If you have to go into public at any point and announce to the world “I’m not gay“, absolutely nobody believes you. And if you have already gotten caught and plead guilty for trolling for gay sex, you are just making a spectacle of yourself.
I’m not going to get into the endless debate of how atrocious (or not) Michael Vick’s crimes were. There is too much of that going on now and all for nothing.
I would like to state, for the record, that if you sign contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars that have these little things called “morality clauses” in them, you are an idiot if you commit any crimes at all. At all.
I will be so bold as to suggest that once you get to multi-millionaire status as a celebrity of any sort, you now have multi-millions of reasons to protect yourself. Anyone that is trying to “keep it real” is stupid. You are in unreal territory. You need to live by the unreal rules. Sequester yourself. Only go to clubs that cater to other incredibly rich, incredibly famous people. You get a driver to take you there. And you don’t break the law. Ever.
I don’t know what kind of sentence Vick is going to get, but if he were being charged with stupidity it would be life.
We are slowly but surely getting moved. This is just a quick note about infrastructure changes for those that are affected by such things.
We’ve cut off the voicemail to our home number and will be phasing it out completely soon. If you want to call us, try the cell phones, mine should even have working voicemail soon.
My comcast email account will be phased out shortly. Most of you use the gmail and/or yahoo account anyways. They all have the same username@ so just substitute the domain you want.
If you need any more contact info, click the “email me” button in the right column (towards bottom) and shoot me an email.
Monday night at work I got some money out of the ATM and wanted some change. I had eaten the “lunch” (in quotations cause it was 11 p.m.) that I had brought but I thought that maybe I could get some dessert in the cafeteria and get some change. Two birds thing, ya dig?
I walk into the cafeteria and the first thing I see are these scrumptious looking brownies. They look exactly like the brownies that Marilyn cooks and, man, are those some delicious brownies. I pick one up and head to the cashier.
Just so happens that the cashier is eating one as I get up there.
“There aren’t any nuts in these, are there?”
She shakes her head no. I pay my little dollar, get my change and sit down to enjoy this delightful looking brownie.
I take a bite and think, hmm, this has an odd texture. I swallow the morsel just as I realize that the brownie didn’t have an odd texture. It was my tongue. It was already starting to swell from the layer of peanut butter in the middle of the brownie.
Ahhh, nuts.
I’m not just a little allergic to peanuts. I’m violently allergic to them. Always have been.
I spit out what I can, head immediately to the bathroom to wash my mouth out and spit out anything remaining. I then go straight to my crew leader to tell him that I was in trouble and needed medical attention.
I head down to medical and talk the security guard into giving me some Benadryl to suppress the histamine reaction. He looked at me a little askance because I think he believed that it was just for sinus problems. Doesn’t matter, though, he gave it to me.
We discussed sending me to the ER and I was thinking that I could tough it out. Five or ten minutes later, my tongue had gone back down and I felt bad, but not imperiled. The security guard and my crew leader talked me into chilling out a bit longer just to see. About 10 minutes after that, I started wheezing and coughing and my nose started running. I changed my mind at that point and told them that I should probably go to the ER.
Ben, a crew leader from Curing, drove me to the ER and I was admitted promptly.
They put an IV into my arm without an actual IV. It was just the thing the IV attaches to.
Then they forgot all about me. I sat there, thinking that someone was gonna be right there. For an hour. At that point my breathing had gotten to a whistling wheeze and I felt a little light-headed. I got up and walked to the nurses station and informed one of them that I was having a hard time breathing.
Things happened quick after that. A doctor saw me about a minute later, and another minute after that the nurse comes into the room with several syringe things that fit into the IV hookup they had implanted in me.
She told me what each one was before she shot them into my IV, but really all I heard was the first and part of the second. Benadryl was the first one (HA, I knew I was right about that) and the second was a steriod. “Steroid” was the only word I heard because my head was already spinning. My breathing became easier instantly.
Have you ever gotten so drunk that when you laid down on the bed and closed your eyes the world seemed like it was spinning? Try that sober. With your eyes open.
The nurse sat me up all the way and I immediately clutched my stomach.
“Are you feeling sick?”
All I could do was nod. If I had unclenched my jaw, it would’ve been all over.
She rushed out of the room and came back quickly with one of those little pink plastic trays they use for everything in hospitals. I unclenched my jaw.
I threw up everything. Repeatedly. I threw up my knees.
Since work had begun that night, I had eaten 2 pickled sausages that I had bought from the gas station, 2 hot dogs, some potato chips, a peach, plenty of Diet Mountain Dew, a small bite of brownie and a half dozen cinnamon breath mints. Most of it was still there. Man, what a smell.
The nurse kept repeating, “I’m sorry”, over and over again. I guess for being a party to my regurgitation. All I could think was “Thank you”, over and over again. I could breathe. Between heaves, of course, but breathing nonetheless. And puke breath is better than no breath at all, I say.
The next couple of hours were very boring in comparison to that. I passed in and out of consciousness as the chemical combo they shot in me had my head wrong but, again, my breathing right.
Ben came and picked me back up and got me back to the plant at about 6 a.m. My shift doesn’t end until 7:15 a.m., so I went back to my machine for the last hour. Heck with it, why not? I needed some more time for the shakes to go away before I got on the road.
I call my lovely wife and tell her the story on the way home and get to the house grateful that the night is finally over.
As I’m getting ready for bed I take all the little bits of paper and releases and whatnot that I got from the hospital and look over them. I find the one that has the post-discharge instructions on it, guess what it says.
“Stay away from peanuts”.
Thanks, Doc. Wish I had thought of that.
It’s amazing how fast my life zips by sometimes. Lots going on, haven’t told you about any of them.
Emily started school Monday. She loves it. She already has the sniffles , presumably from one of the little germ factories she calls “classmates”. I dropped her off at school yesterday with Marilyn so that I could learn the ropes of handing the child off between the parents and the state. It’s fairly complicated these days, but I can handle it if it keeps her safe. The soccer moms dropping the kids off seemed, well, highly self-important. Which is what you expect from them, I guess.
I’m finishing up the flooring at my neighbor’s house. I have spent the last few days tiling their foyer and laundry room, which has been some tricky logistics in light of that being the two most common entrances to the house. Today I do the grout in the laundry room and the baseboards in both rooms. That will get me within putting distance of being done with their renovations.
We are moving. We are going to Martinez, where Marilyn grew up, because of childcare logistics and proximity to the schools that Marilyn is familiar with. So our North Augusta abode is going on the market soon. I hate moving and I hate dealing with the logistics of moving. There are no good moves, just perhaps ones that minimize the pain. We have only just begun and I find this one to be a pain. We are actually gong to be moving in with my in-laws whilst we find the dream house. It better be the dream house, because when we move into it, I want to be done.
I’m tired and want to chill out. I don’t see that happening for oh, say, two or three months.
I heard Chris Rock give one of the best replies to the whole “should Barry Bonds’ home run record have an asterisk” question. He said, sure, if you put one next to Babe Ruth’s name. He had 714 affirmative action home runs, he never played against black guys.
I think that is brilliant and a perfect encapsulation of my feelings towards the whole thing. Different eras in baseball have different negative parts of the game. In Babe’s era it was segregated, in Bond’s era there are performance enhancing drugs. They both may have benefited from these negatives. I say “may have” because Bond’s has never failed an MLB drug test. Babe definitely benefited from not playing against all the best players out there. So to talk of an asterisk is just silly and simple-minded.
Today was Emily’s 3rd birthday party. No, I don’t mean she is 3 now, she is five (!) now. I mean that today was the third celebration we have had for this event.
Last weekend we went to my brother’s birthday bash in Conway and she was included in the festivities. It was a blast and we all had a great time. Michelle Malone and her band played the party and rocked the house. Emily impressed many a guest with her gregariousness and her ability to rock out.
Monday (her actual birthday), at Emily’s request, we went to Miyabi’s Japanese Steakhouse and watched them start stuff on fire and cook our food in front of us. The highlight of the dinner was when this extremely red-headed little girl came over to Emily and started singing to her. She couldn’t have been more than 4 years old (she was tiny) but her singing was quite beautiful and very sweet.
Today was the party with her little friends. One in particular, Sarah, is almost Emily’s perfect match. She is younger than Emily (4) but she has same sort of odd times of seriousness. They both just pick weird points to become very serious about things. It’s cute, if a little disconcerting at times. They are very fond of each other and very smart and will probably worry me sick together. I can just imagine the mischief that those two can get into. Scary stuff.
My little girl is 5 years old. She starts school in 10 days. Holy Cow.