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I’m finally unpacking from the bedbug fiasco. The last few months have been misery, made me twitchy, imagining that I’ll never be able to unpack and be comfortable again. Every time I notice a bug bite on my body, I freak out a little bit, worry that they might not be gone, and that I’ll only unpack to have to repack everything again. I have nightmares about that.
I also have day-mares about the unpacking. It took days to pack up; unpacking will also take days. I’m so tired of looking at black garbage bags. But I’m also tired from flu the other week. I had a sinus headache the last few days, so moving too quickly makes my vision spotty. Not good for lugging heavy bags around.
Between the never-ending insanity that is work, and trying to give myself time to cook healthy food, exercise, and sleep restfully, I don’t have a lot of left-over time. So I unpack in a syncopated, slap-dash way. That’s now it probably looks to anybody but me.
When I look around, I’m trying to find what bothers me the most. The empty bookcases. The bare shelves. The mass of garbage bags that make navigating my room an exercise in patience and grace (patience I can be good with; grace is a long-lost cause. Anybody who has watched me cook or walk up stairs can confirm that). When I unpack, I pick the things that go on the bookcases and shelves first. I figure out where to stash the mass of stuff in my room, so that I don’t see it.
I also keep an eye out for the painting supplies. I still need to finish painting the hallway, and since this week has a tinge of indian summer, I need to pull out those supplies and paint before I miss my last chance this year (this reminds me that I also need to visit Home Depot and pick out paint for my fireplace, since half of the it is covered in white patching material).
Since we’re short one roommate (and looking), we have a spare bedroom to pile things in. And that’s what I’m doing with the things I don’t have time to get to. Pile them in, and shut the door. We want the room rented out as soon as we can find a compatible roommate, so there’s no chance that things will stay there, piled and unfinished. But at least I can close the door on the mess, look around a feel like I have a little bit of my life back tonight.
This has been one of those weeks where I get precious little of anything done. I’m not entirely sure what I did, other than play a lot of Alpha Centauri. Oh, laundry…lots of laundry and other drudgery that made me feel unfit to do anything more than zone out and take over an alien world with my army of mindworms. That little shit Cha Dawn has sneak-attacked me twice; when I last logged off, he’s just hit me the 2nd time, & I need to switch gears from R&D to military units so I can beat him senseless. Asshole.
Computer geekiness aside, everything else has just felt like hard work. Work drama, bedbug drama, medical bills drama…I need to look over WP for dummies more, and learn PHP, since my current setup has two blogrolls listed & I only want the one. I should be able to just delete it from the Dashboard, but that’s not working, which makes me guess that the one blogroll is hidden in the code.
I know a little html, but in order to do well with this blogging thing, and solve my own problems, I know I need to get into PHP. It makes me feel overwhelmed & scared; but I think most of that is my natural terror for trying anything new that’s not food. That could be a whole subject in itself; being terrified to try new things (which I always am), but doing it anyways.
Hopefully, the weekend will bring better things; I’ll get rested & feel ready to plunge back in. I have a few things lined up to do right now: read WordPress for Dummies (I started it a week or two ago), finish In Defense of Food, & make a splashpage for eugeniavb.com, that offers visitors the option of coming here, hitting my tea blog (which is not yet ready for guests), or hitting a few other things that I want to put online. I also started roughing out the direction that I want to take my tea blog in. I need to get a bit more squared away on that, figure out where I’m going to get the energy/time/money to give it a a go, and get started.
Last, but not least, I’m not so sure I like the theme of this blog anymore. At the moment, I’m leaning towards splitting it into two blogs (plus the tea blog – have I lost my mind?). As I write, and look at blogs that I admire, I feel like I’m trying to fit too much into one blog. This blog is about my life, but it’s also about how I feel about certain issues, and why. I see myself adding book reviews, sharing music, art, good articles, interesting purchases that I find. I’d also like to share the art that I’m making it, once I start making more of it (once I either figure out how to sleep-art or sleep-write, or maybe sleep-work). That seems like a lot to fit into one blog. I’m not sure if I should separate the harder subjects (finance, politics, food policy) from the softer subjects (my life, recipes, art).
On the other hand, having the two together would give a clearer look at the totality of my life. I like the idea of having all the important things together in one place. And I wouldn’t need to push so much content out of both areas of subject matter, if they were combined.
But on the other-other-hand, depending on what I’m looking to do with my writing, if I’m using it as practice for writing articles, and to showcase my thoughts on matters, do all of those things really belong together? It seems like, even if both sides are me, they might actually interest two some-what separate groups of people.
No decisions today, just more to think about.
Laura Northrup wrote a Consumerist article today soliciting opinions for a fat tax. Do we want to add that on to our list of other “sin taxes” like the “tobacco tax”?
One of her best points is that, if we do add such a tax, it should be called a “junk food tax”. As she says: No one calls tobacco taxes “lung cancer taxes.”
I think that yes, in theory, we should have a junk food tax. But in practice, it’ll be demonically hard to go through with.
Health and food experts, from Michael Pollan to Marion Nestle to Monica Reinagel, point out our system subsidizes cheap, high-fat, high-calorie, nutritionally bankrupt food. Because of this, we’re giving agri-businesses the green light to keep churning out the chemically-laden, corn-based products that make us fatter and sicker.
But what makes a junk food a junk food? By now, we’ve witnessed the many attempts that big business makes to dress of fake foods as healthy foods. Smart Choices, anyone? Unlike tobacco products, which by their nature (a little stick/puff/chew of plant matter, containing tobacco and other additives, that you light up and inhale or chew), are easy to quantify, giving “junk food” parameters is far more difficult.
First of all, would this focus on restaurants, packaged foods or both? Would their be criteria that each restaurant would have to evaluate their food by, and then they would voluntarily send in a tax for the meals that fall under “junk food”? Would they get audited?
For packaged foods, it seems that a guideline would have to call for a “serving” to have certain criteria: maybe a maximum calorie & fat limit, a fiber minimum, and certain vitamin & mineral minimums. But, even with those guidelines, packaged food companies will happily wade in & tweak as needed to get their products out of the junk food category. I imagine something along the lines of a chocolate snack cookie – cut the serving size down to a few tiny cookies that’s been pumped with inulin (for fiber), olestra (to cut down the fat), aspartame (to cut down the calories), & the standard vitamin & mineral enhancement mix used by many cereals these days, and voila – not junk food!
Perhaps the best way to classify something as “not junk food” would be to take a simplistic standpoint. A non-junk food item would have a maximum of say, 10 ingredients, have to include a certain percentage of whole foods, & get most of it’s nutrition from those whole foods – the fiber needs to come from whole grains, or nuts, the vitamins should also come from the food components, not just added powders. And certain classifications of food additives wouldn’t be allowed. For instance, no fake fats, sugars, artificial colors, and ingredients of dubious genesis (natural flavors, what are those?).
Realistically though, pushing those guidelines through would be near impossible. The artificial sweeteners, fats, and food chemical producers would get their panties in a twist, because such guidelines (they would argue) would imply their food products are “inferior” to natural foods. I say, let’s call a spade a spade and all agree that that’s true – and that, in the name of profitability, portability and shelf-stability, these products do pose some amount of usefulness to us. Artificial sugars are great for diabetics. Fillers and stabilizers that extend the shelf-life of foods can be important in places where it’s very hard to keep fresh foods.
Unfortunately though, the food cartels want these products to be viewed as just as good-if not better- than natural foods. Despite the mounting evidence of the issues caused by eating too much franken-food, producers always place the blame elsewhere – lifestyle, personal consumer choices, overeating other products. It would hurt their profits too much to admit their limited usefulness and play second fiddle to natural foods.
I support a junk food tax. I also support Laura’s idea that the tax monies go to encourage the growing and offering of healthy-food alternatives- make the price of apples and carrots cheaper. But in the world that we live in, where profit trumps…well, nearly everything, I don’t see how we’ll be able to make this tax a reality.
Tonight was another crazy cooking night. I needed to dilute the Killer Chili, make a double batch of butternut squash soup, and make bacon chocolate-chip cookies for the Breast Cancer Awareness bake-sale at work.
I set out to work on all three simultaneously, and was surprisingly successful. Though, in usual form, I managed to spill, slop, throw, and accidentally smack myself with various kitchen tools. Tonight’s bonus was that I almost made the cookies without the eggs – AND the super-duper bonus was another surprise with the Killer Chili.
First, the Killer Chili: In looking back over the recipe for the n-teenth time, I finally noticed that I was supposed to add 1/4 pound of each of the six bean varieties to the recipe – not the 1/4 cup that I added.
So that’s why the recipe seemed to have a lot of meat in relation to beans! ooooOOOoooooh!
After cutting the 1/2 of the recipe that we left out, Sarah pronounced it to be “tasty to people who like spicy food”. Score one for me!
The butternut squash soup went off without a hitch, if I do say so myself. As fragrantly delicious as usual, I served myself a small bowl, and gave myself a good pat on the back.
The cookies also ended up tasty, though I want to continue to tweak the recipe. It needs more vanilla, and the bacon should be cut into larger chunks. Also, I think I need to reserve some of the bacon, to sprinkle it over the cookie dough balls, before they go into the oven. I like my cookies to have chunks bursting out of them. AND, I saw an interesting recipe for making candied bacon, using brown sugar. I’d like to try to candy my bacon before adding it to the recipe. It’s already a bacon-chocolate chip cookie – why not take it up yet another level? It’s not like I can make the damn things healthy!
Forgetting about the eggs was a minor fiasco. But easily fixed – much easier than the Killer Chili. I’d set up all the ingredients early into the night, so that I could just mix them as needed, but neglected to put the eggs out. Sarah ended up doing a lot of the cookie work, and after attempting to make oddly-crumbly cookie balls, wondered out loud if I’d added enough egg. “Egg…ooooOOOOoooohh!” Her response: “ok, pull out the eggs. I’ll add them after I’ve eaten some cookie dough…”
Since I had to fry up a pound of bacon for the cookies, I pulled out Grandma Van Bremen’s griddle. I’d already started using her large frying pan, to make the chili on Sunday. The griddle hadn’t been seasoned yet, and told me it could use some serious TLC. So I fried bacon in both the fry pan and the griddle. After finishing the bacon, I decided to fry up an egg in the bacon-coated goodness of the fry pan.
And there I met with yet another surprise. My egg was bacony-good, yes, but also…spicy. Weirdly spicy for something that didn’t have any spices added to it. After a few minutes of confusion, it struck me like…a fry pan to the back of my head: I made the chili-pepper-loaded Killer Chili in that fry pan, and it soaked up the burn! As Sarah put it, that’s what they mean by seasoning!
Somewhere, Grandma Van Bremen is probably shaking her head & laughing at me. But her cast-iron cookware wanted to come to me, so maybe I’m giving that fry pan the spice it’s been yearning for.
Or maybe, after spending years under the hands of a cooking savant, it wanted to try out life under the hands of a cooking idiot-savant.
We had our cook-off yesterday, and it probably went better than it should have, though we didn’t get through all the recipes I pulled. Given the number of issues we had working against us, I’ll have to call the cook-off a success.
Our first issue was all about me. I originally planned to get up around 9am Sunday to go grocery shopping and be home by noon, ready to go. Unfortunately, my body didn’t want to cooperate; I woke up at 3:30am with horrible cramps. It took until around 5:30 for the muscle relaxers to kick in, so I didn’t get up & moving until around 11. By the time I got home, and got cooking, it was around 3:30 – not the noon start-time I’d hoped for. But oh well. We had the rest of the day.
Grocery shopping was mostly easy (though heavy). I procured all of our ingredients, expect for one – ground poblano peppers – I needed 1/2 a cup for the chili. I looked for those at both Kalustyan’s on Friday, and several grocery stores on Sunday – what the hell are they? Unfortunately, I kept forgetting to look it up online…a decision that later made things…problematic.
So, we have a very late start, and a missing main ingredient. The next issue involves our rag-tag set of cooking tools. Even our largest pots aren’t very big. And Killer Chili (which earned its name by the end) was made to serve 25. Yes, 25. Did I think about halving the recipe? Maybe for a second. But then I figured it’d be best to muscle on, since we were cooking specifically to have a freezer-full of food.
Due to the fact that Killer Chili took nearly all of our pots & pans, we couldn’t start the squash soup. And I keep forgetting that we don’t own any cookie sheets, so making the bacon chocolate chip cookies was out. Ditto to the coconut rice – we just didn’t have enough pots! We did start both the perogies and the german meatballs. A lot of the prep work for those of those didn’t require pots, and we planned on freezing the perogies without cooking, so we were good to go.
While making the Killer Chili, I finally got around to looking up ground poblano peppers, and I discovered my problem. Ground poblano peppers are called ancho peppers – only when they’re fresh are they called poblanos. Damnit, if only I’d looked that up Friday! Kalustyan’s had a TON of ancho peppers.
Since we didn’t have any ancho peppers, I figured we’d use chili pepper powder instead, just a bit less, since anchos are mild & chili is not. So I added in a bunch of that to the recipe & waited to see how it’d turn out.
Over the next six hours, Sarah, Sue & I chopped, soaked, boiled, simmered, mixed, & browned our assorted ingredients. Sarah deserves the title Perogie Queen, as she made them start-to-finish, the dough, the filling, the actual stuffing of the perogies. We had enough perogie-filler left over to have a lot of cheesey-oniony-cuminy mashed potatoes, which were soooo good. I’m looking forward to snacking on those, for days to come.
The german meatballs were also a huge success. We followed the original recipe almost to a ‘T’ – our only variation was, due to lack of simmering space, we boiled down the sauce a bit too much, so we made 1/2 of another batch, so we’d have more. Both the meatballs and sauce tasted awesome! The meatballs were a little under-spiced, so we have plans to try them again using more spice for the meatballs, and sub out the white distilled vinegar & try a combination of apple cider & balsamic vinegars.
The Killer Chili…well…that was a story. First of all, once Sue & Sarah took a look at the recipe & realized it served 25 they were a little flabbergasted. Ok, I may have gone a little crazy. The biggest problem turned out to be my swapping out poblano peppers & using chili pepper powder instead. Despite cutting down on the amount used, it turned out a little…hellish. Killer, one might say. Hot enough that both Sarah & Susan, lovers of hot food, didn’t think that they could get through a bowl. Although I agree that it’s hot, I thought it was perfectly palatable – but then again, I belong in a class all my own when it comes to the heat of the food that I eat, so I’m not the best judge.
We diluted 1/2 of the recipe with a can of pumpkin puree, which took a smidge off of the heat. The other half, we left in the fridge. I’m going to pick up another pound of ground beef, and add another batch of beans into the recipe, in hopes that those additions will take away some of the heat. Our ’serves 25′ chili will probably end up serving 50, once we’ve diluted the spice – or so Susan swears.
All in all, the cooking was a success – we’ve got a lot of food in our freezer now, & that doesn’t include the second half of the chili yet, OR the butternut squash soup, which I’ll be making on Tuesday. I think I’m going to run out today and buy some more freezer containers, we’re going to need them!
I am planning a huge cooking-day this weekend. Since I (and my roommates) are on tight budgets right now, I decided to try my hand at cooking a bunch of things and freezing them for later eating. My auntie Marylou played a big role in this; she visited us last month, at the start of the bedbug nightmare, and left our freezer full of spaghetti sauce, meatballs, and chili. My recipe selections are my delicious butternut soup with lemongrass and coconut milk, potato & onion perogies, lemon scones (I found a box of “just add water” mix last night & decided to throw it in), tipsy sweet potatoes, home-made sauerkraut, german meatballs, and a chili that involves bacon, beer, and beans (let’s not speculate overmuch on the result of eating that heavenly concoction). I’ll also whip up a batch of my (in)famous bacon chocolate chip cookie dough to freeze, since I promised to make a batch next week for the Breast Cancer bake sale at work.
On the subject of the bacon/beer/bean chili (which I will henforth refer to as Killer Chili), I headed to Kalustyan’s to look for the half-dozen varieties of beans needed for the chili. I haven’t been to Kalustyan’s in years; I think my last visit was while at worked at FUBU in the Empire State Building. Returning there was like a visit to grandma’s; wonderful smells, shelves full of fascinating & incomprehensible grown-up toys. And a lot of smiles. Every time I’ve gone the staff is friendly and can show me where anything I might desire will be found.
They didn’t disappoint this time either. I asked to be shown to the beans, and oh! the beans! More bean varieties than I ever knew existed, and with such fanciful names: Christmas Beans, Great Northern Beans, Tongues of Fire Beans, Moth Whole Brown Beans, Appaloosa Beans, Rattlesnake Beans, European Soldier Beans, Canary Beans, Black Valentine Beans, Jackson Wonder Beans…and of course, your standard Lima, Black, Fava, Kidney and Navy (which aren’t blue, hmmm…) Beans.
I picked out packets of the beans I need (Kidney, Black, White, Pink, Red, Cranberry and those tricksy Navy Beans), and also snagged some Thai Black Sticky Rice. I’ve wanted to make Purple Coconut Sticky Rice since I petsit this summer in Brooklyn; I ordered some from a Thai restaurant & I’ve been dreaming about it ever since. So that’s getting added to my list of recipes. Looking back at my list…maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew? It won’t be the first time!
My next stop will be the grocery store, to get some basic ingredients like egg, ground meat, & canned tomatoes.
Once the cooking is underway, we’ll see how many meals we get out of all of this delicious bounty & if it truly is worth all the effort.
Since all my illnesses, my ability to read has gone straight downhill. I haven’t counted, but I don’t think I’ve read more than 10 books this year. As I improve in many other areas, this has been a source of frustration to me. Part of what I’m trying to do right now is educate myself in other arenas, so that I can make money part-time. Extra money is only part of my drive though; in some ways, I feel like my brain has been stalling out the past few years, and I want to learn more. There are just so many things out there that I don’t know how to do yet, that I’d love to learn.
Also, books are a major mode of escape for me now. I’ve always loved escapist reading; most of my earlier reading was entirely within the realm of sci-fi and fantasy. I’ve branched out into nearly every other subject now. Although some of them are far more enjoyable than others, most subjects (with the notable exception of anything involving quantum physics) provide me some amount of recharge from the enormous amount of work pressure I’ve been under the past few months. Losing that enjoyment is part of what makes me continue to struggle and have less to give both at work, and to myself.
So the decrease in reading has been a real drag. I’ve had Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food out for over a month. Despite being written about a subject I’m obsessed about, and the flowing writing, I haven’t been able to stay focused to finish the book. My mind wanders. Once I set the book down, I’m hesitant to pick it back up. I feel guilty for my lack of zeal.
I’m also reading Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write. Also a worthwhile read, that book takes time to go through because it’s set up as a lesson book. I want to give each assignment its due; I can’t zip though. But I’ve been stalled out on reading it also. Although I love it every time I read another assignment, it feels a bit dead too.
Today, I nipped out of work to pick up several of books that I had on hold at the library. Riding back to work on the train, I cracked open Alastair Reynold’s The Prefect. Ooooh, heaven! I felt my brain twinkle & get warm & fuzzy.
It looks like I’ve been too narrow on my reading. My most valuable lesson from reading 100 books is that I need a variety of books to keep up my reading speed. Two subjects aren’t enough to keep me going anymore. Although carrying three or more books at once will be a pain in the ass, if it keeps me reading, it’ll be well worth it.
Also grabbed today was Wordpress for Dummies and Bailout Nation. I’ll add WFD in & switch between those four & see if I can keep the learning going.
Because the weekend is always too short!
But it was lovely. I had a great time with M & B & Tammy. We had our usual hilarity and hi-jinks. It is really wonderful that, even after not seeing each other for years ( though I am the one that disappears the most-they get to see each other far more often), we can get together and have a fantastically hilarious time, as though no time has passed at all.
This was my first time seeing Bri since she was a wee thing, and the talking, thinking, grinning little gamine that latched herself to my jeans belt loops was both adorable and slightly terrifying. And I met Em for the first time – put the two together, and it looks like a circus to me! How anybody can manage two small children is beyond me. Hell, how anybody can manage *one* small child is beyond me!
So we had a lot of laughs, one of the biggest being that I woke up early Saturday morning, screaming “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD”; I was having a nightmare about being in the alien mothership. I slept in a lofted bed in Tammy’s attic, so waking up so close to the angled ceiling and seeing her red nightlight glowing (who uses a red nightlight?!?!) freaked me out even more. I think I scared a few years off of M, who was sleeping on the floor. I’m sorry I still have screaming nightmares like a five year old!
I kept my eyes peeled for pictures to take for my banner, but I realized, once I got on Albrights campus, that I really don’t want anything associated with my alma mater on my blog. While I was there, my department was a mess. Students agitated to have the head of the department removed; the school didn’t act on that until after I left. Although she was a lovely lady, she had a lot of personal problems, and she frequently did things like schedule two classes that she taught with overlapping times – so the earlier class always ended early – which she tried to project as a treat. Being shortchanged on my education wasn’t a treat to me though, and a lot of my peers agreed.
Another regular occurrence was that materials vital to the class often went missing. For instance, for a class on knitting, the knitting machines were lost. How you can lose a knitting machine – they’re huge – is beyond me. So instead of learning about knitting machines, we simply chose a project, any project (and some of the “projects” chosen looked more like 3rd grader work than college junior work) to complete. I got an ‘A’ in that class – and close to zero learning about what the class was supposed to teach.
Also, while I was there, the student newspaper office was raided; President Zimon ordered security to confiscate the school newspaper. The incident stemmed from an article in The Albrightian that discussed Albright’s ranking in Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges. President Zimon thought that the ranking was incorrect, and wanted to suppress the paper so that prospective students wouldn’t review it. Ultimately, it was found that the listing was correct, and the papers were returned, but the damage was already done. Zimon had a number of controversies surrounding his name, such as lying on his resume. After several years of faculty agitating to have him removed, and faculty and board members resigning in protest, he left the school in 2003, citing a “family emergency”.
Long story short, given Albright’s track record while I was a student, I have no desire to support the school. Although many of the players from those incidents are long gone, it left a stain, and I’d rather direct my charity money to organizations that have a much better record – like Kiva.
Since I didn’t take many banner-appropriate pics, I did focus on coming up with ideas of pictures to put together that would be banner-worthy. That will be my little project for this week – more banner pics!
My other major highlight of the weekend was a visit to Sonic – the first for B & me. The $1 burger was awesome! And the caramel malt…I am in love. When my parents & I visit Reading, I will have to take them to experience the deliciousness that is Sonic.
I spent tonight looking through my photographs, to find some new ones to add to the banner of my new theme.
I can’t express how exciting having a theme that I like is to me! I’ve thought about my blog repeatedly over the past few days. I feel so much more energized, now that I don’t look at it & say “ugh ugh ugh” about the design (the writing, now that’s a whole other matter!).
I digress…looking through my photos I realized how few I have of the past year or so. Considering my laundry list of sicknesses, it’s not surprising that I wasn’t in places where I’d want to take pictures. Nor is it surprising that I wasn’t in the mood to be photographed myself.
Tonight I realized that I have some parts of my life, parts that are over and done (and very far from where I am today), extremely well documented. It depresses me. A past that represents a way of life that I traveled away from stares me in the face, almost mocking. The recent past feels like a huge blank wall of nothing, and that reminds me of how my life has transformed into a giant slog between work and sickness and bedbugs.
Somewhere in between those two is the life that I was crafting before I got so damn sick. The one that, now that I’m getting my energy back, begs me to come find it and care for it. Prune it and nurture it and make it all my own.
So, as a project for myself. I will start lugging both camera (which I have handy), AND camera manual (which I have…in a bag…somewhere) around and photograph things every day.
Because my banner is so long and narrow, very panoramic, it poses special challenges towards framing images that will work in that space. I think that added twist will make looking for photos more exciting that it otherwise would be.
As I’m going back to eastern PA this weekend, for my college’s homecoming, to hang out with college buddies, I may actually have some unique subjects to photograph.
We’ll see what I come back with on Monday!
no, not *now*. thank heavens!
I went to my GP today, to fill him in on all the various medical happenings of the past few months. He’d recommended the neurologist that I went to. After I filled him in & he updated my chart, he pulled out the labs that I’d had taken on 4/13, to rule out vitamin deficiencies & other random aliments.
We went down the list:
Kidneys – good
Liver – good
Cholesterol – great (that amazed me, because by then, I was eating crap compared to my usual diet)
Anemia – nope
Lyme’s Disease – nope
Mononucleosis…weeeeeeell, as of 4/13, I was actually recovering from that.
wait, what?
I sat there, whacked fish-like, trying to process that one. I had mono? wtf…I did have a weird, miserable virus over New Years. The only reason I could party on NYs was because I took loads of medication & the party was in my apartment, so I didn’t need to travel. I’m sure that Sarah & Lawrence especially remember that, because I was completely useless for doing party prep work. And I was laid out in bed for a number of days, which Emily & Alan both complained about (though for very different reasons). It had been a weird bug. Fever wasn’t too bad, no body aches, but a *miserable* sore throat, sneezing & runny nose, yet no congestion. And I was pooped. Totally & utterly pooped. It was that illness that made me stop exercising completely, because after I “got over it”, I was still totally pooped.
Gee, looking back, that sort of sounds like…mono. D’oh!
So now I can add mono to the list of diseases which I’ve gotten out of the way this year. um, yay me?
As for how I got it, I have no idea. the only person I’d been kissing was Alan. I do have a theory that Alan is, perhaps, superman. Throughout all of my many & varied illnesses, he has yet to get one. They may have all come from his superman-self, bouncing off of him & smacking into me.
Otherwise, I seem to be doing well. I’ve been a bit worried about the staph infections, since one of those sites has been tender lately. The doc wrote me a prescription for an ointment to use for the next six months; it should help clear the spot up & make it less hospitable to future infections (once an area has had a staph abscess, it’s much more likely to reoccur repeatedly). I’ll head back to see him in six months and probably request another round of labs, just to make sure that I haven’t come down with plague or something.
I’ve continued to step up my exercise routine & I hope that, by that six month mark, I’ll be healthy & strong again.
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