OmegaMom

We like to play “The Animal Game” at dinnertime.  It’s a variation of Twenty Questions “made up” by OmegaDotter.  Her buddy A. enjoys playing the game when he’s spending the night, which he is doing tonight.  Thus, we had a round of The Animal Game to enjoy.

A. started off, but the dotter guessed his animal in record time—an owl.

“It’s a screech owl!” quoth A.

“Oh, then it’s Lady Gaga!” quoth OmegaDad.

I slapped OmegaDad on the arm.  “She doesn’t screech,” I said.

“She does too!” was the response.

Next up was OmegaDotter.  She always starts with, “This animal has eyes.”  Which makes OmegaDad and I roll our own eyes, because it’s useless as a clue.  But we moved on…does it live on land or sea?…is it bigger than A.?…does it have fur?

“Yes,” answered the dotter.

“Oh, then it’s Lady Gaga!” shouted OmegaDad triumphantly.

I slapped him again.  OmegaDotter rolled her eyes.  A. fell down laughing.  (Hey, it doesn’t take too terribly much to amuse 8-year-olds.  Or fifty-year-olds, for that matter…)

The dotter stumped us with that one, because we forgot to ask if it was extinct or not; it was a mammoth.

She went again, starting—of course—with “this animal has eyes.”  There was a question as to whether it ate other animals.  A. wisely recited their teacher’s rhyme about how to distinguish predators from prey (“Eyes on the side, they like to hide; eyes to the front, they like to hunt”).  Then he took to helping the dotter, because she wasn’t very sure about aspects of her animal.

Somewhere along the line, of course, OmegaDad had to ask if it was Lady Gaga.

OmegaDotter got very frustrated at this point, and proclaimed that he was no longer allowed to use those words together for at least two hours.

OmegaDad won that one, at which point the dotter and A. both grumbled, because they knew his animals are hard to guess, mostly due to tricksy initial clues that send you haring off in the wrong direction.  Luckily, because my husband’s mind is an open book to me, I was able to guess his animal—a pine bark borer beetle.  Both the dotter and A. were disgruntled at this, saying that they had no idea what that animal was.  So OmegaDad got to go again.  But he passed his turn on to me.

I took a cue from the dotter:  “This animal has eyes.”  Hah!

So they asked if it lived on land or sea—land.

They asked if it was a mammal—I said yes.

They asked if it was a wild animal—I had to think about this, but eventually said no.

Did it live in trees?  No.

Did it have fur?  No.

Did it have hair?  Yes.

Was it bigger than A.?  Yes.

Do people own it as a pet?  I answered no.

Are people allowed to own it as a pet?  No.

At which point, OmegaDad, having seen my slight smile while I was debating the “wild animal” question, asked, “Is this animal a human being?”  Yes.

And A. burst out, loudly, “Is it Lady Gaga?!”

Yes.

Har.  That’s my tale of our brush with the Fame Monster, and a slice of (silly, pointless, fun, and boring to those outside the family) life around our dinner table.

When I was but a child—somewhere in the region of 10 or 11 or 12—I had my first sinus infection.  Or, perhaps a better way of putting it, my first memorable sinus infection.

“Memorable” is the definitive word.  For all I know, I had previous ones, but simply don’t remember them.

This one began, as all sinus infections begin for me, with soft, puffy skin by the right side of the nose and above the eye and a mild headache.  But the skin kept swelling and swelling, both beside the eye and above it, until my eye was swollen shut.

Um.  That’s a bit of a sinus infection, wouldn’t you say?

My parents, of course, hauled me off to either the doctor or the emergency room; at this point, looking back into the veils of time, I can’t remember which.  What I do remember is being diagnosed with an acute sinus infection (aka “The Sinus Infection From Hell”) and being ensconced in the hospital for a few days while the medicos took care of it.  In particular, I remember The Machine.

It was square and tall and white.  It had a water tank.  It rolled on wheels.  It had a hose.  It had a bulbous glass end that looked somewhat like a dainty glass minaret (or perhaps a stylized glass p3nis).

–>  WARNING:  TMI GROSSITUDE FOLLOWS! <–

This bulbous glass tube was the nozzle end of great suction power.  It’s purpose was to vacuum out my sinuses, sort of a powered, grown-up sized version of the snot sucker every modern parent is familiar with (even those of us who did not have mild, calm babies who would lie still for the dropper up their noses, but babies that would fight against it like snarly feral kittens with every ounce of strength in their small bodies).  Every few hours, a nurse would wheel The Machine into my room, dig the bulbous end into my nose, and then power it up (it sounded sort of like a home power tool), at which point—o blessed relief!—large quantities of blobby mucous would be removed from my pressure-filled sinuses to be deposited into the water tank like grotesque jellyfish.

It was truly, spectacularly, deliciously gross.  The kind of grossness that pre-teen and teenage boys revel in.  I will admit, pre-teen girls revel in it, too.  Maybe even post-menopausal 50 year olds.  I mean, it was gross, but it was really, truly cool, as well.

After this acute infection, I was plagued with sinus infections all the time.  None of them reached the heights of swelling and pain that that particular incident did, but I became very familiar with the soft, painful feeling of slightly swollen skin next to the bridge of my nose and right below my eyebrow bone, which heralded the coming of a sinus headache.  Bleah.  Luckily, our stay in the dry Southwest seems to have changed the tenor of my sinus infections, so they are more cheekbone-y than forehead-y, and my number of sinus headaches decreased immensely.  (Migraine headaches, however, ramped up as I got older, but have now pretty much vanished since the hormonal roller-coaster has ended, yay!)

Goodness knows if the Power Sucker is the modern standard of care.  There’s probably a totally different protocol to follow now, something with lots o’ drugs shrinking the mucus and computerized tracking.  But there was a certain splendid satisfaction to the Power Sucker:  You knew that the mucus blockage was being reduced, and damned if it didn’t feel like it right away, no delays to have drugs kick in or anything.  Just *blammo!*, five minutes of vacuuming and three to four hours of relief.

It makes me wonder why they don’t sell a Home Power Sucker for those days when people’s sinuses go on a rampage.

All of which is to say, I am dealing with some sort of sinus infection right now, one which is mainly concentrated in my eustachian tubes and leaves me feeling like someone is poking an icepick into my ears.  Bleah.  I don’t think the Power Sucker would even help this kind of problem; the main thing to do is to avoid milk and milk products.  (This is problematic when there are fresh chocolate chip cookies in the house.  Or any kind of cookies.  I am of the mindset that cookies must have milk.  Realizing that milk goops up my eartubes has put a damper on my Girl Scout Cookie rampage.  Now I have to weigh the options:  Drink milk with my cookies, The Way God Meant Us To Eat Cookies, or be an adult and realize that if I do, I will have icepicks in my ears a few days later.  Gah.)

(And, no, I have not tried Neti Pots.  What can I say?  Hey, if I wanted to be waterboarded, I’d have become a jihadist, y’know?!)

(To Noreen and Ms. Vinegar Martinis:  You do realize that even the thought of Olympics of any sort scares the snot out of me???  Hmmm.  Maybe that would be useful, given the topic of this post.  In the meantime, I will just let her do team and see how long it lasts.

To Sarah From Italy:  The snow will be gone soon.  I promise.  Sooner for you than me, though!

To Catalyst:  Yeah, but, see, if I can see Russia from my house, that means I’m looking at Siberia, and Siberia is where exiles go.  Hah!

To Kaz and Sarah (again):  Yeah, she has some fine lines.  I’ve gotten used to seeing girls of various ages and sizes flying all over the place, so the dotter’s flips and handstands and what-not don’t scare me any more.)

So yesterday was the first time I was able to see the dotter at one of her gymnastics meets.  Her first real meet was two days after I headed off to Arizona to help take care of mom, and she had a second one while I was still there.  Being a doting mom, I just have to show off her beam routine:

Her handstand was a thing of beauty.  Everyone around us commented on how long she held it and how straight it was.  Alas, her landing wasn’t that good, which ended up moving her from a 9.0+ to an 8.9, and a red ribbon on the beam as opposed to a blue.  Wah!  And, yes, her split jump isn’t very good, but everything else she does on the beam is generally great.

Of course, since she had filled my camera card up with videos of Newman the cat encountering Wooly the cat, when I went to record other routines, the video card was filled up.  After gnashing my teeth at the small capacity of my memory card, I investigated, and promptly deleted two videos of yowling cats rolling around on my office floor, and was able to record her bar routine, too:

So she may be going up to Level 4 this summer, which is honest-for-goodness’-sake team level.  IF she stays focused and works hard, and doesn’t goof off with her buddy K. all the time, which she tends to do.  Doesn’t matter to me, but she and K. have been bitching and moaning about not moving up to Level 4 and how they want to and, gee, they can do their back handsprings and a Level 4 dismount, and blah, blah, blah.

In the meantime, the planet is blasting onward towards the spring equinox.  Tonight, the sun will set at 8:00.  This throws our entire dinner-time zeitgeist off—OmegaDad spends the winter with dinner being cooked after the sun sets (most often long after the sun sets), and the rapid shifting of the seasonal light takes a while to mesh with his cooking brain. 

All the light does not mean warm weather, alas.  In fact, we had well above average temps for two months—mostly while I was in Arizona—and as we move towards official Spring, the temperature has plunged below normal for the past two weeks.  This leaves me generally grumpy.  I managed to rant and rave and cry at OmegaDad this week about how I HATE Alaska and I just WANT TO GO HOOOOOME!  Um.  What can I say?  Seeing all the pictures around the intertubes of people’s swiftly growing snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and what-not, and reading about bike rides and lovely weather…well, it just makes me mighty damned jealous.