mellicious | Entries tagged with sick

I mentioned that it was supposed to get down to freezing last night, but I don't think it did - upper 30s, maybe, though, which is still pretty chilly by our standards. We do usually get a freeze or two (or sometimes more) but it's usually later in the winter when that happens. (Is it even technically winter yet? I think not, come to think of it!)

I was off today and I only ventured out to go to the credit union because we are trying to close out the very last one of my mother's trust accounts. (Some of you who remember me from way back may remember hearing about this looooong ago - my mom died in early 2007, I believe, so darn near 20 years ago.) We had to do some thinking (and some querying of my sister) to figure all this out - at the time Mama died, my sister and her ex were getting or had just gotten divorced, and my mother had been very determined that my ex-brother-in-law should not be able to get his hands on any of her money. Which is what resulted in a trust so strong that that we're still trying to jailbreak the last money out of it at this late date, even though I'm the executor. (With help from the CU, we think we've got it figured out. We just need the right paperwork!)

I'm still half-sick, although I've been coughing off and on for almost two weeks and so I'm bound to be near the end of this cycle, I hope. We did manage to go try that Mexican restaurant that we hadn't been to before and it was really good. (I may go eat leftover fajitas soon, come to think of it!)

I'm not doing so well at Holidailies - well, I've done a few entries, but it's already the 13th and I've done (pause while I go and count) five whole (short) entries. In my defense, I've been sickly, and it just seems not to be going away. Rob has recovered much better than I have.

We were talking idly about going to see Hamnet tomorrow, but really I intend to sleep all day, and the city holiday parade is also tomorrow - it's not impossible to get out during it, because it only goes down the main road and so you can get out by the back ways. But I bet we don't. We probably will go and get the fajitas that we put off last week - that will be Sunday, though.

(We can still go see Hamnet later, anyway - I assume it will still be around!)

I've been watching (in sections) a two-hour video (I added a link in case you want to torture yourself with this!) of a young British woman going through the plot of the book of Wicked in - clearly - significant detail, but then it's also a big fat book, which I'm well aware of because I've been reading the paperback edition. It's making me feel better that somebody else thinks this book is deeply weird. It is deeply weird; I don't know what state of mind I was in back when I first read it, that I didn't come away thinking that. Or maybe it's just that I read a lot of weird stuff!

I'm still not feeling too great. I stayed up all night (not unusual for me) and slept all day (which is). I missed the whole first half of the UT-Georgia game, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem to have been that eventful. UT doesn't seem to be able to handle Georgia too well; I thought that the first time they played this year. They're the only team we've played that's been that way. This is an excellent team but not quite a national-champion one, apparently. I'm going to be interested to see how this whole (expanded) college playoff thing goes. -- OK, now our guys are suddenly playing better. And... there will be overtime, looks like.

(Also, this game is on at least three different channels on my TV - ABC, ESPN, and some kind of weird ESPN feed with no announcers. I ended up watching ABC.)

It's 55 degrees here. Not exactly terribly cold, but we're not used to a lot of cold around here. Our apartment is kind of chilly, although obviously I didn't have any trouble sleeping.

OK, now overtime. Aaaand Georgia wins. Oh well, at least we forced the overtime. Coming into this year, nobody was sure how UT would handle the big bad SEC, and we certainly got through that pretty well.

It's midnight (Sunday) and I just remembered to check and see if the Texans won, and they did. So now I'm watching the Texans play the Titans, and the Titans are wearing the old Oilers uniform, powder-blue with red trim and the damn oil-rig on the helmet, and it's kind of freaking me out. Every time I look up at the screen, I'm not sure which team I'm supposed to be rooting for. (Are there even oil-rigs in Tennessee? Honestly you don't see them very much around here any more, either, but you did when I was growing up.) (I'm sure I've said this before, at some point, but this was such an oil-rich area that that was our phone exchange, back when they still had such a thing when I was a kid - it was Oilfield-8. I think those wells must have gone dry ages ago, though.)

(Finished watching the game in the wee hours. It was pretty exciting. The Texans might possibly even make the playoffs.)

I slept very late and then we went to an early-ish show of Wonka. We both liked it, and there was even a good bit of applause at the end, so I guess most people did. I can't really say it wasn't what I expected, because I honestly wasn't sure what to expect. I had no idea if Timothee Chalamet could even sing, but he did well. I checked when we got home and it made around $40 million domestically, over the weekend, but it opened last week internationally, and with the two weeks of overseas sales it's already earned back more than what it cost - $150m total - so that's pretty good.

(Sickness update, in case anybody's concerned: I'm still coughing every now and then, but otherwise the symptoms are mostly gone. So that's a relief.)

I was whining about being sick, and so I wrote an entry about it last night, and then I spent several hours reading my way back through the sick tag for years and years - and I mean that, because my old LJ entries got ported over here. Years of me whining about sinuses and allergies and various cold/flu symptoms. Honestly it made me feel better (in a way), because I still get sick, but not like I was back then. I think it mostly subsided about a year or so after we moved out of Galveston, even though we didn't move all that far. I guess it was far enough that the allergens were different, though! I'm not sure exactly when I started posting on LJ a lot but the "sick" tag stopped (or, well, started) in early 2006.

(I feel better today, except once in a while I have to stop and cough for a few minutes. Not a bad price to pay.)

I've been sick basically since the last time I wrote - Tuesday? I cancelled my Wednesday doctor appointment because I had a sore throat, and then in really quick succession I had various combinations of sneezing and sniffling, headache, all that fun stuff, and then today I was coughing all day. I went to work, because there really was nobody to substitute for me, and just kept my distance as much as possible (and kept something nearby to sneeze into, so I hopefully was not getting my germs into the air too much). I think it was just a good old-fashioned cold, really. Nobody ever talks about having those any more, but I had a flu shot over a month ago, and Rob & I both had covid a few months ago too. (Although I guess you could get it again if it was a different variant, right? Til lately nobody around here had covid boosters to give people, which is kinda odd.) What are the other candidates? RSV? I think that would be more severe, wouldn't it?

I remember back when that everybody used to pass the "48-hour bug" around, which was mostly something similar to the symptoms I had. (Except when it was some kind of stomach virus.) Anyway, I'm hoping the 48-hour thing is right because that should mean I'm about done.

Have I mentioned that I had the dreaded shingles shot? That was a few weeks ago. My arm was red for over a week and it itched for most of that time, but I've had the shingles, years ago, and that was even more nasty, so I'll drag myself in to the doctor's office again soon and get the second one. (Oh, I remember, I asked about the covid shot then, and they said they had finally gotten them in, but you can't do that at the same time as the shingles shot! It's always something.)

I thought I would have one more movie - Little Women, or something - to add to my 2019 list before the end of the year, but no, I've had a stomach virus and I haven't been out of the house since Saturday, when I had to work. So the list ends with the second time for Star Wars on Christmas Day - which honestly I didn't enjoy as much as the first time.

Most years I have trouble picking a "best movie" but this year was the year of Endgame, totally, for me. I just watched it again the other day. That's my favorite, hands down. There's maybe some doubt about what would be #2, between Knives Out and the "second tier" of superhero movies, all of which were very good. - Captain Marvel, Spiderman: Far From Home, and Shazam! Oh, and I almost left out Ford vs Ferrari, which was really surprisingly good too.

OK, so a top 5:
1. Endgame
2. Captain Marvel
3. Ford vs Ferrari
4. Knives Out
5. Shazam!
(runner-up: Spiderman: Far From Home)

Movies seen at a theater in 2019:

1. Bumblebee

2. Into the Spider-verse (our second time)

3. Lego Movie 2

4. Alita: Battle Angel

5. Captain Marvel (three times)

6. Shazam!
7. Avengers: Endgame (four times)
8. Field of Dreams (30th anniversary)
9. Spiderman: Far From Home
10. Ad Astra
11. Ghostbusters (35th anniversary)
12. Zombieland: Double Tap
13. Terminator: Dark Fate
14. Ford vs.Ferrari
15. Knives Out (twice)
16. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (twice)

(I read Rob the list of what he saw and I didn't, and he said probably Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was his favorite, and Midsommar second.)

Shit, how did it get to be 2019 already? I've mostly been home sick the last few days, although I'm better. I think the only time I've been anywhere since the last time I posted is that we went to Chili's kind of late last night, because somebody gave us a gift-card. I tried being true to my low-fat-low-carb thing (because it's doctor-mandated, mind) and ordered a chicken salad and I didn't really like it. But that was Chili's. I didn't like their vinaigrette and I didn't really like the chicken that much either but I think I would be okay with a salad with chicken at other places. Anyway, it was good to get out. Today I'm still sucking on cough drops and noticing that my nose is horribly chapped, but I'm definitely in recovery mode.

(If I go to Chili's in the future - because Rob gets the urge to go there occasionally - hang the diet, I'm ordering country-fried steak.)

We had a horrible thought. Remember how I said the waitress at the breakfast place we went to might have been the one that infected us? Well, I was thinking that that kind of seemed like a short time window anyway, and then Rob said that he actually thought he got the virus from our co-worker, which sets the whole time-frame for him back about three days, so then I probably got it from him before that, because I was feeling a little better yesterday when my sister said they were both feeling horrible. And then Rob (or I) probably infected them too. That fits the overall timeline who got sick and well in what order a lot more neatly than the IHOP theory. But I decided not to tell my sister about that theory unless she brings it up. Really it's useless wondering about where you got a cold most of the time. (But my brain bounces between subjects all the time - I imagine it going ping! ping! ping! sort of like a pinball - and so I'm always contemplating all sorts of useless things.)

Doctor Who episodes keep taping so I've been watching a lot of those. Let's see, besides the ones I know I already mentioned, I watched "A Christmas Carol" and "Blink" and "Let's Kill Hitler" for chrissake (I don't think I'd seen that one since it first came out) and the most recent one, the Battle of Some Random Name. Tonight I've been watching a bunch of year-end news shows, which mostly were not quite as depressing as you might think. Tomorrow we're going to have another try at "Bumblebee" (and we've already got the tickets so that ups the odds we're actually going this time). And it's at 6:00 so we're going to miss the Doctor Who thing, which is at 7 our time. I already checked and it's set to tape, though, and god knows BBC-A will probably rerun it about a zillion times even if it didn't.

Oh, I almost forgot - we watched "Room" earlier. We had never seen it. I expected it to be good, and it was. I was really afraid the second half was going to veer off and become a courtroom drama, and I am so glad it didn't!

This ends Holidailies, unless I get my shit together and write another entry before midnight tomorrow - er, tonight, officially. I did maybe 15 journal entries, which is not completely terrible. I think I played out on Music Advent somewhere around Day 15 also. I have consistently written nail journal entries. I have been working on my year-end thing where I decide what my favorite polish of the year is. These will start going up tomorrow - it starts with just the list of everything I've worn, as best I can tell, and I narrow it down from there. The plan is to get my favorite up on Friday. I got down to a tentative top three last night so I think I'll get there.

(Hmm, maybe I'll do a Best Movies post! If I get another post done it'll probably be that.)

sneeze cough

Yeah, I'm still sick. I didn't go to bed until like 9am (again) - I woke up and it was getting dark (I'm nearly always confused when that happens because I think for a minute it's dawn, not dusk). Then I went back to sleep for another hour. Rob let me sleep until 6 and we were going to see the 6:45 Bumblebee, but by the time I threw some clothes on & got out the door I was pretty sure we weren't going to make it - it takes pretty much a solid 30 minutes to get to the theater and get Rob his Diet Coke, etc.. At that moment I wasn't sure I cared, either. (I know it has good reviews and everything, but it's a Transformers movie. I suspect I'll like it in the end but it's hard to work up much enthusiasm.) Rob was going, "We can make it," and we got down the road to where our favorite Chinese restaurant is and I said "Are you sure you don't just want to eat?" and we got even further down the road before I talked him out of the movie and into Chinese. It was already time for the movie to start by then and we were still 10 minutes away, and I hate missing the beginning of movies. Plus, I was hungry.

So we had Chinese for dinner, and I ordered what I always order (sweet & sour chicken) before it occurred to me that I talked to the doctor's office first thing yesterday morning (or last thing before bed, for me) - and my A1C was kind of high and so I'm supposed to be eating low-carb, low sugar for the next few months. But oh well, I ate my damn chicken anyway. I was expecting the low-sugar part but the carb thing took me by surprise. I honestly don't know what to eat - lots of chicken salads? I think cutting down on bread will be harder than cutting out sugar, for me. (In case anybody's wondering if they missed something on the diagnosis front, I have not officially been diagnosed with diabetes so far - or at least the nurse I talked to never mentioned it. But obviously I'm right on the borderline.)

And meanwhile I'm sneezing my way through dinner. Luckily they had seated us in a corner. Rob seems better today but I'm worse. I hope that means I'll be better by tomorrow. I looked and "Vice" is showing at the Cinemark, so I'm thinking that I should send Rob off to see that because he wanted to see it and I don't, and that will give me another recovery day. I watched plenty of news all through the Bush administration, I feel like I've seen that movie already.

Oh, and I have been watching Doctor Who for the last few hours - I watched almost all of the last several Capaldi episodes, which for some reason I missed at the time. I think I've watched everything now except the one that comes between "World Enough and Time" and "Twice Upon a Time". (And I still haven't watched the last new episode, either - the Battle of something, I think? - so I guess I should do that before the New Year's Day one! I think that one recorded, but for some reason the 12th doctor one didn't, even though all the others did. What's up with that?)

I mentioned yesterday that I was feeling a little sick. Well, we are both sick - pretty mildly sick, I think it's just a cold - and furthermore, my sister and her husband are too. So I guess maybe somebody that waited on us earlier this week was sick, because meals were mostly when all four of us were together. (I believe one server on Christmas Eve mentioned that they were sending her home because she was sick, in fact.) But anyway, I'd rather have a cold than a severe allergy attack, because the cold will go away in a few days. With allergies you just don't know.

Rob went off to see the Halloween movie at the dollar theater. I just stayed home. I'm watching the MSNBC shows from earlier today (what the heck is the stock market doing?) and futzing around on the computer. I bought two more candles from Bath & Body Works (I always want to say Bed Bath & Beyond, but that's wrong) because they have the 3-wick candles on half-price sale again. I bought another Fresh Balsam candle and a non-holiday one that was Eucalyptus Mint or something like that. I thought that sounded like it was pretty safely something I would like.

I'm obsessing about Zoya polishes at the moment - not the new ones, but the old ones - like, the ones so old you can't figure out all the information on them. I suppose this is a stupid thing to obsess about, but I am just the same. (I have this spreadsheet with a lot of holes in it and I was trying to figure out some of the missing ones. I have names and Zoya's polish numbers and I'm trying to match those up, basically.)

Last night I finished the book that I was reading - one of the series that I didn't get around to talking about earlier, the October Daye books - one of Seanan McGuire's urban fantasy series - so then I had to decide what was next. I have unread stuff that I could have read without spending more money, but I really wanted to either get the next book in that series or the next Expanse book. That was book 9 of 12 on the October Daye books and I've only read the first Expanse book (Leviathan Wakes) - there are a bunch of those too, at least 8 of them, I think, from what I saw when I looked on Amazon. I like both series and I'm not in any particular hurry to finish one or the other. If the October Daye books seemed to be heading towards some particular ending, I would probably be wanting to finish, but as far as I can tell, they're mostly just serials and could possibly go on forever. I'm not far enough into the Expanse series to have any idea about that - it did have an ending to the first book, they're not just cliffhangers like, say, Lord of the Rings, where it's really just one book divided up. But there's plenty of plot to go on with, too. Anyway, I bought the second Expanse book, which is Caliban's War. It seems to pick up maybe a couple of months after the first one ends, from what I've read so far.

We went to see Aquaman tonight, and I didn't love it. I didn't hate it, but I was kind of bored, off & on. It seemed kind of like a kids' movie. And there were a lot of kids there - it was packed, in fact - and there was applause at the end, so somebody liked it much better than I did. It was... hmm, maybe better than Batman vs. Superman, because I was bored with that one some, too. Not quite as good as Justice League, as best I can remember Justice League at all. And of course, not remotely in the same league as Wonder Woman.

I have some more-specific thoughts, which I'll put under a cut assuming I can remember how to do one.

( SPOILERS!! )

I took a long nap when we came home from Galveston last night, and then, of course, I stayed up all night. I mean, til WAY after dawn. It might be that I was a little cranky about Aquaman because I was still sleepy, I don't know. And I feel a little like I might be coming down with something - which happens after Christmas a lot. We weren't even around any kids this year to be disease vectors. Well, I've had a flu shot and so has Rob, so if we're actually coming down with anything it will hopefully be over fast, at least.

Well, I have given in and I have a doctor's appointment in the morning. If nothing else, I figure they can give me a referral to an allergist, and I think it's time to try that. I last went to an ENT doc nearly 10 years ago, and she wasn't even an allergy specialist - somebody may have some ideas they didn't then. Plus, I've had sore throats off and on for weeks now, and while I do think it's likely that it's just allergies, it's time (probably past time) to rule out the other stuff, too. Obviously I've been avoiding it, but man, I'm tired of being sick.

I have not gotten far on my little to-do list from yesterday, except that I did make progress on the making and sending of cards. Some I've done are actually mostly handmade and others less so, but so far I haven't resorted to my leftover bought cards from past years at all. I've been taking scans of the more original ones and I'll post those later, after the recipients have had time to see them. But I'm a little bit happier with myself on that score. Just getting off my butt and doing anything is a triumph these days. I even have a war-wound - I sliced my finger open a little bit with the paper-trimmer - nothing too bad, though.

The fact is, I am not feeling much holiday spirit this year. It comes and it goes so fast now that it doesn't seem like there's time to enjoy it. I guess that's just a part of getting older. (And I think maybe you adjust to the whoosh of time as it goes by. At least, sometimes I think I'm starting to.)

I'm not saying you're actually going to get 7 kinds of random here, but I'm pretty sure that the only way I'm going to get an entry out tonight is to loose the random.

Well, ok, let's start with some updates on things I've talked about previously: first of all, the Texans lost rather ignominiously on Monday Night Football. But hell, they had those injury problems that we had talked about, and it was New England in Foxboro in December and if you read between the lines when I was talking about it before, I wasn't really holding my breath for a victory there. But hey, we're still 11-2. Most teams would give their eyeteeth to be in the Texans' size 14 shoes. We'll see what happens with Indianapolis this weekend.

Also, regarding the cruise ships, this was big news in Galveston this past week: Disney has decided to leave earlier than anticipated. (It looks like the rest of that article is behind a pay wall now, darnit.) Anyway, they're still staying through 2013, they're just not going into 2014 as they had previously hinted they might. And apparently the other suitor for those berths was going to be Princess Cruises, but they have decided to go further inshore and go out of LaPorte. (It's always possible that that will not work out, anyway; LaPorte has had a couple of flings in the past at being a cruise ship departure city and it never seems to work out too well. We'll see.)

I stayed home from work today because I had a sore throat. (I say I stayed home; I didn't drive to Galveston, is what I mean, but I ended up doing several hours of work anyway.) What I really was leading to here, though, was that I have been sick for pretty much the last month now. I'm pretty sure I caught a cold on top of my normal fall allergies, and I was sick for the 10 days or so immediately before Thanksgiving, and since then I've had trouble shaking it. I've been through bags and bags of cough drops. I am getting better, but really slowly. And every few days I get these sore throats, which are usually bad in the morning but then go away again. It's very annoying. I'm pretty sure it's just allergies, but with the way it keeps dragging on, you gotta wonder. (But then what is it? Strep throat? I dunno. I suppose I might should go to the doctor and see what they say. But I hate to.)

I started sending out Christmas cards, finally - I had 5 people on the TUS list who were out of the country, so I did them first, and they're all mailed, and today I started working on the rest of the list. TUS people (until I run out, anyway) are getting some of my precious hoarded cards that I made myself. I've been footling around with more homemade cards this year but haven't gotten far. Anyway, I'm going to use up last year's stash first, some of which are very cute. (I also have Grinch cards and... something else that was on the morbid side... that I'm really tempted to give to my elderly neighbors just to wake them up a bit. But I probably won't.)

We went to see The King's Speech this afternoon - I liked it more than I expected to. I liked it quite a lot, actually, and the rest of the audience seemed to too. The theater was almost full, too. I have been looking up various members of the royal family on Wikipedia ever since I got home.

I didn't come straight home, though, I dropped Rob off and went and got a sandwich at Schlotzsky's and then went to Starbucks, where I read about OB/Gyn codes for a couple of hours, in preparation for my interview on Tuesday. (Today I read about procedure codes, and tomorrow I need to do diagnosis codes; then I'll be as prepared as I reasonably can be, I think.)

I've apparently gotten over yesterday's relapse. I'm still sucking on cough drops, but that's not so bad. I always manage to be sick sometime between Christmas and New Year's, that's just inevitable.

I hear that the Texans actually won today - I suppose it taped, so I guess I'll have to watch it this time, instead of erasing it like I've been doing most of the year. Usually I've already heard before I get around to watching that they lost, and then it's too depressing to watch it. I'm just not enough of a masochist for that.

( Minor Spoilers for Those Damn Martin Books )

Remember how I said I wasn't sick any more? Apparently I was mistaken about that. Which is sort of odd - I had two fairly crud-free days in a row, but today it's back. I don't know how I managed that, but oh well.

I am watching "A Christmas Carol" (the Doctor Who one, I mean) - I watched it last weekend when we got home, but I was distracted by something or other and was paying attention to the second half more than the first. Now that I've watched the whole thing, I have to say it makes a lot more sense. Speaking of making sense, we watched some episodes yesterday that I had not seen, or at least only half-seen - some parts of it I'd seen and some I hadn't. I don't remember why that was. (

nonelvis , do you remember trying to explain the whole Stolen Earth/Journey's End thing to me, a while back? It was that, and I have to say I see why you had trouble.)

I did drag myself out of the house today to go to dinner. Other than that I just played a lot of Guild Wars. (It was the annual Wintersday New Year's festivities - the "hats" this year were a halo and and some really creepy horns.) Oh, and I watched the Rose Parade. My favorite was the Pac-Man float.

I'm sure there was football somewhere around today that I didn't come across (I wasn't looking very hard, let's face it) but it seems to me that New Year's Day is a shadow of its former self when it comes to football. Another thing to lay at the feet of the BCS, I suppose!

I'm always trying to write entries late at night when I'm falling asleep, and this is another of those days. I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open - so good night, and happy new year to you all, once again!

I was going to write a longer entry, but I'm sick and I just don't really feel like it. We're sitting here watching one of Rob's MST3K movies that he got for Christmas - "Devil Fish", which I'm not really enjoying too much even with funny commentary. It's just bad. Possibly I'm also just crabby.

I do feel better than I did yesterday. Let's hope the trend continues.

I'm pretty sure I'm coming down with a cold, which probably means I shouldn't be breathing on the small children (who will be here later) any more than I can help. Right now we have quiet, which is why you're getting an entry. Everybody was doing their separate Christmasses at their own houses and they're all coming over here to my aunt's house after lunch (or for lunch, in some cases). We haven't opened presents at all; we decided to wait until the crowd is here. And I took advantage of that fact to sleep late. Sleeping late on Christmas morning seems like a great luxury, really! It's not often you're allowed to, in my family.

We came up here yesterday, and we timed it just right - we got here right before the front did, and I mean, not 5 minutes before it started raining. The temperature dropped from around 70 into the 40s, which does make it feel more like Christmas. If it's not a white Christmas (which it never is, here) at least it ought to be chilly.

Hmm, I'm conflating Christmas songs in my head. When I typed the title, my brain started trying to sing the "Sussex Carol" at me - I think that's the one: "On Christmas night all Christians sing/to hear the news the angels bring." But that's night, not day. For Christmas Day you have to go to "I heard the bells on Christmas Day/their old familiar carols play" or "I saw three ships come sailing in/on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day." And I'm getting words of one to the tune of the other. My brain is a weird place sometimes.

I will stop now and go be social. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it! and if you don't, well, at least all this nonsense will be done with for another year, after today!

(Middle of the night, last night) I need to go to bed, because I have to get up relatively early, but I can't quite make myself go to bed. We are having lunch with my dad tomorrow - I haven't seen him in nearly a year, I think. I talk to him on the phone occasionally but that's about it. So I'm simultaneously sort of looking forward to and dreading this lunch, all at once.

(Later) I got to bed and got a reasonable amount of sleep but I feel sort of crappy, still. But then I have felt sort of crappy for days on end. I think I have sort of a low-level sinus infection going, or something like that. I've had earaches and sore throats sort of sporadically - they come and they go. I've been through most of a monster Sam's-Club size bag of cough drops already. But I think it's gradually getting better.

It's almost noon and I'm waiting for Rob to get back from the gym so we can leave. It's raining outside, again - it's been raining or raining with sleet and snow mixed in (that was in Bryan on Christmas Eve) or something of the sort off and on for days. (The kids were excited about the snow even if it WAS mixed with rain - it was funny.)

(Even later) I did feel better this afternoon, and to balance out the karma, or something, my voice disappeared. Well, not completely, but everything came out as a croak all day. Still, it's better than feeling bad.

The afternoon didn't go too badly. We had Chinese food and watched a movie, which is much preferable to attempting to have a conversation with my dad. (The problem there being that my dad doesn't really have conversations, at least not for more than a couple of minutes at a time. After that, he gets excited about some subject or other and he stops hearing you, and just orates. It never fails.) The movie was 8 Below, which is about sled dogs; it's a Disney movie, but not one of those ones where the dogs talk. I had actually heard halfway decent things about it, so I was happy to watch it. (Spoilery thoughts about the movie below.) I don't know if Rob really wanted to stay and see a movie, but considering, as I said, that we hadn't seen my dad and his wife in a year, I felt obliged to stay a while. So we watched the movie and played with their dog - who, probably not coincidentally, is a husky - and whiled away the afternoon. It was well after dark before we left.

I didn't have a very good present for my stepmother, and I felt bad because she made us a really nice afghan in very pretty colors that I really like. (And it's not too heavy, which is the problem I have with many afghans.) I'm gonna have to attempt to make up for that at some point, although we have the excuse of my unemployment for bad gifts, this year. Come to think of it, I don't even know when her birthday is, and they've been married for years now. Which probably tells you a lot about my relationship with my dad, right there. I had a couple of books from Half-Price for my dad, which he seemed to like. I always buy my dad the same sort of books - stuff from the history section, about WWII or the Alamo, mostly, or sometimes about the space program. If he's tired of them he's very good at hiding it!

( spoilers, seriously )

(Written during the wee hours last night.)

I have a cold so I am an unhappy camper. I am sneezing and sniffling and hoping I don't have the flu - although I'm not all achy and stuff so probably not.

I am still not getting much studying done, but at least being sick gives me a bit of an excuse. I watched the last episodes of "The Vicar of Dibley" last night, which I got it from Netflix and I had never seen before. I think the disk was called "Holy Wholly Happy Ending" (or was it "Wholly Holy"? I dunno) and it had the last two episodes on it - although according to IMDb, there was also apparently a Comic Relief special which aired after these, so they weren't technically the last. Anyway, I have watched scattered episodes of this show over the years but I hadn't seen these. And actually, apparently scattered episodes is all there are, really - I didn't realize it but they only ever made 24 episodes (in over 10 years) including the various specials. Actually it looked like it got to be like Dr. Who has been lately - all specials. British TV is weird sometimes.

I knew I recognized the guy who played the Vicar's love interest but I had to look it up to figure out why he looked so familiar. His name is Richard Armitage, and he plays Guy of Gisbourne on the BBC version of "Robin Hood" - which I have been watching again lately, somewhat to my shame. I decided the reason I didn't recognize him even though I saw him on the (very) last episode just last week was because Guy of Gisbourne never smiles. Seriously, I really honestly think that character never smiled once in the whole series. Very angsty - so when I saw him smiling and acting like a normal guy I couldn't make the connection.

I have also watched Wall-E several times in the last few days. And the commentary. And also Enchanted. I think I want happy endings at the moment, or something.

I have done some more cards but I still haven't put the tree up. I did sort of clear a space for it just now. (I am having a fit of semi-productivity. I also changed the toilet paper and plugged Rob's cell phone into the charger for him, because it's one of those things he never does himself.)

On the cold front (so to speak), I keep taking more and more pills:
Besides the antidepressants and sleep aids I take all the time, I have had:
a Zyrtec 24 hour
generic Sudafed (2)
a baby aspirin
an Aleve
a Mucinex

(OK, most of that is stuff I take all the time, really. I guess it's the Mucinex, and the way I keep adding more, that makes it feel over the top.)

I have also been attempting to study, but I'm reading the section about the nose, which is just making me more aware of how itchy/runny/miserable my nose currently feels. Ugh.

Everybody has seen the meat hand that notmartha made, right? The onion fingernails are what really make it.

I made one more Halloween necklace to use up some of my leftovers:

I think it came out really well. (It's more simple than I originally intended. I keep finding that less is more here.) I also really like that chain, I'm going to have to do something else with it. I'm working on some more stuff to go in the store, but it's been slow. I feel like my standards have to be pretty high.

I love Halloween, and if we have trick-or-treaters I'll be thrilled (we didn't have one last year, though) but I think Halloween being on Saturday sounds like a prescription for disaster as far as the grown-up parties are concerned. I have gotten leery of any day where the drunks are liable to be out in force. So I'll probably be home playing WoW, for the most part. We may go out to eat, but if we do we'll probably go even earlier than we usually do.

Anyway, my back is still recovering. It's been a bad week, although it's much better than it was. (Apparently I have not eaten a whole lot, either; when I went to Weight Watchers today, I had lost about 6-1/2 pounds.)

Profile

mellicious

January 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Base style: Crisped by timeasmymeasure
Theme: Barren Winter Trees by flatlanders

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jan. 3rd, 2026 05:52 pm

Catchy Name Needed

Looking for a name since 2003

Entries tagged with sick

Winter Song

Sickly and lazy

Wicked-the-book & UT football

Wonka, etc.

The sick tag

The Ick

Movies of 2019

Happy 2019!

sneeze cough

sneeze cough

Nothing much to see here

Aquaman

Ugh.

7 kinds of random

Not-so-bloody Sunday

All is quiet...

The holiday crud.

On Christmas Day

Father's day

In the middle of the night

Halloween stuff

Profile

January 2026

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

Looking for a name since 2003

Entries tagged with sick

*sneeze* *cough*

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

sneeze cough