Just a touch of the plague, nothing to worry about.

Well I was off work for two days, which really kind of sucks because I have to use so much vacation time to take a day off on the weekend, I would much rather spend it doing something I want to do you know? Everyone in the house got sick. Friday, the day of Jessica’s Mortified Nation showing, Alexander was projectile vomiting all over the house. He was pretty tough about it, I can’t recall recall him ever being sick with anything stomach related before so you would think that the first time you ever experienced violently throwing up that it would freak him out but he was fine about it. He would puke, mostly in the bucket, but never all in the bucket, ask to brush his teeth afterward and then go back to watching cartoons while eating crackers and pedialite. Then after an afternoon nap he said, “I feel better now.” and was pretty much better. I wish it was the same for the rest of us though. I went in to work Saturday morning feeling ok, not great but I thought it was more from not getting a good nights sleep than anything. Jessica’s texted me to let me know that she was barfing and of course I had to tell her to be tough about it like Alexander was. Big mistake. By around 4 in the afternoon I was starting to feel really unwell. If it had been a normal day I just would have gone home early but I couldn’t on this particular night because the NCAA women’s basketball regional was in town so we had a couple charters to do and were already having trouble getting in enough people to cover them both since we are already pretty short staffed on Saturday nights. I ended up throwing up all over the north remote terminal ramp behind a 737. At that point I still couldn’t go home, well I could have I guess but that would have left them in more of a bind than we already were so I ended up covering our normal operations while everyone else was on the charter. At the end of an over 15 hour day I finally got to go home and ended up being sicker than I can remember being in a very very long time. I ended up on the crapper most of the night and the next day with explosive shits and got so dehydrated that I was completely cramped up and shaking and I even started crying it hurt so bad a couple times. Don’t tell Jessica but I actually considered going to the emergency room to get some IV fluids pumped into me to relieve the dehydration pain because I couldn’t keep anything down. Jessica’s mom got sick too (she came to watch Alexander for us Thursday and Friday) but she seemed to recover pretty quickly (unless she underplayed how sick she was). I seem to have gotten the worst of it, mostly because most of mine was mud butt while everyone else mostly was puking so I got the most dehydrated. I almost think it was something food related more than sickness because this was more reminiscent of the time I got food poisoning from bad chicken wings than a virus. Don’t know if everyone agrees with me there or not.

Enough about that right? Let’s talk about Jessica’s Mortified Nation showing that happened on Friday. In case you have no idea what I’m talking about Jessica was sitting around one day folding some laundry and the tivo turned to the Sundance Channel to a documentary called Mortified Nation. Basically adults getting on stage and reading their most private and embarrassing things from when they were younger to a large audience. It’s kind of a hard concept to explain to most people but once people get it almost everyone likes the concept and finds it really funny and entertaining. Anyway, it struck a chord with Jessica and before I knew it she had decided that she was going to try and get the live Mortified show to come here to Nebraska. The original plan was to try and get the movie screened in both Lincoln and Omaha to get a little grass roots interest going and to find people who would be interested in getting up on stage but the Omaha part was a little more than she could get done in such a short time frame before she had to go back to working at the park full time (although there was interest). She focused on getting it shown in Lincoln and the whole thing kind of blew up pretty fast. She rented the Joyo Theatre and started work. Just a week before the showing there was interest from the Journal Star in doing an article but they wanted to feature someone local who would actually get up there and be embarrassing themselves. The guy doing the article was more of the human interest writer who wrote whatever he felt would be an interesting story, he wasn’t an entertainment writer who covered movies so in a matter of days Jessica found someone who had some good stuff and there was a big article in the paper about the show and the whole concept, it made the top of the front page telling you where to turn to read it and the front page of “The 402” section, which is basically supposed to be the section that talks about cool stuff that younger people would be into as opposed to the rest of the paper where irrationally angry people complain about “the liberals”. She also used some of her connections to get an interview on the radio and she did really well. The night of the showing went off without a hitch, everything went really well and the audience laughed and liked the movie, our local person Kylie killed it when she came on and did the live example of what we were trying to bring to town, everyone seemed to have a good time even though there was no booze or anything to lubricate things and for the most part, we broke even money wise. I couldn’t be more proud of Jessica for trying to do something new, cool, and interesting, putting a whole lot of work into it, and having success with it. Hopefully it’s just the start and she is able to get the live show here in Nebraska sometime in the future, but for now, it’s back to work for her full time park rangering again until it starts to cool down again. If you have Netflix the Mortified Nation movie is now available for streaming, please check it out and like Mortified on Facebook to help out Jessica’s efforts to bring the show here.