The American Adventure - Vol 30

1 - 30 November 99

If you want to go straight to Vol 31, you may do so now!

...

The first few days of the month were the last few days that Birgitta, Uffe and the kids were here. They kept themselves (and us) busy with looking around, having people to dinner and going out to the Rainforest Cafe.

After the first weekend, Kajsa went back to work, leaving the Ohlsson Wevels to their own devices. One of the days they went into town with Tim, so they could wander around town while Tim worked. Late in the afternoon they got a lift home again. On another day they went off to visit Mount Vernon. They must have done some other stuff, but that is a really subject for their own adventures, not ours.

During the weekend and while he was at work, Tim managed to find some time to put together this year's Christmas card. It is a major production this year and hopefully by the time this is read you have already seen it. If not email us and tell us your new address, as we have probably sent it to an old one. The following weeks included a fair amount of home time devoted to folding cards and stuffing, addressing and sealing envelopes.

Later in the week, Taltarni started getting sick again and complained about "my ears". Kajsa, who had the day off, took her to the doctor on Friday and found out that she now had both ears infected. While her ear-drums hadn't ruptured this time, at least the last time she only had infection in the one ear. Taltarni got a stronger dose of antibiotics, some ear-drops and a sticker.

Later that day, Kajsa drove Birgitta and all to the airport. This was a big thing because Kajsa has not driven up there often, and never at night when her vision is not the best (it seems to be an XX chromosone thing). She had quite a stressful drive on the way home, not only because of the fear of going the wrong way but also because of the traffic on the Beltway which can be brutal. Meanwhile, Tim stayed at home having a very relaxing time while he watched Cats with Kalle and Taltarni. They loved it, especially Taltarni who has a real thing about music. Later in the month, when Tim went looking to buy a couple of videos, they saw Cats and they forced him to buy it (they didn't really need to try too hard!)

Then followed a working weekend. The fact that we are soon coming home really began to sink in when Tim started doing the move out preparations. The first step was the cleaning of the outdoor furniture. For quarantine reasons, anything that has ever been outside has to be scrubbed. Including furniture, bikes, golf clubs, shoes, tools and so on. Just looking around the stuff in the garage is a major source of depression as we realise how much still has be done.

The weekend wasn't all work, however. TTim took some time off to teach Kalle how to play Magic: the Gathering. This is a fantasy game you play with cards and is a lot of fun. Kalle was really proud about getting to play "adult Pokémon".

Teaching Kalle the game on this weekend was good timing on Tim's part because, on the following Friday, Kajsa took Kalle to "Pokémon: the First Movie". This was the movie's release day and, of course, Kalle had to see it on the first day, along with close to half of the child population of the Greater Washington Area. Although the movie was panned by the critics ("Not nearly as good animation as Disney", "What was that first bit about?", "What, violence is bad?", "Does anyone over ten understand Pokémon?"), Kalle and the rest of the prepubescent viewers loved it. In Kalle's class there was one, count him - one, kid who had not seen the movie by Monday morning. They must have really raked in the dough that weekend!

During the rest of the weekend we kept ourselves quite busy with Swedish School, soccer (for which we were the snack parents) and then a combined lunch/dinner at Rob and Ann-Charlotte's. Ann-Charlotte is a member of the local Swedish community and Rob comes from England. Despite being married to a Swede, he refuses to study, being of the "learn it in place" school of linguistics. He has lived in many parts of the world (he moved around as a child as much as Tim did but to more countries) and, using his method, has managed to learn Spanish, French, Swedish and, being from where he's from, a strange dialect of English. He lived for three years in Sweden where he met the lovely Ann-Charlotte and has a good handle on the language.

It was unnerving, at times, to sit in their house. Rob has put up photos of Ann-Charlotte all over the place and you can't sit without her face looking out at you! Still, all the photos were excellent and, as he was in the house alone for a few months before Ann-Charlotte joined him, it understandable that he wanted a few memory pieces around.

At first we were visiting for a late-ish lunch but it soon turned into dinner as the other guests, Mika and Chattarina, got lost and didn't turn up until around 5pm. That didn't matter to us because we had a great time just sitting around with Rob and Ann-Charlotte, talking about a wide range of topics. It is sad that we haven't spent more time with them as they are a great couple.

On Sunday, we prepared for the party we were going to hold on the following Friday. It was a little early to start preparing by our standards but, as Kajsa was working every night during the week and Tim was going away in the middle of the week, it was our last chance to get most of the stuff done. During the day we listened to Les Misérables with Kalle. He had heard a little of it a few days earlier and Tim had tried to explain the medley just after Eponine saves Jean Valjean from the Thenadiers(?). To make it easier we just went through the whole thing with him. He is a great age for this sort of thing, he is very curious and full of questions. Also, listening to the story with him somehow makes it more emotionally intense. You really feel the pain of the character's sufferings.

Tim also spent some time cleaning more of the quarantine type items. We are slowly getting through it all and the basement is starting to fill up with sparkling clean outdoor stuff. That afternoon it was extremely very windy while the temperature dropped swiftly from 20 to 10 degrees C. It seemed like winter had moved in but, sure enough with the crazy American weather, it was back up in the twenties a couple of days later.

On Wednesday Tim went to Moorestown, New Jersey, with the Commodore. There is a Lockheed Martin outpost there, one in which they make one of the most advanced radar systems currently in production. They were taken out to a very special dinner by Lockheed Martin to what is reputed to be the best seafood restaurant on the East Coast and then, on Thursday, subjected to a half day of briefings on various subjects before being put on the train back to Washington.

Then, on Friday, we had our little Christmas Drinks/Last Big Bash Cocktail Party. As always, and as warned, we put on vast quantities of food, ending up with a huge pile of left-overs. We had about forty or so people turn up and tossed out the last lot at around one in the morning. Then we spent a while tidying up the house so it would be presentable for Swedish School in the Basement. We also conducted a bottle count and found that we had failed one of our primary missions, which was to use up some of our alcohol stocks. We had told people not to bring anything but despite that, people brought stuff. So, when the mudslides and premixed margaritas were taken into account, and all the wine we were given, we had ended up with more alcohol than when we started! And only two months to get rid of it. Tim calculates that, if we drink it all in the time remaining, we are unlikely to sober up any time before about April. We are going to have to give a fair amount of it away.

The positive bit, apart from having a lot of fun with all our American, Swedish and Australian friends, was that we were able to cull our beer stocks. We have enough left to secure a couple of favours and that's about it.

So that we could fit everything in, Kajsa worked very early the next morning, leaving before six. So that Swedish School in the Basement could go ahead, Tim and Kalle stayed home from Swedish School proper. Hans picked up Kalle to take him to soccer and then Kalle and Max stayed at our house playing out of the way of the all the pre-schoolers. When Kajsa got home from work, we all headed off to the office farewell for Mick and Ann Hicking.

The day was going to finish with a party next door at Jill and David's but we missed it for two reasons. One was that we were completely buggered from the night before and the full day but, more importantly, we had also finally noticed that Kalle was sick. When Kalle had come home from soccer in the morning, his cheeks were highly flushed. Not a big surprise really, it was little chilly and the kids always run around madly for half an hour or so at the end of the game, playing "it" on the playground.

When his cheeks had not calmed down by the time we were on our way to the farewell, it was notably strange. When they were still flushed when we got home from the farewell and Kalle's temperature was slightly elevated we decided that there must have been something wrong. Tim looked in the home doctor book and noticed that red cheeks, along with body rash is a sign of measles and read that even children who have been inoculated can come down with a mild case of the disease. He went downstairs, noted that Kalle had a body rash and thought "Darn" (or words to that effect). Kalle had probably exposed all kids at soccer, all the Swedish School kids, all the kids at the farewell and, all though he probably got it there, all the kids at school. And everyone at the party.

Tim had visions of having to go through the fallout from the Hep-A party all over again. Quite a few years ago (pre-kids), Tim, Jeremy and Alison hosted a party at the townhouse they shared in Matraville. Yet again it was a cocktail party. Yet again we had a whole bunch of people. Yet again we had someone at the party who was just coming down with something virulent. Only at that party, it was Hepatitis. A very good friend, who shall remain nameless, rang up a week or so after the party and said: "Um, Tim I have some bad news ..."

- Ye-es?

"I have Hepatitis."

- Oh no, that's terrible. (Thinking: And ...?) When did you get it?

"Well, it just showed up. And that means that I was just about at my most infectious last weekend. Like, at your party."

- Hm. That's not good.

As it was it was only Hepatitis A (not one of Hepatitis' more dangerous strains) and there is a treatment for those who have been exposed to the virus. It's called immunoglobulin and it comes as a injection that has to be administered in the buttocks. As a result of the news, Tim and his flatmates had to ring around everyone who came that night and advise that they should go and get treated as soon as possible. What a lot of fun that was.

Still, it wasn't all bad. Tim still gets a good giggle about a little experiment that he and Alison set up. Because of the nature of their work, Kajsa, Alison and Tim all had access to free medical care (Kajsa had some scam going where she worked, Alison is a doctor and Tim always gets free care from the Navy). Jeremy, who was working as an orderly in a geriatric nursing home, wasn't so fortunate. So Tim and Alison decided to take Jeremy on a little drive. When we set off that evening, Jeremy had absolutely no idea where he was going - he thought they were going shopping and was somewhat bemused when they drove straight past Eastgardens.

Where they were actually going to was South Sydney Hospital where Alison was working at the time, in the Emergency Ward. She had kindly arranged for one of her colleagues to give Jeremy a free injection. Now while this sounds like an entirely magnanimous gesture, Tim and Alison (and, to a lesser extent, Kajsa) had an ulterior motive. The injection was not mandatory, it was only highly recommended. You had to have it in your bottom and a few people had reported that it could be painful.

Those of us who were fully informed didn't really want to have the injection. So, Jeremy was our involuntary guinea pig. When we got to the hospital and we had explained why we were there, Jeremy very bravely took his injection (he had had no time to work up a sensible amount of fear you see). We montitored him closely and, as he made no complaints about the injection hurting - despite oblique questions like "The injection didn't hurt did it? Not that we were worried about it or anything. We're just interested, you know" - a couple of days later we all decided to get injected as well.

Soon after we got ourselves done, Jeremy started keenly inquiring as to whether our injections hurt.

- Nope, why?

"Well, I lied to you. Mine really hurt." (See what a cruel and nasty, manipulative brother Tim has. Imagine someone trying to trick you like that. Disgraceful. It was enough to stop Tim from feeling guilty about the incident with the compass and the toe nail.)

At about this point, Alison piped up with a question "How much did they give you?"

"I don't know, they did give me a little bit extra though. There would have only been a little bit left in the bottle so they gave me all of it. They said that it would give me more protection."

"Oh, well that explains it" Alison said, "It always hurt a little more when you have more fluid injected."

"But it doesn't hurt just a little bit. It actually hurts a lot. It still hurts."

After some investigation, Alison found out that Jeremy hadn't got just "a little bit extra". Like Alison, her friends at the Emergency ward were obviously not good doctors. (Alison tells stories about how her patients always used to say that she seemed so young to be a doctor and that her parents must be so proud. She said that she always told them "Oh, but I'm not a good doctor.") When her friends had made the calculations for how much immunoglobulin Jeremy needed, they made a wee error and ended up giving him 10 times the proper dosage, plus the little bit extra. That little bit extra would have probably been just about the dose he needed in the first place. No wonder his bum hurt! On the positive side, he was pretty much invulnerable to any disease for six months or so.

Anyway, when he realised that Kalle had all the symptoms, Tim immediately began dreading the task of ringing around to all the party guests to tell them that they had been exposed to a case of the measles.

Fortunately, a visit to the doctor the next day confirmed that what Kalle had was the benign "Fifth Disease", also known as "slapped cheek". There was no need to ring around the guests as it never appears in adults. Later we also found out that, as long as the condition is confirmed as Fifth Disease and not measles, there is no reason to keep the kids at home. Unfortunately we only found that out after Tim had already spent the day at home looking after Kalle.

As usual, the trip to the doctor gave us the opportunity to get a few other things checked out (we are the really bad type of patients who tend to hoard their medical problems and only go to the doctor when the conditions get really severe or the ailments start to number around five or so). Taltarni had started pulling at one of her ears again that morning, saying "my ear, my ear". The inspection revealed that she had yet another ear infection. Tim, who finally relented and let a doctor examine him after weeks of noticing that his ears felt a little odd, was found to have an acute infection in both ears. Probably picked it up of Taltarni the first time she had it.

So, even though it was Kalle that we were really worried about, it was Tim and Taltarni who walked out of the doctor's office with prescriptions. And what fun we had getting the 'scripts filled ... suffice it to say that there are some downsides to the mantra of "competition" and there are some imcompatibilities between the concerns of healthcare and business.

One of the best thing about having Kajsa work at Kohls, apart from the fact that she knows all the department store marketing tricks now and will be less affected by them, is the Biannual Associate Shopping Days. On these days, all those who work at Kohls get an additional discount on top of their normal 15% discount and any sales or clearance reductions.

The bad thing about this is that these reductions can help you to get into a complete shopping frenzy. Just let it be said that, on that Monday, Tim and Kajsa's shopping bill was the biggest of any in the whole store that day and we should never have to buy shoes again and it will be quite a while before we need new jeans or shirts.

The next evening was devoted to Kalle's soccer farewell. As usual the end of soccer season party was held at the Vienna Fuddruckers. The kids raced around madly, trying to persuade their parents to put money in the video game machines, we ate burgers and then there was a presentation of trophies. Fortunately, at their level, everyone on the team gets a generic trophy, otherwise Kalle would have to make do with the "Trophy Awarded To The Player Most Likely To Not Be Paying Attention When The Ball Rolls Past Him".

Like many things in his life, Kalle is more interested in the idea of playing soccer than the actual practice of playing soccer. He spends most of the time on the field scoring goals in his head, then jumping up and down in excitement at his efforts and paying absolutely no attention to what is really going on around him. Occasionally, he has brief moments during which his connection to earth is stronger than normal and he will run after the ball, give it a couple of kicks and then lapse back into his fantasy world. It should be noted that you can score a lot more goals in a fantasy world and the all the jumping up and down in celebration afterwards does ensure that Kalle gets some exercise from it!

Thursday marked the celebration of Thanksgiving. We went over to Mosberg's for an excellent meal, not quite the standard Thanksgiving fare but there was turkey and the food was definitely far more healthy than the normal spread. The evening ended up with Tim and Hans talking earnestly about the mechanistic/indeterminate nature of the universe while everyone else sat around talking about much mundane things (Pokémon, shoes, horsies and so on).

Kajsa went back to work the next day, the first day of a very full shopping weekend. Retailers call the Friday after Thanksgiving "Black Friday" because with all the sales and the proximity of Christmas, absolutely everyone in the country gets into a shopping frenzy. Kajsa's store turned over a huge number of sales over the weekend and the parking lot was full most of the time. Kajsa came home completely exhausted every night.

In the meantime, Tim bimbled around at home with the kids. On Friday he went out with the idea of buying a couple of small hardware items and getting the band of his new watch resized. It was a bad day to do that sort of thing. First they drove past a parade at Reston Shopping Town, so they had to stop to look at it (the kids love a parade). After the parade, they managed to get stuck in the parking garage because everyone wanted to leave at the same time.

Then they went to the hardware store that Tim had driven to Reston to see and found that it was one of the stores that is going out of business - and has been for about two months. Because they have had their sales going on for so long, the store is pretty much picked clean. There is barely a single useful item left in the shop, just crap. Nevertheless, there were crowds of people shuffling around looking at the crap and Tim, who was shuffling around with them, eventually realised that he wasn't going to find what he needed. So he gave up. Yet another highly unsuccessful shopping experience.

He did eventually find a jewellers in Great Falls village who could make adjustments to his watchband. If he had gone there in the first place, it would have taken half an hour. Time elapsed, slightly under four hours.

The rest of the weekend was relatively quiet. The most exciting thing that happened was that the Christmas lights went up. Despite the assistance generously offered by Kalle and Taltarni.

We closed out the month in Orlando, Florida. We travelled there on the last day for Tim's "Business Trip". Our destination had been a big secret as far as the kids were concerned and we had been warning people for weeks not to tell them where we were going. We set it up so that they didn't even know that we were going away (let alone where to) until we brought them home from school that day.

When Kajsa arrived home with the kids, Tim greeted them with a statement that he some bad news.

We couldn't get a babysitter for the kids and so they would have to come with us and miss a couple of days at school.

Kalle thought that that sounded a little sad but, given that we were going to go on an airplane and stay in a hotel, he would probably get over his disappointment.

When we finally got to Florida and were on our way to the hotel we were amazed that neither of Kalle nor Taltarni noticed any of the Disney paraphernalia which was all over the place on huge billboards. Not that we were disappointed about that, the longer they didn't know about our final destination, the less time they would have to get overexcited!

On quite a few occasions during the month, our dinner time arguments ranged beyond what was and was not going to be eaten. Kalle and Taltarni have become very competitive when it comes to who receives mamma's affection. For a long time now, there has been almost daily discussions on whose turn it is to sit next to mamma. Of course, whenever it is not Kalle's turn, he is convinced that Taltarni always gets to sit next to mamma. It started to get somewhat depressing for Tim because the argument could equally well have been about whose turn it was to not sit next to pappa. This led to a few discussions in which Kalle tried to convey that all he wanted to do was sit next to both mamma and pappa (strangely enough this line of reasoning was only brought into play on the days when it was Taltarni's turn to not sit next to pappa). Taltarni was far more straightforward. She got into the habit of listing all the people that she likes.

"I like mamma, and Tasha, and Hanna, and Agnes, and Kyle, and Anna Carin, and Max, and Johan, and Petra, and Jenny, and moster (Birgitta)."

- And pappa?

(Pouting.) "No!"

- And Kalle?

(Bottom lip waaay out now.) "No!"

Somehow she has also got it into her head that "Boys like Taltarni" and she tells us this frequently. Certainly a sign of bad things to come sometime about ten years or so from now.

One evening, after a long discussion about who Taltarni likes and doesn't like, she was headed off to bed. When she got half way to the stairs, she stopped, turned around and said to Tim, who was sitting in front of the TV, fiddling with the remote: "You watch movie, okay!"

- Thanks Taltarni, I'll do that.