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OMG OMG OMG.
Nov. 6th, 2009 03:02 pmI had just dropped Alex off at school this morning when Michael called and said that he'd been throwing up. I picked him up and brought him home. Felt totally fine through my 10am meeting and 11am research subject and then started to feel ill. Threw up comprehensively. Came home and crawled into bed, feeling incredibly queasy, and discovered that Michael had thrown up an additional six times.
Since then, nausea and a couple of false alarms but no more vomiting for me. Michael is asleep. Nia (our nanny) has to leave now; she's managed to get Colin down for a nap and Alex ensconced in front of a video. But soon Colin will wake up and Alex will need something and I will have to be functional.
Posted a pathetic plea to Facebook for someone to come over later and get dinner for Alex and play with the kids.
Gods help me.
Since then, nausea and a couple of false alarms but no more vomiting for me. Michael is asleep. Nia (our nanny) has to leave now; she's managed to get Colin down for a nap and Alex ensconced in front of a video. But soon Colin will wake up and Alex will need something and I will have to be functional.
Posted a pathetic plea to Facebook for someone to come over later and get dinner for Alex and play with the kids.
Gods help me.
(no subject)
Oct. 24th, 2008 02:01 pmThis is just sick and sad.
That was really the only thing lacking in making this the most disgusting campaign of the modern era, wasn't it?
I hope that all the right-wing blogs which spread the story far and wide are posting prominent corrections even as we speak. Particularly including the president of the FOX network, who posted that the original story might lead Obama supporters to change their vote for reasons having nothing to do with racism. But I hope I'm not going to see any triumphalism about this from Democrats. This is not a story we should be pleased to relate.
This young woman is seriously disturbed. I hope she gets the help she needs. I hope this story will lead more people to a sober examination of the ugly undercurrents in our society that made her original claims seem believable to many. And I hope that will be the end of it.
Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.
Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car.
Police investigating the alleged attack, however, began to notice some inconsistencies in her story and administered a polygraph test.
Authorities, however, declined to release the results of that test.
Investigators did say that they received photos from the ATM machine and "the photographs were verified as not being the victim making the transaction."
This afternoon, a Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Todd confessed to making up the story.
The commander added that Todd will face charges; but police have not commented on what those charges will be.
That was really the only thing lacking in making this the most disgusting campaign of the modern era, wasn't it?
I hope that all the right-wing blogs which spread the story far and wide are posting prominent corrections even as we speak. Particularly including the president of the FOX network, who posted that the original story might lead Obama supporters to change their vote for reasons having nothing to do with racism. But I hope I'm not going to see any triumphalism about this from Democrats. This is not a story we should be pleased to relate.
This young woman is seriously disturbed. I hope she gets the help she needs. I hope this story will lead more people to a sober examination of the ugly undercurrents in our society that made her original claims seem believable to many. And I hope that will be the end of it.
(no subject)
Aug. 3rd, 2007 02:25 pmLast night was so awful.
It started out well enough. My friend Emily came over to stay with Alex (yaaay, babysitting trades!) so that Michael and I could go out and enjoy Baltimore Restaurant Week - a summer promotion in which dozens of restaurants are offering special $30 three-course menus. We went to Sascha's 527, a neighborhood restaurant serving what I guess I'd describe as upscale-American food. Dinner was good, but not amazing.
I had an appetizer of pepper-crusted raw ahi tuna with what was described as an orange Thai sauce. The sauce tasted like orange marmelade seasoned with way too much chili pepper, and it totally concealed the flavor of the fish. The very, very good Asian coleslaw on the side saved the dish. Then I had their take on bouillabase, which was sort of a New England clambake version (it had potatoes and inch-thick rounds of corn on the cob in it) with a really tasty broth. Finally, I finished up with the world's best carrot cake.
We came home and curled up on the couch to watch an episode of Planet Earth. Partway through, there was a loud crack and our power went out. I looked out the window - no lights anywhere on the block.
This is where I need to back up and talk about the weather. Because it was 100 degrees Farenheit yesterday, and humid, and breezeless. By the time our power went out, I estimate that it was still over 85 degrees. Our brick rowhouse had been soaking up the sun's rays all day long. Within minutes of losing power, the house was noticeably hot and stuffy.
We called the power company and were given an estimate of 1:30am power restoration. We tried to go to bed. Meanwhile, I started worrying about Alex. Her room is on the third floor - the hottest part of the house. It works out nicely enough in winter, when her room stays much warmer than ours, but in summer it's damn near uninhabitable without air conditioning. It's a small closed room - we can't open the window because the air conditioner is in it, and there isn't much opportunity for cross-ventilation on that floor.
She woke up shortly after we went to bed, calling for Mommy. I went up to her hot, hot bedroom, disentangled her from some blankets, and helped her find her pacifier. She went back to sleep. I went back to bed and didn't sleep.
Some of the other people on our block had spilled out onto their stoops, where it was slightly cooler and (thanks to the nearby hospital's emergency generator) better lit than indoors. They apparently decided that it was a fine time to have a blackout party. We were subjected to bursts of loud conversation and even louder laughter, with occasional running and squealing, until... I think until close to 2am.
Our bedroom got hotter and hotter. A damp blanket of still hot air stifled me as I tried to relax and go to sleep. When the neighbors shut up for a few moments, I could hear rats squeaking outside in our garbage. Which - and this is the other thing that made yesterday awful, and today doesn't look any better - hadn't been picked up when it was supposed to on Tuesday evening, and had continued to fester in the 100-degree heat ever since because the city kept swearing that they'd send a solid waste truck by any minute so we should leave it on the curb. So every time the human party waned I could hear a rat party on the sidewalk.
In my weird half-asleep, half-awake, intolerably uncomfortable state my worry about Alex started to balloon out of control. I thought about children trapped in hot cars. I thought about elderly people in Chicago dying in a heat wave because they couldn't open their windows. I started to seriously believe that there was a chance that the heat could kill her - not to such an extent that I woke her up and drove her to an air-conditioned motel, but to enough of an extent that any chance of restful sleep for myself was hopeless.
Around 1am it became so intolerably hot that Michael hammered open one of our stuck-shut front windows. (Our only bedroom window that opens easily had the air conditioner in it, naturally.) I opened the tiny bathroom window at the other end of the house in a feeble attempt to create a cross-breeze. The bedroom was still sweltering. I went up to check on Alex. Her room wasn't any hotter than ours, at least. She was breathing. Her hair was damp with sweat, but her skin was a normal temperature. I tried to ratchet my anxiety down a little.
At 2am I got up and called BGE again. Now they gave an estimated power restoration time of 5am. I began to worry about our refrigerator and freezerfull of food, as well as our own survival, our utter exhaustion, and Alex. But shortly after that - maybe around 2:30? - a cool-ish breeze sprang up, and I was able to get a solid couple of hours of sleep.
I awoke at 4:30 because the air conditioner coughed itself into action. Michael went downstairs and turned off the TV and the ground floor air conditioner, but when I asked him about the refrigerator he said he had been too sleepy to check it. So I got up and went downstairs, and was relieved to find the meat still quite cold to the touch and the frozen food rock-solid. I listened at the foot of the attic stairs to be sure that Alex's air conditioner had re-started (it had), and went back to bed for a few more hours of broken sleep.
What. A. Night. And I don't think I really stopped worrying about Alex entirely until we finally woke her up this morning. And they still haven't picked up our goddamned trash. The bags had holes chewed all over them this morning - I didn't dream the rats squeaking.
I don't know how people managed, in the years before air conditioning. I really don't. Now I understand why Washington DC was considered a hazardous posting for foreign diplomats, and why cities would be emptied, in the summer, of everyone who could possibly afford to go anyplace else. I guess we would've had awnings, and a better ventilation plan, and maybe a sleeping porch in the shaded back of the house. And certainly we wouldn't have had windows that couldn't be opened in the summer. Because Oh. My. God.
It started out well enough. My friend Emily came over to stay with Alex (yaaay, babysitting trades!) so that Michael and I could go out and enjoy Baltimore Restaurant Week - a summer promotion in which dozens of restaurants are offering special $30 three-course menus. We went to Sascha's 527, a neighborhood restaurant serving what I guess I'd describe as upscale-American food. Dinner was good, but not amazing.
I had an appetizer of pepper-crusted raw ahi tuna with what was described as an orange Thai sauce. The sauce tasted like orange marmelade seasoned with way too much chili pepper, and it totally concealed the flavor of the fish. The very, very good Asian coleslaw on the side saved the dish. Then I had their take on bouillabase, which was sort of a New England clambake version (it had potatoes and inch-thick rounds of corn on the cob in it) with a really tasty broth. Finally, I finished up with the world's best carrot cake.
We came home and curled up on the couch to watch an episode of Planet Earth. Partway through, there was a loud crack and our power went out. I looked out the window - no lights anywhere on the block.
This is where I need to back up and talk about the weather. Because it was 100 degrees Farenheit yesterday, and humid, and breezeless. By the time our power went out, I estimate that it was still over 85 degrees. Our brick rowhouse had been soaking up the sun's rays all day long. Within minutes of losing power, the house was noticeably hot and stuffy.
We called the power company and were given an estimate of 1:30am power restoration. We tried to go to bed. Meanwhile, I started worrying about Alex. Her room is on the third floor - the hottest part of the house. It works out nicely enough in winter, when her room stays much warmer than ours, but in summer it's damn near uninhabitable without air conditioning. It's a small closed room - we can't open the window because the air conditioner is in it, and there isn't much opportunity for cross-ventilation on that floor.
She woke up shortly after we went to bed, calling for Mommy. I went up to her hot, hot bedroom, disentangled her from some blankets, and helped her find her pacifier. She went back to sleep. I went back to bed and didn't sleep.
Some of the other people on our block had spilled out onto their stoops, where it was slightly cooler and (thanks to the nearby hospital's emergency generator) better lit than indoors. They apparently decided that it was a fine time to have a blackout party. We were subjected to bursts of loud conversation and even louder laughter, with occasional running and squealing, until... I think until close to 2am.
Our bedroom got hotter and hotter. A damp blanket of still hot air stifled me as I tried to relax and go to sleep. When the neighbors shut up for a few moments, I could hear rats squeaking outside in our garbage. Which - and this is the other thing that made yesterday awful, and today doesn't look any better - hadn't been picked up when it was supposed to on Tuesday evening, and had continued to fester in the 100-degree heat ever since because the city kept swearing that they'd send a solid waste truck by any minute so we should leave it on the curb. So every time the human party waned I could hear a rat party on the sidewalk.
In my weird half-asleep, half-awake, intolerably uncomfortable state my worry about Alex started to balloon out of control. I thought about children trapped in hot cars. I thought about elderly people in Chicago dying in a heat wave because they couldn't open their windows. I started to seriously believe that there was a chance that the heat could kill her - not to such an extent that I woke her up and drove her to an air-conditioned motel, but to enough of an extent that any chance of restful sleep for myself was hopeless.
Around 1am it became so intolerably hot that Michael hammered open one of our stuck-shut front windows. (Our only bedroom window that opens easily had the air conditioner in it, naturally.) I opened the tiny bathroom window at the other end of the house in a feeble attempt to create a cross-breeze. The bedroom was still sweltering. I went up to check on Alex. Her room wasn't any hotter than ours, at least. She was breathing. Her hair was damp with sweat, but her skin was a normal temperature. I tried to ratchet my anxiety down a little.
At 2am I got up and called BGE again. Now they gave an estimated power restoration time of 5am. I began to worry about our refrigerator and freezerfull of food, as well as our own survival, our utter exhaustion, and Alex. But shortly after that - maybe around 2:30? - a cool-ish breeze sprang up, and I was able to get a solid couple of hours of sleep.
I awoke at 4:30 because the air conditioner coughed itself into action. Michael went downstairs and turned off the TV and the ground floor air conditioner, but when I asked him about the refrigerator he said he had been too sleepy to check it. So I got up and went downstairs, and was relieved to find the meat still quite cold to the touch and the frozen food rock-solid. I listened at the foot of the attic stairs to be sure that Alex's air conditioner had re-started (it had), and went back to bed for a few more hours of broken sleep.
What. A. Night. And I don't think I really stopped worrying about Alex entirely until we finally woke her up this morning. And they still haven't picked up our goddamned trash. The bags had holes chewed all over them this morning - I didn't dream the rats squeaking.
I don't know how people managed, in the years before air conditioning. I really don't. Now I understand why Washington DC was considered a hazardous posting for foreign diplomats, and why cities would be emptied, in the summer, of everyone who could possibly afford to go anyplace else. I guess we would've had awnings, and a better ventilation plan, and maybe a sleeping porch in the shaded back of the house. And certainly we wouldn't have had windows that couldn't be opened in the summer. Because Oh. My. God.
(no subject)
May. 16th, 2007 11:52 pmWe got robbed.
Michael was home alone this morning when, in broad daylight, someone came in through an unlocked, high-up, hard-to-access window in our kitchen. Michael interrupted him, but not before he'd stolen my laptop from work, which he then proceeded to bounce off the pavement trying to get over the alley gate in a hurry. (So the bastard isn't even going to profit by this - he destroyed our sense of safety at home for nothing.)
Here's Michael's full story.
I never imagined... okay, I knew that security between the yard and the house was weak. (The back door doesn't even have a real lock - just a chain.) But our yard is fenced, and bounded on two sides by other yards, and all access through those yards to the street is through locked gates. I didn't think that anyone would ever come in that way.
I can't believe it. He could have killed Michael. He could have killed him.
In a massively high-crime city like Baltimore, I wasn't sure what the police would even do, beyond filing a report so we'd have a case number to give our insurance. But they sent an officer out, and he talked to Michael and walked through the yard and talked to some workmen who'd been out on the street behind the house and had seen the guy scale the gate. And then, a few hours later, a crime scene investigator came out and dusted the window for prints. She told us that if there's a match in the system when the prints come back - and I'm sure that this was some local dope fiend or crackhead, so I can't imagine that he doesn't have a record - they'll follow up on it. So maybe they'll make an arrest, and we can think in some abstract way that justice has been served. I guess.
For a while, I had hopes that the computer might be recovered - it's got those metal security stickers all over the bottom, saying that it's owned by the University of Maryland. That was before Michael found the doors to the CD drive lying on the sidewalk outside the gate, and talked to the guys who saw the computer get tossed through the bars. There wasn't any unduplicated data on it, or confidential patient information, or anything. Fortunately.
What an ugly, creepy thing to have happen. I'm so glad that Michael is safe. I'm so glad that the guy didn't make it any further into our house - I can just imagine how much stronger the sense of violation would be, if we came home to find that he had been all over, upstairs, in our bedroom...
And I am so, so, so glad that Alex wasn't home when it happened. I keep thinking, sometimes she's downstairs by herself for a minute or two, when whichever one of us is home with her runs upstairs to get something. What if she had been downstairs alone, and a guy had come through the kitchen window? It's awful enough thinking about this happening to my husband.
We are okay. Just shaken up (me) and furious (Michael). It could have been so very much worse. But oh my God...
Michael was home alone this morning when, in broad daylight, someone came in through an unlocked, high-up, hard-to-access window in our kitchen. Michael interrupted him, but not before he'd stolen my laptop from work, which he then proceeded to bounce off the pavement trying to get over the alley gate in a hurry. (So the bastard isn't even going to profit by this - he destroyed our sense of safety at home for nothing.)
Here's Michael's full story.
I never imagined... okay, I knew that security between the yard and the house was weak. (The back door doesn't even have a real lock - just a chain.) But our yard is fenced, and bounded on two sides by other yards, and all access through those yards to the street is through locked gates. I didn't think that anyone would ever come in that way.
I can't believe it. He could have killed Michael. He could have killed him.
In a massively high-crime city like Baltimore, I wasn't sure what the police would even do, beyond filing a report so we'd have a case number to give our insurance. But they sent an officer out, and he talked to Michael and walked through the yard and talked to some workmen who'd been out on the street behind the house and had seen the guy scale the gate. And then, a few hours later, a crime scene investigator came out and dusted the window for prints. She told us that if there's a match in the system when the prints come back - and I'm sure that this was some local dope fiend or crackhead, so I can't imagine that he doesn't have a record - they'll follow up on it. So maybe they'll make an arrest, and we can think in some abstract way that justice has been served. I guess.
For a while, I had hopes that the computer might be recovered - it's got those metal security stickers all over the bottom, saying that it's owned by the University of Maryland. That was before Michael found the doors to the CD drive lying on the sidewalk outside the gate, and talked to the guys who saw the computer get tossed through the bars. There wasn't any unduplicated data on it, or confidential patient information, or anything. Fortunately.
What an ugly, creepy thing to have happen. I'm so glad that Michael is safe. I'm so glad that the guy didn't make it any further into our house - I can just imagine how much stronger the sense of violation would be, if we came home to find that he had been all over, upstairs, in our bedroom...
And I am so, so, so glad that Alex wasn't home when it happened. I keep thinking, sometimes she's downstairs by herself for a minute or two, when whichever one of us is home with her runs upstairs to get something. What if she had been downstairs alone, and a guy had come through the kitchen window? It's awful enough thinking about this happening to my husband.
We are okay. Just shaken up (me) and furious (Michael). It could have been so very much worse. But oh my God...
(no subject)
Dec. 7th, 2006 09:08 pmFred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, of "God Hates Fags" fame, will be taking time out from their busy schedule of picketing soldiers' funerals to protest in Baltimore this weekend.
They'll be set up just a block from our house - outside the Baltimore School for the Arts, where the kids are performing The Laramie Project.
Just what is the proper response to the invasion of your neighborhood by this... utter filth?
They'll be set up just a block from our house - outside the Baltimore School for the Arts, where the kids are performing The Laramie Project.
Just what is the proper response to the invasion of your neighborhood by this... utter filth?
Aaaaand a change of subject.
Nov. 14th, 2006 07:05 pmMy assistants and I were hanging around the office in a celebratory mood, talking about where we were going to go for our Enrollment Victory Dinner.
My phone rang. I picked it up.
"Hi, this is Rebecca."
The caller said something in a hoarse, barely audible voice.
"I'm sorry, what was that?" ...We have clients who are quite ill, of course, and it was certainly within the realm of possibility that, say, someone might be calling me from the hospital where they were being treated for pneumonia.
But he spoke again. Still in a strained whisper, but this time I understood him clearly.
"I'm masturbating."
I slammed down the phone.
And now I'm stuck wondering: was it one of our clients? Or just some guy randomly dialing numbers, hoping for a female voice?
Ugh.
My phone rang. I picked it up.
"Hi, this is Rebecca."
The caller said something in a hoarse, barely audible voice.
"I'm sorry, what was that?" ...We have clients who are quite ill, of course, and it was certainly within the realm of possibility that, say, someone might be calling me from the hospital where they were being treated for pneumonia.
But he spoke again. Still in a strained whisper, but this time I understood him clearly.
"I'm masturbating."
I slammed down the phone.
And now I'm stuck wondering: was it one of our clients? Or just some guy randomly dialing numbers, hoping for a female voice?
Ugh.
