Shining Emeralds, Game Six

This day begins for me at 5:30 a.m., when I wake up from dreams about things that can go wrong at the Honors Graduation Ceremony, which starts at 8:00 a.m. I get to school by 7:00 and my printer doesn't work.

While I'm attending graduation ceremonies, the Wells family is transporting Pablo to Ardmore, where he has a double header. They win the first, 7-2, and the second, 5-2, running their win streak to six games, following a season-opening loss.

After the Honors Graduation Ceremony and the Traditional Commencement are over, I head to Emilio's noon game, still in my formal graduation clothes. The game starts late.

When the Wells family gets Pablo back to Ada from Ardmore, we get in the van and head back to Ardmore, for Nina's 4 o'clock game.

Nice one-touch with the left from the top of the box to give us a 2-1 lead. That's Nina's 7th goal of the season (including one for the Co-Ed team).

In the second half, Nina escapes and delivers an effective strike to the corner. The ref called this one offsides, but it's a bad call.

After the game, we drive to north OKC to deliver Nina and Mari to an overnight birthday party for Anneliese. We then head back to Ada, stopping at Wendy's along the way for a Frosty (as Emi and I often did when he was attending FCBEscola Soccer Camp in OKC last summer).

Norah's in Town

American Gothic Variations

Technical difficulties kept me from updating this blog over the past month (a faulty DVD and a computer--Mari's--that hasn't been working well lately), but Mari managed to take a roll of Grant-Wood inspired photos of the twins using a good old-fashioned camera a couple of weekends ago (don't think the Wood reference was intentional, but who knows?). In the 48 hours of my post-op condition, I am not supposed to lift up my babies, but there's nothing to stop me from uploading these photos.




The Emilio shots are on the next roll, which we have yet to develop.

American Gothic by Grant Wood (1930).

I Survived

Surgery was successful, I'm told, and I'm home now. Gruesome details below. Skip 'em if ya wanna.

That would be me on the table in the photo at left and Dr. Charous in the middle with his assistant, Pinky (her real name).

I've got a big bloody scar on my neck and a draining tube that drips blood and other liquid junk into a little plastic pouch that is pinned to my shirt. That's supposed to be there another day (or two?) and will then be replaced by a gauze pad.

My throat is sore and hurts when I swallow. I feel like something might tear if I raise my chin, so I don't want to do that. Mom is at the pharmacy picking up prescriptions and the kiddos are all downstairs, where they do not have to face the temptation to pull at my tube and poke my sore spots.

I haven't had anything to eat or drink since last night besides a little bit of water at the hospital, so I'm missing my Diet Coke caffeine.

Joining the Lone Star Conference

Before reporting for surgery today, I called the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma to accept the tenure-track teaching position in the East Central English department, which he had offered me one week previously (see image at right).

For those of you who don’t know (and I didn’t before tonight), the East Central sports teams (the Tigers) are in the Lone Star Conference along with some familiar Texas schools (those blog readers who are neither sports fans nor natives of the region may want to skip to the next paragraph): Abilene Christian, Angelo State, Midwestern State, Tarleton State (in Stephenville), Texas A&M-Commerce, Texas A&M—Kingsville, West Texas A&M (in Canyon). Other Oklahoma schools in the Conference include Cameron (in Lawton), Northeastern (Tahlequah), Southeastern (Durant), Southwestern (Weatherford). Somehow Eastern New Mexico snuck in there, too.

It was a tough decision for Mari and I to make and we went down to the wire with it, but three influential reasons in the plus column helped tip the balance:

1) It is a positive professional move for me;

2) It will be great to live within a 3-hour driving distance from a lot of family members in the Metroplex who are likely to be interested in helping us out with some of our childcare needs;

3) It will be nice to live in a warmer weather climate, where the kiddos can enjoy the outdoors for longer stretches of the year. Januaries in Ada have an average high of 50 and a low of 28 (that’s 10 and -2 degrees centigrade), which is not unlike Marches in Chicago where the average high is 47 and the low is 32 (that’s 9 and 0 degrees centigrade). The average highs throughout the Ada winter are about 16 (8 C°) or more degrees higher than they are in Chicago. Daddy like.

We are confident that Mari will be able to find an elementary school teaching job in the area, but reason four in the plus column is the late-breaking news that:

4) Mari might be able to land a full-time job teaching introductory and advanced Spanish language courses for undergraduates at East Central. The pay would be less than what she would get teaching elementary school, but the hours would be better and it would be great for us to work at the same place and she is excited about the intellectual challenge. The dean told me that he should know by the end of June whether they’re going to have the budget to hire her.

The biggest minus in the negative column is leaving behind all of our wonderful friends in Chicago and frankly, I just don’t even want to think about that right now.

Going under the knife

For those of you who don't know, I'm having surgery today at 1 p.m. to remove the benign "thyro-glossal duct cyst" in my neck. It's an oupatient procedure, but I'll get general anesthesia and won't be able to pick up Emilio for a couple of days. Maria is going to have to take a couple of days off from work and Dad is flying in tonight to lend a hand as well. Mom is already here and she will go with me to the hospital and drive me home afterwards.

In other news, I am graduating this Sunday, Mother's Day, with a Ph.D. in English (see image at right). Lisa and Melissa are coming up for that and will watch the kids so that they don't have to endure the ceremony.

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene Six: The Middle East

In January, the Bush Administration announced plans to send another 20,000 U.S. troops to Iraq and named Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, an expert on counterinsurgency, as U.S. commander of troops in Iraq. Petraeus (on the right in the photo at right) replaces Army General George Casey. Throughout the spring, Bush urges the country to get behind the Petraeus plan.

In February, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he would bring home more than 1,600 of the 7,100 British troops in Iraq. In March, British troops pulled out of Basra; two days later, rival Shiite factions began battling over a government building that had been evacuated by the military. In April, the British government announced that it would no longer use the term "The War on Terror" to describe its foreign policy aims.

On the 4th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, icasualities.org estimated that 3,476 coalition troops and 62,474 Iraqis had died as a result of the war in Iraq. A year ago, the numbers were 2,536 coalition troops and 38,576 Iraqis. On average, then, according to this count 15,000 Iraqis have died each year since the start of the U.S. invasion in March of 2003, with almost 25,000 dying over the last year (an average of 68 per day). (Meanwhile, between 50,000 and 100,000 are dying each year in Darfur).

But the casualty count in Iraq may, in fact, be more than ten times as high as the estimates of icasualties.org. As was mentioned in this blog in December, according to an article published in the Lancet more than six months ago, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey", a study done by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that between March 2003 and July 2006, 655,000 Iraqis (2.5% of the population) or 540 per day died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation. On April 18th, The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq criticised Baghdad for concealing casualty figures.

The men in the AP photo at left, which was taken a week ago today, are mourning relatives who were victims of a car bomb that exploded the previous day in the Shiite holy city of Karbala when the streets were packed with people heading for evening prayers. The bomb killed 58 and wounded scores more near some of the country's most sacred shrines.

In March, the United Nations reported that 2 million Iraqis, including the judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death, have fled their country since the war began. Iraqi refugees were flooding Syria and Jordan, where they now account for 5 and 12 percent of those countries' total populations. According to the State Department, by late March, the United States had accepted 500 of those refugees. The Bush Administration agreed to reverse its policy of the last several years and discuss stabilizing Iraq with high-level diplomats from Syria and Iran.

In April, former CIA Director George Tenet published a book accusing the Bush Administration of taking his phrase “slam dunk”—referring to intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—out of context in order to justify a war that the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense had resolved to wage before September 11, 2001.

On April 19th, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that the United States has lost the war in Iraq.

The day before Reid's announcement, a senior U.N. inspector revealed that in the past two months Iran has doubled its capacity to enrich uranium.