Kevin bought a used…

Kevin bought a used keyboard and installed it for me, so I have commas and left angle brackets again, but at various points other letters and symbols don't work. It seems to change, though, so we're hopeful that if he takes it apart again and tightens the connections, maybe that will fix it. Yesterday the p wasn't working; today it's the left parentheses. In the meantime, I can blog again, if in a somewhat odd way involving a fair bit of cut and paste at points.

We had kind of a miserable Thanksgiving. I don't know if I mentioned that Kevin couldn't join us? So it was me alone with the kids on a flight to Boston for dinner at my aunt's -- terrifying in normal circumstances, but made worse by Anand seeming cranky in the morning, and clearly feverish by the time we got on the plane. We survived the trip, made it to her house, but once there, Kavi quickly grew ill as well -- she basically slept through Thanksgiving, waking only long enough to be upset by her cousins and to eat about two bites of turkey. Thursday night we drove back to my parents' house in Connecticut, where I ended up staying up all night with a sick Anand, who threw up all over me around 3 a.m. Joy.

Friday was mostly trying to stay awake and keep the children relatively happy; they wanted me to carry them as much as possible, and I wanted to collapse. The relatives all tried to help, but the kids were having none of it. By the end of the day, my neck and back were killing me. But thankfully, they started feeling better around dinnertime, and then mostly slept that night. I managed to get them home the next day, though Anand was a total cranky nightmare on the flight, and my arms were aching from holding him down by the end of it.

Kevin took over around lunchtime Saturday, and since then, I've done a lot of sleeping and re-reading _The Bone People_ preparatory to teaching it this week. Somewhere in there, I came down with whatever the kids have, which we think might be strep -- feels like dull knives in my throat when I swallow; I'm going to get checked out on Thursday, when I have a regular doctor's appt. scheduled to talk about my aching back. According to pediatrician Roshani, even if the kids are better, we should give them the strep antibiotics, to avoid the potentialy dangerous sequelae -- rheumatic fever, etc. So we'll check that out.

The kids went to school today; they seemed mostly back-to-normal yesterday and totally fine this morning. Hopefully they'll have good days. This is the last week of classes; we just need to get through this week, and then we can all collapse for a month. I'm going to send an e-mail to my students now, telling them to keep their distance from me this week; I think I'm fine to lecture from the front of the room, but I don't think I should be doing any close one-on-one paper critiques or the like.

So basically, a terrible holiday. It was nice to see everyone, of course, and I got to know my fabulous new brother-in-law a bit better. Oh, and my mother's curries were utterly delicious on Friday, and she sent me home with fresh rolls and cutlets, which I'm still eating. Plus some maple candy. That's something.