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 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. ‘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 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.

As you can see, he enjoys the fin­er things in life, like flow­ers. Espe­cial­ly if he’s per­mit­ted to maul them.