The Absurdity of it ALL

It is hard as a parent to resist imagining your kids being in awful situations that you read in the news happening to other kids. Two weeks ago a boy of the same age as our kids drowned in the river Soča. Because we were planning to visit that region of Slovenia I just couldn´t help picturing the same awful thing happening to us. Before I had kids it was easier to distance myself from occurrences like these. But ever since I tied my life inextricably with the lives of my offspring, things that happen to other parents in some ways seem to affect me. When I was reading this nightmarish story, unwittingly picturing it happening to us, to my kids, it made my heart squeeze tight in my chest and I had to actively stop imagining what I would do in that situation. And then this week there was a mom whose son had a bad infection of a toe. However, when trying to seek medical help at the ER the doctors would not admit the boy until the COVID-19 test came back. Which takes 33 hours. While I am one of those squares

that always respects the rules, tries to understand the government and realizes that not everyone is going to be happy with the elections or with how other people behave or act or view the world, I just cannot wrap my head around this event. The way I see it is: a boy was sick, the cause of it was either the infected toe, which was plainly observable, or the COVID-19. The infected toe had to be dealt with regardless if the boy was also sick with COVID-19. However, they wouldn´t admit him until they got the results back. My question is this: if the results got back positive, would the health-staff refuse to treat the boy for the toe infection? If the answer is no, then why did they make him wait for the results and not treat him immediately? If the answer is yes, then what kind of twisted world are we living in? I am no medic, but I am guessing that a serious infection that is septic is far more dangerous for the boy than COVID-19. And medical staff are supposed to be able to treat patients without risking anybody else getting infected. I just do not get it. Luckily, a surgeon decided just hits, that the sepsis was far more urgent to deal with than waiting for the results, and he operated the boy before the results got back. But this was only after the boy and his mother had to wait a whole day to be treated. And of course I pictured ourselves in this situation, trying to resist all the outbursts of mental anger and visualizations of my violent behavior if my kids were refused a treatment they really needed just to wait for the COVID-19 results to get back. To top it all off, our politicians have started to make absurd decisions when it comes to COVID-19. For two months now the warnings regarding neighboring countries that had increasing numbers of infected people have been utterly disregarded in favor of providing these countries to have a normal touristic season. But now that the politicians holidays have finished, they have started to publicly protest and criticize these countries, where the same politicians just spent the last months holidaying. There is one specific politician that has spent the last whole month in his holiday house in the neighboring country, but wishes to put the same country on a red list now when he is done with his holiday time, using non-proven allegations regarding false (underreported) numbers of infected people. If this whole situation has not gotten absurd, I do not know what else is needed.  

Ok, my ramblings done and over with, I can get back to telling our day to day story. We got our kids back and we did what any responsible and loving parent would do. After a day we gave them away again, but this time just for a week. They spent a week with my mom and my brother and his partner in the lovely Slovenian Dolenjska region. But this weekend we got them back for good. Good until we sent them somewhere else again, but not this summer holiday. Now we have a week of family adventures in the Soča region of the country. Arguably one of the most picturesque regions of Slovenia, with canyons cut into the bedrock by the most gorgeous river on the planet Soča (it is for Slovenians anyway) in the mountain region of West-Northwest Slovenia. Soča is the emerald colored natural treasure of our country and we have to admit that our kid have not seen it yet. We will amend this mistake this week.

But for now all I have to give you is some nice SUP expeditions we made during the weekend. First we went to Šmartno lake near Celje, which a really nice lake to go walking around and/or SUP-in, but it is not the best one for swimming and sunbathing. So, SUP-ing was great, but swimming and sunbathing was interrupted all too often by the numerous people that passed us. All the pictures bellow are unedited, so some may be too dark or too bright, but I blame it on my wife´s super computer (an harman/kardon aluminium alloy monster of a laptop that does not have a simple picture editing program on it, but is the only computer we took on our trip to Soča region). *While I was writing this last sentence my wife almost jumped on the ceiling

and showed me that she has four different excellent programs for editing pictures. Honestly, none of those I know how to use, so we will just stay at unedited pictures.

So, on Sunday we decided to go to a place that was tested and proved several times before – the Kočevje lake. Clean water, nice places to lie down and get some sun on your skin, plenty of things for the kids to do and good enough SUP place. We had a nice time that was somewhat spoiled by the discovery that our (rented) SUP was leaking at the seams a bit (small bubbles were coming out at the seams persistently.