Living In the World, Not on It

A panicking parent called 911. Then the panicking parent began to calm down and hung up on 911, thinking the call hadn't completed. The dispatch officer called back three times, but panicking parents' parent, who doesn't really speak or understand English hung up on the dispatch officer. Ouch. We arrived and the one-year-old child looked and reacted normally. He was like every one-year-old in the world - only mommy and daddy can touch me. Who're all these strangers in the house? What's this thing on my finger? Why am I up at 2200? We checked him and the panicking parents said they'll just take him to the doc tomorrow. Perfect. If we go back, which is fine, then they go to the hospital. We allow patients one RMA but if we are called back it indicates a problem, so off to the hospital you go! I'm thinking this is one call we won't have again. One-year-old children barf. A fact of life. I didn't log a singe call in September. Not one. Not even a half. I...

I got out of drinking tea when I first cut back on sugar. It was so hard to give it up but I knew I had to cut back on it and a lot. I'm not as good about it as I used to be when I originally did this in October 2007. But in many ways I'm so much better with sugar. I have my bad moments, like with Smarties, although I don't normally go nuts with those. And I cannot pass chocolate covered strawberries (sometimes there are some left over from an event and the kitchen staff put them out for us to polish off. It works! The food is excellent there and chocolate covered strawberries - what more can I say?! But then Splenda came out as a powdered sugar for baking. Shortly after, it came out as granular sugar for coffee or tea. I tried it and hated it. So for a while I didn't touch tea. I used WAY too much sugar in it. Around six months later the Splenda folks came out with something new: sugar and Splenda mixed together. I tried it and found it was okay. I'd started using ...

This phrase was at the bottom of the Webpage for Patrick's Place ( http://www.patrickkphillips.com/ ): Bad Behavior has blocked 1389 access attempts in the last 7 days. What does this mean? What exactly is bad behaviour? It's a blog - when did free speech become bad behaviour? I'll have to check out the link part... now I'm curious. I need to know what that means. And what 1,389 attempts to be bad was... Oh, look at this: Welcome to a whole new way of keeping your blog, forum, guestbook, wiki or content management system free of link spam. Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it. Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers. Read More on ...

Today was an odd day. It started poorly and ended (so far) well. I still have a stretch to go... (yes, I know, not as much as the rest of the crew but for me this is a stretch), but it is under 4 hours now. Counting down the time, sort of. I have my hero, Bill Engvall, on. He's a riot. He keeps the humour clean. He does refer to sex and body functions, but never uses words that I can't play at work. I love this man. I'd invite him to my workplace if I could. He loves the sport. But that's just my wishlist. Anyway, today... I got a lot of stuff done and went out for a drive. I have been itching to see the roads with the glorious autumn leaves. And they are glorious . Oh, my gods, it is staggering. And so I started out on the higher one and took lots of pictures and then headed around the usual loop to the low road. It's beautiful. It's staggering. It is just delightful. Today was the perfect day: perfect temperature, perfect light breeze, perfect sunshine with ju...

I awoke at 0400 (I forgot to reset the alarm clock to 0440) ad then to add to it, I'd fallen asleep on the couch for a while and it was 2000 when I awoke. So I'm an hour off anyway! My alarm going off... I hit the button to silence it and stlked into the bathroom, came out and reached the conclusion that this is too damn early and I'm going back to bed. Big mistake. BIG mistake.