View From the Bushes

Well it's been a while, hasn't it. First there was the vacation, then just as normalcy was on the verge of returning, I got sick -- desperately, horribly ill (it started about 2 am Tuesday morning, though I wasn't feeling 100% on Monday night either), and I am just barely recovering. This was a pretty nasty sickness; everyone in my family ended up with it and around 3/4 of my extended family caught it as well. I was only actively vomiting for about 7 hours, but so violent were my exertions that my back is still sore. Well, that's enough about that subject, but it wouldn't be my blog if my first post back didn't involve vomiting...

As if all the illness weren't exciting enough, on Saturday my youngest child decided to shove something up her nose. She got it so far up there, that it took a trip to the ER, four people and some pretty serious sedation to get it out. What was it, you ask? Well you know those pencils with little plastic cartridges holding pre-sharpened lead, that nest in each other, so when you're done with one you stick it in the back of the pencil and push a new one out? Yeah, it was one of those...

Looking back to the week before the great flu pandemic, the reunion was pretty fun. I have to say that while I prefer hanging out with my family (brothers, sisters, father, mother) to hanging out with my wife's cousins, that I prefer hanging out with my wife's cousins to hanging out with my own cousins. And I found out something interesting while I was down there. Someone else who lives in Utah and is related to the Arizona family by marriage (i.e. my own situation) mentioned to her nephew (one of my wife's cousins) that the family was largely humorless until I married into the family and that's when the humor started to return. Needless to say I was touched to be accounted so pivotal in the condition of an entire family...

Mostly harmless
Ross