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.
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.
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!