Today is a happy day

Lebensgefahr

Stella has recently developed a love of sunglasses. She accidentally broke her first pair, so we have been keeping an eye out for new ones. This has helped me appreciate how rare children’s sunglasses are in this country. A few days ago we were on an eerily successful shopping trip, when we discovered some likely candidates. The size and price were quite good, but the sticker left a little something to be desired…

Discovery

Stella has discovered that she can roll her tongue.

Advice urgently needed

Three days ago, my mother got quite sick. Within about two hours she went from normal to vomiting and bedridden. She couldn't keep anything down, and didn’t want to try for about a day. She then gradually came back up to speed over the course of 8 hours. We hoped it wasn't contagious, but last night the kids and I all started spontaneously throwing up at about 1 am. For the girls this happened at least twice, for me only once. I still went to work today, but didn’t eat anything.

The trouble is that Mary Ann is now showing symptoms. From the previous pattern, she’s probably going to be throwing up within about two hours. My question is, how do you prepare a bathroom for someone who is going to throw up to make the experience as pleasant/less horrible than it otherwise would be? I’ve just cleaned the bathroom, so everything is clean, sparkly and no longer smells like three people just spent the last day throwing up in there. Unfortunately, she really doesn’t like the smell of bleach, so my most powerful (and instinctive) weapon is out.

I think the smell is neutral at this point, but where to go from here? As anyone who watches commercials knows full well, girls love candles in their bathrooms, so I’ve done that. Also, She doesn’t have long hair, so the whole “a friend is someone who holds your hair when you are throwing up” thing isn’t going to apply…

Any ideas on what else I could do?

Decisions

For some reason, Stella has spontaneously decided that she no longer feels comfortable going down the big slide at the park by herself. She hasn’t had a bit of trouble for months, but now it’s different. Who knows, maybe she has started understanding the cause and effect relationship so often associated with gravity and tall objects.

Despite these misgivings, she still enthusiastically climbs up the slide, but then won’t go down without an escort. On a recent trip she seemed to be willing to handle the slide on her own. In this picture I’m reminding her that she has changed her mind about solo sliding for the last 20 or so attempts. She assures me she will do it herself.



As usual, I follow her up the ladder to prevent any nasty consequences from her loosing her footing. We’ve had her do this twice, and nothing reminds you of the proper role of a parent like catching your child as she falls from a 15 foot tall ladder. Oddly, she is not a bit afraid of the ladder...



She finally arrives at the top of the slide, and guess what? She changes her mind.



After assurances and persuasion, she is unmoved. Her majesty then decides to send an unequivocally clear signal on her position.



There’s always next time…

New Shirt

Paradise Found

Mary Ann has discovered a solution for the age old problem of babies pulling out their pacifiers at night. Generally, this problem requires some adult reparation, particularly when it’s dark. With the application of a bit of creative thinking, and minimal investment, behold the solution:



This is now pacifier paradise. No matter what happens during the night, the supply of pacifiers is always so plentiful that Danielle can solve the problem on her own without waking us up. This has resulted in the whole family sleeping through the night for no less than four nights in a row. Mary Ann is a genius.

I am most seriously displeased

Maybe it was because I just wrote the post below, but I had pepper on my mind when I went to the cafeteria this afternoon. Therefore, I noticed that there was a little basket containing little packets marked “Salt”, and low and behold “Pepper”. Since I’m fond of pepper, I was quite pleased about this.

I happily opened one up and began to sprinkle it on my food, foolishly believing that just because it was labeled “pepper”, it would actually be pepper. Silly me. It was in fact, cinnamon. Strangely it wasn’t pure cinnamon, I think it had some cloves and maybe something else on it. In any case, it should have been on a Christmas cookie somewhere, not on my lunch.

Vital and critical update

The peppershakers in our cafeteria are full of cinnamon. The salt shakers do indeed have salt in them, but in the year and a half I’ve been going to this cafeteria, I have yet to see any pepper whatsoever. Apparently, cinnamon is the preferred spice for Lebanese food. Can anyone offer a better explination?

That's interesting...

Americans' Ratings of United Nations Among Worst Ever

Our good friends over at Gallup have put out some interesting data on the good ol' UN. The isn't any information on causation for the approval ratings, but I do find it interesting that the highest rankings seem to come aroung the time of the first gulf war, and Sept. 11th. Maybe there was something else at work there, but the timelines do match up reasonably well.

On another point, I was had expected the approval ratings among Democracts to be higher than they were. Now, let's take a look at these figures for other regions in the world...

Witz

This is only funny if you know German…

****

Matthew: Want to try and guess what this German word means?

Mary Ann: Sure, go for it.

Matthew: Opduziert

Mary Ann: I have no idea. Hmmm… Does it mean saying “Du” to someone you should have said “Sie” to?

Matthew: That’s a really good guess, but no. It means autopsy.

Dirty but happy

This cursed black fingerprint powder is still fighting our efforts to get rid of it. The morning after the investigation, and after much scrubbing and vacuuming, this is what #2s knees and feet looked like after crawling through the living room for less than five minutes.



We were a little slow on the uptake though, and left her in her white clothes. It will come as no surprise that they were gray very shortly thereafter. Why this did not occur to us at the time is a mystery of hindsight.

Coping

Anyone have music suggestions for someone who's trying not to think about the fact that someone is watching his family's movements and breaking into our house to steal our stuff?

Robbed

Today, sometime between 1030 and 1130, someone broke into our apartment. They took our laptop, video camera, and digital still camera. All together, we’re out about $2,700.00 Whoever it was must have been keeping a pretty close watch on us for a while, because they timed their escapade for exactly when Mary Ann was out shopping. Fortunately, we had backed up the laptop recently, so she only lost about two days of work on her thesis.

I’m quite glad to all the help we got through my workplace. They sent me down to the main police station with a translator, which made things a lot easier. I’m fairly confident that the office I was in for starting the investigation used to be a jail cell at one point, but that just adds to the ambiance. I also got to see where they are storing the vehicles from the Harriri explosion, so that was another item of interest.

In the course of the investigation, it has come to light that the concierge was asked to change the locks on our apartment when we first moved in, but didn’t actually do it. This sheds some light on why there was no actual forced entry into the house. Whoever broke in used a key, or did a very good job picking the lock.

Things got a bit hectic this evening, with the landlord coming over, and a squad of forensic detectives dusting for prints and so forth. We had Danielle in her chair eating some chocolate, but in all the hustle and bustle she got a bit dirtier than she normally would have.



Later on, Mary Ann and I were both finger printed so they could compare our prints with the samples they lifted off the house. Tune in later for my witty insights on how to clean up the plague of black fingerprint dust.



Fortunately, we do have renter’s insurance, and it does cover this sort of thing. I’m curious to see how the claim process goes.

Let that be a lesson to you

To all you procurement officers out there who don't feel a rush to process paperwork, take a lesson from this guy who was kidnapped because UNICEF hadn't paid its bills (allegedly).

lone shark or swim with the crowd?

I am a rather self-motivated person. I’ve reached a wide variety of goals without anyone helping to motivate me. I’ve kept an exercise program going for several years, and done other stuff, like distance education. However, I’ve recently come to believe that being self-motivated is all well and good, but doing things like this is quite a bit more difficult than doing things in a team. Joggers do better when they run together, and the second child almost always develops faster than the first because the older child is setting the pace.

Now that I’ve had this brilliant revelation, I just need to figure out how to best apply it. Anyone out there want to change the world, learn Chinese, and write software?

Glad to see the sport is properly named....

Even though British English is supposedly the standard in the UN, the still got the name right on this new website:

UN Soccer Club