Ahh… woke up this morning with a sick child (actually she’s been raspy-coughy for weeks but we finally decided we’d had enough) who we were going to keep home from school and take to the doctor. Then I went downstairs and peered out the front door window, where I noticed the dim glow of the streetlights was not illuminating my car. And the place where my car had been was marked only by a snow berm where the plow had gone around it.
To Alicia, who was upstairs getting dressed, this sounded like “Ohhh, ohhh no. No no no. Where’s my car? Ooohhhhhh…”
Also, today is our three-year wedding anniversary.
So I spent the morning at the St. Paul police impound lot (along with three hundred other people), patiently standing in line for the privilege of handing over $250 as a way of saying thank you to the city for moving my car 3/4 of a mile. That’s right, we live within rolling distance of the impound lot.
Then I took our lovely and incredibly tough but explosively grouchy daughter to the doctor’s office, which she’s now old enough to remember as the place where they shove sharp objects in her thighs, arms, and butt. Between the crying and screaming and prodigious quantities of snot covering her face, she looked like the creature from Alien. With a blankie.
Doctor diagnosed a probable staph infection, which is not the 15th episode of the TV comedy series Arrested Development, but the asexually-reproducing microbe that causes 500,000 hospital visits a year in the U.S. Remedied by a prescription of Zithromax in oral suspension, which is fine by Ayla since it tastes like sugar and doesn’t involve any stabbing.
So, now we’re home, getting ready to celebrate the three-year-long beginning of a very long endeavor (see my earlier thoughts on starting long things) with a rotisserie chicken, green beens, and, for me, a beer. Glamorous we are not.
But my car is back, my wife is here helping with the Alien, and I’m feeling remarkably good.
Oh You Know, Like Bruno 