Holy Road Trip, Batman!

I've never really explicitly stated it before, but the whole 'Citizens' thing, in addition to being an obvious extension of the 'nation' metaphor, is also a minor homage to the old Batman TV series with Adam West.  I always loved that show, and particularly liked the way Batman refered to the denizens of Gotham City - "Thank you for your support, citizen" - that sort of thing.

Anyway, after catching up on what's been going on here for the last few days, I feel like I need to give a Batman-esque speech to everyone.  "Citizens... please, remain calm.  Return to your computers and everything will be fine."

Just so you know, I left Long Beach on Sunday afternoon, and have been in Yellowstone the last few days with the family (we were there when the bear incident took place, but weren't even aware of it until after we had left).  Frankly, I usually try to do a better job of making sure that the blog community is prepared for my absence, but I had a pretty bad week last week.  Because it's my blog, I'll tell you the story.

Two Mondays ago, ClipperMax went to the park with the guys from his wrestling team to play football.  In his version of what happened (and he can be a little full of himself sometimes, though I have no idea where he gets that from), he was scoring pretty much every time he got the ball, and the other team was getting a little tired of that.  So the next time he caught a pass, he was dogpiled.  I spent the rest of that afternoon in the emergency room with him, and we assumed he had a dislocated shoulder.

Long story short, we spent most of last week in doctors' offices and were unsure if we were going to be able to take our long planned trip to Yellowstone and Denver.  Although the shoulder was in fact not separated, Max was eventually diagnosed with a non-displaced fracture of the coracoid process (a piece of bone at the top of the scapula, i.e. the  shoulder blade).  On Friday afternoon they told us he could travel with his shoulder immobilized, and our trip was on.

Then Saturday morning at 5 AM, ClipperZoe woke up with a 103 degree temperature and a pain in her abdomen.  So we took another trip to the ER.  After ruling out appendicitis and several other nasty things, the doctors finally decided that she just had a bad stomach virus - but not until after she'd spent Saturday night in the hospital.  (We were supposed to have spent Saturday night in Zion.) 

In the course of seven days, between our two kids, we had been in the ER twice, spent the night in the hospital, had three X-rays, one MRI and two CT scans, almost cancelled our vacation several times and delayed it by about 30 hours.  But Zoe felt great after her night in the hospital, and we decided to get on with our lives. 

The strangest thing is that both of our kids have been incredibly healthy overall.  We'd only been to the ER once before as parents, and had never had a child actually admitted to the hospital.  So it was a rough week.  But in the end, none of it turned out to be a big deal, or perhaps I should say it could have been much worse.  Yes, Max has a fracture, but after the first few days his pain had subsided substantially, and basically he feels fine as long as no one touches his shoulder (which we still forget, from time to time).  And Zoe basically just had a 24 hour bug that happened to have everyone spooked during those 24 hours. 

Why am I telling you all this.  I'm not really sure.  I guess I feel like you need a bit of an explanation as to where I've been.  I'll be away another week, but I'll be at my sister's house most of that time, with decent internet access, so I should be around some. 

But play nice everybody, OK?

Look, I read the FanPost about Eric Gordon being below average.  I don't happen to agree, but it's not really that extreme of an assertion, is it?  If the basic logic says that he's above average offensively, but below average in possession stats (rebounding, turnovers and steals), I think everyone agrees with that, right?  Then it's a question of how you add those things together, and there's certainly no consensus on how to do that, and it's not worth getting into name calling if you don't like the way one person does it versus the way another person does it.  Is it?

The page views have been surprisingly strong this week, considering that I haven't written a proper post since last Friday.  Maybe you think I'm happy with mean-spirited arguing driving up page views.  I'm not.  

"Please remain calm, citizens."