The day started with an errant alarm that sounded at 6 a.m.! Because my ringing smartphone was on the desk charging, the only way to get it to cool its heels was to get out of bed and stroke the touch screen with what felt like a gingerale-filled hand. I guess that I had been sleeping on that hand because I was now a lot more awake than my hand was.
This alarm thing is driving me a little crazy. Because I went back to college again, mid-life, my computer knowledge is at least as good as most 50-year olds, but for some reason my Droid still gives me a run for the money on a few issues, and this is one of them.
My 5-year-old grandchild had downloaded a clock app several months ago and set it for 6 a.m. This didn't seem too problematic because, about a week after she did that, I had to reload my phone from scratch due to a technical meltdown. That meltdown should have deleted the clock and the alarm as well. The shortcut clock icon was deleted, but somehow that alarm was still in there, and it was still harassing me. It was like "A Christmas Carol," the ghost of alarm clocks past, a shadow of its former self, that still kept it going off every flippin' morning! The problem now was, short of erasing everything, there was no way to capture and eradicate this annoying thing without a hard reboot or simply a boot.
Consequently, whenever it went off, it meant getting up, touching the screen, and then fruitlessly trying to sleep for a few more minutes, until the second and then third alarms would sound. Add to this morning confusion, the fact that I have been traveling so much that I have lost track of not only what hotel I am in for the night but also where the bathroom is located.
It's probably a matter of time until I open the wrong door and wake up in the hallway in my undies with the room door locked behind me. The other thing that continues to plague my current travel schedule is trying to remember what drawer my underwear is stashed in and what city I am gracing on any particular day.
Well, today, I woke up with a 6-year old jumping on one side of me and a 4-year old on the other. It was another special weekend with the kids. They always fill me with hope for the future, and unbelievable awe at their young curiosity. This Saturday there were a few kid phrases that caught my attention. The first came from my grandson's buddy who explained that he went fishing with his dad and used sympathetic blood worms. In my mind's eye, I saw these little worms looking very sad and sensitive hanging on a hook. Then, we realized that he meant synthetic blood worms.
Later, while driving to dinner on Friday night, my daughter reached down and picked up the little sample container of dental floss that the dentist gives me when I visit, turned to her 4 year old and said, "Tell Poppa what this is." She looked at her mom and without any hesitation, she said, "That's camouflage."
We arrived for dinner, had a bowl of black olives, a piece of homemade Italian bread with four or five containers of butter, and then our non-kid-typical appetizer arrived: squid. Believe it or not, these kids love calamari. In fact, when the calamari arrived, the kids dove into that quasi-rubbery seafood as if they had been on a religious fast.
The plate was filled with circular pieces of seafood and a few tentacles. As I passed the plate to one of the kids, she looked up and said, "Poppa, I just want the circles. I don't like to eat the testicles." Fair enough.
(Nick Jacobs, Windber, international director for SunStone Consulting, LLC is the author of the blog Healinghospitals.com.)
Sympathetic worms and squid
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