Early this morning, Emilio felt sick at his stomach. He's thrown up three times since then and is staying home from school. Between bouts, he seems to feel fine. Right now he's in the empty computer lab that adjoins my office, where he is talking smack to a free computer football game available via ESPN arcade. Mom is at the Jiffy Lube getting a new fuel filter installed in the van (something I've been putting off until our bank account recovers from the trauma it is currently experiencing).
It has been a traumatic morning. After I dropped Nina and Pablo off at the daycare, I went back home to fetch Emilio. As Mom was driving us to ECU, I took a swig from my can of Diet Mountain Dew, felt a sudden, intense pain, and spit out both the Dew I'd been drinking and the bee that was stinging my tongue. Apparently, the little striped villain had crawled in there between swigs. Mom drove me straight to the Urgent Care clinic, where I completed the sign-in procedure with the stinger still sticking in my tongue. It stayed there while the staff worked on their McBreakfast (they were all at the front desk) and the nurse's assistant took my blood pressure. Apparently, this is not the branch that put the "Urgent" in Urgent Care. I didn't see any other patients in the building while I was there. Eventually, the head honcho came in and removed the stinger with a pair of tweezers and then walked out to write me a prescription for a pain killer. He also recommended that I take an anti-histamine to reduce swelling. The nurse's assistant came back and asked for my hip, which she promptly injected with a steroid, also intended to reduce swelling (but it will also probably make my butt look more muscular, no doubt, which is the silver lining). After the injection, they said I had to stay there for 20 more minutes (to make sure I didn't get bulk up too fast, I guess). All this while my tongue is burning (and I'm thinking: if I sneaked a live bee into a spoonful of Santa Fe chili and fed it to Brian and Dad blind, would they thank me for it?). By the time we got out of the clinic and got my pain medication prescription filled at the drug store, the pain had subsided somewhat.
Saturday, Emilio got his first taste of Cowboys Stadium, the biggest video screen in the world, and a first-row, live look at the best soccer team in world history (missing one key player): our family favorite, FC Barcelona. We won: 2-0.
