Halfway down the Danube

See you in September

Going off on the big family vacation: New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, DC.

Three weeks and change.  Not, alas, a very long gap by the recent standards of this blog.  Someone once said that you know a blog is starting to die when the blogger starts trying to explain why he's not posting much.  So I won't do that.  But the blog, though very slow and patchy these days, is not dead.

Back in the middle of September. 

Happy Saturn Equinox Day!

It's Saturn Equinox Day today.

Hey, it only comes once every 15 years.  Here are some pictures and, if you like those, here are some more

We celebrated by, um... hanging around.  Alan built a really impressive helicopter out of Legos.  David did a reading lesson on the computer.  We did a lot of swinging in the hammock. I finished telling them a particularly long and convoluted Monkey story.  (Monkey vs. Red Boy.  It's about three chapteres of the Journey to the West.)  Claudia went shopping.  A summer vacation day.

Oh, and I finished my work.  I'm officially done with agricultural inputs in Senegal; pharmaceutical supply chains in Uganda; and regression analysis of factors in successful Business Startup projects around the world.  The good part is, I don't have any of that stuff hanging over my head any more: all done!  And I should get paid for it.  (Soon, I hope.) 

Less good is that now I have to start beating the bushes for work again.  Such is the freelance life.

Summer vacation, Friday morning

The baby ate a bee.

It’s vacation time here, so mornings are pretty relaxed.  We allow about an hour of TV in the morning and another hour in the evening.  (Okay, sometimes it’s more.  But those are our goals.)  The morning hour is usually pretty early, often before breakfast… the boys consider watching Teen Titans or Pokemon a higher priority than eating.  Possibly this is a little too relaxed?  But it’s summer vacation… 

In our defense, without the lash of school, everyone wakes up at different times.   So it’s simpler to wait until everyone is up, and do breakfast then. As a pre-breakfast stop-gap, to keep blood sugar from crashing and kids from getting cranky, I’ll offer some small healthy snack.  Apple slices are popular, or at least acceptable.  (We bought an apple corer from IKEA a year ago.  It cores the apple and splits it into half a dozen convenient, child-friendly slices.  Best four euros we ever spent.) 

So anyway: pre-breakfast.  The boys were watching Robin, Cyborg and Starfire fight the Hive.  Claudia was sitting on the couch.  I was at the kitchen table reading e-mail and checking my news and blogs.  (I guess this is the modern equivalent of having the newspaper up in front of me.)  The baby had had her bottle – that’s a priority – and was rolling around on the floor. 

What happened: one of the boys dropped part of an apple slice.  A bee just happened to wander in and land on it: mm! sweet!  Meanwhile, the baby had the same thought; after all any piece of food that lands on the floor legitimately belongs to her…

Claudia saw it, though a moment too late to stop it. 

The baby screamed… and then SCREAMED and SCREAMED and SCREAMED.  A bee sting on your tongue is no fun for anyone, but if you’re not quite a year old it must be a particularly horrible surprise.  Poor thing!

They die after they sting, you know?  In fact, they die almost instantly – the dead bee was on her onesie, all curled up and pathetic.  “Get it off her!” yelled Claudia.  “It’s dead,” I said stupidly.  “GET  IT OFF HER!”

We ran for the tweezers, then Claudia held her while I probed.  (I can’t recommend this.  Squirmy, slimy, swollen, and every touch causes more screaming.)  Eventually we got it out: little black stinger, with poison sack and bee guts still attached.   We gave her a little Motrin.  The screaming eventually subsided to sobs.  We watched her closely for a reaction to the sting, but she was fine.  Half an hour later she was taking her morning nap.