Ante Diem XI Kalendas Martias, Anno Domini MMXVI

I. Sick Day
We're all down for the count with something. Well, everyone except me. James was sacked out on the couch all day yesterday watching episodes of Curious George, and is doing slightly better as of this morning. He insists, however, that he's still so sick that he needs to watch George all day. If you propose something that he finds interesting (like Monopoly Junior) he suddenly gets better miraculously quickly. We'll see how the rest of his convalescence goes.
Owen picked up whatever he had, and the cough quickly turned into croup. (Again.) He was up all last night and I was thankful to be in the position of second-favorite parent. Only Mommy would do, and she spent most of the night camped out on a mattress in his room with, in her words, "a sick boy attempting to sleep on my face." I only have vague, sleepy memories of most of the night. I think at one point she told me that she was going to take him outside, but that must have been a dream, right?
Unsurprisingly, J has slowed down as the morning has gone on. She isn't yet running a fever, but an afternoon nap became an increasingly necessity.
We'll see how much of the family makes it to church tomorrow after another 18 hours of this.

II. Legumier
With the majority of the family lying about the living room in various states of invalidity, it's fallen to me to take care of meal preparation. Surprisingly, this has gone quite well. Pax and I made a Valentine's Day dinner for our wives a few nights ago, and I helped (still in an underling role) with the chickpea dressing for the chicken we were making that turned out to be my favorite part of the meal. Yesterday I made (and ate most of, since everyone else was sick) a shredded carrot and raisin salad, and today I replicated the matchstick fennel/celeriac/apple/cheese/leek salad that J made for February DNI. I doubt I can keep it up much longer, but I need to boast a little bit about exiting the kitchen three days in a row with edible food. (The trick, I think, is to avoid food that involves a heat source.)

III. Marginalia
I love reading books that someone else has written in. It's like reading the book along with another reader. Some co-readers are better than others, of course. Plenty of marginalia are too argumentative or only interested in one particular element of an argument. Others are tiny cursive hands too difficult to read or written in indecipherable abbreviations. Most of the time, though, I find that reading the book in the presence of another reader helps me to get more out of the experience. This afternoon I was doing a little score study (preparation for RPO Heldenleben in two weeks) and appreciating the wonderfully detailed analysis that the previous owner of my score had done. There's a full harmonic analysis, some helpful conductoresque notes (where to cue, etc.) and a detailed analysis of the "program" of the piece and what each motive meant. (Ein Heldenleben, which means "A Heroes' Life" is a 45 minute indulgence of Strauss admiring himself in the mirror.)

IV. Recently Reading
When J finished reading Bringing up Bebe I congratulated myself on having recommended such a good book to her without ever having read it myself. She tells me that I wasn't the one that recommended it to her, but I still think I did. Whether or not I recommended it in the first place, she proceeded to recommend it to me, and I enjoyed reading it over the past few days. I finished the political "node" of my reading project last week and am onto the Medieval "node" next. This morning I started Huizenga's Decline of the Middle Ages, and then there will be a survey of Courtly Love essays followed by Lewis' The Allegory of Love

V. The Anode Road
I hate failing at things. I'd already failed at inspecting the anode rod twice in the last year, and I had "Check Anode Rod" set as a reminder in my phone for endless months. The alert would go off, and I'd set it to Snooze for some future date. I was always out of the house when it went off, or in the middle of some important task like teaching a lesson or reading a book or sitting at the kitchen table teasing James in my pajamas.
The issue is getting the threads unfrozen. Well, it's an issue of turning the supply valve off, turning off the gas, draining an appropriate amount of water from the furnace, tinkering with the HVAC until I have access to the anode rod, and THEN getting the threads unfrozen. And then, after two failed attempts, managing to somehow get the vent back in place and the gas burner re-lit.
It wouldn't have been so bad except that J knew that I needed to do it. She would ask me on a Monday morning: "Anything you need to do today besides practice?"
"Well, today would be a good day to see if I can check the anode road in the hot water heater, I guess."
And then I wouldn't do it. Week after week I chickened out of trying to get that blasted anode rod check off my to-do list, and I knew that J knew that I was putting off.
This week Pax and Kylie's hot water heater went up. It was a massive stress and inconvenience to them. It was a huge expense to have it replaced. I resolved again to check our anode rod. I researched the process from start to finish again. I went down and measured and found that I wouldn't have enough overhead space to pull the rod out even if I did get it free. I gave up on the project. I stewed about it for a half an hour and then decided to go ahead and check anyway, to get a look at even the first 30 inches of the rod.
I shut off the supply, turned off the gas, drained the lines, ran off some excess water, and set up with a breaker bar to work on getting the rod loose.
I broke the breaker bar.
I don't know how sturdy old sillcocks are expected to be, but I cracked right through the metal on mine as I worked around it.

I'm pretty sure that thing is just in there for good.

At the very least, I'm taking it off my to-do list.