Catchy Name Needed

I was complaining last week about it being so cold and damp, but it's warmed up this week - I think it's probably doing to be in the 60s today. I also think it's supposed to get cooler again soon, though.

I had a massive sinus headache all day yesterday and it seems to be coming back today. There must be some serious pollen in the air, or something, because everybody is sick. There were four people (out of ten) in the office yesterday, and two of those four were sick. Everybody is here today but they are all sneezing and sniffling and dragging around.


We didn't do much over the weekend. I played a lot of GuildWars. We did go to see Juno, which I ended up liking a lot. Rob did too. ursulahitlerand I had discussed in my comments that the clips we had seen didn't make either of us want to go see the movie very much, but then again, it got a very high ranking on rottentomatoes, and I have gotten where I rely an awful lot on those. Juno was running at 93% there, and that's basically the main reason I went. It did seem sort of overwritten and excessively cute at the beginning (first-time screenwriter syndrome, I imagine), but once it gets rolling that mostly stops. The girl's performance is mostly what makes it work, I think. Really extraordinary.

We have also been running our own little "Lost" season 3 marathon - we had stopped watching 4 or 5 episodes in, but we ended up with a copy of the full season, since my nephew told one too many people (apparently) to get him that for Christmas. And we decided since the new episodes were starting up, we might as well just catch up. And everybody who told us that season 3 perked up after those first few episodes was right. We have definitely gotten into it - which is just as well because we waited until rather the last minute to start this. New episodes start Thursday. We have 5 old episodes to go - I think we're going to make it.


Linkage:

Man, I am tired of being sick. I feel better this afternoon and I'm hoping that means I've finally turned the corner, but I'm afraid to believe it.

Well, let's see, I haven't talked about what I've been doing in several days. I did do a few things besides just hang around and be sick... Sunday I figured it would cause family drama if I said I was too sick to go see my mom, so we went anyway. We picked up lunch on the way over there from Angelo's, because my mom loves their penne con pesto. (The day she stops wanting to eat is the day I'm really going to be worried about her. She still loves her food.) She was talking better again Sunday, but my aunt had been there on Saturday and she said she wasn't then, so it may just have been a fluke. She also seems to be operating under the assumption that she will be going home soon and I just hope she's not going to be terribly disappointed about that. Art does seem to be willing to take her home again, if she gets strong enough, but she's not nearly there yet.

Oh, also, apparently they are planning to go to Glenn's house for Christmas so we are more-or-less definitely planning on going to Bryan. (I think Rob would rather go to Glenn's, quite frankly, but since we haven't been to Bryan for Thanksgiving or Christmas in two years, Bryan won out.) We will just be gone one night - go up Christmas Eve morning and come back after lunch Christmas day.

After we left Mom's we went to Fry's and we were planning on going to Wal-Mart but I was just completely exhausted by the time we got out of Fry's. It's a big place, but some of that I think was sickliness, too. Rob spent too much time picking out movies, as usual, but we weren't there that long. He got the Hammer version of The Mummy and some Dan Curtis movie that I had never heard of. And we bought me Willow. (Hush. I know it's cheesy. I still like it.)

We did make one more stop coming back - we stopped at Palais Royal. Remember how we were talking about that store called Peebles in Ohio? Well, it turns out that they are the same chain as Bealls and Palais Royal down here. And since my mother-in-law and Aunt Betty were so crazy about Peebles, we decided to get them gift certificates for Christmas. I hadn't been in the Palais Royal in Galveston in years and years because I thought it had really gone downhill the last time we were there. But it was nice again, and they had expanded into the old Walgreen's space next door, too. (Rob spent too much time browsing there, too - this time he was looking at shoes. Isn't it women who are supposed to be all into the shoe-shopping?)


Yesterday morning I was still coughing and sneezing and hacking, but I had a couple of things I was worried about at work - most notably, a meeting that needed changing that I forgot to take care of Friday - so I went in and stayed a couple of hours and then left. And today I didn't go in at all. Today, the sneezing and everything was better, but I woke up with a killer headache, and went back to bed and slept - or dozed, at least - all morning. By the time I woke up and had lunch and recovered, and realized that I did in fact feel better, it was 3:00 and too late to bother going in. (I imagine things are pretty slow this week, anyway. Hope I'm right about that!)


I did mail my in-laws' Christmas presents while I was at work yesterday, so that's taken care of. And I pretty much got the rest of the cards done yesterday afternoon. I still have some things to do, but I think I'll be able to manage to get everything taken care of by the weekend. If I don't have a relapse, anyway. Cross your fingers.

I can’t sleep. I got up and took a benadryl and I’m hoping it kicks in soon. I’ve felt fairly crappy all day today and I really don’t want to miss work tomorrow. Especially since I am going to be gone Tuesday in any case, in order to have the damn needle biopsy that I put off last week because I was so sick. I have now been sick for just about two weeks, and I am awfully fucking tired of it.

Until today, I had actually been feeling better. The last couple of days I had still coughing some, but not quite as much, and I felt quite a lot better. Well, I don’t care - if I still feel this bad tomorrow, I’m staying home. They can manage without me for a couple of days, and I can stay home and lounge around in bed and read Harry Potter and take naps, and hope that  that makes me feel better, because I’ve had it with being sick.


Did y’all see the piece on Netflix on 60 Minutes? It made me want to watch all the Netflix DVDs that are lying around my house so I can get new ones. I had already watched one on Friday - the first four episodes of the Christopher Eccleson season of Doctor Who. Then tonight I watched another one - the last disk of the BBC Bleak House from last year. (I really do need to read that book.)


Yesterday we finally got the license plates for the new car, and since the check for the down payment also finally came through the bank this week, I finally feel like we actually own the car. I mean, really, if somebody wrote you a check for over $2000, would it take you three weeks to cash it? I was beginning to think they lost it.

Well, never mind, I am not having the biopsy today after all, I am too sick. I am probably going to go to my doctor's office after while and get them to work me in and see if they think I have bronchitis or not. And then it looks like I am going to have to go up to Houston to sign papers for my mom to get transferred out of the hospital - to where, I'm not 100% sure. But I guess somebody up there is figuring that out. Apparently she is no longer considered competent to sign for herself, which means I get to do it. Joy. So anyway, I guess it worked out that I'm off today, because it sounds like I'm going to be busy.

The biopsy, if you're wondering, will be next Tuesday (the 4th, I think?) - same time same place.

I was intending to write a long entry today but I am tired and sick and grouchy and it's probably best that I just keep this short.

My mom is in the hospital at M.D. Anderson (that's the big cancer hospital in Houston). She is not really any worse than she was, except that they doubled the dose of steroids she's on and now she can't talk coherently at ALL. She seems to understand what you're telling her perfectly well, but when she goes to answer you the wrong words come out. You know how sometimes you mean to say one person's name and you say somebody else's instead? Well, she does that every single time. Like, when she means to say "Art" she says "C.L." instead (that's my dad), and when she means to say my sister's name she says mine, and I decided the other day that she may be messing up "yes" and "no" also. I think tomorrow when I go I'm going to make her nod or shake her head instead, and see where that gets us. I know I'm frustrated and I can just imagine how she must be feeling.

There is a ray of hope - or I'm choosing to take it that way, anyway. They are talking about doing surgery again. I figure if there was no hope at all, they wouldn't be considering it. I will probably have the final say on it, since she can't really tell them and I'm the one with power of attorney, god help me. I am going to ask a LOT of questions before I say yes, I know that. I'm hoping I will be able to tell how mom feels about it, too, even if she can't actually say so. Up to now she has been consistently in favor of the agressive approach. (But look where that's gotten us.)

We ended up having a decent Thanksgiving. We got invited to horn in on somebody else's dinner - one of Art's kids - and we accepted gladly. We were still invited to my aunt's in Bryan, of course, but I just didn't have the energy to go up there. The worst part was that we went to see Mom first, and she wanted to come with us to dinner. I felt so bad leaving her!

I have been sick all week - either a cold or allergies, it's hard to tell. I probably shouldn't even have been going to the hospital at all in that state, but I wasn't sneezing or anything, and I washed my hands a lot. (And how am I going to tell my mom, sorry, I can't come see you, I have a cold?) I think I was choosing to tell myself it was allergies, although the way it's been steadily progressing from runny nose to sneezing to cough all week, I suspect that I was probably wrong about that. Anyway, now I am to the coughing stage and I'm really tired of it. I did stay home and try to rest today but I don't know if it helped that much. I still feel exhausted.

(This was longer than I intended but it all poured out pretty fast. I've written much shorter entries that took much, much longer to write.)

Somebody on my friendslist wrote a "where I was" entry, and it reminded me that I've sort of been meaning to talk about this all day. I've talked about it before, but I think that entry is gone.

The thing is, I practically missed 9/11. (Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.)

I had called in sick, because I woke up with my usual sinus crap, headache & dizziness & all that stuff, and I slept late and then I read the rest of the morning. Nobody knew I was home (well, except my co-workers) because I didn't realize how bad I was feeling until after Rob had already left, so nobody called me to tell me, they just assumed I was at work & I would already know. I don't remember what I was reading, but I must've been really engrossed in it, because it was 2:00 before I got up. (It's possible that some napping went on somewhere in there, too.) When I did get up, I turned on the computer, not the TV - but I had AOL in those days (yeah, yeah, I know) and the picture of the burning towers was on the welcome screen. Some welcome. So then I turned on the TV, and I saw.

I remember that my first reaction was disbelief. And it's funny, I watched the CNN replay of the original coverage today, and it seemed like that was everybody else's first reaction, too. Not really surprising, but I missed all that at the time, see. Even after the 2nd plane flew into the towers, the commentators were still discussing whether it could possibly have been a mistake - some kind of terrible error  with navigational equipment. Yeah, right. Even though it was a perfectly clear day. And it was also very clear that when the first tower collapsed, nobody was wanting to believe what they were seeing. Even after the dust cleared enough that you could clearly see that there was no tower there, nobody would say it. Finally they started saying that part of the tower might have collapsed, that was as far as they went in the coverage I saw. And I mean, I'm not saying that that was an unnatural reaction to a huge event like this one - I'm just saying that I really didn't even know until today that that was the reaction at all. Even after all the years and all the press coverage, there are still big gaps in my knowledge about that day.

They also kept talking today about how beautiful the weather was that day, and I don't remember them saying that at the time. - They probably didn't, actually. It's the kind of thing you think about afterwards. It was beautiful here too. The only reason I went outside at all was because I had a 4:00 psych appointment. (This was during my Psycho Depressed Woman period.) I remember that the sky was very blue and that the dragonflies were swarming - something they do this time of year, but I've never seen as many as I saw that day. Now whenever I see a lot of dragonflies I always think about that day.

I've always thought that having missed all the early coverage of that day made it just the slightest bit easier to get through. Or maybe it was just partly the depressed state I was already in - my emotions were pretty much encased in cotton-wool already, at the time. I mean, I was still somewhat traumatized, definitely, but not to the degree that a lot of other people seemed to be. And at least by the time I found out what was happening, the worst of the uncertainty was over. I do think that was a help.

You know, though, there was another thing going on there. Maybe I'm just a more skeptical person by nature, because I always believed that there would be a terrorist attack in the US eventually. Do you remember people saying things like, "Oh, that'll never happen here"? I do. And I never believed them. I certainly didn't imagine the horror and the magnitude of that attack, but it didn't surprise me a bit that there was one. (I mean, hell, there had already been one. 1993, wasn't it?)

(This is sort of rambly but I'm sleepy and I don't have the patience to edit it any more. I hope this makes some sense.)

I am still grouchy. I am getting very tired of feeling crappy about 50% of the time, to the point that I am tempted to try to set up a doctor's appointment - but I'm 99% sure this is allergy/sinus crap so there's probably not much they can do. Besides, I'm sort of leery of the whole ENT department since the last ENT doctor I had is now under investigation (or she still was the last time I saw her on CNN, anyway) for (allegedly) euthanizing people in New Orleans during Katrina. That just makes you a little jumpy, you know?

(Cut for more whining and some GuildWars)

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We went to an open house Saturday at the most gorgeous house - if I had $400,000 to spare I would totally buy it. It was an older couple that Rob knows from running, and they have apparently spent the last 25 years remodeling it, and now they are moving to Guadalajara to retire. I forgot to ask how old the house was - at a guess I'd say it was built in the 1890s. It had to have been pre-1900 because they had a picture of it being jacked up when they raised the island after the storm. Among other things, it had stencilling in nearly every room, and the kind of library I've always dreamed about - a whole room lined with shelves, with one of those library ladders on rails that you can move around to reach the top. They had some really great artwork, too. Besides getting to see the house, some friends of ours turned up and we had a nice time talking to them, too. So see, a social life is not such a bad thing after all.

(Part of this was written yesterday.)

I am writing this entry on Notepad because the writing of it is liable to be on-again, off-again. Rob will be home in a little while, and usually that is his designated computer time, and even if he doesn't want it, I've been sitting here most of the afternoon and I think I am ready to go lie down again.

I am sickly today. I don't exactly know why. I didn't sleep well last night, partly because my sinuses were acting up, and partly because I am just an insomniac, at least that's what I thought. I dragged out of bed around 7:15 and got dressed and started out the door to work and I just felt awful. And like I said, I am something of an insomniac and I am fairly accustomed to dragging myself to work in a sleep-deprived state, but today was different, somehow. Rob could tell, even - he told me to go back to bed if I wanted to, and he doesn't usually really encourage me to do that. So I did. I took an ambien and called and left a message at work that I wouldn't be in this morning, and went back to bed and slept til nearly noon.

And if it was mostly lack of sleep that was the problem, then I should be all cured, right? Four more hours of sleep ought to have been plenty. But no, I got up and started to get dressed and I still felt like crap. Just kind of generalized symptoms - achy, etc. I hope to god I'm not coming down with the flu. (I've had a flu shot, so I shouldn't be. But doesn't that sound suspiciously like it?)


Anyway. I really meant to write about my weekend. But really, this weekend was mostly like most of my weekends, except for the extra day. So I will content myself with saying that we went to see Munich, and I really liked it a lot. I have now seen three of the five Best Picture candidates, and I would put Munich in the middle, Brokeback Mountain at the bottom, and Capote at the top. And actually, Munich is a fairly close second; it has grown on me a bit in the couple of days since I've seen it. (Brokeback, for whatever reason, is sort of going the opposite way in my mind. I liked it better the first couple of days than I do now.)


(Now it's today, not yesterday!) I went to work today, and felt better, but I am still sort of achy and tired. My latest theory is that I actually have a mild case of the flu, and the flu shot is keeping it from getting any worse. Let's hope it's that, and not incipient bronchitis or something.