Of course, I should have realised that Illinois is cursed.
The first trip Nathan and I took here, to Chicago for him to do college interviews, resulted in absolutely no one having an interest in him. I got to spend the drive back convincing him that, frankly, there wasn't anyone he wanted to have an interest in either, so the failure was mutual.
The second trip was down to NewTown to look for the place we've just moved into. That's when his mother called him with the news that, no, he didn't pass German so he didn't graduate so what did he think he was going to do with his life, work at a hardware store?
We were two hours behind schedule leaving CF. It took us twice as long to clean the kitchen and bathroom, tear down the bed (yYs! SleepNumber beds will come completely apart and we fit most of the pieces into two decent sized boxes, no lugging a full mattress around!) and pack the last few remaining boxes.
In addition to that, we had to get ice, dry ice (we had frozen stuff we couldn't eat in time, along with the top of our wedding cake), and Nathan left a bunch of his stuff at the theatre. I went to pick it up, so the last person I talked to in CF was Mark the Designer. He went to uni here too, but several years ago, so he's really interested in Nathan's progress.
Finally, we're on the road. It was basically uneventful except for being two hours behind schedule and the drive being an hour longer than Nathan estimated. We checked into the hotel in NewTown at 11:45. PM.
The hotel is an OK one, but it has some eccentricities. For example, Nathan left some cookies on the counter. Because of that, I discovered in the morning that a family of ants lived in the light fixture. Nathan hates bugs; all I have to say at the moment to make him jump is "Ants!"
We arrived, unpacked the truck. Actually, Nathan and my brother did most of the unpacking because it really wasn't a three person job. I tried to make sure everything ended up in sort of the right rooms.
Then we went to Denny's.
For a long while now, Nathan has done this funny hiccough-y thing every now and again about food. Generally, he gets it taken care of, and I put it down to not chewing his food enough. Yesterday, he took one bite and spent the next twenty minutes in the bathroom. He came out and said we'd better go to the hospital. Oh, great.
I drop him off and take my brother back to NewHouse so that he can either stay there, or leave (he decided to leave, a smarter choice than we realised at the time). I go back to the hospital and wander around looking for Nathan, whom I cannot find.
He calls and says he's in emergency and that they know I'm looking for him. I hate hospitals. Very few people who work in them are genuinely helpful, and they are about as user friendly as an airport, on top of all this they are full of unhappy people. So, I am doing just about the last thing I want to do in the world by asking where I'm supposed to go.
Long story short, I spent five hours in the hospital yesterday. The boy has holes in his esophogus, worst they've ever seen. (Someone should have listened to me when I told him that Mountain Dew was not the elixir of life.) They kept him overnight, and told me to come back at eight or nine the next morning.
In the meanwhile, remember that bed I told you about? I got to go home and assemble that all by myself, took me two hours because I would only half read the instructions and then realise something was wrong. That was my fault, but by the time I went to bed it was two AM.
I get up to go back at nine tomorrow. He hasn't slept all night because, well, one, he's in a hospital and they make him almost as miserable as they do me, and two, he doesn't sleep in strange beds. Cranky is beyond the phrase for it.
Cue the nurse coming in to say that they want to keep him until at least two, maybe five. Lady, that is not nine AM, but that's not her problem.
I leave him there, and come home to set up the computer and the desk because the phone and internet people are coming sometime between one and five. That took me two hours as well because it's impossible to put all the cords and pieces for one computer into the same box. That and the desk is a super bulky Wal-Mart job that really requires two people.
But, the internet and phone man came. Obviously.
I'm supposed to go back to get him in half an hour, they called me about 2:45. This would be all well and good except that we still have a moving van parked out front. A moving van that has to be returned to a town two hours away by eight tomorrow morning.
Even if I could drive the thing, I wouldn't be able to get back because it's two hours away (and coincidentally across state lines). If he's too tired to drive, we still can't take it back.
So, as much as I'm looking forward to having him back, I don't know how much I want the tired, cranky, grumpy boy who will probably be on a liquid diet for the rest of the night and not allowed to have caffiene anymore. Since he's addicted, it'll be like getting him off crack.
Kids, get a complete medical history of everyone you date. Not just them, their parents. See if you can deal and afford their ailments. We're already talking about moving to Canada.
Oh yeah, hello from NewTown!