DJ Electric Daddy

I watched a bumble bee die today. Slowly. It must have taken three or four hours. Gaige got his first bee sting whilst playing in the dirt in the back yard. He was playing well by himself while Dani and I were doing yardwork preparing for someone's fifth birthday party next weekend. All of a sudden I hear him SCREAMING at the top of his lungs " I'VE BEEN STUNG, I'VE BEEN STUNG". He comes running to me holding his hand yelling with tears beginning to roll down his cheeks. So we take him to the bathroom, soak his hand in cold water, and give him some Tylenol. This helps and after about ten minutes the poor lad finally settles down, and begins telling us a story about how he got stung two times before, at his old house. Everything has a story with Gaige, and almost invariably involves some anecdotal reference to 'his old house'. I tried to tweezer the stinger out of his swelling hand, clearly visible as a small black hair protruding from the wound, but was ...

Bad things always seem to happen when you are no position to do a thing about them. Say, perhaps, 8000 feet above sea level nestled in the mountain pines for a little ski vacation. With no cell towers within any kind of reach, I felt severely cut off from civiliziation. At least, cut off from "the grid" - SMS text messaging and twitter which is about as much contact I have with civilization these days. It was in this state of incapacitation I recieved a text message that slipped through a crack in the trees. My grandmother, back home in England, had been taken suddenly and seriously ill. Don't you love those brief and vague snippets of info, that may as well have come through in morse code. "Dot dot dot dash dash. House gone. Fire. tornado. Send info later." So, desperately I try to reply to the message to confirm I am now in the know, but as luck would have it the crack in the trees mysteriously closed and no message came or went for the rest of the weekend. Y...