“I’m tired of the waiting game! Let’s play Hungry, Hungry Hippos!”

Our trip to the States was pleasant, but uneventful, so I don’t have much to write about it. Except that we visited the International Spy Museum, which was interesting. (Not $18US worth of interesting, but interesting.) We also went to Washington D.C. and looked around. Unfortunately, we forgot the camera; can you tell that these pictures are of the capital and the Washington Monument? Neither can I.

(Well, I guess you can tell which one’s the Washington Monument. It’s pretty recognizable.)

We didn’t bother stopping by the White House, or doing any other site-seeing. We just took the Metro, which dropped us off in the middle of the Mall, and that’s where I took those pictures from; if you look one way, you see the capital, and the other way, you see the monument. Most of our time was spent in the Smithsonian, which is free. Unlike the Spy Museum, which is not.

We also got to play with a GPS navigation system, which was fun. So fun that we’re going to buy one. (One of Andrea’s American cousins can hook us up with a good one, for cheap.)

And then I got home, and for some reason, I noticed that I was peeing an awful lot. And there were some other symptoms, which I won’t bore you with, that led me to think that it might be a bladder infection. So I finally broke down and went to the doctor’s, and found out that it’s probably not. It’s probably kidney stones. (Luckily, my doctor had a better idea of what my symptoms meant than I did.) What does one do about kidney stones? Well, in most cases, one simply waits for the stones to pass. One spends most of one’s day in front of the toilet, because one’s bladder is so desperate to get rid of the foreign object that it’s making one urinate constantly, and waits for the stone to come out. One also drinks so much cranberry juice that one is sick to death of the sight, smell, and taste of it.

(Have you ever had cranberry juice? I’m not talking crantinis, or cranberry cocktail, or some kind of fruit juice that has cranberry juice in it; I’m talking about cranberry juice. Organic, unsweetened, juice from cranberries. It’s bitter, foul-tasting stuff. I’m drinking a mixture that’s about 80% water, and 20% juice, and it’s still nasty.)

I’m led to believe that passing this stone is going to be one of the more painful experiences in my life. I can’t wait to write about it.