"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Thursday, January 15
High Resolutions
Went to Shreveport on New Year's Day to see my dad and the rest of the clan. I told my dad, "Boy, I really had a fun and interesting New Year's Eve".
He said, "Really? What did you do?"
"Sorry, dad," I said. "That was sarcasm."
In fact I spent much of the evening hanging out at the emergency room. It all started, as these things tend to do, with me, the wife, and the daughter stretched out on the sofa bed watching Willie Wonka. I was kind of hungry, and apparently the girl was too, but the wife was not interested in cooking.
Some change fell out of my pocket, and the girl picked it up and started playing with it. I didn't think anything of it. But a minute later she was gagging and freaking out. As she later said, "I was pretending it was candy".
(Aside: She once asked my wife who the man on the penny was. My wife explained that his name was Abraham Lincoln, and he was President of the United States, and that a crazy man killed him a long time ago. And my daughter said, "Then he turned into a penny?")
So she's puking and my pregnant wife is turning four different colors, and I'm grabbing the girl by her feet and holding her upside down. Nothing came out, unfortunately, but my wife DID ask every single doctor we met that night if that was the right thing to do. They all said, "That's what I would have done!", so in your face, babe!
At this point I knew we were headed for the hospital. We got my daughter calmed down and headed to the local hospital. They took a nice clear X-Ray of a coin lodged in her esophagus and told us we needed to go to Cook Children's, downtown (they still charged us, however). So we trooped out to the car and headed to the other hospital.
Where they took another X-Ray, "Just to make sure it hasn't moved". It hadn't. At this point they said it was probably a nickel because of the size. Nobody thought it was funny when I said my daughter had expensive tastes. They made mywife and I leave the room, then strapped the girl down to a papoose board and stuck a tube up her nose, at which point she yelled, "Somebody get me out of here!" and a lot of other things.
They got the tube down below the coin, blew up a little balloon, and popped the whole thing out. Turned out it was a penny after all; my little girl is a cheap date. She told us she was trying to yell, but "they wouldn't let me." We bought her a Wendy's Frosty and she was laughing and playing before she went to bed. Which brought my blood pressure down to 220 over 185.
* * *
Well, it's about halfway through January - time for some New Year's resolutions. Number one, of course, is
STOP PROCRASTINATING!!!
Of course, that was on my list last year too, and I, ah, never got around to it. Some other resolutions:
1) Submit to all of Michael Bracken's anthologies this year. He's got three of them, to which I can submit a total of four stories.
2) Finish revising all my other stories and get them in the mail. I'm a lazy writer, but I've got three good stories on the shelf, almost ready to go. I just need to get off my ass and finish them.
3) Get my Microsoft Database Administrator certification. Two more tests and I'm in. The only thing standing in my way are the cure-for-insomnia study guides.
4) Create at least one salable software package. Right now the leading candidate is my book databse / Amazon.com store. What's there is complete, but it needs a few more features, and it's rough. You have to know what to avoid doing so you don't break the program.
