Category: family

Gail’s short story yesterday reminded me of my own juvenile therapy experience. I was five, and don’t remember much of it. I remember bits and pieces of small chairs and tables, colors and smells. I remember the event that lead to the therapy almost like a movie, looking at myself in third person, watching the events unfold like a spectator instead of a participant.

When I was five, we lived in Germany. Dad was stationed at Ramstein, and we lived on the army post at Kaiserslattern. It was fun. We lived in a first floor apartment with uber-waxed wood floors that caused my first two trips to the emergency room that resulted in stitches. There were always kids around to play with, and we took trips all over Europe in our beefed up VW pop-top camper. While my cousin Andy was visiting us, we went out to the country to look for some nature center mom had heard about. Lacking good directions we ended up running down paths through the wood looking for something that resembled our intended destination. My cousin and I had run up a hill to see if maybe we had missed it or something. As we ran back down the hill, my sock got caught on a branch and my foot jammed into a beehive. For some crazy Bavarian evolutionary reason, German bees (who are especially efficient) build their hives at the base of trees, in the ground. The bees decided that the best way to remove me from their home was to sacrifice their lives by stinging me repeatedly until I left.

My cousin had already reached the bottom by the time I started screaming. He ran back up the hill, took off his sweatshirt and started beating the crap out of me with it to get the bees off. I dislodged my foot and we ran down the hill. I don’t remember much of what happened next. I remember there was this older German couple walking their (wait for it) German Shepherd. She was deathly allergic to bee stings and had some weird thing around her neck that was supposed to ward them off. I think she had some cream for stings that she gave us. I don’t remember anything else about that day.

In total, I was stung more than 35 times, and developed an allergy. And worse, I developed a crippling fear of flying bugs. If I went outside and saw a fly or some other buzzing insect, I immediately ran back inside. This is when the therapy started. I remember the office was in a small beige building (all offices on a military base are some shade of biege and usually small). There were bright simple paintings on the walls. I remember sitting on a chair at a small table across from (I think) a woman and looking at pictures.

Not too long after that, we moved to Iceland (which I’ve talked about a couple times). I don’t remember going to therapy there. I do remember the ulcer. It took forever to diagnose. I had to go to several Icelandic hospitals in the capital, drink barium and watch it slide down my throat and into my now porous stomach on TV. I was a member of the Frequent Mylanta club and went through a large bottle every few days. My pediatrician said I was the first six year-old he’d ever met with a stress-induced ulcer. I don’t remember when the ulcer went away… but it did.

Speaking of starving… I’ve been doing pretty well with my New Year’s Resolution. I decided that I drink way too much soda (I was up to 3-4 20oz Dr. Peppers or Code Reds a day). So, I’m down to one 20oz Dr. Pepper for breakfast. On my daily trek to the convenience store in the building with some friends, I decided to take a look at how many calories I’m saving with my new plan. If you look at the back of your Dr. Pepper bottle, it says there are 100 calories per serving. You’d think by serving, they meant the bottle, right? Nope! 8 ounces. Who drinks 8 ounces of a 20 ounce bottle and then puts it away? Not I, and not anyone I know. There are 2.5 servings per bottle, which means that every 20 ounce Dr. Pepper is actually 250 calories. That means I’m saving 750 calories a day by not drinking my other three. And even worse, Code Red is 120 (I think, it might be 150) calories per serving. Fat, your days are numbered!

I’m still thinking about the book I want to write. There are only a few things I know enough about to fill a book: AOLserver, Tcl, SQL, HTML and CSS being up on the list. I think a book about all of those things without a hook could be a huge jumbled mess and take way too long to complete. So, I’m leaning towards a “You Can Build an Intranet in a Month” book about using a PC with RedHat, AOLserver and Postgres on it to create a useful and powerful intranet (much like the one I created for work only more formalized).

The problem I’m having with this concept is that there’s already a great community system out there for AOLserver. The problem is there are no books about it. You couldn’t go to Amazon and find an O’Reilly book on the ACS or AOLserver. Someone needs to write one, and while I’m not the expert on AOLserver, I’m good. I’ve been using it for years and have enough passion for it to fill a book of just praise for it. But, who wants to read that?

I’m still intrigued by the Group Project Manual of Style idea too. I may tackle that one first because it could be article-length and will be less server-specific.

Either way, I should shut up and start writing it.

And for those who care – no more PreacherHair™!

Winter always makes me think of Iceland. I just read this post from mybluehouse about central heating that runs under the floor. It reminded me of our little apartment in Iceland. It had uneven floors that sloped towards the door, one small bedroom, with one small window covered in aluminum foil to keep the sun out at night in the winter, that my brother and I shared. It had one small bathroom with a step tub/shower combo that was great for playing with boats and toy subs in. The dropoff was the deep ocean where the giant squid lived.

We had a portable combo washer/dryer that smelled the place up whenever we did laundry. The whole apartment was smaller than the basement in my townhouse. Mom and dad shared a sofabed in the living room (where they conceived my little brother, which once I figured out what “conceived” meant, gave me an undying respect for their courage). I was 6, and Tim was 4, and he was wired. We lived in that little place for a year.

Getting back to my original point when I started this thing. We had lovely geothermal heating that ran through pipes under the floor. Whenever we came out on Saturday morning to wake mom and dad up so we could watch ancient cartoons on the only network we got (AFN – It irreversibly stunted my pop culture growth. I’m a generation behind in TV viewing), we’d sit on the floor in our footie pajamas, eat cereal and let the heat from the pipes seep up through our bodies. I never felt warmer or more secure than those mornings sitting on the floor with my little brother.

We lived about 300 yards from the end of the runway. Fighter jets, airliners, transport planes, etc would take off at all hours of the day and come in to land right over our house. The walls shook; the windows rattled; whatever was sitting on the table that stood on our slanted floor ended up on the slanted floor and rolling towards the front door. We had blizzards with sixty-five mile-an-hour winds and twenty foot drifts that blew over the tops of buildings. Yet, our little apartment always had warm floors, aluminum foiled windows in the bedroom and that stupid tub. I know it was probably miserable at the time, and I have no idea how my mom survived being pregnant and having to deal with my brother and I in that tiny place. What’s odd is how fond my memories are of the place. I can’t think of anything bad to say about living there (other than the time my dad kicked me in the neck on accident while we were sledding down a dormant volcano in a refrigerator box and my ulcer, but that’s not really connected to Iceland but another story I’ll tell another time). My memories are rosy and warm, like geothermal floors and footie pajamas.