A light at the end of the tunnel?

NYT (by way of yahoo to get around the paywall) quotes animal studies around the world that show Omicron almost exclusively impacts the upper respiratory system. This is amazingly good news, as many COVID deaths and long-term impairments came from lung damage, or clotting elsewhere in the body. The comparison may be close to when we inoculated with the minimally-harmful cowpox to prevent much more serious smallpox infections.

So I'm a single dad...

For the few readers who don't know me in person, I've let this blog sit idle because of several job changes, a pregnancy that didn't end well, and finally my wife's fight with cancer. She lost that fight in early May. We're all struggling to figure out what to do from here.

Camp Mc-Han-lock-etri-alooneros-kac-enstien (Orlando)

By popular demand, we're not doing a theme park marathon, just a day each at Hollywood Studios and a water park. The rooms are for Thursday night through Sunday morning, and anyone who wants to is welcome to stay at our place the night before or after. We're about an hour from the Orlando attractions.

Proposed Itenerary

Thursday:
We need to talk about lunch/dinner shows. Jenny votes Medieval Times, and Ekata likes Arabian Nights. We'll do a group purchase for whoever's coming, so we should get a discount.

Interesting times

We apparently have sinkhole activity on our property, which means we can probably expect ome kind of insurance settlement in the next few months. According to the insurance company, the soil is "very loose" in quite a few places. Repair estimates start at $95000, just for the soil. So we may be stuck with the choice of doing repairs that are more than the remaining market value, or bringing the settlement plus some cash to pay off/down the mortgage, and having an unrepaired house.

Rohan tells a joke

Roan has been teasing us for a while (like calling me "Mama" just to get a rise out of me), and trying to master knock-knock jokes ("Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Rohan" "Rohan who?" "Me, ba."), but today he actually got me with a joke.

He loves fire trucks, so he'll usually ask where they're going, whether they have their lights on or not. So he asked "Where did fire truck go?" Thinking he saw one, I said "I didn't see a fire truck. Did you see one? Where did it go?" and I started looking around. He responded "At his house, ba."

Orlando Plans (2)

We reserved Thursday, July 21 (4PM) through Sunday, July 24th (10AM) in a 3-bedroom unit at http://www1.hilton.com/en_US/hi/hotel/ORLSWGV-Hilton-Grand-Vacations-Sui...

Officially, it sleeps 8. I can reserve extra days or another room, depending how many people confirm. For any family members who want to come, please let me know the dates and your park preferences ASAP.

We're definitely planning to do Disney, and a couple people have requested Universal too.

Disney

Hance / Chhetri / McKinnon Orlando Invasion Plans

I've been bouncing around the idea of a family trip to Orlando for anybody vaguely related to us. My dad and I both own timeshare "points" through Hilton, and between the two of us, we can reserve at least 4 bedrooms, plus pull-out couches in the living room. After talking to my cousin Jenny, we're planning summer 2011 or 2012.

Things could be worse.

I'm currently sitting in Hong Kong International, on hour 9 of a 12-hour layover. Ekata and Rohan are catching up on their sleep before our last flight. I just found out what gate we're suposed to depart from, and fortunately it's not too far from where we "camped out" for most of the day.

Big place, nice shops, but prices are about what you'd get in the US, occasionally higher. So no, we didn't go on a shopping spree. I don't think we could take another ounce on the plane anyway.

Nepali Pronouns

Since I'm married to a woman from Nepal, I've been slowly trying to learn the language. My first systematic effort at it was to figure out the list of pronouns. No simple "I, you, he, she, they, it"... there's no gender to pronouns, but there are up to four levels of formality or respect.

Perhaps the following list will be of use to someone else trying to learn the language, or to go from Nepali to English. I need to dig up a paper copy I edited a bit, so there may be minor errors on "these" and "those".

Rohan's Playset is Almost Done

It's been fun so far, but I've gotten sunburn twice from being out in the yard all day, received untold splinters and scrapes, and the batteries to my toolkit keep running out of power. Everything's done but the roof, the steps, and the swings. I just got the drill bit I needed to mount the swings last night, and finished setting them up a little earlier. I'm pretty proud of my work; thanks to Ben for helping when I needed an extra pair of hands.

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