Patience.org

The big boy recently acquired this Horrid Henry book from his Mum’s recent quick trip to London and he’s finished in in about a week, reading a few pages here and there most nights.

It has 101 pages and is the first of what he calls “chapter books.” Naturally at 5 years and almost 4 months he’s justifiably proud of having finished it tonight. Especially so, when you have to explain what “conscientiously” and “multiplication” mean in the last five pages, but little else.

Having left New York yesterday where it was a high of 24°F (-4 C) and arrived in San Diego where it was 66° F (19 C) and been picked up in a stretch SUV limo (sorry, planet), I got into my room, stuck on BBC 6Music and it was playing Bowie’s Rebel Rebel and I saw this out my window…

….and I thought yeah, not bad.

So after five years and three months with kids and more than two and a half years with two, we finally succumbed to the emergency room yesterday afternoon, and inevitably, it was the younger one of the two that led us there.

For some reason, she pulled the piano bench over onto her foot. Off came the toenail, and blood appeared, so off to NYU hospital.

About five hours and six stitches later, the fearless one was back. We’ll see if this causes her to lose her nerve. I doubt it, somehow.

UPDATE: It was eight, not six stitches.

It’s a worth an hour of anyone’s time to watch the NY Times’ John F. Burns talking to Charlie Rose this week. Rose can be a fawning windbag at times (much of the time in fact) but thankfully Burns can talk, and do so intelligently.

Almost a shame he’s going to become the NY Times London bureau chief. Although London is hardly peripheral to the current power struggles in the world, his insights from the Middle East are invaluable.

And Burns, more than most journalists, understands Britain’s culpability in helping create the current situations with some shonky border drawing, to say the least, as well as the causes and likely consequences of the US government’s current actions.