On the home front

I've been too busy with domestic duties to blog. Here's what I have learned over the past few days:

* my 4 yr old daughter needed day surgery (for a dental procedure.) She charmed the nurses, which is entirely understandable (I am a biased father) and was a very good girl. I have no particular worries about relatively minor procedures like this, but I found it a bit more disconcerting than I expected to hold her hand and watch her fall asleep under the anaesthetic gas. It's too much like one's imagination of being with someone at death; that's the problem.

* Speaking of anaesthesia, I was talking to a doctor recently and the topic of suicide and anaesthetists came up. He said it was true that they had a higher rate, due to their familiarity with the ease with which the right drugs can end it all. I mentioned that, as far as stress goes, I would have imagined that their job was something like that old adage about war: mostly a lot of sitting around being bored, interrupted by the occasional period of absolute terror. I was told that it's not like that for them because many different types of surgery require blood pressure to be well controlled to limit bleeding, and the surgeons can be demanding throughout the procedure that the anaesthetist keep the pressure within a very tight range. That can be difficult, apparently. Interesting...

* I picked up the new (actually, second hand) car. It is amazing the stuff you get in cars these days for the price. I am not into cars in any significant way: the one I am replacing (which is the one I use for work) is 13 years old. Getting this new car has reinforced what I have said many times: why does anyone really need a car worth over, say, $50,000 these days? The one I got is 18 months old, cost barely over $20,000, yet has all the features that I can imagine ever really wanting. If I was benevolent dictator (and if government over regulation actually worked, which I know it doesn't) the law against manufacturers wasting time on building luxury cars would be high on my agenda.

* New, bigger cars, involve unwanted re-arrangements of garage junk.