Ear!

Last night was rough. Devon woke up about 4 am screaming at the top of her lungs (this is just one more even that assures me our neighbors in this building will be throwing a party when we finally leave). After some initial resistance, we got her the milk she asked for (I was trying to hang on till 5 am, but the Fockerizing won out); usually after a bottle of milk she'll go back to sleep for an hour or two. Not this time. She kept wailing and crying out. "Ee-air! Ee-air!" (ear) so I thought that perhaps she had an ear infection or something wrong with her ear -- and of course there was nothing that we could do about that at all. She just cried and cried and finaly after a couple of hours fell back into an exhausted sleep, at which point Walt and I did too (although this was the time I was supposed to be waking up for work).

All of this caused me to be late to work, since I missed the train, had to drop Walt and Devon off at 8th, etc. The weird thing about all of this was that Walt said she was fine the rest of the day and acted like nothing had happened. I was all over him in the morning to take her to the clinic and see if she had an ear infection, but it sounded like she was really chipper today, so he's recommending that we not bother with the doctor. I guess we'll see how she does tonight. We also have her 18 month appointment this Friday, anyway, so we can always have the pediatrician check around and confirm that all is well.

Walt and Devon spent the day together and had a great time. They went swimming at the JCC, and apparently Devon was really excited about it and kept crying, "Poo, poo!" on the way there. Although oddly, Walt said that once they got in the pool, she wanted to get out again quickly -- perhaps it was all the build up to the pool and not the pool itself. I also heard that she was quite a terror in the men's lockerroom. I'm sure that's it's pretty much only, in Walt's words, geezers in the locker room during the day on a weekday; so I've no doubt that they are not exactly accustomed to small children running around and slamming the locker doors closed, tipping over stools and the like. I can certainly vouch that it was a big lifestyle change for my dad, and he just experienced a weekend of it. (On a side note, he's continuing to find the Mark of Devon all over -- yogurt on the patio chairs, yogurt on the car dashboard, cheese doodles on the living room floor, etc.) They also went to the playground, which Walt said was totally packed. This is, again, one of the great mysteries of San Francisco -- who are all of these people who are hanging out during the weekday in places like playgrounds and cafes? Maybe there are just a lot more stay at home mommies than I realize; I was quite surprised when Walt told me how crowded it was.

Well, we finally heard some good news on those damn cabinets; they're supposed to come in on August 28. I was thinking that they'd be here in mid-September, so this is the only thing in the entire transaction that is exceeding my expectations. I'm still going to write my crabby letter to the store manager, since I'm steamed that they basically said, sorry about not submitting the order, and then went on their merry way. However, if the cabinets arrive at the end of August, we just might have a fully functioning kitchen by the end of September. I'm hedging my bets here since our carpenter seems to be on perennial vacation, so I don't know when he can install them. He just told Walt today that he's going out of town on Thursday and won't be back until Tuesday night. Our plan to have him install wainscoting in the bathroom is now down the drain; I'm hoping that maybe we can just get a strip of moulding in and live with that (the original idea was to have the 1920s-style tile wainscoting -- but when I realized how expensive that is, we quickly downgraded to a suggestion that the colorist had -- cheapo MDF wainscoting, with it painted one color and the wall above it another. We chose a fairly saturated peach color for the bathroom, and I'm worried that if we don't do something -- like just moulding with one color above and another below -- the color will be totally overwhelming for the small room.) Anyway, he can only come in tomorrow, so we'll just have to do whatever we can in a day and leave it at that.

The painters, at least, seem to be doing a good job so far. They're continuing to patch, but apparently tomorrow they'll start to prime (finally). The patching in this place has seemed next to endless -- they've been patching and sanding for over a week now -- but the good thing is that the progress is clearly showing. All of the huge holes and cracks in the walls are gone, and the place is starting to look halfway decent now. Walt is going to try to take a couple of pictures tomorrow that I'll post. We are also going to try to make some headway on the backyard; everyone (us included) is tired of having a dirt lot behind the apartment. First we still have to get rid of the huge stump that Walt excavated, then we need to level the space and then finally lay the patio. I'm sure it will be a several weeks-long process, but it would be nice to at least get rid of the stump this week -- then we'll have some demonstrable steps forward.

A propros of nothing, I have to say that I've been delighting in the ongoing scandal that Mel Gibson has been finding himself in recently. I just can't stand fundamentalist proselytizers of any stripe -- for god's sake, where are the religions that are so compelling that people turn to them naturally instead of being browbeat by their neighbors going door to door? Then throughout the development and subsequent showing of "The Passion of the Christ," he kept claiming that he was only giving illustration to the bible and portraying Jesus' life as it really was, despite being excoriated by several sources claiming that the film had a latent anti-Jewish message. In his run in with LAPD's finest, he's now shown his true colors -- an anti-Semite of the first water. Horrible.