I haven’t blogged as much as usual in the last few weeks (not that I blogged much before). I’ve decided that rather than form a coherent thought, I’d catch you up on my comings and goings in bullet-point form.

Yellowstone

I recently went on a whirlwind trip to Yellowstone. All summer we’ve been promising the kids that we’d go camping, but all manner of time commitments have stood in our way, so two weeks ago we packed up and spent a quick weekend watching water boil.

By strict definition, it wasn’t “camping”. One night we stayed in a one-room cabin in the woods, and the other night we stayed in the Marriott. But, we totally looked at trees out the window, and I think there was a show about nature on our plasma screen TV.

Being August, there wasn’t a lot of wildlife to be seen. If you go to Yellowstone in early summer all the elk and buffalo are hanging out by the roads, hoping to see and be seen. But by August they’ve decided they hate tourists. This is all normal and we’ve experienced it before (we go to Yellowstone a lot). What we haven’t experienced before is that all the geysers were taking summer vacation, too. My theory is that there’s less water due to the hot weather, so they don’t erupt as much, but the other theory is that we didn’t spend a ton of time and our lack of patience was our downfall. Either way, the hikes were dull, with no geysers, just steamy puddles. That said, we managed to see all the animals we wanted to, including a huge grizzly on the shoulder of the road. They were just fewer and far between.

The Emergency Room

My next trip was to the ER on a Sunday evening. In the morning I’d been experiencing some weird symptoms which I described to my wife as “a migraine without the headache”. It was all nausea and pressure and lightheadedness. Then, at church, she said I looked pale and my lips were blue, so I went home and discovered my blood pressure was really high. (Those of you who know me might not be surprised at the high blood pressure, since I shower in bacon grease every morning, but I’ve actually never had high blood pressure in my entire life, ever. And yet this was REALLY high.)

Me having a headache. Aren't I cute?

And then the kicker: after a few hours of weird symptoms and high blood pressure, my face started to go numb. A quick consultation with Dr. Internet indicated that I was having a stroke and that I needed to visit the hospital and an estate lawyer.

Fortunately for all, it wasn’t a stroke. I had an EKG and a CT scan, and the doctor and nurse had a long conversation where they tried to find something sharp to run across the bottoms of my feet. In the end, I can’t remember what they chose. But I flinched several times during the conversation, so it wasn’t needed.

The ultimate verdict was: A Complex Migraine. It’s like a migraine, but with more random crap they can’t explain. Then they paged the crazy doctor for a consult, and he came in and told me that my body was filled with toxins caused by aspartame and food additives, and the only possible therapy was to give me an expensive placebo (and to make me an independent placebo distributor!) Or maybe I made that part up. But it was a Complex Migraine.

The Edits

The first round of edits for Variant are in the bag, and I still have a few days before the second round begins. Overall, the edits weren’t bad at all. They certainly weren’t like my third book, when the main edit was “We like it, but make it more like The Da Vinci Code.”

There were three main revisions, one of which was to knock off the repitition. And, as I looked at my editor’s notes, I discovered that I repeat stuff constantly. Constantly. I repeat stuff constantly. What I’m trying to say is that when I say a thing, I will repeat it. Constantly.

We’re Moving

I move a lot. In ten years of marriage, we’ve had nine different addresses (though that includes a few quick little moves, like when we house-sat for someone for four months, and when I interned for my MBA). This time, however, we’re moving to a far more stable place–a house. It’s a marvelous house in a good area with a big yard. It was built and decorated in the fifties, and it has a fine selection of gold and baby-blue carpet.

Also, we discovered yesterday, it has a chubby rat lounging on the back lawn. So, hooray! Watch out, Mrs. Frisby! The exterminators are on the way!

Another thing the house has: a walnut tree. I cut open one of the fruit to figure out what it was (because it looked green and round, not walnutish) and the juice permanently stained my hand. It’s been six days. Dang walnuts.

Anyway, the important thing about moving into a house is that now you can help me carry the piano up the front steps. Come one and all.