"The hardest thing I've ever gone through"

I exchanged IM's with Ed today, and that's how he described sitting in his daughter's hospital room, wearing a mask, listening to her on the phone. She and her fiance are changing their plans, moving their wedding date up to as soon as she leaves the hospital. I didn't have the heart to ask why.

He mentioned how impressive his wife has been. "One tough cookie," he wrote admiringly. The ultimate movie fan, Ed described her as "more Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment than Sally Field in Steel Magnolias."

It's not lost on me that both those movie heroines lost their daughters by the last reel.

Firefox, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?

Company-wide, my favorite-most browser is down. I feel like a pioneer woman who has to cook over an open flame, wash her clothes by beating them on the rocks by the river, and use Safari to post to her blog.

What a nice boy!

My Friday sight seen: Two portly, matronly-looking ladies -- a mother and daughter, I guess. They were chatting rather animatedly in Spanish while looking at the lilac lacy underthings in the Cacique window. Standing close by -- but not too close -- was a lad in his late 20s. You could tell by every line of his being that he was mortified to be stuck there, on Wacker Drive on a busy sunny lunch hour, in front of the plus-sized lingerie. But there he stood, patiently and respectfully, waiting for (I assume) Mom and Grandma to finish their unutterably embarrassing conversation.