Teething and Other Stuff

Man, I thought it was rough when those bottom two teeth came in. Now there’s some dental action up top and the girl’s really been feeling it. When I picked her up Thursday the daycare staff said she’d had a “rough day” — her very first. I guess that’s why she had a little fever on Saturday, and it seems to be making her nose run. Yes, we’ve given her the frozen washrags, teething rings, etcetera. I massage her gums. All these things seem to help a little, but they sure ain’t no silver bullet. I guess the only thing we haven’t tried is benzocaine, and I’m not sure we want (or need) to go there.

Gustav blew off one-third of our shed’s roof. Yesterday David B. wrestled it back into place and secured it with some screws and nails. Not exactly what I called hurricane-proof, but hopefully it will keep the rain out for a while. The shed really needs a whole new roof. Actually we need a whole new shed, but I don’t feel like dealing with that anytime soon. There’s a lot more pressing work needed.

I need to hire someone to do a number of odd jobs on our old house. I’ve held off because I was waiting for Xy to start getting paid, now that she’s back to work. Her paycheck didn’t materialize, so finally she went to the main office. Everything seemed to be in order — except, oh wait: “You shouldn’t even be working! We never got a note from your doctor saying it’s OK.” So Xy had the doctor fax a note and they cut her a check.

This is all random and jumbled because I just haven’t had a chance to record much lately.

Ike really shut things down Friday. Xy got to school only to find they were closing — just as parents were dropping kids off. Then the daycare called and said they’d be closed. It had been raining hard early that morning, so David B. dropped me off on campus. A minute after I got there Janice called my cell and informed me that campus was closing at 9:00 AM. I got a ride home with her. Adding to the craziness of the morning, we had a small electrical fire in the office suite. An exit sign just burst into flames. I arrived in time to see the blackened ceiling tiles.

I found myself getting a little choked up reading about the devastation Ike has caused. They say the flooding in some Louisiana parishes is worse than Rita, the worst in living memory. And in Texas… parts of Galveston are just gone. It looks similar to what happened to the Mississippi Gulf Coast in Katrina. Of course, it’s very dissimilar to what happened in New Orleans then, when the floodwalls failed and the city filled with water for weeks. I hope people don’t make false comparisons between the two events; it’s like apples and oranges.

And since I’m rambling, I might as well mention this little gem. I’d been laboring under the delusion that the internet and telecommunications in general are fairly “green.” I’d subscribed to the fantasy notion that such technologies could promote a cosmopolitan worldview while consuming less energy than actually moving people around. I should have known better:

Data centres consumed 1 per cent of the world’s electricity in 2005. By 2020 the carbon footprint of the computers that run the internet will be larger than that of air travel, a recent study by McKinsey, a consultancy firm, and the Uptime Institute, a think tank, predicted.

That’s from an article about Google’s idea for putting data centers on barges.

Also, David B. and I went to see the matinee of Burn After Reading Friday at the Prytania. First flick I’ve seen since the girl was born. A fine, fun, forgettable film. I laughed until I cried. No joke. What a treat.