Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue

If you don't get the joke, watch the movie "Airplane".

Today is August 18, 2009. Here is the upcoming schedule:

August 19 My father's 69th birthday - very good!
August 20 My children start school again - good for me - they are less than thrilled.
August 21 Aural Skills test at the University of Illinois - very bad.
August 21 At work we begin migrating the whole firm to Exchange 2007. Hopefully good - but also the beginning of 4 months of work - mostly at night.
August 24 My third semester of graduate school begins. So far so good?
August 26 My three year anniversary with Nicole - very good!
August 27 The 2009 Opera season auditions at the University of Illinois - both good and bad.
August 29 I start teaching at Millikin University again, Very good!
(skip a bit and drum roll please . . . . )
September 5 My wedding to Nicole! Outstanding!

Sorry to be so tedious with all the detail but I got a phone call today and now I need to add something to my schedule - surgery to remove my gall bladder. Very bad. Or at least not fun.

I have Biliary Dyskinesia - technically an 18% Ejection fraction. That means I have 18% use of my gall bladder and they have to remove it. I will say that since they gave me the news today it hurts more consistently than it did before. Must be a mental thing.

I have had what I thought was muscle cramping since last fall, and after finally going to the doctor 3 weeks ago she told me I don't have muscles where I have the muscle pain - just a gall bladder. They did a sonogram - nothing - so Friday I had a HIDA scan. They called me today with the test results.

Now as you can see I don't really have time for all this surgery nonsense, but apparently I don't get to decide. The doctor can't see me until August 28, and with a 10 day to 2 week recovery time from surgery, the numbers just don't add up here. So unless something goes very wrong, I will have the surgery after the mini-honeymoon in early September.

I won't thrill you with the information I have found on life after Gall Bladder removal, but I wouldn't recommend it. Limit dairy, spicy food, greasy food, caffeine and very sweet foods. I will miss spicy food and caffeine but I don't care about the rest.

I suppose I will actually have to sit around and watch movies during my recovery - perhaps I will start with Top Secret, Princess Bride and Airplane. That should give me enough good quotes to start at least 5 more blogs.

If anyone has suggestions for movies suited for recovery from surgery I'd love to hear them - preferably nothing with . . unpleasant bodily functions.

Parenting and the Yankees

I love the Yankees. I sat up listening to the 1981 Yankees\Dodgers World Series on an antique radio long after I was supposed to be asleep. The radio got terrible reception and I figured out that if I took a book of matches and stuck it under the tuning dial then the reception was better. I listened to the whole series - sad to hear the Yankees lose 4-2. Dave Winfield, Goose Gossage, Ron Guidry, Don Mattingly - a great team. Don't ask me why I choose the Yankees - probably because I grew up in North Carolina and the closest team we had was the Atlanta Braves - and to be honest it was boring to watch baseball on TV. For some reason it was really exciting on the radio.

I saw my first live Yankees game shortly after moving to Brooklyn in 1996. It was a regular season game, and I don't remember who they were playing but it was great to be in the stadium. That year I also went to a Mets game at Shea stadium for the first time. But the best was yet to come - the Yankees were playing a very strong Cleveland team in the ALCS that year, and game 6 was at Yankee Stadium. I was working in Manhattan and got a call around 3PM from a friend whose brother had tickets. "Wanna go?" he asked? No question about it - off we went. BTW - thank you James!!!

The stadium in September can be really cold and I was there without a coat - so $60 later I had a sweatshirt and a hat (still have them actually) and watched an amazing game that the Yankees won - the beginning of 4 World Series titles in 5 years - a great run for a Yankees fan living in NY.

While the Yankees have played well and been successful since then, and though they haven't reproduced the magic of those years, I still watch and follow them, sometimes to the annoyance of my fiancee as we only have one TV. But as to how the Yankees tie into parenting? Since you asked I'll tell you.

The last 2 days the Yankees have played the Chicago White Sox - a team with lots of talent but having a bad season and in with the Yankees on a roll, it should have been an easy series for the Yankees. Instead they lost the first game by an extra inning base hit, then got blown away in the next two games. My frustration was high - I was getting used to success. Parenting can be the same - you have a good run with great kids and you get spoiled.

Fast forward to my son - age 9, entering the 4th grade. He is in this lovely place in his development where he is never wrong, never apologies (except under pain of punishment) and has no consideration for his parents' feelings once he has decided what is right (or should be). Argue, complain, argue, debate, argue (did I mention argue?) . . .

The past three days have been very taxing for me - my patience has frayed on multiple occasions, but in truth nothing has worked to this point. I am considering some dramatic steps such a emptying his room of all the toys and making him earn them back, but the next few days will determine that course of action.

So I realized this morning that watching the Yankees and parenting a 9 year old are very similar exercises. I realized that while I have no control over the Yankees (I even switched to the Cubs game yesterday to avoid watching the blowout - heresy!), I have precious little control over my 9 year old in some areas as well. I wonder if I had taken away the toys from the Yankees bullpen yesterday if the 14-4 loss could have been avoided? Burnett - you can have your 60" LCD back when you start throwing strikes! Phil Coke - you blew 2 games in 3 days - no Nintendo, computer or Xbox 360 for a week!

There is another game today, and another day of parenting awaits, so cross your fingers for the 9 year old, and the Yankees. The frustrated parent and fan ultimately believes in both of them but will take a deep breath as he wades into the new day . . .