Made. Of. Win.

Landlord was called, Murphy had fun, and we should have a new water heater in a day or two.

Phew!

You see, Henry’s nickname is Benny. This comes from a combination of his having at times been called Henny, and that having been used in the song The Name Game: Henny Henny bo benny, banana fanna fo fenny, fee fi mo menny, Henny. This had us using Henny Bo Benny a lot, or Bo Benny, and thus just Benny, or Ben, or Hen-Ben. We also sing the song with Henry rather than Henny, but it was the original that stuck, when the girls would leave out the r.

In the book, there are two separate kids named Henry and Benny. It seems weird.

As you see a hint of above, she and the other kids recently got a lesson about roughhousing in the stairwell…

Valerie is in kindergarten and doing pretty well, though a lot of it bores her, and while she’s extremely bright, she is differently so than her prodigal sister. The broken arm is her left, which wasn’t good, since she is overwhelmingly left-handed. She seemed to like all the attention, though.

I also thought it was the first time I’d not publicly acknowledged the date, but it appears the last one I mentioned here was the sixth. “Serious slackers” indeed.

Anyway, the sticker expired at the end of September. Money was tight even to spend $29 on inspection, so you can imagine what the extortive repair would mean. I finally took it today.

I got in the truck, started it up, and… no more engine light!

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I was worried that it somehow cleared itself, and would be in the same state clearing it electronically would create. If you use a device to clear the error electronically, the computer in the car lacks enough data for the inspection computer to say that it’s working right for emissions. You fail, and have to give it a week or so to accumulate information, then get it retested. Thus if you have a rejection sticker and repair will involve resetting it, you really should get the repair done a week or more before the deadline of the rejection sticker. Otherwise you go over, even if you didn’t want (need) to.

But no… it passed! There were no other problems, and the computers had a friendly chat that resulted in much happiness on my part. Even if there is something wrong, at least we buy time.

The girls never had evidence worth noting tht they might have allergies. Until now.

Valerie had classic allergy symptoms after eating a peach, skin included, and getting the juice on her skin. She had also drank “peach punch,” a favorite juice we sometimes buy the kids when it’s on sale for a dollar per half gallon, but I discount that as a direct factor, with reason. Turns out that onset of peach allergy can be a symptom of the onset of birch pollen allergy, naturally manifesting in the spring, and common in our neck of the woods. Processed, peaches or peach juice might not trigger that the same way a raw peach, skin and all, could be expected to, or so I gather.

It has been several months since we needed Benadryl for Henry – approaching a year, perhaps. It took a solid dose of it – initially I gave her a lighter dose based on what I remembered giving Henry when he was younger – but that and washing thoroughly cleared it up. A bit slowly. She had hives all over her belly, was extremely itchy, was red around her mouth, and had one eye get red and puff up almost closed.

I called the doctor’s office and they lined up a prompt appointment with the allergist. Early next week will be busy! Sunday there’s a beach get-together the kids and I are going to, centered around a friend visiting from Oregon. Monday Valerie has two sessions of evaluations at the kindergarten, seeing just what help she may need with school and how she should be placed. Then we have a brief get-together with someone I haven’t seen since 1976, visiting from Minnesota.

On Tuesday afternoon it’s Valerie’s allergy testing. Should be interesting, since she’ll get a battery of them, and they are notorious for showing allergies that have never been seen to exist in actual practice. Like my grandniece with the peanut allergy that isn’t. Which I suspect may be true with Henry, since that’s the one thing he never showed signs of at all. In his case we won’t take chances, though.

Things have been going well, so just keep doing what we’re doing. He’s had no signs of any new ones that needed testing. There was no answer to the question of why his tree nut allergies showed up positive without our having had evidence he was allergic to any of the ones in the suite. Macadamia is not part of the testing. He broke out after sucking the salt off a macadamia, and it could have been cross-contamination or something else. Also, he had eaten most tree nuts, and showed a reaction to what he’d had, in proportion to how much he’d had it, but none to what he’d never had. If I were going by observation, I’d say he was allergic to milk, eggs and bananas, not the peanuts or tree nuts, yet those are the most dangerous, traditionally, and also the easiest to avoid.

I was able to report to him that he was correct about Henry eating things with dairy or eggs cooked in. He can eat cake, brownies, donuts and bread with those, for instance, and we no longer look at whether red sauce has milk, as some unexpectedly do. If it is flavored with cheese, duh. If it’s “traditional” flavor, why would I expect milk? But there it is!

I still have to pick up the eppy pen prescription, waiting at Walmart, which I’ll swing by tomorrow. In effect, that was what the appointment was about. Which is fine, though I was already curious about what a retest might find – if there’d be a breakthrough.

At the risk of having to reschedule it or whatever, I made an appointment a year ahead. He goes back, and gets the retesting next time, April 12, 2012. Subject, of course, to any need to change it for shceduling or insurance conflicts.

Most notably, we were quiz buddies. I’d take a silly internet quiz and post it. He’d see it and take the same one. Or vice-versa.

We were more or less in related political circles, though in his later blogging, and that of his eventual co-bloggers, he seemed a bit hard right. Which, I should write a post about sometime, I am not, despite overlapping enough to have been naturally friendly with bloggers who are vehement in ways or degrees I am not, or who might be startled by where I stand in some cases.

In the past 2-3 years or so I’d tended to forget to visit there as often as I could have, but still enjoyed seeing what they had to say. It’s sad to see it gone.

Anyway, MS is of particular interest, given that my sister has it, a friend has it, a former, albeit lousy, supervisor had it, the first guy I ever bought web hosting from had it, and Deb has symptoms that act like it. That very list make it feel like MS and the like are more prevalent than they once were.

She was one of those bloggers I’d particularly wished to meet someday, and one who left me intrigued by the idea of possibly living in Alabama.