rivka

A guy in Norway is collecting giraffes. He's trying to get people to send him a million giraffe images by Jan 1, 2011. Which sounds ridiculous, right, except that he's been at it for about a year and has already collected 850,000. He might actually make it.

It's really neat to see the diversity of images people have sent in. A stunning and subtle watercolor painting is a few clicks away from a crude giraffe sculpture constructed from office supplies. I am particularly struck by this one, which may be the most artistic thing ever constructed from an old banana peel. I love this adorable knitted one too. But there are quilted giraffes and giraffes made from guitars and giraffes made from sports equipment and mosaic giraffes and scultped giraffes and edible giraffes and drawing after drawing, from people all over the world. I love the internet.

The statistics page is also kind of fun to look at. Why so many giraffes from Lithuania? What on earth happened the day he got 30,000 giraffes?

Alex and I made contributions yesterday. (Hers, mine.) I encourage you to consider helping him out as well. The only rule is that the giraffes must be hand-created, not computer generated, mass produced, or living and photographed.

So you might remember that I am preaching at my church - for the first time ever - on July 11. The monthly newsletter just recently came out with this sermon description:

July 11—“Life or Death Situations”
Rebecca Wald
Rebecca will share lessons she's learned from working with people who are dying and people who want to die - two sometimes-overlapping groups. Is assisted suicide the best we have to offer those among us who are dying?

One of the things that led to me feeling called to preach this sermon is that a member of our congregation, a physician active in the Final Exit Network, was arrested a year or two ago for assisting in a suicide in Georgia. When he came back to church the interim minister lauded him from the pulpit and he got a standing ovation from the congregation. I think that his position has sort of been automatically adopted as the church's position, because, well, he's one of the noisiest members. But I think that many people haven't really thought it through. That's one of the reason why I really, really want people to hear a different perspective.

Well. That member just called my house and spoke to Michael. He told Michael that he wanted to bring a number of people from outside the congregation to hear my sermon, and was that okay? Clearly he means his Final Exit Network/Hemlock Society buddies. Michael said - as, really, what else could he say? - "Come, come, whoever you are..." But shit.

OMFG I am panicking about this. I'm gonna be lynched. Well, probably not. But he's going to pack the audience with people who are hostile to me from the outset. As if this wasn't going to be hard enough already.

I came home this evening to discover that our landlord decided to replace the entire study ceiling, not just the third closest to the damage. I don't disagree, from a safety standpoint. But it means that we'll be without our study and our desktops for more than a week. It also means that all the bookshelves had to be covered with plastic sheeting, including all the homeschooling stuff and all Alex's art supplies, and I didn't know it was going to happen so I didn't save anything out.

Also, I am obsessing about lead. The workers said to keep the kids away from the study. Was that because of tools and ladders and debris and dust? Or was it because there is lead in the plaster debris, and "keep the kids away from the study" is their half-assed risk reduction strategy? Because if so... NO. Every time they come in and out they track dust onto the landing and stairs, where we pick it up on our feet and carry it all over the house. Annoying enough if it's just dirt. Potentially brain-damaging for the kids, if it's lead.

So. Tomorrow I'll be home when they come and I can ask them to test for lead. Until we know, there's no point in borrowing trouble. Right? Because our landlord is a conscientious guy, and not likely to risk the problems that would come from not properly safeguarding children from lead on his property.

Surely. Right?

I still feel like crying today. I don't know why. Michael is clearly non-brain-damaged this morning, although horribly sore and stiff. No more portions of the house fell in overnight. But I feel all emotional and weak-kneed.

Also, this morning I was thinking: we have a big three-story house. There are only four of us. What are the odds that, at the precise moment that a portion of the ceiling fell in, one of us would just happen to be underneath that exact portion? They've got to be astronomical.

At 6:24 this morning Michael was sitting at his computer checking his e-mail before work, when he felt a few tiny plaster crumbs fall onto his head. He looked up. The crack in the ceiling looked a little wider. He grabbed his wallet and phone, preparing to get out of the way. He didn't make it. The ceiling fell on his head.

This is where I would like to interrupt the story and say, "But don't worry, he's okay." Except that we don't know yet whether he's okay or not. He's at the ER right now awaiting a head and neck CT. They have concerns that there might be a small neck fracture. And of course he feels absolutely awful.



Right after it happened I came out of our room and saw Michael sitting on the stairs looking shocky. I came down and checked to see if his head was bleeding. It was filled with dirt and silt and plaster dust, and my first ridiculous thought was that he was going to need to shower again before work. But of course he didn't go to work.

Our insurance company has a 24-hour advice nurse. Based on what we told her, she thought we could monitor him at home. She instructed me to check on him every two hours for 12 hours, then every four hours for the next 12, and every 6 hours after that. I was to make sure that he could be easily roused from sleep, that he knew who and where he was, that he could speak and walk normally, and that his personality hadn't changed. He could have Tylenol only for pain, and an ice pack for twenty minutes every two hours.



I made him stay awake through the first two hours. The lump on his head swelled to the size of his hand and was oddly hot to the touch. By the end of the second two hours, he reported increasing dizziness and an awful lot of neck pain and stiffness, so we decided to go to the ER. He was talking and walking okay, but sounded a little befuddled.



Our landlord came out immediately to survey the damage, with his handyman Mike. He had Mike come back this afternoon to clean everything up with a Shop-Vac. It took remarkably little time. I'm washing down the desks now, and then I need to mop the floor and use the forced-air canister on our keyboards. I'm guessing we'll wind up getting new keyboards though. Fortunately Colin went down for a nap just after Mike got here, and Alex is curled up watching a movie and staying out of the way while I clean. Of course the rubble and destruction were massive kid magnets all morning.

They'll come on Tuesday to take down another big chunk of the ceiling and replace the whole thing.

I didn't get weepy and panicky until the kids were both out of the way (asleep or deep in Monsters vs. Aliens) and another adult (Mike the handyman) was here. Because that's the thing about being the only adult in charge. Now I just want to cry and wring my hands.

We weren't even a hundred yards past the entrance gate when we saw a group of wild ponies.

I had just finished reading Alex a bedtime story. I crossed over to the study and sat down to write an e-mail, when I heard Michael say sharply: "Rebecca, I need you down here."

His tone made me stop typing in mid-word. I ran down the steps. He met me at the bottom. "The police are here; someone has reported a burglary in progress at our address. Colin is on the changing table." Then he disappeared.

I found Colin (abandoned halfway through a dirty diaper change) and got him cleaned up and dressed. The seldom-used front door was standing wide open, and a police officer stood in our garden shining his flashlight carefully over every inch of the front of the house. I heard a helicopter overhead. I got the officer's permission to close and lock the door and the tall iron gate that protects it.

The side door - the one we actually use; here's a picture of the layout if you're confused - was standing open. I found Michael at the back of the house, by the open kitchen door. He was leaning out the door talking to the police officers searching our back yard. He asked me, firmly, to take Colin upstairs to the study. As we were on our way up, the cops pronounced the yard clear and left.

Michael's story: He heard a couple of odd noises that sounded like something might have been knocked over by the wind. He checked the back door (which he found we had accidentally left unlocked) and then, after another strange sound, went to look out the front window. There was a scruffy man who looked homeless standing outside our gate, which was ajar. When the guy saw Michael looking at him, he left. Michael and Colin sat back down to watch the baseball game, until (a) Colin needed to be changed, and (b) Michael noticed several officers with flashlights in the garden, and one of them came up to knock on the door.

It appears that the sound Michael heard was someone trying to get in through the solid metal gate that shuts off the back of the house. The garbage can normally stands in front of that gate, and it had been moved out into the passage. We think the guy tried the gate, found it locked, and decided not to try to get over it. Michael saw him on his way out.

He may or may not have tried the metal gate that covers the front door. It was slightly bowed out when the cops checked it - there's a little bit of play where the two halves come together, even when it's locked. The wind could have moved it, or.

Here's what bothers me most: the lights were on in the living room and study. Michael had the TV on, too. He was moving around on the first floor. And the guy still tried to come in. It frightens me that he wasn't deterred by the house being occupied. I'm afraid he may have had a home invasion in mind rather than a burglary.

Very grateful that we have bars or heavy metal mesh on all the downstairs windows.

A lot of my friends are missing their mothers today.

I just wanted to let you all know that you've been in my thoughts all day. Wishing you peace.

My grant is technically due to NIH on Friday, but I am planning to submit it around noon today. If there are any issues with the submission and processing, that will give us time to withdraw and resubmit. Plus I just don't think I can polish it much more.

You know what, though, it is hard to let it out of my fingers. This is my last chance with this project; if it doesn't get funded this time around, I can't resubmit. My research plans for the next eight years hang in the balance here, because if I don't get to do this study I don't get to do the larger five-year study this one is supposed to set up. Is it any wonder that I keep reading and rereading and reviewing and second-guessing, looking for any tiny hole that might make a reviewer stumble?

Everything but the research plan is now in the hands of my grant administrator. I took a printout of the research plan to a coffee shop this morning and gave it one last close reading. I have a bunch of tiny wording changes and additional clauses to put in. But then I'm calling it done, and telling my grant administrator to push the button that sends it through its chain of local signing officials and on its way to NIH.

I don't think I've ever explained here what all goes into a federal research grant, so - in part because I'm still not quite ready to force myself to finish - I'm putting a list under the cut of everything I'm shipping off to NIH. ( Read more... )

Alex, apropos of absolutely nothing, on the way to school: What happens to the rest of the sperm?
Me: ...
Me: ...Oh, you mean after one joins with the egg to start growing a baby? The rest of them just kind of die and come out of the mom's body. They're so super tiny that you couldn't see them, though.
Alex: Can you smell them?
Me: No. (Semen has a smell, but not sperm. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)
Alex: Maybe, when a baby boy is nursing, the mom gives him the leftover sperm.
Me: No. The mom's body doesn't have any sperm to pass on.
Alex: What about when the baby was just born?
Me: Not even then. Even by the time the baby just starts to grow inside the mom, the leftover sperm is already gone.

She went on to ask a lot of very detailed questions about what sperm look like. And whether the first people were born from sperm and an egg. Not to mention monkeys. Where did this all come from?