Ah...It's ALIVE!

I decided to celebrate Halloween early this year by becomin a zombie. Well, not actually; I contracted some puking plague that left me unable to do much more than lay on the couch and sip ginger ale and PeptoBismol. You know you're sick when the yucky taste of the pink stuff doesn't even faze you. Thanks to Zabet, I survived without withering to a husk. She left the aforementioned items along with children's acetaminaphen on my door as a care package and then scampered out of the plague zone. (No sense getting sick being a good Samaritan, after all). :) Unfortunately, I didn't get to see Mecca's rendition of "Thriller" zombies because I was pretending to be one. For a full description, check out Zabet's blog.

I did manage to make it to work yesterday, but apparently must have looked like crap, because no one bothered me and I quietly wrote out book cards and defragmented my hard drive. Oh, and took a nap for lunch, right at my desk. After all, I wasn't up to much other than saltines. You know you look bad when the cashier just tells you to take the little packages because she doesn't want you to be too close. Now normally, working in a hospital, I wouldn't have come in. But with all the doctor's appointments I've had this year, even though I haven't been missing days and have tried to make appointments near the beginning or end of the workday--and I've finally built up some personal time off (about a week's worth, actually), I'm under verbal counseling for attendance. So...I dragged my ass into work. Besides, I hadn't thrown up for about 14 hours and I wasn't shivering anymore, so I thought I was safe. More than anything I was sore. I literally felt like someone had beaten me senseless with a splintered baseball bat. Even my ankles hurt. So once the clock came up for quitting time (well, actually, it didn't; our clocks at work have responded to the return from daylight savings time like they were in the twilight zone--we finally got everything back on time today) I skipped DBT and went home to crash for a few more hours.

My mom and grandmother called last night. Apparently the sickbed emanations of "I want my mommy!" winged across the aether. I had almost called Momma on Sunday, but decided that was kind of pathetic. Apparently they'd both been thinking about me and wondered if I were doing alright. That's the Reardon women for you--I used to think they just had eyes in the backs of their heads (and flames in their eyes, but that's another story). After a few times of my mom slowing down right before the deer darted in front of the car or pulling over because she felt "like a lot of people died, all at once)--nearly crashing the car that time--just as a plane crashed about 500 miles away, I stopped questioning. When my mom told me she didn't feel she could give me an old car of hers because she could see me dying in it, I understood. I'm still convinced that it's just as well that my own car has been reduced to non-working status. I got flashes of a crash from the first week I had it, and certainly no one ever seemed to see the thing, since I was rear-ended not once but several times.

Anyway, going back today was much better, despite getting soaked. I'd left my umbrella, which is breaking down anyway, at the office the day before. So I wore my purple duster, thinking that it didn't look that bad, and got soaked through. One of my coworkers said something about a nice day for a morning stroll. I said I was starting Halloween early, going as a giant purple Jawa. After awhile, with my life, you learn to take things with humour. Fortunately I had an extra shirt squirrelled away at work, and my shoes dried out fairly quickly. To be honest I'm not sure the umbrella would have helped. I am thinking that now that I'm a pedestrian I need to get some brighter duds. Nearly everything I wear or carry is purple or black. It's no guarantee--that bright umbrella of the woman killed by a bus here in Lexington not too long ago still haunts me, but it couldn't hurt. I found an umbrella that was bright blue with cats on it tonight. I'm thinking though that I need something more reflective, like yellow--and a jacket, too. :) Of course, I'd look like a giant duckling. That would be a Halloween monster guaranteed to scare the kids. :)

Well, that's enough for now. Time to go eat real food (black refried beans in a bluet taco shell, with European salad, tomato, and onion). Oh, hell. Maybe I should just go for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. No sense in tempting fate too much.