Category: Daily Life

Ah, the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals.  The antibiotics are working splendidly and I feel a zillion times better already.  The first night I took them I experienced one of the side effects mentioned in the enclosed literature:  extremely vivid dreams.  In fact, I woke up convinced that one of my dreams was real and I even called my husband into the room to talk to him about it before I woke up enough to realize that none of it had really happened.  Fortunately, I’ve slept fine ever since.

On Saturday morning I met up with my sister to go grocery shopping for our Thanksgiving feast.  I was expecting the bill to be staggeringly huge, but we ended up getting enough food for a dozen people (plus planned leftovers) for a little more than $50.

I brought home the ingredients to make pumpkin pie and dinner rolls on Wednesday night.  I’m also planning to make spiced pecans for us to have as a snack.  I’ll go to my sister’s early on Thanksgiving morning so we can collaborate on the rest of the meal.

On Sunday morning, my husband’s sister flew in with her 4-month-old baby and I picked them up at the airport.  After breakfast, I baked a batch of cookies with white chocolate chips and dried cranberries to take to my community service group’s Ronald McDonald House dinner.  After that, I put a pot roast in the oven and cooked it slowly all day long.

I’m looking forward to a lovely week of good company, tasty meals and other reminders of all of the things I have to be thankful for.  (Yes, that’s a terribly awkward way to end a sentence, but it didn’t sound right any other way.)

Yesterday I began to realize that I wasn’t quite as well as I thought.  A six-block round trip walk for coffee left me short of breath and coughing for the rest of the workday and into the evening.  Today I went to work for a couple of hours in the morning but I felt completely enervated and as soon as I managed to line up a 2:30 p.m. doctor’s appointment (same day appointment – can you believe it?!), I went home to lie down.

Now I’m back from the doctor with a diagnosis of bronchitis laced with dainty touches of ear infection and tonsillitis, yet another scary, steroid-laced inhaler, and a prescription for 10 days’ worth of horse pill sized antibiotics. 

If I didn’t have that "deflated balloon" feeling and the cough, I’d be doing pretty well.  Let’s hope an early bedtime makes a difference.

Partly due to circumstances but mainly by natural inclination, I tend to be rather thrifty.  Thus, there are few things that bother me more than wasting money.

Yesterday morning I was frantically running errands, one of which involved dropping off two printed pieces to have multiple copies made.  I’d been up late the evening before preparing these items and the lack of sleep must have had an effect because one of the forms I had printed ended up being the sample form I’d originally downloaded and not the customized version I needed.

I didn’t notice the mistake until I’d already passed out dozens of copies of the form, neatly folded with the other flyer.  At a meeting, I urged everyone to distribute the form far and wide and as I read some of the copy out loud, I realized that the deadline was wrong.  Hmmm.  A quick glance revealed that the address information on the beautifully-copied forms read, "Your Street Address, Your City, Your State, Your Zip Code."  D’oh!

Fortunately I had a small supply of correct forms that I’d laser printed on plain paper, so all was not lost.  Still, I spent money and wasted nice paper for NOTHING.  Oh well, I’m sure I’ll get over it.

Today is my second day without cold medicine, so I think it’s safe to say that I’m officially well.  Woohoo!

I slept a lot this weekend, but I also got a lot of work done around the house.  My husband’s sister and her four-month-old baby will be staying with us all next week, so I figured it was time to tackle the giant piles of dirty laundry in the basement.  Now I have so many clothes jammed onto my clothes rack that I barely have the strength to push apart the giant bale of clothing to retrieve what I want to wear.  I think it might be time to do some serious closet culling.

Yesterday I stewed a hen all day long, which turned the house into a chicken-scented sauna but provided us with a lovely dinner of chicken and dumplings when all was said and done.  That means we’ll have chicken pot pie for dinner tonight and chicken with noodles for dinner on Tuesday.  Not bad for $7.50 worth of meat.

The rest of this year is going to be extremely busy.  I have two trips, two holidays and countless social events planned.  Thank goodness I’m over my cold…knock on wood.

I woke up coughing at 5:30 a.m., but instead of re-dosing myself and going back to sleep, I figured I’d just get up, blog, shower and get to work early.  I have a feeling I’m going to be taking a few hours off sometime soon for a doctor visit to address this cough, so it’s best that I get in all the work hours I can.

I can never decide if I’m a good morning person or not.  On one hand, I ordinarily wake up on my own and get up right away.  On the other hand, I usually manage to let time slip away in the morning until I’m running late and cursing up a storm all the way to work.  Maybe I need to start making coffee at home.

Oh goody, I can hear that it’s storming outside.  Fortunately my husband pays attention to the weather reports or I’d have left my poor lime tree outside last night during a hard freeze.

Hmm, with a windy storm, a quelled cough and general cold-y tiredness, it sure is tempting to go back to bed for just another half hour.  All right, I’ve talked myself into it!

Christmas used to be my favorite holiday.  I’d bring in a real tree, decorate every square inch of my house with faux greenery and shiny baubles, and bake cookies every week from Thanksgiving on.  I loved to choose the perfect gifts, wrap them and admire them stacked under the tree.

Now…not so much.

Somewhere along the line, "enchanting and glorious" turned into "expensive and time-consuming."  My family members began making increasingly strict present-limiting agreements to the point where I’m pretty sure we only buy gifts for my niece now.  I still enjoy baking cookies and making candy, but with a diabetic husband and other relatives on diets, it seems cruel to have too many sweets available.  I now have an unnaturally tall and skinny artificial tree that fits neatly into a corner of the living room.  I buy pine-scented Glade Plug-Ins to try to replicate the fresh tree smell, but it’s not quite the same.

When I was a child, I always woke up early on Christmas morning and sat with my sister at the top of the stairs for hours until our parents woke up and let us go down and open the gifts from our stockings.  Now I sleep late on Christmas morning and barely get to my sister’s house in time to help her prepare the afternoon meal.

This year I want to really make an effort to recapture some of the appreciation for Christmas that I once had.  I want to decorate the house, have lots of friends over, make goodies to give away and think of thoughtful, affordable gifts for each family member.  With any luck, this will be the best holiday I’ve had in years.

Last night I got home from work secure in the knowledge that I had the ingredients to make tuna noodle casserole for dinner.  The casserole was delightful:  low-carb pasta curls, cream of mushroom soup, a can of tuna and a cup of frozen peas, baked until bubbling hot with a crust of French fried onions on top.  It’s not something you’d ever look for or even want at a restaurant, but sometimes the quickie, at-home meals are the best.  (See also:  rice topped with a can of pork and beans.)

I spent the next morning cleaning up the kitchen, feeling no shame at the sight of crumb-covered cooling racks from a pre-Halloween batch of cookies.  I know I’m a slob and I accept that.

I was a little ashamed at the state of my dressing room.  It’s developing a bad case of half-hidden junk piles.  There are stacks of papers in bags and boxes tucked here and there throughout the room, no doubt placed there to get them out of sight of visitors on various occasions.  It’s nothing an evening with a paper shredder wouldn’t fix, but that evening really can’t come too soon at this point.

Maybe this weekend I can spend a day at home, put a chicken in a pot on the stove to cook all afternoon, and do a thorough tidying.  As long as I lock up the TV remotes and my unread books, I might have a shot at accomplishing something.  Stranger things have happened.

My weekend was almost entirely uneventful.  I attended a game night with friends on Saturday (one win, two losses, 10+ cough drops), but spent the rest of the weekend flat on my back either sleeping, reading or watching TV.  The cats loved me for it.

I read America (The Book), Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and Interior Desecrations – all very entertaining in different ways.  I also watched a lot of basic cable, which sharpened my distaste for the smarmy bartender in the Disaronno Amaretto commercials. 

Did all the extra rest cure my cold?  Unfortunately not.  Still, I’m sure I’m better off than if I’d raced around from one event to another all weekend long the way I ordinarily would. 

Yes, I’m still sick.  I woke up in the middle of the night with so much tension in my upper back and shoulders that I thought my body was preparing to pop my aching head off like a champagne cork.  After a dose of Dayquil (it’s all I had) I sat reclined on the couch with a heating pad across my shoulders and slept until the sun came up.  The headache was gone.  Hooray!

Now I’m a little medicine-fogged and prone to frequent throat clearing, but I think I can be functional.

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have such a puny immune system.  It’s an absolute miracle when I can make it through even one cold weather month without getting sick.  Vitamins?  I take them daily.  Immune-boosting supplements?  Useless.  I get plenty of sleep, mostly stay away from refined sugar, etc., etc.  Nothing helps.

Okay, enough whining.  If I don’t stop now, I’ll lose all my readership except my hypochondriac base.  Assuming this cold is over in the usual amount of time, I should be better by Monday.  Have a lovely weekend!

The last time I felt flush with cash and went to get a pedicure, I decided to get a manicure as well. It was just clear polish and a remedy for my many hangnails, but I enjoyed having well-groomed fingers and decided to let my nails grow for a while.

I’ve never had much luck growing my nails and my rule has always been, “Once one breaks, the rest must go, too.” This time, though, they just kept growing. I don’t know if I’m getting lots of unexpected gelatin in my diet or if it was the polish, but my nails simply didn’t break. They grew and grew until there was no polish on the last third of the nail surface. I even had to file them one day so they’d keep their shape. It was a fun experiment at first, akin to growing a colony of Sea-Monkeys, but with far less maintenance.

Soon, however, I began to remember why I usually keep my nails short. The length of my nails started to hinder my daily activities: they collected remnants of cookie dough, hand lotion and bar soap, and they sometimes got hung up between the computer keys when I typed. When I put my hands in my jacket pockets, my nails dug into my palms. No doubt to the annoyance of my co-workers and friends, I added a new kind of fidgeting to my repertoire: tapping my nails on things. My little experiment was becoming a nuisance for everyone.

Last night I’d finally had enough. I was awake in the middle of the night with another bout of cold-induced insomnia and surfing the ‘net when I decided I could no longer stand to type with my nails scraping the laptop keys. It took less than a minute to undo the weeks of nail growth progress and return to my short, practical manicure. Ahhh! The feel of my fingertips on the computer again!

Now I’m adding long fingernails to the same category as pointy-toed shoes. They’re attractive and all, but the suffering outweighs any possible benefits. That’s why I’ll never be particularly fashionable: I’d much rather feel good than look good.