank God! -- gave a diagnosis.
"It's a hematoma," The Boy reported to Sweetie, who called me (I'd been awaiting reports, almost breathlessly; the only thing that got in the way of my actually being breathless is that, like Sweetie, I too was very busy not caring whether The Boy lived or died.) Not being a medical expert, I had to look up hematoma, which I did immediately...
...which is when I learned it's a bruise.
I'm still not 100% convinced that The Boy is going to pull through, though. And I'm sure he's getting a second opinion today -- probably right around 7th hour when his Spanish quiz is scheduled.
2. Pizza for dinner, leftover pizza for lunch today. Look, pizza is going to make this list every single time it comes up, okay? Just deal with it.
3. The article about George Steinmetz in last week's New Yorker. Last Friday, as soon as I got my allowance, I downloaded the book The Solitude of Prime Numbers onto my Kindle. I was going to start reading it right away that night but I got wrapped into the last week's issue of The New Yorker first, and the latest article that I read was about photographer George Steinmetz, who uses a parasail to take pictures of various places in the world. The article is a fascinating portrait of him, and led me to find Steinmetz's website, which has pictures like this:
That's a picture of a house of one of the Tree People of Indonesian New Guinea -- a group of people who use cannibalism to punish the sorcerors they believe cause death among them, and who live in trees.
Why, I can't help but wonder, do we have 300,000,000 reality shows in which some guy goes somewhere to eat something gross, but not a single show about the Cannibal Sorcery-Punishing Tree People of Indonesia?
Anyway, the article was so great that it completely occupied my time before I fell asleep, and it was so great that I wouldn't have started reading Prime Numbers right away anyway, because I had to let the article soak in and anything I read immediately after it would seem weak by comparison.
Go to George Steinmetz's site, here.
120 down, 10,625 to go: I actually have this song on my iPod, but Sweetie did not take me up on my challenge to her to have it playing when The Boy arrived home from Medical Emergency 2010. It's Bruises, by Chairlift.
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