You’ve probably heard the old saw about little kids and their parents: “Daddy means fun, Mommy means business.”

Well, DADDY means business.

Long story shortened: Gleek wakes up with a fever and some snot-induced gag vomiting. Not a full stomach purge. Not flu. She needed some fever reducer and some night-time meds, and was unwilling to drink it.

Sandra and I fought with this for 20 minutes, wiping gag-vomit from the kitchen floor, and catching a double-handful as the only barely-preferable alternative to cleaning vomit from the carpet, before I finally got fed all the way up. Her tantrum was preventing her from getting medicated, and she needed to be snapped all the way out of it.

So in a somewhat quiet moment, and with just the right hint of anger in my voice (no need to feign it… I was upset) I explained to this three-year-old that there were three ways she could take the medicine.

1) drink it yourself.
2) Mommy squirts it in your mouth (and makes you gag, and you barf in Daddy’s hands again — option #2 is ruled the Hell out)
3) Daddy takes you to the Doctor and they give you a shot.

“Are you going to drink it yourself?”

Tears, negation-noises, kicking and screaming.

“Okay.” I scooped her up. “Let’s go to the Doctor and GET A SHOT.”

Within 2 minutes I had her drinking her medicine enthusiastically. Because Gleek knows that Daddy Means Business.

I’ve washed them twice. My hands still smell like barf.

–Howard

Between the post-nasal drip and the diarrheah, I’m sore at both ends. (TMI, I know).

I’ve got mandatory meetings at the beginning and the end of the work-day, today, so I think I’m going to take four hours of sick-leave and try to sleep this off midday. I’m even putting it in my GroupWise calendar.

Sandra’s illin’ too. Gleek has a fever. Patches has goopy-nose-and-ears. Link’s fine, and Howler is well. Sounds to me like a rhinovirus is making the rounds, though, with three of us down with similar symptoms.

Funny thing: my shoulder feels better. I’m not going to go play disc golf today though — it was 79F (26C) this moring at 8:00am. I’m sure it’ll be a hairs’ breadth from 100F (38C) by lunch today, and I’m not going to take my sickly self out in that heat. Besides, it’s probably just the twisted ear effect. You know, you twist a horse’s ear when you brand it so it’s paying attention to pain up there on its head right up until it’s too late and its butt is on fire. This cold may be making me not pay attention to the shoulder.

Whatever. Rest, vitamins, fluids… it’s all on the schedule for today. My co-workers can scan my schedule for free slices in which to schedule meetings, and there won’t be any.

–Howard

I just learned that my neighbor’s son just took his own life. I think he was 25, or thereabouts. He’d recently gotten a job at Novell, working in security. We’d met a couple of times in the halls, and in the lunchroom, and we’d spent time sitting on the porch there in our little cul-de-sac, just talking about stuff.

He looked happy. He was always smiling.

I feel sick.

And right now, I can’t even remember his first name.

–Howard

For those of you interested in Disc Golf, there’s an LJ community where I posted this rant about some new discs I bought.

I need to follow it up with a rant about how that particular community might as well be a fence-post for all the feedback I get back out of it. Except for the one time I posted pictures from Rotterdam, that is. You’d think those guys were spending all their time outdoors, playing disc golf, rather than sitting inside at the computer reading live jour… oh. Never mind.

(Oh, and whoops. Somebody just replied to my post. Forget that fence-post comment, really. I meant nothing by it.)

Additional cross-posting can be found in the Open Letter, itself cross-posted to the SchlockTroops LJ Community, which you really ought to read if you like webcomics, because there’s fun “inside story” stuff in there. Go clicky!

What else… hrrmm…