cranky pixels

My nose is doing this thing where it feels like little pop rocks are exploding in my sinus cavity. If you thought to yourself “Wow! That sounds like fun!” you are sadly mistaken.

Also: I can’t get sick now! I’m going on vacation in a week! Exactly a week, in fact: at this time next Tuesday I will be emerging from an airplane in a Valium-assisted haze in New York freaking City. It goes without saying that sniffles and a sinus headache would seriously cramp my style.

In an effort to nip this whole illness thing in the bud (and also because the kid is driving poor Not So completely batty at the office, what with the whining and the demanding and the inexplicable banging of things what are not meant to be banged) I elected to stay home today, thinking I’d get some rest while catching up on housework and working on my laptop. Take a moment and look at that sentence. One of these things, as Sesame Street was wont to say, does not belong. Can you guess which one it is?

So, yeah. On the plus side, I’ve got laundry going and dishes going and I did a bunch of work. On the minus side, there are pop rocks in my sinuses.

Through my mighty powers of contagion, I managed to fell the rest of my household yesterday. Not So stayed home, which ironically meant that I got to sleep in. (Ironic, in this case, is apparently meant in the Alanis Morissette sense. Shush, I’ve had a fever.) Sleeping in when you have a cold is lovely. I highly recommend it to myself, and will keep it in mind for next time, when I will invariably be seized with a compulsion to clean the house the second I start feeling wretched.

What’s up with that, anyway? Whenever I get sick I get all over-achieve-y. When I was a kid, I used to know I was really sick because I’d voluntarily clean my room. (I was not a spic-and-span sort of child, obviously.) Now it’s cleaning plus work plus obsessively reading my RSS feeds because god forbid something should happen in the world without my knowledge. It’s almost a relief when the illness progresses to the point at which I can’t focus my eyes or stay upright.

But that’s all water under the bridge, since I’m better now. Well, except for a few errant sniffles. Er, and a bit of a hacking cough. Aside from that, though, I am the picture of good health!

Although maybe it’s a bad sign that I’m obsessively doing laundry…

Oh my god, y’all, I am sick again. How can this be? I never get sick. Yet, here I am, with my second ass-kicking cold in as many months. It’s not right, I tell you.

The good news is that my lovely husband got me the tissues with lotion in, so my poor beleaguered nose can get a break. Since I need to blow my nose roughly every ten seconds, this is a wonderful thing.

I hate being sick. I especially hate having a runny nose. When I was in high school we lived in the Santa Cruz mountains, way up in the redwoods, and my mom said she used to know when I was awake because I’d start blowing my nose. Which, way to recognize that your daughter is allergic to the damned trees, mom. So, yeah, I spent four years in asthma hell, and every time I get a cold it’s like high school all over again. Except with marginally better hair.