STRICKEN!!!!

I just knew it. There is a price to pay for staying to long at the party when you have Epstein-Barr!!!!! After all the fun and frolics and late nights, I have been down for over a week with a very bad strep infection. As I write this I am still in my bathrobe and it's almost 12:00, which may seem like the good life to you, but I hate it.

Listen up, strep infections are nothing to mess around with! I nearly wound up in the hospital and had it not been for my excellent Peruvian doctor, I'd be laying in a ward right now with IV's and doctors and nurses I can't understand! We caught it just in time but the pain has been terrible.

So yes, for those of you thinking that I am living it up in Mexico (which I am), I am also paying the price. Oh, well. It's been worth it and my friends and Mexican family have all rallied on my behalf, bless them!

Soon I will be able to hear out of my right ear (I haven't been able to hear out of it for over 2 weeks, due to the ear canal being inflamed and trapping fluid in there because of the infection). In some ways it's been a blessing because my right ear is on the side of our noisy street and party hall next door so I've spent some nice time in my cubbyhole office working without being so distracted by all the noise. I've also slept better because I can't hear the traffic. I also have a good excuse for exercising selective deafness if somebody wants me to do something I don't want to do. Ha! Still I will be glad to have my hearing back and I don't think I'll complain anymore about all the noise.

The joke now at La Vendimia (from me) is to introduce all of them to you saying, "These are my new friends who put me in the hospital!"

When I get well I want to go to the second hand shop next door and buy a pair of roller blades. It's true, we go through a very crazy time when we get near age 50, and we Boomers are coming up with incredible ways to be in denial about approaching our "Golden Years." None of that boring sports-car-affair-with-the-secretary stuff for us! Ohhhhhhhhh, no! We can do more with midlife crisis because we had Johnny Quest. This gave us a purpose in life...grow up, make the stuff on Johnny Quest, then come up with a way to afford to buy it. Unfortunately, Hummers and SUV's are becoming very unpopular because of high fuel prices. They didn't say anything about that on Johnny Quest, but we certainly do have all of the interesting exotic cultures and "evil-doers" to fight with, which leads me to believe that our administration took the exotic turban wearing bad guys on Johnny Quest seriously. Makes me feel like saying, "Hey, we weren't supposed to REALLY fight with them!" Some people just don't play fair and that sucks. I think they should all be thrown out of the sandbox.

Funny the thoughts that come when one is ill and unable to physically ignore all the junk from television that's accumulated in the brain. Remember this one? "We start out with an English muffin, then add cheese and egg and some of that REALLY GOOD CANADIAN BACON yes that's how we GO 'BOUT MAKIN' BREAKFAST, McDonald's BREAKFAST...." Now, really. How many Gen X and Y's can claim that THEY remember when McDonalds created the Egg McMuffin? Huh? They don't know ANYTHING. And how many of them can claim that they remember the first calculators? A mere $400 was all it cost to have the power of basic math in your hand! Of course, we were not allowed to use them in school. Well, using them in school wasn't an issue because the only people who could afford to buy those things were people who didn't have kids.

Last night I was watching the "I Love the 80s" series on VH1, and I was very smug; Smurfs and Snorkels??? Transformers??? BAH! Those weren't real toys or cartoons! Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner (Wiley E. Coyote), Johnny Quest...those were the cartoons that made us THINK! And I remember the exact Saturday morning when I decided I didn't want to get up and watch cartoons, then spend the rest of my Saturday inventing what I saw with what was out in the garage. That was the day I became a teenager and spent a good many years being dramatic and completely awful to be around. Yechhhhh. I think I got over that when I was around 30. Finally I got sick of myself and decided to watch Johnny Quest again to sort my head out.

And then there was Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite and guys like that who brought a sense of real class to the news. "Good night, Chet." "Good night, David." Without all the cutsie flirting and how-are-the-kids stuff. Our news anchors just said, "Back to you, David." All without sat phones and satellites and embedded anythings. That was the stuff!!!!! I'm glad I was born when I was. I used to think that technology would NEVER catch up with me, but it has. I just wasn't counting on all the jargon that came with it. When Professor Peabody used to catapult himself and that nerdy kid through his Wayback Machine, no acronyms were used. He'd say, "We'll set the time to this or that date," and KAPOW there they were with Caesar or King Henry V, no acronyms needed. Things just had short names. Then I guess they ran out of names. If we had a machine like that, the instructions (written by an ESL person, of course, in one of those exotic Johnny Quest places) would read:

"SETUP: You not want go to the rong time. Please to connect the LED display to the UCNETO before attempt to activate the ENIMATE. Danger: be sure you have the correct voltage output as seen on page 235634672 section II a.XXIVI. Select correct voltage output for you specific structure. For current names of countries see Appendix V, "Current Country Names" (CCN). Disclaimer: Manufacturer is not responsible if name of country has changed since printing of instructions."

I am going to quit now, since this is my infection talking and not me!