Katrina relief, Denise needs 5000 calories

Katrina relief:
A friend down the street told me about his friend that owns Grand Slam, a local batting cage/laser tag/arcade in Monrovia CA. On Monday (Labor Day) he'll be open 10am - 7pm, and he's donating ALL of that day's proceeds from batting, slam dunking, and laser tagging to hurricane relief. With gas prices being what they are, lots of us are staying local this weekend. Let's help this guy help a lot of other people out. Bring the family. For those of you that know me through Pasadena Christian School, I believe that this is the same Grand Slam that we send kids to during our magazine drive and jog-a-thon fund raisers (if so, they love it).
Click here for the address & more info: Grand Slam

Usually when disaster strikes, Red Cross asks for more blood than usual. Denise is A positive, so that frees up a bunch of you to donate elsewhere. She hasn't needed a transfusion for several days, now that I think about it. So those of you that have been holding off on donating in case Denise needs you, now's a good time to donate to Red Cross or City of Hope (if you're local to us) or some other place that needs it. Free juice & cookies are in it for you.

As far as Denise's progress goes, today was relatively uneventful. The draw of fluid from around that psoas muscle was performed today and turned out to be a pocket of old blood... a hematoma, probably from the Lovenox. She was a little bit more alert today than yesterday. She had a twitch in her upper lip that I hadn't seen before. The resting energy expenditure test was also done and it was determined that Denise is using up about 5000 calories a day. A guy my size needs about 2000 calories a day (well, probably less, now that I'm sitting on my keister most of the time next to a hospital bed). I don't know how they're going to pump that much food into her. I thought of going to Cheesecake Factory, buying a couple cheesecakes, pureeing them, and pouring them through a funnel into Denise's g-tube. Any nurses reading this, I'd buy one for you all to share, leaving it intact, of course.

It occurred to me that Denise has been absent from the house for over six weeks, and I've not in this time gone to Tommy's for one of their chili burgers. See, Denise detests the smell of them, both before and after ingestion, and prefers that I only eat them when she's gone visiting her parents for a weekend. She once asked me to order one of their burgers without the chili (blasphemous... the lady taking the order over the drive-thru speaker said, "Que? Chili no?" and I heard laughing in the background). Anyway, I finally went to Tommy’s today. Scary, but the double cheeseburger, chili fries & shake may have amounted to Denise’s aforementioned required daily caloric intake.

And for the smart alec that asked about my parking by David Hasselhoff the other day:
No, he doesn't still talk to his car.
(I talked to his sister today... she said that she was still in high school while Knight Rider was on TV and she always got teased)