sitting at my desk

So here I am sitting at my desk watching a blue progress bar slowly creep across one of my myriad of necessarily open programs.

.11%

It is significantly past when I would normally be home with my family. I have been working like mad the past few hours, so again I apologize for the tardiness of this post.

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Anyhoo... Maybe I will share some of this riveting graphic as Digital Thursday. I know you are all out there with hearts all aflutter waiting with barely contained anticipation to see what could possibly be keeping me from eating dinner or going home. Maybe I will throw you a bone. A very dull and unexciting bone from what very possibly was at one point in time, a squirrel.

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So, other than being here sitting at my desk watching a progress bar barely progress, I do have news to impart to you, my fine readership and it is concerning Little Man's allergies.

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Yesterday Little Man had an appointment with the allergist who is also in charge of managing Little Man's Asthma.

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Results:

Firstly the asthma. It looks as if we will look at reducing the amount of asthma meds going into our 5 year old's system. The regimen that we are currently putting him through is working really well, so the doc wants us to look at what his breathing is like with marginally less meds. So kick ass there.

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Secondly the food allergies: Little Man got a scratch test which he was not happy about receiving, but the results were amazing. It looks like he has finally gotten past his milk and egg allergy and he might be less than a year away from outgrowing his peanut and tree nut allergies as well. Go ahead. Read it again. I will wait.... I know! Isn't that just amazing?

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To recap:
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After this thing gets to 100% I am going to take it home to work on
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I have a better machine there and the same software
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We really don't even know what to do with this potentially food allergy free child
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It is pretty amazing to think of
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US v Trinidad and Tobago tonight in World Cup Qualifying
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My phone ran out of battery around 2pm today
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Okay this is silly, the progress bar is just playing with my emotions now
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umm... listening to Right in Two by Tool
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WTF!!?!?!? Still 99%?!?!?!
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SWEATY JEBUS AT THE WATERHOLE! JUST 1 MORE FRIKKEN PERCENT!!!
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Woooooooooooooooo-Hoooooooooooooo!

Ride, Ride

Our house is a crazy roller coaster ride of apprehension during the months of October, November, December, January, February, April, and early March due to Little Man’s asthma.
Let me take you though a, sadly, typical weekend illness.

We will start the weekend illness on Thursday night. Around 11:30 Little Man sat up in bed and promptly voided his stomach. His belly made a groaning noise that awoke the slumbering Wifey from the dead of sleep she was enjoying. “It sounded like the gates of Hell were opening to unless the fury of a pent up devil.” –Wifey. The bed was now the recipient of 1 half bowl of tomato soup, at least 1 juice box, 5 chicky fingers, and some snacks. He had gotten the annoying virus that has been going around Central Ohio like wildfire. He continued voiding his gut periodically until noon on Friday. Then the magic of Sprite kicked in and settled his disagreeable tummy.

This was the first major hill of the roller coaster. The one where you are attached to the chain and feel the coaster slowly climbing the hill to start up the wild ride.

In Little Man’s words “Tummy feels better with Sprite!” - Little Man The little one was running around and enjoying himself all day Saturday and Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon {cough}. I’m sorry, what was that? {Cough!} Oh goody!

Looks like the coaster is about to go through that annoying part where your cork-screw around just before the loops. Now, He sounded a little ‘creaky’ on Sunday morning, so we gave him a full aerosol breathing treatment and that seemed to clear things right up. He is good and responsive to the treatment, that is a big positive in our world, but {cough, cough, cough} by Sunday evening, he needed another treatment. After his bath and during his bed-time ritual, he needed {cough, cough, cough, cough, cough} another breathing treatment. While I am in the queue to log on to the Shadow Council server for World of Warcraft (367 people want to log in at 9 pm EST on a Sunday night? WTF!?!? Don’t get me wrong, I am not an RP fairy, but just don’t like the asshats and asshattery associated with PVE and PVP realms) he needs another one. It {cough} has {cough, cough} only {cough, cough, cough} been about {cough, cough} 90 minutes {cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough}. Here come the coasters loops. You know the ones. They tend to make even the most hardened coaster buffs a bit queasy at the thought of them, and tend to cause your head to hit most of the safety restraining equipment associated with the coaster. Yeah, those loops… and there are 4 of them coming.

Last night, I gave {cough, Cough, COUGH, COUGH!!!}him another { COUGH, COUGH, COUGH, COUGH, COUGH, COUGH, BARK, BARK, BARK, COUGH, COUGH} (Whoa, did he just bark?) breathing treatment {COUGH, COUGH, COUGH}and his coughing got worse {COUGH, COUGH, COUGH, COUGH, BARK, BARK, BARK, COUGH, COUGH!!!}. {cough, cough} He did not {cough} stop {cough} coughing until {cough} around 11:30. We were gearing up for a trip to the ER, when all of a sudden, he just kind of stops… (by “just kind of stops” I mean he is sleeping while sitting up against me [to start with, Wifey took my place after about 20 minutes sop I could get ready for bed. She was in that position for much longer than me.] we think it was due to rapid succession of treatments coupled with a vertical positioning.)Sure he stops coughing, but Wifey and I are primed to fight this for the long haul. "I really though this bout would end up with us in the ER. I mean, his cough had developed a 'barking' quality." - SRH He doesn’t cough again until 7:30 this morning. I am not sure where in the hell on the roller coaster we are at the moment. It seems too good to be true that we are doing the tiny hills and turns that are used to decelerate so the ride can stop. I think more likely we are at one of the boring sections on the top of the coaster that have a sharp decline come out of nowhere.

To recap:
I hate roller coasters
That, and I am tired
I have gotten my hunter up to 19.5
I hope he is 20 by the time I go to bed tonight
Little Man coughs a bunch
Spaghetti for dinner
20 Questions Tuesday will be a continuation of the Christmas theme from last week
I think Little Man will not want tomato soup again
Thursday was the first time he had tried it as a soup and not just an ingredient in Orange Rice
I have a conference call I have to be in on at 9 am tomorrow
Not sure why I told everyone that, but it is true
So far it is the only thing on my schedule for the week

Breathe

I went to Little Man’s allergist appointment today. It was a fine little check-up. He is doing just fine. It was a delightful little family side trip in the middle of the day. I got to see my little boy and my wife for a nice hour long interlude in an otherwise monotonous day. It was a wonderful, yet not long enough, hiatus from the doldrums of work life. It really did make me really wish we were independently wealthy and did not have to toil in the cubicle salt mines of today’s information economy. A slave to the keyboard I am. Anyway… sadly, the trip to the doctor’s office to discuss my kid’s breathing issues was, forgive the horrid pun, a breath of fresh air.

He is almost old enough and coordinated enough to use the inhalers with breathing spacer associated with these new fangled contraptions. That would cut his breathie from about 5 to 10 minutes to however long it takes him to take 8 deep breaths. That would make the morning and evening rituals much easier. We will be working with him on this really diligently. The breathing machine (nebulizer) can be quite the chore. Sure it is a chore that keeps my kid alive, but a chore is a chore is a chore is a chore, in my book.

So after the Dr’s visit, Wifey and the boy drop me off at work so I can chain myself back to a desk and toil away. Wifey drops Little Man back off at G-Ma D and G-Pa R’s and then off to work she goes. Off to work she goes… with my cough drops. Oh, no! She drove off with my cough drops. My drops of anti-coughing. My Lozenges of Throat Soothiness. My only way of not hacking up a lung on a co-worker’s desk (I would not do it on my desk, sanitary reasons and all).

Mentholyliptus (Greek God of Throat Soothing) why did you allow me to be left bereft of all anti-coughing lozenges? Why?!?!? Please, Oh, Sweet Merciful Phle-Gnum (Egyptian Goddess of Colds and Wracking Coughs {Shout out to B!}), please forgive my transgressions against you, for I only have 2 cough drops left and hours yet till I can be re-united with my bag of soothing remedy. I realize that it was my own fault for putting the bag in Wifey’s cup holder. I realize that I am at fault, but, please, please have mercy on my pitiful itchy throated self.

To recap
Two Halls Cherry Flavored Cough Drops away from Hellish office coughdom
Left overs for dinner tonight, I am just not sure what it is that we have left over
I need to go and get more Breath Right Strips tonight, for I am out
Wifey is going out for drinks with some VIPs tonight
I’m staying in cradling a bag of red cough droppy relief
There is no projected tornado this evening so I won’t be working out
Wifey is a lightweight – maybe I’ll get lucky
More likely I’ll cough my way into a lonesome bed trailing a wave of sick behind me
8 Deep breaths, how hard could that be?
……
Okay, I am a bit light headed now
Really, there is a good bit of dizziness going on right now
Maybe I should try to get him to do 8 deep breaths, not 8 DEEEEP breaths
….
Whew…. spinning in my chair right now while sitting still
Okay one should definitely not do 8 DEEEEP breaths followed by 8 deep breaths

Writing

I am writing a whole bunch of crap for work today coming up with requirements for my company to try and break into a newly emerged field of work. This task of actually writing for work is making the process of writing for blog a bit more difficult. It seems that I have a finite amount of writing in me per day, and unfortunately for this post, I have to focus on the work situation instead of the blog situation. Stupid work, getting in the way of my blogging!

Keeping my limit to my wordificationnessosity in mind, as this post gets longer, the less grammatical and cognitive sense it will probably contain. Thems the breaks.

Last night Little man and I went to Ted’s Montana Grill to celebrate Wifey and I exchanging our nuptials 9 years previous. Anyway… for their kid’s meal, Ted’s does not merely make a single child sized hamburger for the tiny tots to consume at their leisure. Rest assured tiny tots consume everything at their leisure. It is a fact of life. One can not speed up the eating of a tiny tot. To attempt to do so, will only backfire. Woefully, woefully, full-of-woely, backfire. No, Ted’s Montana Grill has decided that 3 smaller quarter sized patties are really what kids like. Unfortunately, they cook these itsy-bitsy-teeny-weenie adult bite-sized burgers are cooked on the same surface that the gigantor adult sized burgers are prepared. This lead to my burger being done perfectly (it had a warm pink center and was nice and juicy), but left Little Man with 3 charcoal lumps to force down his gaping maw. They were not good. Not good at all. The fries sucked as well, but he loved the IBC Root Beer. The wee one drank almost an entire bottle of IBC. Burped like a lumberjack when he was done. He was proud. I was proud. The wait staff was mildly shocked. But all this is irrelevant.

The thing to keep in mind is that I only have a discrete amount of writing ability that can be called forth from my noggin on a daily basis. I cannot tap the universe for some ethereal infinite writing ability that professional prolific authors seem to be able to tap into. No my dear readers, I must rely upon the paltry limited chunk of writing capability that is lodged within my head.

It turns out that some sort of dairy cross-contamination occurred in the preparation of Little Man’s coal-esque meal because I noticed some hives appearing on his back during his evening bath. I have no idea if the dairy was introduced because of butter on the cooking surface or the fact that his French fries also had one lone dairy laden onion ring gracing the same plate. Regardless, I forced the little guy to have some Benadryl. This ingestion of foul elixir caused much mental anguish and anxiety to my wonderful little boy, who wept for 5 minutes due its the disturbing taste. He was up from about 2:30 this morning until about 4:00 am due to his belly attempting to deal with the dairy within. This morning, when he awoke at 7:30, he started farting deep and rumbly farts that could potentially register on the Richter Scale. The dairy induced sub-sonic gas emissions caused some discomfort to the wee one, and much discomfort to those around him. Those of you who have experienced allergy induced gas know exactly what I am talking about. The important thing to consider though, is that the above information is not even remotely germane to what I am attempting to focus on today.

The real focus of today’s post is on how I only have a restricted reserve of writing capability at my disposal. Today is all about the way in which my work writing is interfering with my ability to post.

To Recap:
It seems that I have a finite amount of writing in me per day
Ted’s can make some charcoal for kids to eat
I only have a discrete amount of writing ability that can be called forth from my noggin on a daily basis
Dairy causes much gas in Little man
I must rely upon the paltry limited chunk of writing capability that is lodged within my head
I like to consider myself a wordificationnessositition
I only have a restricted reserve of writing capability at my disposal
In summary SRH’s writing ability ≠ ∞
I will again being dealing with the parents this weekend
I am tired
Have a great weekend

Still eating...

Little Man is still an eating machine. He always stuns the wait-staff at restaurants when he really goes after something that he likes and currently wants. The operative phrase being “currently wants.” For clarification purposes, I feel it is necessary to define “currently wants” as “he wants it at that very instant in time.” Okay for more clarification purposes, I feel it necessary to really break his eating conditions into their 2 constituent pieces. Number 1: it has to be something he likes. Number 2: it has to be something that he is currently interested in eating. Okay, so there are many a food choice in his usual menu that he will only eat occasionally and voraciously. So, of the many food items that he does likes, if their availability does not coincide with him wanting them, he eats like a typical toddler. IF the 2 conditions are met, be very careful around his plate and his mouth, you might just get stabbed by a fork or bitten by some non-permanent teeth.

Last night at California Pizza Kitchen was one of those “he’s going to eat his entire meal so keep non-food items away from his gaping maw” kind of nights. On the Kid’s menu at CPK there is this wonderful Fusilli with Tomato Sauce that he LOVES. As a bonus, as long as we tell the staff there that he is allergic to dairy and egg so they do not accidentally butter the pasta he is allowed to actually eat it. Turns out that there is a veritable panoply of food he wants to eat that he can have nothing to do with. Anyway, he will typically take down the entire portion of pasta whilst at the restaurant, much to the wait staff’s shock and awe. By the way, if he doesn’t end up licking the plate at CPK, he wants to finish it off when we get home.

So, we went to CPK to celebrate the little one’s birthday. Another point of clarification: Since Sunday everything in Little Man’s world has been a Happy Birthday something-or-other. Sunday was his Happy Birthday Party where he got Happy Birthday Presents only to be capped off with a Happy Birthday Cake that he just mashed up with his fork. Sure, if the cake had dairy or eggs in it, he would have scarfed down a plateful and broken out in hives, but, nooooo, we go through the trouble of making a special cake that he can eat, and he doesn’t want to touch the thing… Anyway… he did not know why we went there, because we were not going to tell him that Tuesday was his actual birthday because he would have expected another Happy Birthday Party with more Happy Birthday Presents. He doesn’t understand the whole observed vs. actual thing just yet. In a few years, Little Man, a few years.

So, last night, which was his actual birthday, not his observed happy birthday, Little Man ate the heck out of his pasta and stayed up way too late. Sounds like a good way to ring in one’s next year, don’t you think?

To Recap:
Little Man can still pack it away
CPK is a good place for Little Man
Little Man’s favorite thing at the moment are the Hash Browns at Burger King
He loves the darn things
Spellcheck wanted to exchange Fusilli with Fusilier
“On the Kid’s menu at CPK there is this wonderful Fusilier with Tomato Sauce that he LOVES”
Big difference in meaning
Not that Little Man couldn’t love a Fusilier
They are just getting more and more rare, and California Pizza Kitchens typically don’t have them on the menu with tomato sauce

Off Topic

Got nothing today, but I figured I could blather on about something.

Number 1: I don't usually have an opinion about the royals but wtf?!? Harry, Harry, Harry. I hope your handler got sacked for letting you attend that party in an Afrika Corps uniform. For the love of God and all that is holy, did no one ever sit you down and talk to you about the application of common sense? All you have to do is not something stupid, and yet you seem to mess that up all too frequently.

Hey, royal wranglers, don't let that child go out anymore. Turn one of the lesser country estates into a big night club, import some partiers, and let Harry party there. Get him as many loose British rave chicks as he wants, some "x" if he wants it, marijuana, beer, liquor, etc... and take some control of where and how this child behaves. You cannot keep him from partying, just take control of the parties. Give the kid his excesses, just keep him from doing his stupid stuff in uncontrolled environments.

Number 2: ro·ta·vi·rus (rO-tah-vI-rus)n. pl. ro·ta·vi·rus·es : Any of a group of wheel-shaped RNA viruses of the family Reoviridae, including the human gastroenteritis viruses that cause infant diarrhea. Also called gastroenteritis virus type B.

That is what the doctor seems to think the little one has had since 12-27-04. Says that it lasts anywhere from 5 days to 3 weeks. Well, we are on 2 1/2 weeks, so here's to hoping it is coming to an end. Little man has been vomiting every night between the hours of 11pm and 4 am for 2 1/2 weeks as well as having some nasty ass poo during the days. Sent some poop out for tests, and most likely the lab will be able to tell us what the big man just got over. Here's to hoping.

Number 3: Why can't we just let sleeping cheese lie? Okay, for the last time. I do not dislike cheese, I dislike the over usage of cheese in the US. Too much of anything is bad, this applies to cheese as well.

Number 4: Got Milk? I hate the fact that the American Dairy Council has somehow talked non-Caucasians into doing their ad campaign. Caucasians have a mutated gene that allows them to ingest cow's milk and process lactose. Everyone else in the world has difficulty with cow's milk. As adults, many Caucasians cannot effectively digest lactose as well. The dairy industry is subsidized by the US government and therefore milk and cheese is made into a mandatory food stuff in the US.

Since my little boy is allergic to dairy, I have had time to think about the whole concept of using a cow as a wet nurse. Humans should not suckle off the teat of another animal. I will continue drinking my soy milk, thank you very much. I have found it amazing just how pervasive dairy products are within the US diet. Dairy byproducts such as whey and caisin are additives found in a whole heckuva lot of food products. It is absolutely mind numbing what one can find out about food, just by reading the ingredients listings. I am positive that most of the dairy byproducts found in foods are there because of the government subsidation of the dairy industry.

Stupid dairy.