Freak the Mighty

I've discovered something about my daughter Ellie. She likes scary stories. A friend recently lent us a scary story called Coraline, and Ellie sat through it well even though it was more advanced than the books we usually read.

Ellie has had less patience for reading with me, so I decided to take advantage of my new insight. We read The Monkey's Paw, which is really really advanced. I'm not kidding; there were like 8 words I had to look up in the dictionary myself to explain them to her. Even Linda didn't know the meaning of about half of the words I had to look up.

We are currently reading Freak the Mighty. Linda had it. She has shelves of just really excellent young adult and children's books. I had read this one, but I'd forgotten just how good it is. I'm really impressed. The language is so normal, I don't even feel like I'm reading a book; I'm just telling a story, just talking. Ellie is liking it, and she hasn't even complained that there aren't any pictures.

Tidbits

Linda is still enjoying her new walker. It's the end of semester, and things are getting busy. We had a party (for computer geeks) last night, but it was fun. Somehow geeks seem to attract cool spouses, so there were people for Linda to talk to who didn't want to mention computers. There are lots of social things coming up in the next two weeks. Then the social environment turns to dust. It happens every vacation period, so we're expecting it.

Free

Linda is getting rid of her cat, Kate. She's fixed but not declawed and about 12 years old and healthy. You can email Linda (address at the left) if you want her.

Walker update

It's been a week now I guess with the new walker. Linda likes it, and is using it all of the time. It doesn't fit in the trunk of the car as well as our old walker, but I manage. I'm not sure what we'll do if we want to take a wheelchair and a walker somewhere. We may have to just use the old walker for things like that because it folds down smaller.

New Lexus

Linda got a new walker on Monday. We spent the day in Columbia, since Truman was closed and Ellie had school. We picked up the walker and took it over to Rusk for practice. Nowhere is easier than Rusk, so if the walker had been too hard there, we'd have known it was too hard.

But it wasn't too hard. It was interesting at first, but Linda soon came to feel more comfortable with it than her regular walker. She felt like she walked better. She said that back when we were at Rusk, one of the other patients described a new electric as his "new Lexus." So that is what Linda called her walker.

We took it to the gym today; our first try there. It was different on the track, and more challenging. We've got a different strategy for the next time we go.

If you'd like to see what her walker looks like, they sell them at Amazon.com: picture. It's very blue.

Flashing lights

Linda woke me up to ask me about lights flashing on the ceiling. It turns out there were 6 police cars and an ambulance parked on the road in front of our house and a roaring fire on the other side of the road. I have no idea what happened, but while we watched 3 more police cars and another ambulance arrived.

Then the firetruck arrived. There's a lesson. Clearly we never want to have a fire, because they are obviously the slow responders.

It looks like things are winding down. I just watched a couple of the police cars pull out and drive away.

Update

I walked out this morning, and the fire last night was a car that flipped over in the ditch. The driver was nowhere to be found, so apparently survived intact enough to walk away or get a ride from someone into town.

At school I mentioned it to someone I knew was a volunteer responder, and he naturally knew something about it. He said the first car on the scene was the police and the 2nd car on the scene was a fireman. He also mentioned that most fires can be controlled with 5 gallons of water or less, and that the fire was contained (and burned itself out) well before the firetruck arrived.

All abuzz

For about a week, I've had a buzzing in my right ear. It sounds sort of like cello or string bass playing 2 octaves below middle C. I went to the doctor, and she says my ears are full of water (on the inside). From allergies I suppose, but it seems to be taking a long time to improve and my allergies don't seem that bad. It doesn't usually hurt, and it is often very quiet and unobtrusive. There's generally enough white noise at work that I don't hear it much.

In fact for a couple of days, I thought there was just some new noise at home. Like construction equipment being run over the hill somewhere and only the low frequencies carried to my house. I was tempted to throw all of the circuit breakers in the house to see if something in the house was making the noise, but Linda convinced me that it was all in my head. Apparently it really was.

Ahh, warmth

Linda is enjoying the warm weather. Actually she was enjoying the warm weather until it turned cold today. That chill blast really made us realize how nice the weather had been.