POSITIVE

I am a walking Petri dish of horrifyingly icky streptococci.

Which is why I came back to work. I figure if I make everyone sick here, I'll have the place all to myself next week. Janis Gore suggested that the smart course of action would be to go home and go to bed, which would work fine if I wasn't so danged lazy (or if I was smart). As it is, if I go home, I will be sharing the house with Oldest Daughter, who fell ill at school and had to be taken home by Wife, who will also be there.

Meaning, that were I to show up at home, I would be greeted by Wife with a list of things that we could do around the house. Of course, she would sigh and say I should go on and get in the bed, but the rest of the afternoon would be spent listening to her uuumph-ing boxes around, and errrrrughhh-ing stacks of books off the floor, and CLANG/CLATTERING-ing dishes out of the dishwasher, and turning on the television in the bedroom so she can hear it while she works out in the hallway, and sometime in there Oldest will decide to that, hey, she feels just fine now and will get out her clarinet and start practicing the best way to make it squeak loudly, and then the phone will ring and someone will ask for Terr-uey O... O... Og... Ogu... Ogusl... Ogrigsboy, and I will have to patiently tell them if they don't hang up I'll have to come all the way to Bangalore and rip their hemmorhoids right out through their nose, and then it will be time to go get the other kids from school, and they will come home and re-enact the first twelve hours of Operation Iraqi Freedom at top volume.

So, I think I might just stay here, where it is quiet.

As for the doctor trip, it went very nicely. She was very impressed that I had lost weight since the last visit (15 pounds), and she treated me like the gigantic big fat wimpy baby I am. Which comes across much better coming from an attractive young female doctor, rather than a crusty-but-lovable old man doctor.

Sadly, just as there was with my former crusty-but-lovable old man doctor, there is the issue of the horrid exam room artwork (see earlier posts dealing with Lewitt-Him artwork). And as before, the "artwork" is fish related. AAARGHHH!! Make it STOP!!

One wall had a slick cardboard print of Van Gogh's Purty Colored Fla'rs in a cheapie gold frame, which wasn't so bad, but the other wall...O! the other wall.

Overall composition approximately 24 real live English inches wide by 18 high, in the "Old Man and the Sea"ish genre--guy in a slicker, sitting in a dinghy, battling a marlinesque-sorta looking fish, all done in that peculiar mid-1970s angular mosaic style of rough wood strips of the sort one finds at the best head shops and sea shell emporiums along the Miracle Mile at Panama City Beach.

Each strip of wood had been carefully cut and nailed into place (them's REAL nails!), and each little tortured hunk of timber was apparently lovingly salvaged from old fruit boxes. I imagine it was probably constructed by an earnest young artist struggling to break into the big time realm of rumpus room and doctor's office artwork. "If I can only get just one on The Brady Bunch, I'm set!!" Each strip was painted in the appropriate washed out green and blue and gray colors, and in the corner the proud artist woodburned (another of those fun 1970s craft activities involving possible skin damage) his or her name onto the wood..."degroot".

The Great, eh?

Oh well, then--who am I to argue?
posted by Terry at 1:20:00 PM