MERE had a birthday party sleepover with a bunch of her friends, manically had tons of fun with them, and is now sleeping - appears that some of the manic-ness was a cover for a flu or cold, so *she’s* down for the count tonight, tired, stuffed up, and miserable.

CONNIE is fading badly.  Sleeps practically all the time, is horribly confused and ( Read more... )

• Meredith is starting to ease back in to her skating training; some of the aerial maneuvers that she was talking about picking up made my heart go THUD-CREAK, but the coach and the kids know what they are doing. *grimace*
• Her sister’s family recently moved from a big city to farm area in another state, reasonably close to a medium sized city.  Susan ( Read more... )

People have been asking in all sorts of ways as to how I’ve been doing since the surgery; the answer is that I’m still off my feet, still in a doctors care, but doing better.

The foot surgery was held up for several hours because, as usual, people were having a lot of trouble getting an IV into me. Including the anesthesiologist, who was somewhat ( Read more... )

If you ask me what the real situation is with the Japanese reactors, I’d say I haven’t the foggiest (but I’m alarmed) because there’s so much stuff being spouted in all directions, and that I have little faith in any entrenched bureaucracy or organization to tell anything straight in the direction of bad news.  I am absolutely repelled by the ( Read more... )

For those who didn’t get the message earlier, I caught a cold that really got going the Friday before Valentines Day.  Had to skip Capricon; Meredith went for about half the con, but I was way too sick to deal with it.  The cold  turned into a sinus infection, and then on towards bronchitis and finally pneumonia by the 18th (the day before my ( Read more... )

This last week has been a fun fest for me; fell down the stairs to the basement early Sunday morning and generally hu5rt myself - and suffered a mild concussion.   The swelling and pain have down down, but I’m still moving rather gingerly.  And sometime Friday, I came down with what is probably a case of stomach flu - which was majorly unpleasant, ( Read more... )

…cross fingers and all that.    My earlier post on this talked about dealing with a new set of docs at Edward Hospital, and so far, it’s paying off.  I’m on long-range doses of penicillin for the near future, about 2g a day (broken into four pills) and have to wash myself down with Hibiclens (surgical scrub soap) daily or so.  The stuff does work ( Read more... )

Meredith came home early today sick to her stomach and running just under 100F; the H1N1 still isn’t available out here except a trickle with the public health departments, and there’s been some deaths with teenagers (usual serious swine flu symptoms).   I can’t take the live virus nose spray, and that’s all that’s available.

Susan may have some ( Read more... )

The new way to get tourists back to Mexico: we did such a good job on H1N1, don’t worry. Now, on to making sure that the furious drug lords war in Mexico doesn’t catch you on the street with an AK-47 before you get to see an interesting stage show in Tijuana.

Tip to Bamm Hartman for the video link.

A different perspective, as pig farmers are finding out that the swine flu may not kill them, but it’s doing a lot of damage to their pigs…or rather, that people are scared to buy pork and catch That Really Big Disease.

“We’re heading for a wreck,” said Simon Goodwin, a pig farmer in Alberta, where a herd infected with the new influenza AH1N1 ( Read more... )