A few months back, I started getting weird abdominal pain once in a while. It would start off with stomach cramping, and then proceed to spread around to my back, where it would hurt outrageously for 20-40 minutes, and then stop very abruptly. Since the incidents were pretty infrequent, I ignored them for a while, but finally got off my kiester to go to the doctor and have them checked out.

My doctor’s first suspicion (which mirrored that of Mom McMains) was that I might have some gall bladder issues. He sent me off for blood work, which came back normal, and an ultrasound, which showed a bunch of tiny gallstones. The recommended treatment? Gall bladder removal.

The gall bladder is a small, hollow organ that stores bile from the liver. Bile is used to metabolize fats, and when you eat a big or especially fatty meal, the gall bladder contracts and squeezes out this emergency backup supply of bile to help your body deal with the influx of fat. Apparently most people’s livers can pump out enough bile quickly enough that the gall bladder isn’t essential, and can be removed with very minimal, if any, effect on one’s metabolism.

I thought it rather curious that I would get gallstones. Evidently, the high-risk group for gall bladder disease is fat, sixty year old Hispanic women — a demographic I fall squarely outside of. But I have little doubt no that the diagnosis was correct, as my most recent attacks occurred after having a big plate of nachos or greasy pepperoni pizza for dinner. (Ironically, I had an attack at Maggie’s birthday party before I knew what the cause was, and tried to help myself feel better by scarfing down as many pieces of Chuck E. Cheese pizza as I could lay hands on.)

My surgery is scheduled for December 19. (The doctor’s office wanted to schedule it for the 16th originally, but I figured spending my wife’s birthday in the hospital would be impolitic.) While gall bladder surgery used to be more of an ordeal, the procedure is now generally done laproscopically, which means that instead of cutting your abdominal wall wide open, the surgeon instead makes several small incisions, and works a camera and his tools in through those small holes. As a result, recovery time is greatly reduced.

I was pretty nervous about the surgery at first, but my surgeon has lots of experience with this kind of work (which is now the most commonly performed procedure in the United States), and did a fine job of explaining what he’ll be doing. (His answering service, however, sucks.) Further, Chris assures me that general anesthesia is safer than driving to the hospital to get it.

Until then, I’m carefully avoiding fried foods, cheese-heavy dishes, and drinking olive oil. I’ll post an update on this after the surgery’s complete, as there won’t be much more action in the interim. You can read more about gallstones here.

As I mentioned previously, Kathy took off (at my urging) to New York for a week to spend time with her family at Thanksgiving, leaving our brood of four at home with me. Now, I love my kids dearly — Emily with her creativity, gentleness, and appreciation of sheer, silly fun, Abby’s earnest questioning of life’s meaning, lovely singing, and earnestness, Liam’s boyish energy and growing understanding, and Maggie’s imaginary-butterfly catching and dancing-just-for-the-joy-of-it. They are a tetrad who can, without meaning to, turn my heart inside out with just a look, bring stinging tears of gratitude to my eyes just by smiling, and make all the time I spend earning a living suddenly seem worth it a hundred times over.

That said, I was rather afraid that I wouldn’t like them much by the end of the week of Kathy’s absence. I’m very much an introvert, and tend to get pretty edgy if I don’t have time to myself. (I told Kathy while we were courting that she would have to pass the “48 Hour Test.” If I was able to be around her continuously for two days straight, and at the end of that time didn’t want to kill her, she passed. Most people fail that test.) While there are a bevy of complimentary adjectives which can fairly be applied to my children, “low-maintenance” is not among them, so I expected to be climbing the walls by the time Kathy returned.

But in spite of my fears, the kids and I had a wonderful week together. I determined long ago that the key to enjoying children is to avoid laboring under the false hope that you’ll be able to get anything else done while you’re with them, so I planned to dedicate the week to spending time together, cultivating those relationships, and giving them some good memories to take into the future with them. It was a treat to get to center the day around doing things together as a family, reading books, finding treasures, taking walks, and playing games. Some of our friends volunteered to take the kids at times, and I actually turned them down, as I felt it would have interfered with the family time we were having. Plus, I forgot. (Credit where it’s due: The evenings with Daniel, Jonathan, Halo, Peter Jackson, and the occasional Killian’s Red helped the enjoyment of the week a great deal too.)

What a delight, what a luxury to be able to devote that kind of time to things that are actually, immediately important. So much of my time is sucked up doing things that are a means to an end — living once removed from real life. How refreshing to kick that aside for a bit and have a good long swim in the vital, turbulent, exhilarating waters of child-rearing and people-loving. Now I’m eager for Christmas.

The kids and I went on our first Geocaching adventure two days ago, and had a great time! (Geocaching is a big game of GPS-enabled hide and seek, where one person hides a box, takes note of the GPS coordinates of that box, and then posts those coordinates on a website. Other players then try to find the box using the coordinates provided.)

The first cache we went “Treasure Hunting” for was in a little nature park down by the San Marcos river which we’ve walked through countless times, but never suspected held a cache. The next one we tried to find was by on old train depot, but we were unable to locate the cache there. We went again today to find some farther-flung caches, one along the “Devil’s Backbone,” a road that runs along the ridge of some hills between here and Canyon Lake, and the other on Prayer Mountain, a beautiful little mountain just outside of Wimberley. With a bit of scrambling around, we were able to find both, and even ran into another geocaching team on the mountain.

You can see the team profile of Clan McMains on the Geocaching website, and follow our adventures there. I hope to hide a cache soon, as San Marcos doesn’t have nearly enough yet!

Though I’ve been painfully remiss as a friend for not mentioning it before now, my good compadre Daniel Priest has started a weblog of his own: Punch Like a Poet. Daniel is one of those writers who evokes both admiration and envy in me — I want to write that well, and am glad he does. His poetry is some of my favorite, and for bonus points, his weblog’s name is a Simpson’s reference.

Go, visit, and revel in his wordsmithmanship…his writerly skillness…his prosewranglerhood…oh, just read it.

I mentioned in my last post that we have a working GPS again. I had bought a Garmin GPS III about four years ago, when I was doing more freelance consulting, which I used to find client sites. Within the last couple years, entropy and the hot Texas sun took their tolls on the unit, and it stopped retaining waypoints and started having display problems.

I looked at Garmin’s repair policies, and decided that even at $99 for a refurbish, it was cheaper to repair this unit than to buy a new one. I sent mine in, and was startled to receive it back in less than two weeks, fully repaired at no cost. The paperwork indicated that they had determined it was covered by warrantee, which is of course unheard of for a four year old electronic device.

So, kudos to Garmin for the great customer service. Unless the company is hit by a giant meteorite and wiped off the face of the earth, I’ll never buy a GPS from anyone else.

Kathy’s up in New York to spend Thanksgiving with her family there. I’m riding herd over the kids while she’s gone, which has been a lot of fun, though a bit on the exhausting side. We’ve spent time with my Mom down in San Antonio, done a church potluck, run around to various friends’ houses, and various other miscellany. On a friend’s suggestion, I’m planning to take them out Geocaching today or tomorrow. (I’ve had this lurking in the back of my mind for a while, but have only recently had a working GPS. There have been some new caches hidden in San Marcos in the last few months too, which should make it a more satisfying thing to do.)

It’s nice to get the extra time with the children without the pressures of work, though we’ll all be glad when Kathy returns home!

Kathy and I went to see our first Poetry Slam last Thursday night up the University. 10 students presented their work to start things off, followed by the professional poets (how odd that sounds!). The pros were Broken Word, an Austin-based group, and were a load of fun.

Both the students and the pros did a good job, with a couple obvious crowd favorites among the students. Probably the most entertaining part of the evening was Broken Word’s “Haiku Death Match”, where each poet would select a haiku from his/her book of poetry, and the audience would then vote on their favorite. These ranged from clever to comic to poignant, and while perhaps not in the original spirit of haiku, did present some interesting approaches to getting meaning out of such a compact form.

A sad postscript to our beach weekend: when we returned home, we discovered that our four-year old cat Popeye, who we’ve had since he was 2 days old, had been flirting with traffic, as was his wont, and came out on the worse end of it. We were sorry to lose our longest-term pet to date. We did, however, add three guinea pigs to the menagerie around the same time, which have been a lot of fun for the junior set.

This weekend Ben joined Emily, Liam, Abigail and me for Austin Celtic Festival 2003. We had a great time sucking down fish & chips, listening to music, checking out the crafts, and watching the SCA do their combat demonstrations. This year they actually let kids from the audience grab a foam-covered PVC pipe “sword” and go after the armored folk, which my brood loved and went back for several times.