October 30, 2011

Brett was home from school for four days last week with pink eye.  He wouldn’t have missed so much school if I had been faster at diagnosing and treating his condition.  It’s just that I have never seen an eye infection that did not include itchy, puffy, swollen, goopy eyes.  In my mind, no goop = no infection.  For future reference, you can have pink eye with no more symptoms than . . . pink eyes.  I wonder if there’s a lot of that going around, because when we were at the doctor’s office, I could hear the patient in the next exam room.  His diagnosis was pink eye, too.  (You’d think the Patient Privacy Act would have addressed the sound proofing of exam rooms.)

By the time it was diagnosed and treated and no longer contagious, he was out of school for 4 days!  It wasn’t all bad.  We got an entire unit of his independent study course done in those days. That’s two week’s worth of work all taken care of.

When Jeff heard that Brett was highly contagious, he pulled out the Clorox wipes and sanitized his Gameboy DS and all his video games.  Never mind door knobs or faucet handles or the refrigerator.  It’s the video games that are most important.

Today was the Primary Sacrament Meeting presentation.  It was the first time in 19 years that I haven’t had a child in the Primary program.  I had planned to sit in the audience and enjoy it, but then the Primary pianist had the nerve to go into labor yesterday.  Guess who was the last-minute substitute pianist for the program?  That shows you just how sadly depleted our ward is of musical talent.  I prayed myself through it, hoping that my mistakes at least would not be of the horrendously distracting variety.  I didn’t want anyone’s attention to shift off the children and on to the pianist.  I would rather speak in stake conference 100 times than play the piano in sacrament meeting once. Phew!  Glad that’s over.

And just for fun, take a look at this portrait of President Clark from BYU-ID.  It’s actually carved on a pumpkin!  Ian Anderson from our ward has entered a pumpkin carving contest in Rexburg, and this is his entry.  Isn’t it incredible?  The pumpkin with the most “Likes” on Facebook, wins.  If you happen to want to vote for Ian's masterpiece or if you want to see other entries, click here 

Until next week . . .