So the open house went rather well, I suppose. We had nine sets of people come through in the two hours, which indicates to me that the house-buying traffic is picking up around here. Unhappily, natch, none of those nine people have put in an offer . . . people seem inclined to look, but if they're buying, I don't know what they're buying, as nothing on this street is selling.

I am completely puzzled by this real estate slowdown. In typical pessimist fashion, I think the halt in the housing market (which, by all accounts, is gripping the whole country except for isolated pockets here and there) signals a bigger economic problem, about which we're being told nothing. (Another bit of corroborating evidence for this is a New York Times article that said that large numbers of men aged 35-55 - like, 18% in Michigan - are unemployed and not really looking for work any more, therefore not being counted in the unemployment figures.) My fear, of course, is that if we continue on this path and end up with two houses we'll go to financial hell in a handbasket (which is where the whole country seems to be going).

So. It's hard to keep the chin up and to look on the sunny side . . .

But we did have a diversion, of sorts: Emily's tonsil abcess returned with a vengeance over the weekend. Yesterday I took her to the doctor, who sent her packing to the ER because he was afraid that oral antibiotics weren't going to take care of the problem before her throat closed up . . . yikes! So the poor kid got the whole throat-poking rigamarole again, much to my dismay. I made an effort to get them to just give her antibiotics and see how she responded, but they had many many Good Reasons about why they needed to drain the pus that was inevitably going to be there . . . Yeah, well, they found about as many pus pockets as there were WMDs in Iraq. I'm still mad at myself for giving in to them, and mad at the fact that some of the arguments that convinced me were economic ("Well, we'll have to keep her in the hospital for observation . . . "). As it turns out they kept her overnight anyway.

And as it turns out, the intravenous antibiotics knocked out the infection so fast that she was chipper and free of fever by midnight, free of pain this morning. We finally got her sprung at about 6:00 tonight (they announced at noon that she could go home, but hospital mechanations grind along slowly . . . ). Looks like she'll have to have her tonsils removed - we'll know more about this after her appointment with the Ear, Nose and Throat doctor (in October! - that was the earliest appointment!!).

That's about all the news. Nobody got much sleep last night - Emil and Em were at the hospital, and although I came home I couldn't drop off and I got up early this morning. So I'm hoping that eight or so hours of decent rest will make the whole world look better . . .