I'm starting to feel better, but have very little wind. I tried to start running again this weekend, but even 2 miles was a real struggle. At that point I could not go on, could barely breathe. On a lighter note, I have given in to the persistent pleading requests of my daughter (at one point during the school year, she actually finished an assignment to write a letter making an argument for something by writing to me describing why we should get another kitten. She made some good points, although some of them are probably assumptions. And Beth was not discouraging it either. Then a lady Beth knows through work who lives out in the country recently had two pregnant stray cats choose her house as a nice place to have their kittens. So, that was pretty much it. One of the kittens is even a calico, so we were planning to take that one home. Thursday though, I got the call from Missy that they were headed out there to pick up the kitten so I met them right after work, and when I got there it turned out the calico had been taken earlier that day. So we picked out another one, a tiny all black little girl kitty that we named Ruby. The lady says the kittens are 8 weeks old but I'm not so sure, because they are teeny tiny. We brought her home and Iris wasted no time making her displeasure known. She does not like this new development. At all. But lucky for us she doesn't punish us by peeing like Opal did. Anyway, Ruby's making herself right at home. And she's still so tiny that the claws are just cute.
In other news, I bought a new water heater this week. The old one has been making me very nervous. The relief valve has been leaking for a while now, and the handwheels on the shut off valves have been corroded badly for some time. And that crusty buildup...lime or something...on the fittings keeps coming back so things are leaking a tiny bit all over. So I got a new one, which I fully intend to install myself, as soon as I am confident I know what I'm doing before disconnecting the gas line.
Saturday was also the BBQ at Jordan's house in Fort Wayne. Jordan is my new boss, what with the recent merger between Zimmer and Biomet things got shaken up a bit. I'm still officially in Trident until the end of this month but as soon as that's all over I'll be back in research with an entirely legacy Biomet chain of command. The department I'll be in is about a half and half mix of the legacy companies though, so Jordan had everyone get together at his house as a welcome to the new group. It looks like the group will be good and Jordan will be good to work for. Personalities seem to mesh pretty well and everyone hit it off pretty well.

What a week. I am planning to go back to work tomorrow, for the first time in over a week. After missing two days of work the previous week, I went to the doctor on Monday (Dr. Dick was out so I saw Dr. Remington). I told him about Alex having the horrible cough and getting a Z-pack which cleared it right up and then got a lecture about 1) doctors now consider upper respiratory infections to be self-limiting, 2) antibiotics are over-prescribed, 3) it was irresponsible for Alex to have gotten antibiotics, 4) he does not do that. But he did check me out and send me across the street to the radiology clinic for a chest x-ray. Then he sent me home, saying they'd call me back by that afternoon with the results. Well, they called back about 90 minutes later asking me to come back in right away. Yep, it's pneumonia all right, and here is a particularly strong prescription of antibiotics, and I don't see you going back to work at all this week, come back Friday for a follow-up. So I spent most of the past week in bed or coughing my lungs out (I felt like Doc Holliday). The softball season also ended this past week, without me. I was unable to play due to the pneumonia, so I dropped off the bag at the park and went home. I wanted to stay to watch but Beth didn't think I should. The team won a game without me, but lost the next, so the season is over. Not sure why it's single elimination. Friday I came back and the infection still wasn't clear, so then I got three *more* days of antibiotics. And now I've spent the whole weekend doing not much more than coughing.

Oh kay. This week is not going the way it was originally planned to. To start, Beth and I had planned several months ago to take a trip to Ontario this long weekend to visit the House of Industry and Refuge, a poor-farm now-museum that I recently found out in our genealogical odyssey is where her maternal great-great-grandmother lived the last years of her life. How she got there, we do not know. But we do know she went from Iowa to Ontario somehow, had epilepsy, and died of an aneurysm around 1915. But, we cancelled because neither of us are really healthy, we don't have a passport for Beth, and we're low on funding for another trip. Just as well, really, because remember that coughing illness Beth had a couple weeks ago, when we were camping in Holland? Now I have it. It's been bad enough that I stayed home from work Thursday and Friday, but now it's bad enough that I'm looking forward to going to the doctor tomorrow. It certainly got no better over the weekend, although I did go to the Black Pine Animal Sanctuary with Beth and the kids today. Probably shouldn't have.

Remember that doctor's visit Beth had just before we went camping to Holland? And how the doctor decided that it might be pneumonia but it was probably allergy-related asthma so he was going to treat her with steroids and leave it at that? Well, she spent most of the trip coughing because of not being treated properly, and grouchy and having to pee all the time because of the steroids, and Monday went back to the clinic and saw a nurse practitioner, who was incredulous that she had only been given steroids instead of something that would actually help her when it was obvious she at least had bronchitis ad probably pneumonia. So she got a Z-pack now, and after less than a week it cleared up. Go figure. On a higher note, Missy got her braces off Monday.