The things parents do for their children

If you’d have asked me, pre-Ottawacker Jr., what was the most ridiculous thing I had ever done, I might have come up with a few answers. I once, for example, superglued my hand to my penis (not deliberately, I add, not that that makes it any better), and there was the time I organised a friend’s stag do, got him drunk to the point of passing out, roped in a few willing medical students to plaster cast his leg up to his boxers and the pretended he had fallen down the stairs and broken his leg, causing him to cancel his honeymoon. There were several steps in-between, but as he wandered down the aisle on crutches three days later, the slow realisation that I had somehow forgotten to tell him and his fiancée that the plaster-casting was a prank might have led me to say “Oh, fuck” out loud in the church, to the absolute disgust of his octogenarian auntie who was sitting next to me. That was a bad one. (Not as bad as his wife’s reaction when she found out immediately after the wedding, of course, my opening gambit of “you’re going to laugh, Monica, but…” proving woefully inaccurate.) Today, however, I might have done something more ridiculous. Today, I got up at the crack of dawn to drive Ottawacker Jr. to the airport so he could look at the departures board and confirm that the new Porter Airlines service between Ottawa and Victoria (direct, the same flight he will take in a couple of months) was “on the board”, as Ottawacker Jr. assures me people in the know say. Why I am so weak-willed as to say “yes, of course I can get up early and drive you in so you can look at the board” and not strong enough to say “are you insane? Look at the departures board on the airport website” is open to conjecture. I might be trying to make up for past misdemeanours. By the time we had returned from the airport, I had a headache (not enough coffee) and Ottawacker Jr. just had enough time to get his lunch ready for school and head out of the door.
 
The rest of the morning was spent in some sort of limbo: I had, yesterday, amassed a spreadsheet of what I needed to do in order to be come a surprise success at my time of life. I screwed up the morning completely, watching a YouTube documentary about wartime Berlin in colour. Then I snapped out of it, and spent the rest of the day doing my best to catch up. At 3.15, I had a phone appointment with my doctor who assured me he will do what he can to find me a new rheumatologist (although he cannot guarantee that he will be as inept as the previous one), arranged some bloodwork to see my status of immunity to measles (we are in a vaccine sceptic-induced outbreak here in Ontario), and told me he would send me for an MRI for my back, but the ENT specialist he wanted to hook me up with had a three-year waiting list. A THREE-YEAR WAITING LIST. I am on it. By then, I hope my disappeared sense of smell will have returned.
 
I then got back to work, having railed to Mrs. Ottawacker about the healthcare service in Canada, and finished my 2015 photo album. I was going to send it off for printing, but then realised we might be a week away from the a brand new postal strike. Well, why not? It’s only been three months since the last one.
 
There was nothing untoward about the superglue incident, by the way. I was fixing a light switch and needed to go to the toilet. The rest, I am sure, you can imagine.