Home | Away

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Praxis Tuesday

image

Here’s Jamie at the 2005 Canadian Down Syndrome Society conference, doing what everybody does at conferences—chatting on the cell phone (to his mother), looking around, playing with his hair.

The CDSS was held May 12-14 in Waterloo, Ontario, and back then I had intended to post a bunch of pix from it—Jamie swimming with a bunch of kids in the hotel pool, Jamie enjoying himself at the conference dance, Jamie at the Kitchener African Lion Safari (yes, you read that right)—but then I decided to have emergency abdominal surgery later that week, as especially dedicated readers of this blog might recall.  Besides, I can’t post all those other pix until I learn how to compress them.  Any tips?  What do you all use to get those million-byte monsters down to size?

Hey, wait just a minute, I can hear some of you saying. We clicked onto your site for another installment of Theory Tuesday (this one on Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams, like you promised), and you’re asking us for advice about how to post pictures of your kid?  Saaaay—what kind of bait-and-switch is this, anyway?

Just the usual kind of bait and switch, I think.  You know the sentence that opens the final section of My Ántonia?  “I told Ántonia I would come back, but life intervened, and it was twenty years before I kept my promise”?  Well, folks, life intervened.  Jamie has been under the weather for the past four days (and therefore home from day camp for the past two), having gotten a sinus infection so nasty that it blew one eardrum.  He’s OK now, and taking eardrops and various other medications like a man.  (Though for some reason it’s getting harder to buy Sudafed around here.  Hmmmm.) He almost never gets sick, and even when things like this happen, he rarely complains.  He is, as the cliché has it, a trooper.  In one way that’s great: he has a high pain threshold, apparently, and a fierce determination to insist that he’s just fine.  On the other hand, his stoicism sometimes lulls us into a false sense of security.  So I haven’t had the unbroken 3-4 hours I need to do one of these Theory installments.  I stole twenty minutes yesterday to do the Roberts-Dobson parody, but even to do that I had to type really fast—and use a pruning knife.  Don’t ask.

Life will continue to intervene for the foreseeable future, I’m afraid.  Something else has suddenly come up in the extended-family-and-friends circle, and the family and I are headed off to be with that EFF circle for the rest of the week.  I probably won’t be blogging again until next Monday. 

The rest of August will be spotty, too.  We’re here August 8-11, then off for our Ten Days of Vacation, where no blogs may trespass.  Then here August 22-23, then off to St. Louis to deliver Nick to college again.  John McGowan still has the keys to the Thursdaymobile, of course, and I’ll pick up the Theory Tuesdays whenever it’s Tuesday and I have Internet access.  I have about 4-5 of these things planned and another 3-4 under consideration, and am willing to run them right into October if need be.  But I promise I won’t make everyone wait twenty years.

And one of these days I’ll post those pix of Jamie at the conference and the safari.  In the meantime, I just want to say that I think Michael Bolton will make a fine ambassador to the United Nations.

Posted by Michael on 08/02 at 03:14 PM
(27) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages