So many things to say. I'm not sure where to start. This Monday morning I am seething with anger over so many things not the least of which is the Senate steroid hearings and the idiots before them. I have been very touchy about baseball ever since the strike but now I just don't know. Jose Canseco's a dick. I'm one of those kids who was dreamy and really believed in baseball. After all the bickering over who gets the extra .2 million dollars, this is just ridiculous. As I told Mikey this morning, I'm sticking to kids tee ball and minor league games.

I'll rant about a few more things but I'll wait until the end of my post to do so. This weekend was full, life jammed against the margins. Saturday we took Atticus to see my parents. It was the first time since the birth that they've seen him. My dad hasn't been in the greatest of health but he was beaming. And my mom has rarely been so sweet (heh heh, just kidding mom...sort of). He certainly is a charmer. On the way we forgot the baby bag at home and didn't realize it until we were already near Lake Shore and Illinois so we have no pictures of the event. My parents took some. I'll post those when I have a chance. On the way there we saw a car with this bumper sticker: Save our country. Stop immigration. Teenage Riot (Sonic Youth) also came on the radio and I had two memories, one of the first time I heard those openings chords after I had bought Daydream Nation and looked at that Gerhard Richter painting of the candle and the other of when I was teaching. This punky girl had just started in my class and I saw that she had a Sonic Youth patch on her bag. I asked her about the patch and told her they were a great band. Her response: "They're a band?"

At my parent's we filled Irene in on our old neighborhood (where I grew up-my parents moved as in moving on up when I had already left home) and all the characters in it like the Sicilian man next door to us that would walk around with his machete and the cop and his son who lived down the street in our cul de sac who hated, just hated foreigners and how for the first six months we lived in our house it was egged and vandalized day after day.

Sunday we went to celebrate Irene's mom's birthday. A fun day that involved lots of seafood (we went out to eat), chocolate and coffee. I don't know what it is but the past few days I've been drinking coffee like it's going out of style. I mean I know I should be watching my intake of things into my body and it IS coffee but I always end up sitting in a chair zonking out and shaking. I think I do it because I just want to feel normal again. Sounds crazy but it makes sense. I'll cut back though.

My feet are still numb. No diagnosis yet. My hands have started cramping up again and my nails, I kid you not, are in pain. They have started forming ridges, has anyone seen this before? Anyway, the neurosurgeon visit is this week. We'll see what the head is doing.

I have more to say but I'll write again later. I'll post some pictures of the weekend up. I'll leave you with this disturbing news, from a lead article in today's salon.com:

March 21, 2005 | One day in the next two weeks, a uniformed colonel from the U.S. Army is expected to pay a visit to William Cala, the superintendent of the Fairport Central School District in Fairport, N.Y., east of Rochester. While Cala has not been told exactly what's on the agenda, he knows why the colonel is coming: to try to talk some sense into him about how he's handled the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act. It might seem strange that the Pentagon is sending an emissary to a school district, but it's actually the law.

One day in the next two weeks, a uniformed colonel from the U.S. Army is expected to pay a visit to William Cala, the superintendent of the Fairport Central School District in Fairport, N.Y., east of Rochester. While Cala has not been told exactly what's on the agenda, he knows why the colonel is coming: to try to talk some sense into him about how he's handled the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act. It might seem strange that the Pentagon is sending an emissary to a school district, but it's actually the law.

The colonel's visit is the latest move in a three-year dispute between the Fairport school district and the government over a little-known provision of No Child Left Behind, the controversial landmark education legislation passed in 2001. The provision, under Section 9528 of the law, requires districts that receive federal funding to share students' names, addresses and phone numbers with military recruiters. This is where Cala, an outspoken critic of NCLB, has run into problems with the law -- he doesn't want to hand over student data to military recruiters without explicit permission from parents. "The Fairport Board of Education has a very long-standing policy that we don't share student information with anybody, period," says Cala, who has run the Fairport schools for eight years. "We're being forced to reverse this policy because the military says so, and we don't think that's fair or right."

The government is hoping the colonel will help Cala change his mind. Schools that don't comply with the law are at risk of losing their federal funding, and a visit from a military officer is the government's first step toward rectifying the situation.