The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Thanks to everyone who left a comment or emailed me about Dad’s being in the hospital. He’s doing much better now and he expects to be sent home from the hospital on Friday.

I was surprised at the number of folks who wrote in defense of People and US

magazines. I suppose that everyone’s got his or her own favourite brain candy. I’m no different: I

myself prefer comic books and have recently been enjoying the set of

old-school Dungeons and Dragons manuals that David “This Boy is Toast” Petite gave to me for my birthday.

When I visited Dad yesterday, he said to me: “I don’t really want

magazines. What I really want is some light entertainment on TV. I want

to watch Oprah and Dr. Phil.”

I sighed, pulled a twenty from my wallet and put in an order for an

in-room TV. Dad’s always been there for me, and if he’s bored stiff in

a hospital room and hankering for daytime TV, I’m going to make sure he

gets some.

I hope he at least tunes in to Law and Order at least once in a while.

Dad wound up in the hospital at the start of the week. Despite the fact

that his donor kidney failed earlier this year, he still has to take

immunospuppresant drugs to keep from rejecting it (I’m told it’s bad to

remove it even though it no longer works). Unfortunately, that leaves

him open to a number of germs that most of us would shrug off. He

contracted some kind of lung infection and showed really bad fever

symptoms, which led to his being taken to the hospital.

Back in 1999, a few months before my sister’s wedding, Dad got very

ill, and a good chunk of what kept the ol’ warhorse going was my sister

saying “I’ll be very sad if you’re not at my wedding.” Following the

same tack, when I visited him in the coronary care unit last night, I

got him sitting up and conversing lively with talk about

how Chanukah with Wendy’s family went (the latkes were delicious, they really made me feel like part of the family and I

made out like a bandit, present-wise) and various wedding plans.

The silver lining in the could is that Dad’s condition inspires me to keep working out and eating right.

I’m going to drop by this afternoon and leave him his favourite light reading: People and US magazine. Dad’s a great guy, but his taste in reading material is atrocious.

Once again, if you have any prayers, good thoughts (or if any of you Feng Shui types want to move the coffee table a couple of inches for his sake), they’d be appreciated.

I’ve been spending the day at the Internet + Society 2004 Conference, and it’s been pretty good. I’ve taken lots of notes, but I have to clean them up and format them before I can post. Cool presentations all ’round, and I got to see some old friends and get plenty of congratulations for getting engaged to Wendy.

More later!