Why Can't My Head Just Explode and Have Done with It?
Thursday I came home from work and found Bobby lying on the couch. Under a blanket. Now, I like to be warm. Bobby likes to be cold. So I knew something was wrong right away.
When I asked how he was, he said in a voice that should never belong to such an imposing dude: "Sick...."
By Thursday night, there was a suspicious tightness in my throat. I ignored it, went to bed, and woke up Friday morning--after a night of tossing and turning and trying to ignore the feeling that a dozen or so hornets were building a nest in my throat--exhausted and sore and barely able to roll out of bed, onto the floor, and make my way to my cell phone, plugged in on Bobby's side of the bed, to call my boss and ask if I could have a day off.
Being uber-cool, of course, he said yes.
I then proceeded to go back to bed and slept for a total of twelve hours. I felt like a teenager again! It was not as delightful as I'd supposed.
For me to call out of work is a big deal. I've called out of work once before in my whole life and that was back in my kitchen manager days, when I had a rampant throat infection (although I didn't know that at the time and thought it only a cold) and couldn't even stand up for more than a few minutes without getting weak and light-headed. (Insert "light-headed" joke here.) Even then, I tried to go to work. Bobby and I worked together then--yes, I was his boss :P--and I was so weak that I stacked two milk crates together at the cold side and sat on them like a high stool. Bad idea. Don't ever stack milk crates together and sit on them. They do not stay together. I shifted wrong, the milk crates fell, and I went with them. My feet flew up in the air and knocked off the cutting board. Luckily, there was nothing dangerous on it like knives or heavy plates, but I did get a pretty hearty dousing with some honey mustard. Poor Bobby got it worse--he was my co-cook on the hot side--because the corner of the cutting board landed square on his toe.
Needless to say, I got sent home, went to the doctor, and found out that I had an infection, hence the fever and the weakness and the feeling that someone had scraped the back of my throat with a fork.
Funnily, though (in retrospect) is the fact that I refused to go home an for an hour or so after the "milk crate incident." All my coworkers were accosting me to the point where I started crying and yelled at them to leave me alone. I must have looked very professional and "managerial" that day!
This time wasn't nearly as bad. After the twelve hours of sleep, I managed to get up and have a meager lunch with Bobby--who had stayed home again with the same virus--and got online and got drawn into some insta-drabbling with juno_magic and the insta_drabblers. It was awesome, though! Then Bobby and I watched The Legend of Ron Burgundy on the digital cable--which was less awesome (although he liked it). Gattaca came on after that, though, and as this is my fourth-favorite movie of all time, I had to lay there and watch that too. How many times have I seen that movie by now, I wonder? I know most of it by heart.
Friday nights are nerd night, and I mustered the energy--laying around and watching two movies in a row--to give it a go, with the caveat that Bobby not engage in any overlong games involving each person putting 5,000 points on the table, with a total of ten people joining before all's said and done, with someone always using an army out of the case and, hence, requiring two hours to write a list....
Okay, that's an exaggeration, but I did ask him to keep it short. He played Potter, and each brought 1,000 points, which is a manageable game, although they lost track of turns and so played to the death, which made it a bit longer.
The good thing, though, is that my stupid dragon is almost totally puttied! W00T! Yes, I have about 10% left to do, and it is the easy part: I have some scales to add on the neck and the middle seam to seal and it is done!!! ::does happy dance:: Of course, then there is priming, basing, painting, and building a suitable base...it might be ready for the Golden Demon competition next May! I should re-emphasize might. I haven't even started on the rider yet. I am very slow when it comes to artistic endeavors.
Our best friend Harry Potter spent the weekend with us. Last week, when we got home from AC, I told Bobby that we were doing nothing this weekend that involved leaving the Howard County area, with the exception of nerd night. If people wanted to socialize with us, they were free to come to Ellicott City, but I was not having a weekend of driving to Belair three times at an hour-long trip one way. That turned out to be a good thing, because it left me free to stay home and catch up on all the crap that I missed doing while my Internet was down all week. So the weekend was busy but in a stay-at-home-in-your-PJs kind of way.
Yesterday, I played LotR Trivial Pursuit against the combined team of Bobby and Potter. I whooped their butts! W00T! That makes me still unbeaten at the game (although I've never played anyone besides Bobby--and now Potter--so the competition's never been particularly steep.)
On top of being sick, my ear decided to do something really gross. I have my ears pierced. I don't know why. I am terrified of blood and injuries of any kind. When I get paper cuts, black "bats" flutter across my vision unless I stick my finger under cold water long enough to stop the slow seepage of blood. When I first got my ears pierced when I was nine, there were times when I would black out and get chills and shake while putting in earrings. So I'm not sure exactly why I ever had my ears pierced, much less why I continue to occasionally force myself to put earrings in to keep the holes open. It'd be much healthier just to let them grow into scars and have done with it.
Last week, with the Internet down, I spent a lot of time on the phone with tech-support. Sometimes, when I talk on the phone a lot, my ear piercing will get irritated and swell a bit. So when it swelled this weekend, that's what I figured it was. Only it didn't go away in a few days.
Finally, I decided to lance the swelling with a sterilized pin and see what happened. (I took Bobby into the bathroom with me to catch me if I fainted! Good husband offered to do it for me, but I'd rather do it myself than imagine someone else doing the same thing. It's a weird phobia....) Nothing remarkable happened when I poked it, so I swabbed my ear front and back with peroxide...and whatever was on the back popped and decided to--
Okay, I'm not going to write anymore because I might pass out on my computer. And no one wants to read that anyway. Suffice to say that I had to sit down and drink lots of water to remind my throat which way it is supposed to swallow.
Anyway, my ear is normal now, although my head is still congested and feels like it might explode. That could be messy. And I'd probably faint.
Sickly yours,
Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain