Happy V‑Day!

Happy Valen­tine’s Day to all, whether you’re part of a cou­ple (tri­ad, quad, etc.) or not 🙂

Sam­bear brought home truf­fles and flow­ers! And iTunesi­ness! And then he went and cooked deli­cious steaks for dinner!

My baby girl’s sweet­ie has mono. Ewww. They had to put off their spe­cial din­ner tonight ’til after he’s feel­ing bet­ter. Hope­ful­ly, he’ll get over it more eas­i­ly than she did a few years back! Since she and I have had some sort of flu-thing that we caught from him, I know the poor guy is hav­ing rot­ten luck. Flu, then mono? Ick!

I spent a ridicu­lous amount of time look­ing at the pho­tos of Char­lie over at The Dai­ly Coy­ote. I don’t think it would have occurred to me to call a coy­ote “cute,” until I saw this. He’s a very well-behaved coy­ote, raised with lots of help from a cat. I’d love to show you one of Char­lie’s pho­tos here, but I don’t want vio­late his Mom’s copy­right. Go look!

In the not-fun part of the world, the CDC says that at least 82 kids have died in the US play­ing “the chok­ing game.” I will admit that I ini­tial­ly assumed they were talk­ing about acci­dents involv­ing auto­erot­ic asphyx­i­a­tion, but those are actu­al­ly count­ed sep­a­rate­ly. Whodathunkit?

The play­ers are most­ly ath­letes and well-behaved kids who want to get a “high” feel­ing with­out drugs or alco­hol. Those who have died were all play­ing alone. The researchers do state that the sta­tis­tics aren’t reli­able because there’s not a sep­a­rate cat­e­go­ry for coro­ners to use to dif­fer­en­ti­ate sui­cide from a pos­si­ble “game” gone wrong, but the expec­ta­tion is that the prob­lem is being under­stat­ed rather than overstated.

I real­ly hope my daugh­ter knows that even a tem­po­rary loss of oxy­gen to the brain can cause brain dam­age, but if she did­n’t before, she will by tomor­row. She isn’t in the prime age group for this but of crazi­ness, but it’s eas­i­er to talk to your chil­dren than to bury them. I know, just 82 in how many years? But that’s 82 young peo­ple who might be alive if they’d had a bet­ter under­stand­ing of phys­i­ol­o­gy, at the very least.

Cyn is Rick's wife, Katie's Mom, and Esther & Oliver's Mémé. She's also a professional geek, avid reader, fledgling coder, enthusiastic gamer (TTRPGs), occasional singer, and devoted stitcher.
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2 thoughts on “Happy V‑Day!

  1. I’m 62 years old. When we were kids in the 10–12 year old range, we used to do that pas­sout thing. You know, the one with the bear hug from behind. It was nev­er about ‘get­ting high’. It was a game. And you were ‘chick­en’ if you did­n’t play. It was almost like a game of ‘trust me’. We stopped when one of our neigh­bor­hood kids went kind of spas­tic com­ing out of the pas­sout, almost like a seizure. He was o.k., but it scared the crap out of us. I guess it’s a good thing it did.

  2. I hon­est­ly had not ever heard of any chok­ing games before read­ing that arti­cle, and my child­hood cer­tain­ly was­n’t spent swad­dled in cot­ton. I shud­der to think what could have hap­pened dur­ing Sling the Stat­ue, or some of the par­tic­u­lar­ly fierce games of Win the Flag (that one has anoth­er name which escapes me at the moment). It’s fun­ny to look back on things about which I was non­cha­lant as a child (like rid­ing my bike back and forth sev­er­al times a day over a tree that had fall­en over a big gul­ly, know­ing that the gul­ly was home to many snakes), know­ing that I had great fun, and still being scared spit­less over the idea of my pre­cious baby ever doing them!

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