Friday Four

1. Ugh! The past few days have featured the Van Horn family taking turns enduring a stomach virus. I'll spare the reader further details, except for the cute part: I am, apparently, the "go-to" parent for Little Man. Pumpkin, on the other hand, said, "I want my Momma," when she fell ill.

Side note: I discovered in conversation yesterday that Pumpkin's vocabulary includes the portmanteau, "ginormous". (Until just now, I had no idea that that word had originated as 1940's military slang: I heard it for the first time in the movie, Elf.)

2. Word to the wise: As much as I like our Dropcam, it can't work if it can't call home. Luckily, we have a radio monitor as a back-up, which somewhat offset the frustration of learning that "Dropcam [was] down for maintenance," when we were up at 4:00 a.m. tending to one sick kid and needing to monitor the other. Dropcam is fine -- but you should have a back-up system.

3. Halloween -- and the frequency with which daycare failure has been keeping me from using my home office lately -- evoke thoughts of cobwebs. Hopefully, things won't get quite to this level before I get back in there!

4. Evaluating possible future positions in my wife's medical career has been made much easier with this cost-of-living calculator. For example, despite an impressive-sounding salary, a position in San Francisco would have left us worse off than we are now. I suspected that might be the case, since, when we were in Boston, I met several people who had moved there from San Francisco to save money. Boston ain't cheap, and San Francisco is a no-go.

-- CAV