Monday, November 7, 2016

Week 168: On the eve

I'm a writer by profession and by hobby. I'm not often out of words. But, tonight, I just don't feel like I have that many left. Nor can I imagine that my loyal readership has much capacity left for consuming words found on the internet after the last few months. Tomorrow is finally election day, so with any luck the flood of online words will slow a little bit, and we can all take a moment to catch our collective breaths and square our shoulders to face whatever comes next.

On Wednesday, Lemon and I went to the clinic and got the PICC pulled. I had the idea that since we had the PICC in and could do blood draws totally painlessly, it would be a good idea to do the draw for his annual labs, since he was about due anyhow. That may or may not have been such a smart idea, since the tests came back today and revealed extremely high levels of a few liver enzymes. This is probably due to the fact that he was just really sick and on IV antibiotics.  Probably. But, now we have something new to sort of keep in the back of our minds for a month or two, until we repeat the tests. And of course, that means a needle stick, which is what I was trying to spare Lemon by having the labs drawn from the PICC in the first place. Sigh. At least the PICC is gone so we can go back to regular "two boy" baths, and the skin on Lemon's arm that was under the dressing can start to recover.

The last two nights have led me to believe that this whole clocks falling back business is specifically designed to torture the parents of young kids. Getting up at 4:15 is bad enough. But 3:15 is really for the birds. And by birds I mean nocturnal owl type things. Hopefully our guys (Lime in particular) will get this sorted sooner rather than later. Either that or I think Papa Bear is actually going to follow through on his threat to set up a Pack-n-Play in the basement.

I know this election has impacted all of us, and I know a lot of you who have more capacity than I do have been personally involved in getting out the vote. I know this not just because you have posted about it on social media, or told me about it in person. I know this because I live in a swing state and I have a land line and IT HAS BEEN RINGING OFF THE HOOK EVERY NIGHT FROM 5-9PM FOR THE LAST MONTH. I do thank you sincerely and earnestly for your efforts, and I am officially done with politics for the foreseeable future. I may take a tip from my grandmother and cancel my subscription to the New York Times for a while. All I can say with certainty about tomorrow is that I'm going to get up, take care of my kids, and go vote. Afterwards, I'm going to get my hair cut.  Because I haven't quite had the time to do that in the last 9 or so months, and whatever the future holds, I will be better equipped to handle it if I am less shaggy than I am now.

See you on the other side!