Oh, the weekend wasn't a complete failure. I did manage to find a swanky athletic shoe store in a swanky little northeast Ohio town while I was there, and I got these:

I know, I know. These probably look like a goofy eccentricity at best and a terrible idea on the other end of the range of possibilities. I mean, they look like some weird combination of shower shoes and isotoner gloves, right? You can probably tell from the picture that the soles are pretty thin. And these are running shoes? 

Well, yes. Although I knew a few years ago that a former student of mine picked up some of these shoes and loved them, but it wasn't until I read Born to Run (info here and here) that I had a desire to get some myself. It's not that Born to Run particularly advocates for Vibram Five Fingers shoes, though they are mentioned. It's that they advocate for the kind of natural running that's fostered by running barefoot, (potentially) in sandals, and in these shoes. 

Now, I haven't actually gotten the chance to run in these shoes yet. I may very well hate them, though that's obviously not my expectation. The point at this time is that the weekend wasn't a total failure.

Really, not by a long shot--it was also nice to see my mom and my in-laws and to go to a nice Super Bowl party at my brother-in-law's future in-laws'. 

Our threesome arrived at my mom's Wednesday night, and I should have known it was going to be a bad few days from the way that the local Borders, despite being willing to honor my 33% off coupon, didn't have the book I so wanted (Steven Brust's newest in the Vlad Taltos series, Iorich). Nor did, for that matter, any Borders within a reasonable driving distance of my mom's north-central Ohio home. Did Brust suddenly cease to be an important fantasy writer? Last I checked, his stuff was still great!

And it was all downhill from there.

Let me back up for a moment to mention that last Saturday, Lauren abruptly developed hives which, over a few hours, spread to pretty much her entire body. A late-night (or, to be perfectly accurate, early morning) trip to the emergency room and shots of benedryl and prednisone  later she was on the road to recovery. Following a schedule of the same in pill form for the next week she was totally fine the next day and all through the next week. 

Then, in the wake of my literary disappointment, on Thursday night she started developing hives again (just as the prednisone ran out). We went to an Urgent Care facility where we were only barely given any attention--basically just enough for another prednisone shot and a suggestion that she might try Claritin instead of Benedryl. None of which were more than mildly helpful. By evening Lauren was feeling pretty bad and by 1 or 2 in the morning it was unbearable. Time to go to the emergency room.

Except that she had no choice but to bear it, because we were snowed in. I shoveled just enough of the driveway to get the car out of the garage and stuck in the snow (still in the driveway) before we  went back inside. Lacking anything better to do, I put in a half hour of shoveling snow, which was just enough to get the car unstuck and back in the garage, but Mom has a pretty long driveway and, anyway, did we really want to take our chances with being stuck in the snow at 3 or 4 am? I couldn't do much more than sympathize, though I could do that. I liken it in some ways to the way that the cholesterol medication I've been on can sometimes cause flushing, such that it feels like I have a sunburn on my entire body. Like with the hives, cool washcloths help... but likewise they leave you chilled to the bone and uncomfortable... with the initial discomfort of flushing or hives still there. Now, when I had flushing, it could drive me nearly out of my mind... but I knew that in a half hour, forty-five minutes, an hour tops, the awful sensation would dissipate. So no matter how bad it felt, I've always known I just need to endure for that limited time. I can't imagine having that kind of feeling and having no idea when--or if--the feeling would go away.

In the morning, thoroughly snowed in (and Lauren still thoroughly miserable), Mom called around to people she knew to get our driveway plowed out. In the process, calling someone from her church, she recalled that the man's wife was a nurse practitioner (or some such thing), so I had a brief consultation over the phone--which, it turned out, was better than any of the ones we paid for in Emergency Room or Urgent Care. Whether because of our personal connection, her intelligence and expertise, or just the fact that we weren't one patient in the midst of a long queue, she took the time to go through our whole story and the various symptoms, ruling out some things and giving us some recommendations (apparently Zantac, for instance, can be useful in the treatment of hives--who knew?!). We could not, per her recommendation, get in touch with one of our doctors back in Indiana to get another prescription of prednisone, and while the Zantac added to Benedryl gave some comfort, we ended up back in another Emergency Room around midnight (and for a couple hours afterward). This was the Cleveland-area EMH Health Campus Emergency Room which, in our experience, was the creme de la creme of emergency/urgent care. The nurses and doctors were--despite a little flakiness at one point--far more attentive than any we'd seen in the past week. And unlike the urgent-care place, they actually gave Lauren a prescription to follow up her treatment.

Lauren is not, at this point, perfectly recovered. And, of course, we have no idea what might be causing this reaction (we suspect it's related to changes in her body caused by pregnancy and childbirth, but that's just a contributing factor). She's at least at a manageable level of discomfort and hopeful. High on our priority list when we get home from this road trip is to get an appointment with an allergist. We've got to get this figured out.

The other night while out at a restaurant chain, Lauren overheard the people behind us talking about the addition of Ellen Degeneres to American Idol, and they were saying that they weren't going to watch now that she's on. Further, one of them commented that "Maybe she's just there to judge the gay contestants."

Okay, so it's good to know that your refusal to watch American Idol is, in fact, based on homophobia. Which is weird, because if you've been watching American Idol long enough, you've certainly seen your fair share of homosexuals and, though you may not have been aware of it, probably cheered for some as well. And if you're not aware of that, well, I guess you are just as ignorant as your comments led me to believe.

Really, it just baffles me--it's not like Ellen Degeneres is some kind of controversial figure, all in-your-face-about-homosexuality. She's open, but if she wasn't openly gay, you probably wouldn't know it. She's just a funny, sweet woman. I don't know whether she'll be better or worse as a judge than anyone they've got now, and since I don't watch American Idol I don't really care how good she is as a judge... but it seems crazy to me for anyone to dismiss her out of hand because she's a lesbian.

Yesterday, I suppose with a bit of brag, I posted on my Facebook status that I "had a gourmet dinner: pan-seared salmon, bi-color baby romaine salad with goat cheese, walnuts, and Asian dressing, and hot cornbread chock full of kernels--all at Chez Sherck."

Sounds good, no? The fact of the matter that this was a pretty simple meal, and I just dressed it up with words. A couple cheap salmon fillets with salt and pepper, cooked in a cast iron skillet; the baby romaine came packaged at the grocery store and I just added some goat cheese and crushed walnuts, while the dressing was homemade with a little dressing mixer from Pampered Chef that has lines on the side marking how much of different ingredients to put in to make a salad dressing. The cornbread was the only thing that took much work (recipe from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice).

One of my friends commented: "Wow - I thought you had a new baby! Is all of that code for frozen pizza or are you guys just making parenthood look that good and that easy?" I don't know what parenthood's been like for anyone else--it's certainly had its challenges and frustrations (some days more than others!). But when you're lucky enough to have both parents at home, it's not so hard to find the time to make a nice dinner most nights, especially since we've already been in the habit. We're probably saving money too, all things considered. Of course, it probably helps that I'm the one doing the cooking rather than Lauren, because as the primary caregiver for Thea, she's usually more tired out than I am, so if we were relying on her for the home-cooking we might be worse off.

Fortunately, things are as they are, we're both at home, and we're eating well.

It seems to me that a good many of our problems here in the 21st Century are of the "boiling frog" type. Are you all familiar with the analogy I'm making? If you drop a frog into boiling water, it will immediately get the heck out, because the problem is patently obvious. If you start a frog in room temperature water and gradually raise the heat, it will sit there comfortably until it boils. Incidentally, my understanding is that the story's not quite literally true, in that unless it's really really gradual, the frog will jump out of the heating water too, but the point is that we humans--both on the individual, the communal, the national, and the global scale, are also not well equipped to deal with creeping problems, and I'm suggesting that most of our biggest problems are of precisely that type: climate change and resource depletion (from fossil fuels to fisheries, from water to forests and rare metals) spring most immediately to mind, but the gradually-eroding standard of living (cool gadgets aside), our apparent economic slide, and even the problems in our health-care system participate in this class of problem, with the added twist of being fairly complicated and opaque at the same time, which is another way besides being gradual that a problem can be "out of sight, out of mind."

All of these problems have been shaped by impersonal forces including the impersonal force that is the aggregate of all the human interests on the planet, which ends up being more than the 6.8 million people living on the planet, for a reason I'll address shortly. We each bear some measure of responsibility for the problems and their solutions, a sort of massive  "tragedy of the commons." In the case of many of these problems, those of us in the first world, because of our standard of living, bear a greater responsibility.

However, more than any of us as individuals, the actors with the most power to influence our world for good and ill are artificial entities--corporations and governments. Both have far more resources and power at their disposal not only to do direct harm or remedy but also to shape the environment of the commons in which we all operate. 

The big problem, then, is that both of these types of artificial entities operate--leaving out some exceptional individual examples--on the short term. To be fair, this is true of individual people as well--we didn't really evolve to deal with truly long-term problems or truly large-scale forces. But this is especially true of these artificial entities. Corporations, beholden to their stockholders, are driven to be profitable quarter by quarter and to increase their value. If a long-term benefit cannot also pay short-term dividends, often it is dead in the water. Politicians, too, operate on a short time-frame, needing to be re-elected (in the U.S.) every 2, 4, or 6 years. And as far as that goes, in order to get re-elected, they are beholden to 1) the voters and 2) the people who give them money to finance their campaigns to convince the voters to re-elect them. Now, to which are politicians more responsive? The amorphous bulk of the public who don't pay that close of attention, are easily misled and distracted, and have few other choices anyway? Or the people footing the bill, who no doubt pay quite close attention, at least to any legislation that is relevant to their interests? At least in part, though, this is not simple corruption, but a temptation built into the system--modern election campaigns are expensive to run, and they happen with relative frequency. And even with the voters, politicians need results right away--look for example at how quick people have been to criticize the stimulus package as ineffectual, even before all its monies were dispersed! What politician can afford to put long-term interests ahead of short-term interests?

This, then, is the problem: long-developing problems that will require long-range solutions, but the entities with the most power to tackle these problems are stuck in short-term paradigms.