Sometimes having a wide variety of experiences is not calculated to make you more popular. However, I did manage to restrain my initial reaction when my mom emailed to say they were OK after yesterday’s 5.9 earthquake. This is probably good, as my initial response was something like “Only 5.9? Would wouldn’t you be fine?” But of course, it’s much different when you live in an area that doesn’t expect earthquakes and doesn’t take them into building plans.
On the nephew front, a few days ago they moved the feeding tube to his nose because he kept trying to pull it out of his mouth. (He comes from a long line of men who are terrible at being hospital patients. Apparently some traits manifest early.) It’s taped to his face, with a thicker bit from which tubes go off to each nostril. There are a couple of pictures in which that part is slightly displaced, in which the combination of the tubes and a somewhat peevish expression makes him look a lot like Dr. Zoidberg, the octopus-faced guy on Futurama. (I would look peevish too, if they stuck tubes up my nose!) But the good news from Mom yesterday was that he’s gained another ounce, and now they are going to try taking him off spplemental oxygen, and removing the feeding tube for a bit to see if he’ll take a bottle.
The other thing that makes me very happy is that my brother and SIL have been tagging me and Mom whenever they put pictures up on Facebook. (This has confused some of my Dutch friends, especially when he was stlil in utero and they tagged me on the ultrasound pictures. They saw my name on them and at least two people thought I ws pregnant! Facebook really needs a way to alert people that a picture is up that they’d want to see, without actually claiming they’re in it – Google+, are you listening?) It makes sense that they’re using FB instead of just emailing, since they have a lot of people who want to see these pictures, but tagging us feels like a sweet way of emphasizing the family bond – this makes me especially happy considering some of the issues with my SIL on the other side. This SIL is probably not the person I would have picked for my brother – I would have picked someone more like him intellectually, shared interests in books and all that, and instead I think she is more like him emotionally in some ways. That just goes to show what I know (not much!) because really they are far better for each other than anyone I could possibly have picked would be.
(Both are on LJ, though I doubt they’re on much at the moment, and this post is not filtered. That’s OK; I don’t particularly mind when people know I’m saying nice things about them.)
It’s not just “area not used to earthquakes” — as several news stories pointed out, the geology of the eastern US is very different from the geology of the western states, so even relatively small quakes shake harder and are felt across longer distances in the east than quakes of comparable magnitude in the west.