At the very least, WordPress being updated might make things snappier and avoid errors that might ultimately make this as unreadable as an old Expression Engine blog that’s been obsoleted by version changes to PHP on the server. Kind of hard to be archival if it can’t be read, eh?
I’ve spent a lot of years having but not much posting on a bunch of blogs, starting with the one that this replaced eons ago despite my better judgement. This may be changing.
My reaction was “because they own it… because they fucking OWN IT.”
Duh. End of discussion. “Stakeholders”? That’s always been utter bull.
Had a rare interlude of TV available without kids and not needing/wanting to do laundry, dishes, etc., which led me to discover Atlas Shrugged Part 1 was on Netflix. So I watched it again. Went to great lengths to see it when it was in theaters originally. I was surprised at how well it held up for me. The most jarring part remains Hugh Akston , and I found that even more so this time. The current times and economy conspire to make it all the more fascinating to watch.
It’s a bit odd reading chapters from The Boxcar Children to Sadie.
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.
Valerie turned six recently.
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.
Here we go again. Updated WordPress to the latest I know our database can support. Updated our theme to this awesome new one. Managed to lose my Sitemeter in the process, and don’t even know what e-mail address I don’t get any more they have for that account. Plan to start posting here extensively, so stay tuned. There’s a backlog, but time is often limited.
I remembered our eight anniversary was coming. Then yesterday, eight days later, I remembered again, surprised I had let it pass without recalling or noting it on that day. Made me think.
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.
The spouse’s Chevy S-10 has had the service engine light on for months. One of those silly emissions-related things that cost a fortune to fix and seem designed more to support the repair industry artificially than to be necessary to us proles. At least, that’s what my nephew’s device for speaking to car computers said, and that’s usually what it is. $500 for… being able to get a valid inspection sticker for a car that has no other symptoms than conspiring to make you fail an arbitrary regulatory hurdle.
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.
As is well known, Henry has allergies to bananas, dairy, eggs, peanuts and tree nuts, and when he was very young was sensitive to salicylates, azo dyes, and some aspect of screen printed ink on many of my T-shirts. He is gradually easing on the egg and milk fronts, in that he can eat foods into which those have been baked or cooked thoroughly, and can eat foods which have been fried in butter, or that contain butter or sour cream cooked into them.
The girls never had evidence worth noting that 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.
What’s the appropriate gift for a 13th? Luck, perhaps? It’s been a big 13 years for my oldest nephew and his wife. Congratulations!
To my cool mother-in-law, Peggy.
So yesterday was Henry’s annual allergy appointment, which turned out a bit unexpected, as the doctor decided not to retest him this year. He’d like to wait until next year, at which point he’ll be to the point of maybe growing out of the ones that are commonly grown out of before adulthood.
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 scheduling or insurance conflicts.
Another blog I remember fondly is Drumwaster’s Rants, which somewhere along the line – not all that long ago – turned into a domain parking page. I never did learn Drumwaster’s real name, but he was part of the overlapping blog circles I was in or touched upon after I started blogging in 2003.
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.
This kind of thing makes a lot of sense and I’ve been seeing more and more of it. Probably some of it also queued with old links I never blogged…
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.
A big one in the list of bloggers I miss is MedicMom, AKA Sonia, from Alabama. Not sure I should even say that much about her here, given her concerns that led her to abandon her blog. Which is apparently not to be confused with a newer one of the same name that came up when I searched just for giggles.
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.
Again on the topic of old blogs, I also miss Ian Hamet. His ianhamet.com, which featured a blog named Banana Oil in my early days of blogging, seems to belong to someone else. He had a temporary blog, Upbeat Cynicism, that was last active in 2009.
Perhaps he will see this and make himself known.
I didn’t go this time, scheduling it instead so Deb could have a chance. Just as well, given how sick I am. It was pretty similar – Sadie is great and all – but Deb also had a long talk with the principal about Sadie and the siblings following her, rather than just the talk with Sadie’s awesome teacher.
She still has a bit of the social awkwardness, despite being far better than she was, and we ought to put her in extracurricular activities of some kind to help maintain and expand her progress.
Her speech impairment is essentially gone and should not need any help, with the last of it just waiting for teeth to come in. Yay!
She’s the top reader in the class, along with one other girl, so the teacher sometimes has the two of them read together, believing in clustering that way. She did so well in the standard reading test earlier in the year – she was in the top 4% – that in April when they do it again Sadie will get the first grade test, rather than the kindergarten one, since that’s where her reading is.
Apparently we accidentally prepared her well for school. They assume we worked with her intensively, when in fact we thought we slacked. It surprised them she’d not been to preschool or such.
It’s this far into the year and Sadie still loves going to school. That’s cool, since her parents both had some degree of issues with school along the way, though in my case not at the very beginning.
We’re hoping she gets another great teacher for first grade. That makes all the difference. It did for me. My experience was up and down, depending how the teacher was year to year, or teachers, later on.
I guess there will be a lot of these memorial blog posts, depending how quickly I go through the blogroll at AV. And this is sort of active, still… there, anyway, it’s just that Acidman died. If you never visited or want to revisit Gut Rumbles, there are regular reposts. I’ll keep it linked from Accidental Verbosity, since that remains blogrolled there, and it will remind me of Rob to see it now and then. As if I need reminding! I still miss him, sometimes wonder what he’d say about current things, and think about how close we came to using Henry Robert instead of Henry Adam.
I’m going through the old blogroll at AV, grabbing stuff to link elsewhere and purging what no longer exists. This could take a while. This also provides fodder for one of the things I’d decided Blogblivion would have as a topic when I mostly stopped posting at it: blogging generally, and obsolete blogs we miss or remember fondly or were influenced by or whatnot.
One of my early blog friends was Ith and other at or connected with the blog that became Absinthe & Cookies, dead of apparent blog software and/or database issues, and never recovered. Ith is still around, and the root of that domain remains valid, but the blog is gone.
What bothers me is the difficulty I am having remembering the original name. It was some number of girls… and a guy. Which really amount to 2 girls, whether the official number was 3, 5 or what. It was great fun.