So a full week after the blood sample was taken - I am not kidding - it now is revealed that mono is in fact being had, in addition to having previously been had, which I strongly suspected.

When we look back, it appears that F must have had it for quite some time, b/c she's been battling fatigue and headache and so forth for a while.

Think she's turned the corner, though. We're going to go shopping in a moment so we can gauge how much strength she actually has right now. There's the possibility of her returning to work on Monday, for a half-day at least.

Mrs. Who told me not to have any more crises.

The continuing saga........

......F is with us again, and has been since Friday night. So are her cats. I have four angry little animals in my house, and one sick daughter. To make a long story short, we are waiting on test results to see if she has mono. If she does not have mono, she has one nasty virus.

And so it goes.

F has been with us this weekend. She'll be going back home when she finishes reading her book about Princess Alice. Evidently she is finding it quite the page-turner.

We've had her this weekend because F has been battling some kind of virus or something and she called Friday night with a headache, fever, and feeling like crap. So her dad went to get her when he got off work early Saturday morning. I made soup, with just a little bit of chicken b/c F is more about the vegetables; and onion, celery, red bell pepper, carrot, potato, okra, tomato, yellow squash and zuchini, and alphabet noodles. Added some purchased chicken broth. Lots of sleeping, drinking fluids, and Mommy soup has done the trick - she looks like she feels OK now. (Oh - and I made her a nice dinner a while ago, catfish, fried okra, and salad. When she saw the okra she told me I am a nice mommy. Right, and don't you forget it, I told her.)

The rest of the soup is in tubs ready to go back to Kissimmee, along with some other stuff.

I've had discussions with people about jobs elsewhere in the country, but how could I leave her?

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

Speculative and informal claim by little-known scientist during phone interview -> article in pop sci mag -> benchmark report by IPCC. This is what happens when you don't bother to check out info that confirms what you think you know: you wind up with egg on your face.

It'd be funny if so much weren't riding on the shoddy work and the outright lies. Well, at least there appeared to be one hell of a party in Copenhagen. And that's the important thing, right?

Leaned over to pick up a glove from the floor this morning ... and wrenched my back.

%&*(^ the aging process. I mean for real.

I was able to go to work today but was stiff and walking slow. People asked if I didn't want to go home - why? I can hurt here or there just as well. Half an hour ago I took some Soma I had left over from a previous adventure (and I can't help remembering the tranquilizer Soma in Brave New World, "A gram is better than a damn!" with which I heartily agree) and so I will have to go to bed in a moment.

WHAT NEXT. (Don't answer that.)

So three people have been reported to have opened their mouths.

Evidently, according to the new book Game Change, Bill Clinton tried to get Ted Kennedy's support for Hillary over Obama in the last primary and he said this to him:

A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.

And Kennedy took this as a racial remark, and became very cold to Clinton afterward.

I don't know whether Kennedy took it that way or not (and in fact I don't know that Clinton even said it) but I really don't believe that if Clinton said it, he meant it that way. I don't think he would have had that thought, that as a black man Obama was meant to be a servant, and if he had, I don't think he would have voiced it expecting to get support. He probably meant that Obama was a newcomer in the political arena and that Hillary had paid her dues and was ready for entry into the old boys' network of Democratic politics.

One of the irritating things about the current state of race relations, of course, is that the worst possible construction is routinely put on what people say. Was it Eric Holder who said that Americans need to quit being too cowardly to have a real conversation about race? Ha ha.

The second remark is Harry Reid's, as reported in the same book, and acknowledged by him:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada described in private then-Sen. Obama as "light skinned" and "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Obama is the nation's first African-American president.

Once again, I'm not seeing the big deal here. The word "Negro" is not in current use very much, but I'm not aware of its being a pejorative. Reid's point was that Obama's presentation is mainstream enough that he could be a strong presidential candidate, and in fact he was. It would be nice if such things as skin tone and dialect weren't relevant to a candidate's acceptability, but we'd be better off if a lot of things were less relevant: how physically attractive a candidate is, for instance, especially a female.

The third remark, by Blagojevich, is a big deal.

I'm blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.

So Obama is less black than Blagojevich because he was raised in a wealthier household. "Black" is equivalent to "not affluent". Charming.

Not funny.

CNN:

Brennan: Some Guantanamo detainees will go to Yemen

Washington (CNN) - The United States still intends to send some Yemeni detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility back to Yemen despite a terrorist threat there, President Barack Obama's terrorism czar said Sunday.

...

Closing the Guantanamo facility is necessary because al Qaeda and others have used it as a propaganda tool against the United States, Brennan said.

Some time back, I read a blog post by this man in which he said that he was going to stop worrying about things he could not help. I think that was in the context of Obama's election but I can't find it. Anyway, I decided to pretty much adopt that point of view, but sometimes I cannot stand the stupid.

Let's announce, in a news medium that's read all over the world, that we undertake major policy decisions in response to al Quaeda propaganda. I believe that is the definitive exposition of the idea that "the terrorists have won".