Post-Holiday Brain Dump

"functionoverfashion" (functionoverfashion) 01/03/2017 at 13:08 • Filed to: rants

0

1

I don’t really like the term “Brain Dump” because no one wants to associate with someone else’s dumps. But it’s better than Brain Spew or Mind Ejaculation I guess. And the whole reason I’m doing it is because it feels good to get it out. OK I think I’ve gone far enough down this road.

2 cubic feet of lake, delivered to your doorstep

To start the holiday break, we had an amazing Christmas with my 2- and 4-year-olds. They are really getting into the whole thing, and that’s cool to be a part of. And somehow, no kids were sick all of this week; well, not quite - more on that later.

We took our dock out of the lake - yes, it was frozen - because we procrastinated too long this fall. You can see the ice block in my car, that we cut out with a chain saw and brought home to show the kids. It’s still on my deck now actually. Anyway the ice had melted around the poles so it wasn’t bad.

While we were stading on a frozen lake with a chain saw, we tried a mini-version of the giant circular ice disc party trick. Basically you cut a huge circle in the ice, then put a hole near the edge of the disc with an outboard motor hung in it, and off you go - just google “ice carousel.” Let me just say it’s a lot of work, but not as dangerous as it looks. We didn’t complete ours but we could see it’s not complicated, just time-consuming.

We took the kids skiing a few times, and they are really progressing fast! I don’t mean that I’m teaching advanced slalom technique to my 2-year-old, but they went from skiing literally attached to us or not at all, to the 4 y.o. skiing independently and the 2 y.o. skiing 10 feet in front of me on a tether. As a big skier myself, one of my few goals in life is to ski with my kids as they grow up. So that made me deeply, deeply happy. Skiing was important to my grandfather and my father, to me (and my wife and her family), and now to our kids, or so I hope.

There were breakdowns. Everyone in my family cried at some point over the past week. I even managed to break my car a little - I caused a leaky tire to get quite a bit more leaky by doing a scandinavian flick into my road in the snowstorm last Thursday. At least the flick was well-executed; my wife was in the car with me and she agreed.

I said the kids weren’t sick. They weren’t, but my dog was sick last night. No, she didn’t get into the Christmas candy. She has Addison’s disease, which in short means she doesn’t handle stress well, her body can’t produce stress hormones normally. So, “normally” her simple medication keeps her very happy and healthy. But 10 consecutive days with the kids in the house? That would make anyone a little stressed, and sure enough she had an “episode” last night wherein she was very mopey and her legs were trembling. We thought *maybe* she ate something? So we gave her something to get her to throw up, which she did, but it was just her dinner.

So now doggie goes into the night all out of stress-fighting power AND hungry, so no ability to make sugar out of anything, so her blood sugar dropped. By 6am she couldn’t even stand and was nearly unresponsive so off to the doggie ER we went. She is being treated and will recover fine, but it was a tough night to end the break.

On top of THAT, after being up with the dog literally half the night, during one of our brief sleep periods one of our smoke alarms decided that 3:45am was the time it would let us know its battery was weak. Of all nights. Really?

In other news I found out over break that my uncle died. In May. He was “distant” you might say. He did, however, have several Dart wagons that I’m sad I’ll never see again.

Oh and on a lighter note, my wife got me an awesome present. I’m going to Team O’Neil in 2 weeks for an open session - you bring your car, and they open a slalom/skidpad area up for you to go nuts, for an hour. I’m sure it will fly by, but I’m also sure I don’t need to thrash my DD for more than 60 minutes. I can’t wait.

Closed Course. Amateur Driver. Do Attempt.

Lastly, we had an amazing spontaneous New Year’s Eve with a couple friends. They had dinner reservations with two of their friends, but the others backed out so we jumped right in. My parents came through in the clutch with babysitting, driving 30 minutes to meet us and switch cars, take the kids home and put them to bed. The other couple has kids about the ages of ours, so the four of us had a great time hashing things out over a pre-fixe meal at a great local restaurant. That’s now my idea of a good time, yep it was great.

If you made it this far... How was your holiday/new year/weekend?

pip bip - choose Corrour > functionoverfashion 01/03/2017 at 18:16

1

did nothing , still on hols (summer here in Australia)

back to work monday though.