Ill and pregnant and ill and pregnant and ill (and a trip to Muncie)

Karin has been ill since the weekend, with symptoms of cold and fever. She began feeling especially poorly on Saturday after we completed a six-hour parenting class. She rested all of Sunday and returned to work on Monday.

On Tuesday, after seeing a doctor, she felt well enough to go with me to Muncie, Indiana, about three hours to the southeast, so I could interview for a job. Afterward, we toured the town to get a clearer idea of what it’d be like to live there. We saw the fringes of Ball State University; Muncie Central High School, which lost to Milan High School in the famous Indiana High School Boys Basketball Tournament of 1954; numerous statues of a Native American warrior; and occasional references to Garfield, which is set in Muncie (its cartoonist, Jim Davis, is from that region). We also became very familiar with the scenery between Muncie and South Bend.

Our son behaved normally through all of this. Karin & I received no indication that he was silently experiencing Karin’s illness. (This evening, watching House, M.D., we were reminded of that possibility when we observed Hugh Laurie try out a medicine by inducing a migraine in a comatose patient.) Our boy’s organ systems have developed about as much as they will inside the womb. Now, he’s putting on fat and enjoying a few more days of peace.

Reading report; dreaming report

I await my $0.64 copy of The Sorrow of Belgium. I bought it online from Better World Books. It has passed from BWB’s warehouse in Mishawaka (5–6 mi from my house) to Cincinnati, OH, to Allen Park, MI – near to Detroit. Now I’m hoping it’ll come back west.

It’s dumb for stuff to be shipped so circuitously. Would the Pony Express have taken this route? I doubt it.

Meantime, I’m making good progress reading these books:

Inner Workings by J.M. Coetzee;
The Witches by Roald Dahl;
Doctor No by Ian Fleming.

Later this month, Karin & I’ll go on a long car-ride to a place called Brown City Camp. I don’t like to listen to audiobooks, but Karin does. I’ll compromise. The key is to pick out something funny and gruesome: for instance, a book written by Roald Dahl and narrated by Stephen Fry, or by Hugh Laurie, or by some other British comic person. (Maybe also some nice sermons.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I dreamed last night that I wasn’t very fat any more – but also not very limber; and that I was trying to play soccer on a tiny field with two dozen other people, and that the passing lanes were all blocked off; and that the overaggressive coach (or whoever he was) was telling me to “jab the foot in” more, and I was like, It isn’t necessary, Sir: on this congested field I can simply hold the ball carrier off; he will lose his control of the ball. And I dreamed that I scored my only goal by climbing up a chain-linked fence and waiting for the ball to come up to me and then tapping it in from above the other players; but everyone wanted to disallow that goal.

I dream a lot of dreams like this one.