Gah. I almost wrote a blog post at the end of the year ranting about the most overused phrases showing up in the blogsphere. (“Blogosphere” itself is definitely an overused word, but I can’t help it. It’s succint.) The phrase at the top of my list for 2003 was “drinking the kool aid.” The new overused phrase for 2004? Rising sharply over the last week, and will continue gaining momentum: “echo chamber.”
Tag: Rant
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Portable Electronic Society
I must be having a Luddite moment or something, but it’s getting ridiculous, the number of rechargeable and portable electronic devices we have these days. I mean, just in the past few days I’ve had to charge my PDA, charge my cell phone, charge my cordless razor, charge the digital camera (only to find out the battery was dying and useless), charge the video camera battery (only to plug the camera into the outlet directly anyway), and charge up my mom’s laptop as I worked on it.
And it gets worse: flashlights, a portable handheld vacuum sitting on my desk, remote controls for the TV, VCR/DVD, digital cable, and stereo, myriad battery-powered toys the kids have, the cordless phones. Don’t yet have a portable music or DVD player, video game system, or my own laptop—but I suspect it’s all a matter of time.
Okay. All done. Back to coveting electronics, rather than disdaining them: I’d kill for a camera phone and a WiFi-enabled laptop…
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Comic Book Rant
This rant is something I mentioned here some time back, and I’ve been mulling it over in my head for a while now; if you’re not interested in comics, then you can safely pass this up. It’s one of those highly geeky topics that make many people shake their head in bemusement whenever it comes up.
Also, it’s long. Consider yourself warned. (more…)
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Frustration
Two days ago my daughter Kaitlyn underwent surgery on her eyes to correct her congenital esotropia (lazy eye). This was the second surgery for her, the first occuring when she was only six months old (she’s three now). We drove up to Portland Wednesday afternoon, had dinner with our good friends Justin and Raegan, and had the surgery Thursday at Casey Eye Institute.
Turned out to be an even worse day than we’d imagined; Kaitlyn had a pre-op appointment at 11:00, to be followed (we thought) by surgery at approximately 12 noon. Unfortunately, the appointment ran long, and the doctor told us the surgery would be around 1:30 or 2:00, as a baby was in surgery ahead of us.
Well, it wasn’t 1:30, and it wasn’t 2:00 either. We got bumped again, and finally Kaitlyn went into surgery right about 3:00. At that point, we had been pretty much led to believe that we’d be getting into surgery between 2:00 and 2:30, because they let us bring Kaitlyn back at about 1:30 for an oral sedative to calm her down, which she needed because she was completely freaked out about the whole deal. So, from about 1:30 to 3:00, I held Kaitlyn (who was groggy with sedative, but fighting it), waiting for surgery to start and desperately hoping it would be soon so we could get the hell out of there.
The thing is, we were apparently originally on the schedule for a 2:30 surgery to begin with, but nobody told us that— we were led to believe she’d go into surgery around noon right after her pre-op. No one told us otherwise, until after we got there and checked in for surgery. And since patients can’t have any food for six hour prior to surgery, we had to get Kaitlyn up to have a light breakfast at 5:30 that morning. So when they finally took her in, she’d been without food for 9 hours.
She’s doing fine now, and her eyes are red but straight. It’s amazing how fast kids bounce back from something like this. Still, I’m not happy with the runaround on the day of surgery. If they schedule us at 2:30, fine. If a young baby has priority over us, fine. But nobody told us until it was too late. That’s what burns me up. We were there jumping through the hoops they laid out for us, but they didn’t even have their shit together enough to tell us what was going on.
Enough venting. Kaitlyn is good, things are good and the whole ordeal is behind us.