Scroller’s Scaphoid.

Let’s play a game! Can you guess what this is?

If you went with “fast-growing tumor” or “inept method of cocaine concealment” you are incorrect. It is my new workplace accessory, a handful of ice cubes sealed into a sandwich baggie and arranged beneath a tight-fitting sleeve. You know, for the pain.

It is beginning to feel a little Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House around here, what with the slapstick-worthy (if mundane) succession of things gone awry, most recently a new unathletic injury to add to my history of Shopper’s Elbow and Biographer’s Lung—Writer’s Wrist? Typist’s Tendon? I haven’t settled on a name yet, but what it boils down to is tingling fingers, a swollen forearm, and a stiffened, painful burning sensation, the result of wedding myself to my laptop until my muscles shortened and entrapped my nerves. Or something.
At first I was certain it was a blood clot—or maybe, given the arm-tingling, a heart attack. Scott cleverly pointed out that it was the wrong arm for a heart attack, and at last I put two and two together and got “Pernicious InterneT Addiction” (or “Pain In The Ass”), which answer I ignored until my arm hurt too badly to use at all and I was forced to slink off to have my wrist bones popped and clicked back into alignment and an odd muscle in what I can only describe as my wing (somewhere no longer shoulder but not yet breast) stretched and massaged by a professional. This helped a little, but it’s still painful to be on the computer for more than a few minutes at time. I’m going to try using a laptop desk to make up for my not-particularly-ergonomic couch-working posture and I also ordered a devastatingly stylish fingerless glovebrace. This glovebrace gets excellent reviews from video gamers making it de rigueur in parents’ basements around the world, so I’ll be in excellent company. However, until it arrives I am reduced to writhing with pain and annoyance whenever I want to write an email or scroll through my feed reader. At this point I’d just as soon cut my arm off and replace it with something sturdier, like a prosthetic made from gleaming titanium.

On Friday, having recently finished a two-week course of antibiotics for the ailment that had dogged my child since the beginning of May (the antibiotics alone should tell you I was desperate—only after a month of lingering snottiness did I cart Simone to the pediatrician to procure them), we went to Iowa, source of the original pestilence, for the weekend.

I know. It looks so STUPID, typed out like that.

On the drive back yesterday, Simone’s nose started running. Sprinting, really. We had to pull off the highway in search of a gas station to buy tissues, so that I could spend the remaining two hours of the trip turning around every three minutes to staunch the flow. By the time we got home she was burning with fever, and a few minutes after she’d fallen asleep for the night she woke again, sat up, and leaned over to puke in my lap. We’d gone to Iowa to visit Scott’s family, and had thought we’d caught my sister-in-law’s (gonad-rendingly adorable—this was the first time I’d seen them) seven-month-old twins between colds, but no. And now I am paying for it, or Simone is. She’s coughing and congested and fevered and miserable and I swear to god, I cannot take another month like May, it will break my spirit.

This was a lot of whining for one post, I know. So here! Let’s have some cheerful pictures!

First, the poster my brother brought me from a recent trip to Seattle:

There is plenty to find amusing, but the reason I love it is that my brother and I are both MOST amused by the same line—or more specifically, the same two words of that line, the two words that, for us, take this poster from kitschy fun to actual hilarity, and thus this souvenir will always remind me of my beloved Max, and the cozy feeling of having such perfectly matched senses of humor.
(The two words, obviously, are “STAGE VERSION.”)

The next photograph requires explanation. Imagine the scene: after a long day of work, you arrive home, put your key in the door and enter to see…
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…a FERAL BABY, drinking from your kitchen faucet!

How did it get IN here? you wonder—but there is no time for idle speculation: it has turned at the sound of your footsteps to bare its wee teeth at you before scampering fleetly off the counter. Now its wet feet are slapping against the floor as it races about like a trapped moth and oh, hell, not the vase!
At last you manage to shoo it out an open window with a tennis racket, and surveying the damage, remind yourself to buy traps the next time you’re at the store.

[Actually, Scott has been giving Simone baths in the kitchen sink because she is so distracted by the spray of the removable hose-faucet that she forgets that she's too busy with important pen and spatula related business to make time for bathing, and last week she insisted upon a refreshing quaff of tap water before getting out. But the first story was much better, I think.]

Next, proof that Simone is beginning to grow hair:


It’s only fluffy like this during a slender window after it is washed and before she sleeps upon it, but still, I was shocked by how much there is, all of a sudden.
As Simone herself is fond of saying these days, (demonstrated below), “UH-PIIIIIIZE!”

(That’s “surprise,” for you laypeople.)