Holidays wrap-up [elongated version]

Back at home, after having spent seven of the eight nights around Christmas and New Years sleeping out of home. Spent the 22nd through the 26th in Connecticut for Christmas with Cathleen's family, and the the 27th through the 30th in Yorktown for a belated Chanukah gathering with my family. The schedule was roughly as follows:

22nd: Drive to Bloomfield. Participate in Claudia and Walter's annual Caroling Party. Eliza spent almost an hour sitting next to Walter at the piano, quietly toying with the right side of the keys, and pushing away Walter's hand any time he tried to play the high notes. Earlier in the day we went sledding in the back, and discovered that Max had turned into this kid who loved the snow, loved sledding, loved playing around in the snow. Parenting doesn't just allow you to enjoy your kids' lives, it allows you to relate back to your own childhood; as we sped down the hill in the toboggan, I channeled the rush I would feel sledding down the Lim/Zuliani hill as a kid. Loved it. Regrettably, our digital camera spent the night of the party outisde. On the snow. In the rain.

23rd: Attended church service at the Unitarian church Claudia and Walter like to attend (Walter played the music for back-to-back services). I spent most of the service down in the playroom with Max, Eliza and Alani. We dined at Macaroni Grill afterwards, and then hung out at the house.

24th: Went sledding again, but the snow had frozen over from the previous day's rain, and the hill was slick and fast. I brought Max and Alani halfway up the hill and, early in the descent, I discovered that I could neither slow down nor control the toboggan. We wound up hitting a bump and spinning around backwards. "This," I thought, "can not end well." The next bump jammed the edge of the toboggan, and Max and Alani turned into projectiles. As I held the two crying kids on my lap, I unconvincingly tried to sell them on "wasn't that crazy and fun?" Cathleen and I then built them a snow fort that they didn't use at all. Late in the day we went to (Great) Aunt Catherine's for tea. It was a bit stressful this year, with Max hyped up on a combination of sleep deprivation and cookies, running around and being loud (like a four-year-old), but Aunt Catherine remained unfazed and as charming as ever, and I had an interesting talk with her son Steven about the hot air balloon ride that he and Sheila took for their 50th wedding anniversary. Later that night, back at the house, the adults exchanged gifts. I presented my "spring subscription to BAM" gift to Cathleen by way of a Mad-libs which pretty much worked.

25th: At Claudia and Walter's, we sleep in a humongous bed. Max loves that bed, and it is the only place that we allow him to sleep in bed with us. That morning, Cathleen got up with Eliza at around 6:30, and I remained in bed with Max until he woke up around 40 minutes later. As consciousness slowly washed over him, I quietly asked him, "do you know what today is?" He didn't jump up, or even perk up. He just looked at me and replied with a question: "I wonder if Santa left us two notes (in response to the one that he and Alani wrote the night before)?" I then got out of bed and began to get dressed. Max remained in bed and told me that he wasn't quite ready to get up. A couple of minutes later he announced that he was ready. Having never celebrated Christmas as a child, I have no personal experience with the "wake up early and run downstairs to rip open gifts" phenomenon that one sees in Christmas movies. Chanukah's a night-time event, and so the excitement of gift opening is preceded by the tension-killing wait for the sun to set. But here was Max, content to lounge in bed for a few more minutes before calmly going downstairs to check out what gifts lay in wait. I thought that was cool. He was less cool by the time the small cadre of guests arrived for Christmas dinner, but a good dinner was had nonetheless. Ann Chilton still makes a mean trifle.

26th: Woke up, packed and drove home. Unpacked slightly. When I turned in for bed, Max was asleep in our room, on the floor, and I spotted a bedbug crawling across his pillow. I killed it, and then brought out the vaccuum. Still wound up with three bites on my right arm by the next morning. Those motherfuckers.

27th: Woke up, packed and drove up to Yorktown late in the afternoon. Mike and T and the kids were already there; Lorri and John et al. arrived later that evening. Eliza is obsessed with Jacob and Ryan and if one of them was not paying her constant attention, she would stand and shout one of their names repeatedly until due attention was provided. But damn if she is not cute doing so.

28th: We packed into cars, drove to Croton and took Metro North into Manhattan, to then head up to Rockefeller Center to see The Tree and other sights. It was, in civil engineering terms, crazy-ass crowded. Max, despite his firm urban roots, does not like thick crowds, and so he began yelling at all of the people to leave New York City. It is with great pride that I note that he has developed a precocious distaste for tourists. Maybe we'd like you better, people, if you didn't stand in the middle of the sidewalk. Duh. We also saw the Penny Harvest at Rockefeller Center, where NYC schoolkids -- Max among them -- had collected $1 million in pennies to be used for charitable causes. Thems a lot of pennies.

29th: We exchanged presents for the kids in the morning, and then Mike, John and I headed off with the kids to the local bowling alley. Other than some technical upgrades, that place has not changed in 30 years. Oh shit, I have become a guy who can say "that place has not changed in 30 years." Oh well. Max was pretty much wasted by this point. With the exception of the night of the 26th, he had been losing on average 2 to 3 hours of sleep each night for a week (getting to bed late, not sleeping in late), and then had been playing at full pace with his beloved cousins non-stop. At the bowling alley, it all came crashing down. There was impudence, defiance and eventually screaming. With a crying Max hanging onto my left arm, I still managed to bowl a strike in one frame. That night the adults exchanged gifts. Lorri and John gave me, inter alia, a stuffed Giardia doll. You know, something to cuddle with when I want to reminisce about crapping away 13 pounds of my bodyweight in a month's time.

30th: Apres breakfast, we packed up and headed over to the cemetery to visit my dad and grandparents' graves. Lorri figured out that she is four years younger than my mom was when my father died, a fact that drove home how young he -- and we -- all were when he died. Or maybe it drove home how old Lorri is? Probably the former. We then poured into our respective cars and departed. Not "departed" in the traditional cemetery sense. We all went home. I think that it is interesting that as notably different as I am from the remainder of my family, how happy I am when we are all together. And it is not just that I cannot get enough of my nieces and nephews. I come home from family gatherings exhausted because we adults insist on staying up late talking with each other. Imagine! We are a pretty lucky family. I stayed up that night to watch the final football game of the regular season, between Indy and Tennessee. I don't care about either of these teams, but it was in this game that I dropped out of first place in my winner-takes-all ($350) season-long NFL Pick 'Em pool. I led the pool all season, until the last game (of over 200 games) of the entire season. I suck that much.

31st: I woke up illin, probably a healthy dose of actual exhaustion. I tried to rally for a family dinner party at friends' house, but I left 30 minutes into the shindig, leaving Cathleen behind to contend with both of our kids and dinner party conversation. I was in bed well before midnight, the first New Years that I didn't witness the ball drop or the clocks change in close to 30 years. Here's to 2008...

A Boy and his Dogbite

As I approached our front door this evening coming home from work, my cell phone rang. It was Cathleen. She started talking to me in pig latin. She was saying two words, and I couldn't figure them out. My linguistic skills are pretty bad, but even I was embarrassed that it took me several "whats?" to understand what "og-day ite-bay" meant. I swear I was once a pretty smart kid, honest. After we were able to move beyond "dog bite," I was able to glean from her that Oscar had bitten Max, on the face, near his eye. "Be prepared for it to look bad," she advised me.

So I came in through the apartment door and Max rushed me for a hug as he (and Eliza) normally do (hands down, my favorite moment of the day), and then I saw his face. It was stunning that Oscar could do such damage. Nothing deep, but a pronounced scratch and cut just under Max's right eye, and another scratch-ish cut on his cheek. Max, apparently, had been cornering the dogs in the kitchen, preventing them from moving away from him, and despite several warnings from Cathleen that he was scaring the dogs and to back off, he didn't. And Oscar bit him.

Oscar is not a good dog, and by most standards is a bit of a bad dog. But this was new territory for him. Now what do we do? Turn the other cheek?

As for Max, Cathleen called our pediatrician's office. We now have the answer to the question, "what does it take to get a doctor on the phone?" The answer is, "my dog bit my child's face." She prescribed antibiotics, so he is now on amoxycillin for five days, and we smeared his face with bacitracin. He doesn't seem to be experiencing any level of discomfort, so either the bitemarks were indeed superficial, or Oscar severed Max's facial nerves. Most likely the former, but I'm no medical expert.

Eyewitness to an anomaly

A coworker who has season tickets to the Knicks couldn't make it to last night's game, so she offered me the tickets. I actually had to think about it for a second. But a game in the Garden is a game in the Garden, and despite my loathing for Isiah Thomas, once I realized they were playing against Lebron and the Cavs, I had to go. Sameer wound up as my date, so we dined on some Be Bim Bop at Kum Gang San and then made it to the seats about a minute after tipoff. It is good hanging out with that fella. We've only been friends since the eighth grade.

The seats were pretty good, and the Knicks kept it close in the first quarter. Then they built a 17-point lead by halftime and wound up winning the game in what had become a laugher by midway through the fourth. Hooray, all is right in Knicksville.

The Indignities Mount

After Ben the Exterminator visited this past Monday, I went five consecutive nights without a bite. "A few more nights," I was thinking, "and we can cautiously conclude that this is over." Last night, however, the bedbugs were up and at em. I woke up with a bite on my upper right arm, three on the back of my neck, and one on my lower lip.

My lower lip.

A bedbug got me, right on the kisser. Talk about adding new meaning to the notion of sucking face.

I have tried to convince myself that I was probably laying on my side, with my mouth pretty much touching the pillow or the bedsheet, and so my luscious, Botoxish lips were the most accessible flesh for some random bedbug in search of a meal. The other option, that a bug crawled onto and across my face, gazed lovingly at my impish-yet-pouty smile, and planted a tender chomp on my lower lip...it is almost too much to bear.

Today I vacuumed the room, the bed and the bookshelves with the intensity and anger of a frat boy who has realized that he had sex with the dog last night.

Hey, guy I fired

"Rick, I'm ready for some more cases if you have any to assign," typically means, in modern office parlance, that you've actually done work on the cases I already had assigned to you.

38 Special

38, today am I. I think that I was born at like 9:50 a.m., and Mike came out ten minutes later? I know for a fact that Mike came out ten minutes later. Hell, that has been a fact that I have lorded over him for, oh, about 38 years now. Of all the ways that I psychologically tortured him as a child (and an adult), among my favorites was saying, after he sought clarification on some passing reference that he likely had merely not heard, "oh, I can't explain it now. In ten minutes you'll be old enough to get it." I'm good, no?

Today was a roller coaster ride of a birthday. Morning celebration with Cathleen, kids and the Entin Bells featured a "doughnut cake" -- Max's genius alternative for normal cake. At his behest, Cathleen bought three Dunkin Donuts, uh, doughnuts, piled them up on each other and implanted candles. A bit much of a sugar jolt for me pre-coffee, but the kids seemed to like it. Miriam made me a great card ("You are the jokiest boy I've ever met.").

I arrived at work late and over the course of the day I had to fire someone for the first time ever, and I learned that a former client of mine, whom I had worked with many times and liked, had died. Firing the guy was a no-brainer, as his screw-up was monumental and was not, unfortunately, unprecedented, but it was stressful nonetheless. Fortunately, to his credit, he was gracious and professional in accepting his dismissal, but that in the long run may have made it all that much harder for me. In a sense it would have been easier had he screwed up and then had been angry with me for holding him accountable. I mean, I wouldn't be worth shit as a program director had I not fired him, but I can't escape thinking about the impact it had on his life. As for my former client...well, a few times every year I am reminded that my clients have AIDS and, despite the amazing advances in treatment that have been made over the past decade, it is still a terminal illness. I remember this client as a friendly, vibrant, chatty woman who would get all dressed up to attend what I considered low-level administrative hearings regarding her benefits and whom, despite the number of times I asked her to call me Rick, would always call me Mr. Kahn in her thick, high-pitched, Puerto Rican accent.

After work, I met Cathleen in Manhattan for dinner at Casa Mono, a Spanish tapas restaurant opened by celebrity chef Mario Batali. It was smaller than I had expected, and the tables adjacent to ours were practically on top of us. And it was loud, with music booming over us as if we were in some hipster bar. But once we had ordered our food, and began consuming our bottle of wine (something red, I cannot believe that I have no recollection of what it was), and adjusted to our surroundings, I realized that I was hearing Up the Junction coming from the speakers. Oh my god, they were playing Squeeze! A really good restaurant just became sensational. What are the odds of walking into a semi-trendy Manhattan restaurant on your 38th birthday and having the night's soundtrack be one of your favorite bands from 20 years ago?

The food was great: bacalao croquetas with an orange sauce; mussels with chorizo; duck with cranberry mostaza; lamb shank with jerusalem artichoke puree; grilled brussel sprouts; sauteed mushrooms with garlic. We polished off the bottle of wine by the end of the meal which meant that either Cathleen finally had gained the capacity to drink a half bottle of wine at dinner, or I was a bit cocked. She alleges the latter. For dessert she managed to make it through only half of some amazing chocolatey chocolate thing, and I managed to wolf down my entire burnt vanilla custard (sort of a creme caramel) which featured battered and deep-fried bay leaves on the side (you eat the fried dough, but not the leaves). We headed home and spent a while talking with Claudia who had put the kids to bed; she regaled us with tales of how Max was this incredibly helpful, caring and thoughtful older brother during the entire process, supplying her with ideas and assistance in trying to pacify a congested and ear-infected Eliza.

I can distinctly recall the days when 38 seemed old to me, and yet I still feel like a goofy kid most days of the week. It's more of an "in denial" thing than a "young at heart" thing, but old is as old does, I suppose. Back in those days of actual youth, I'm not sure I had any sense of what 38 would be like for me, but I imagine that had I had some measure of focus, I would have hoped to have married my true life partner, and perhaps have fathered two amazing kids whom I cherish more than anything. Regrets, I've had a few, but I could not be in a happier place.

Are the bugs winning?

If you can't tell already, this bedbug experience speaks directly to the obsessive side of my personality. Screw my other blatherings and falderal; I just might turn this blog into Bedbugs 24/7. Of course, then I'd be forced to compete for viewership with my new favorite website: http://www.thebedbugresource.com/.

Six days post-extermination and I'm still waking up with multiple new bites each day. This is not entirely unexpected. The insecticides do not necessarily kill on contact -- they typically wreak havoc on the bugs' nervous systems, eventually causing death -- but they require contact for death to ultimately occur. Because bedbugs feed only once every five to seven days and otherwise spend their time in their "harbourage," up to a week after a spraying adult bedbugs will still venture out for a night-time Rick meal. Also, eggs that were not hit with insecticide will hatch and eventually turn into bugs which will likewise seek my flesh. The goal with spraying is to coat the areas that the Rick-seekers will traverse so that they encounter the insecticide and, after leaving me with a new itchy welt, finally meet their demise. Indeed, the professionals recommend that you continue to sleep in your room after a spraying so that you can act as bait to lure the bugs out into the poisoned environs.

We, nonetheless, had concerns about the scope of Ben's spraying the other day, so we called and requested that we take another hit. I was at work, but Ben arrived before noon. He helped Cathleen disassemble our bedframe (separating the headboard from the mainframe), at which point they saw two bugs. Then, as Cathleen was moving items off of my small bedside table, they noticed two tiny little newbies scurrying off. Ben sprayed the entire bed and table directly with Bedlam. With each passing day our comfort level with the insecticides grows. In another week I will no doubt be willing to bathe in a vat of Ben's favorite pyrethroid mixture.

In the meantime, reality has forced us to cancel our annual holiday open house party, which had been scheduled for this coming Sunday. The bugs appear to be contained within our bedroom, but if someone were to come to the party and take a bug home with him...it would be an unforgivable act. On the one hand, our apartment is such a war zone right now: bagged clothing here, boxed up stuff there, that prepping it for the party would have been a huge effort. But I look forward to that party every year, and I'm bummed that we're putting it on hold. The new plan is for a bedbug free party maybe in January, but it won't quite be the same.

Chanukah

The "Hannukah" spelling really irritates me. As a language, Hebrew's intrinsic value lies in its ability to not just forgive, but to encourage, a good gathering of back-throat phlegm in nearly every sentence, what with it's baruchs and melechs, not to mention its chutzpah and chanukah. Vernacularizing it further by dropping the initial "c" would be like spelling Christmas with a "G," people.

Chanukah has seemed a little extra special this year. Maybe it's that both kids are into the menorah-lighting -- Max, because he kinda knows what is going on; Eliza, because she is wide-eye entranced by the dancing flames. Maybe it's that we've been able to share the experience with others a bit more -- two nights with the Entin Bells, this night with Jeff and Laura (after I spent a great day with Jeff, catching up with him mano-a-mano for what seemed like the first time in years). On the second night, we gave Max a Playskool pirate fisherman set-up, and he needed my help assembling the pieces. As we sat on the livingroom floor putting the toy together, with the menorah flickering on the table next to us, I could feel and see myself 30 years ago, on the livingroom floor in Yorktown, excitedly putting together some new Micronauts figure, with the menorah lighting up the front bay window.

Then, last night, as we were herding the kids to go to bed, they wanted a last look at the menorahs (we have two). With Cathleen holding Max, I picked up a protesting Eliza, and to calm her down I suggested that we sing a Chanukah song. With the apartment lights off, and the candles casting a glow about the room, and two tired kids barely keeping their heads up to stare at the flames, Cathleen and I sang through our limited Chanukah repertoire. It was one of those moments when the chaos dissolves, and we're only aware of each other, and all we have left is our happiness.

Away, ye critters

Yesterday was Extermination Day. We had spent the prior week washing all of our clothing and sealing it up plastic bags. Most of the clothing now sits in large plastic bags, to remain unworn for the next few weeks. The essentials -- a handful of shirts, pants, underwear, socks, running clothes -- are in large ziploc bags that will sit in our dresser drawers. When we have determined that our long, national bedbug nightmare is over, we can take all of the clothes out of the bags and resume normal living. Cathleen fantasizes about living in this downscaled manner in perpetuity, but she is crazy. We all know that.

Ben the Exterminator arrived at a little after 9:30 in the morning. Ben has been to our home a couple of times before to deal with what we like to call "the mouse problem." Ben seals up holes, and "the mouse problem" goes away. Bedbugs, of course, don't respect the seal-up-the-hole method, and they require a good dose of toxic juice. Ben came armed with toxic juice.

When we first scheduled an exterminator to come, Cathleen asked what insecticides they'd be using. We were told they'd be spraying something in the walls -- one of three frighteningly named poisons: Suspend, Bedlam or Tri-Di. Then they'd spray Steri-Fab on the surface areas in the room. I called my brother-in-law, John, who has a Masters in Industrial Hygiene, and asked him to weigh in on whether it was judicious to have these things sprayed in the midst of our young children. John, bless his toxicologically-educated soul, did some quick research and gave us enough information that we felt comfortable having our home so insecticided. John also seemed to suggest that we were doing a greater disservice to our children's health by raising them in the big city. John, you country bumpkin.

Well, when Ben the Exterminator arrived, Cathleen asked what he'd be using that day. "Onslaught" was his reply.

I am a total sucker for a good name. Onslaught, however, is not a good name.

We then set about calling John (no answer), researching Onslaught on the web, calling the company that makes Onslaught, and having a mini-conference call with Mike the Exterminator Boss. We learned little, except that Onslaught is a residual insecticide. This is a good thing to have when dealing with bedbugs, because when you inevitably miss the eggs or the larvae that are hidden in crevices somewhere, when they grow up and venture out the poison is still there for the killing. This seems like a bad thing when you have young children and small dogs who might venture amongst the poison. Like we do.

Ben the Exterminator does not have much of a bedside manner. He looks a bit like all of the kids in my high school that came from Putnam Valley, which is to say that he looks like he just came home from a Megadeth concert. Long hair and a dour demeanor, except that Ben is in his forties, and not an angst-ridden 15-year-old. He is a bit rough around all of the edges, and was unapologetically impatient with our chemicals-might-be-harmful paranoia. I eventually explained that we had two concerns: getting rid of the bugs, and protecting our children's health, and that he had better respect that. He finally calmed down enough to focus on working out a solution, and we ultimately decided that he'd spray the hell out of our room but nowhere else; he'd put traps in the kid's room and under our couch, and if we later found bugs in them, we'd have to revisit our gameplan.

I then worked with Ben in our bedroom, moving furniture and the like. First he unscrewed the lightswitches and outlets and sprayed stuff into the walls. Then he sprayed all over our bedframe, and throughout our dressers (in every drawer, etc.). I took apart our four-piece "lawyer's bookshelves" and spied a live bedbug sitting happily in the crevice where two of the component pieces meet -- eeeewww. Ben sprayed every piece. He then sprayed the base of the wall, where it meets the carpet, all along the perimeter of the room. And that was it. He then checked around in Sophie and Joseph's apartment for signs of bedbugs (nothing visible), and did the same in the basement. And then he sprayed in the rental apartment because they recently started seeing roaches. Total bill: $500.

Having confirmed that our lawyer's bookshelves were infested by at least one bedbug (and no doubt others), I was concerned that the 30 or 40 books in those shelves were perhaps laden with eggs. So I bagged up the books and stuck them in our freezer where they will sit for a couple of days. Bedbugs can't survive in the freezing temperatures, and so we have a little Francine Prose and Jonathan Lethem squeezed in between our sun dried tomato ravioli and our espresso-ground Gorilla coffee.

Cathleen and I had earlier talked about sleeping that first night in the basement, but I convinced her that it would be safe to sleep in our apartment. Max, however, was so excited to sleep in the basement that it really wasn't even up for discussion. Kids are weird. So we celebrated the first night of Chanukah and then slept in our basement. A great miracle happened there...