Without the visual aid of photos, I don’t really have anything to write about. Wait, I take that back. I can tell you about Typhoid Marco. Please note that this story is not really new if you’ve read my Twitter or Facebook feed, but it’s a story, so what the hell.

I sat across the aisle (all two feet of it) from a whiny one year old named Marco and his mother on the plane ride back from Atlanta. Now, I totally understand about whiny kids, particularly around naptime, so it didn’t bother me so much, especially when we were above 10,000 feet and I could use my iPod. BUT, when we landed and were sitting on the runway (we had also been delayed for like an hour in Atlanta, so I had plenty of time to listen to Marco), she makes a phone call to someone and says “Yeah, we woke up to Marco throwing up, so I was washing sheets at 4 AM, but he seems fine now.”

1.)     No wonder kid was whiny. I am also whiny when I have spent the previous night throwing up.

2.)    They were apparently flying to the Czech Republic to see family, and I imagine those tickets were expensive, probably too expensive to reschedule.

3.)    But seriously, “he seems fine now” should have been code for “he’s still contagious, and he’s infecting the entire plane.” (Thus the sobriquet Typhoid Marco.)

4.)    We had no real food in the house when I got home, so I ate chocolate from the Chocolate Fetish for dinner Monday night. This was a waste of good chocolate when the germs Typhoid Marco had infested me with took hold at about 1 AM. Used chocolate really burns the nasal passages when it comes back.

6.) I felt better within 24 hours, so Typhoid Marco didn’t have the flu, just some 24 hour virus. This is good because I haven’t gotten a flu shot yet.

I could belabor this some more, but I won’t.

She put me on a different kind of pill, one that was supposed to give me lighter periods and make me run faster and jump higher and stop that pesky spotting mid-cycle that meant I was probably ovulating – OOPS! Since I had been on stone age pill with only a few breaks since 1997, she warned me that my body would have to adjust to the new pill.

I had no idea what that actually meant until about three weeks into the new pill, I realized I was kind of batshit crazy as my body adjusted to new hormone levels. I think the craziness lasted three weeks the first month. It is now down to apparently only the three days before my period, since I realized that Shark Week starts on Thursday, and probably my sojourn through Bat Country was responsible for me hating everyone at work this week.

Some people will tell you that liberated women shouldn’t blame their bodies for their moods, because that’s something unenlightened men will do: ask you if it’s your time of the month. I, on the other hand, own that my hormones are hanging out in the mosh pit right now, and if a man asked me if it was my time of the month, I would tell him yes. Right before I put the smack down on him. Bat Country, it’s a hell of a ride.

And it makes the work day a hell of a lot more interesting.

Other reasons why this is a precious gift, other than the fact that I won’t have to run through an entire box of Kleenex in two days:

• I will be around to do things. Like homework. Because even when I take my homework to Pittsfield, I end up ignoring it, which is bad.
• I can clean my apartment, which gets covered in fur when we’re gone. Just because we’re taking some time off doesn’t mean the cats are, apparently.
• Also, maybe Jordana can come over and get the bookshelf that has been sitting in our hall for Samang all summer. Our schedules have not meshed enough to do that in the past three months. My hallway looks like the garbage dump right now as a result, because stuff in our house tends to migrate to the designated messy spot, and right now that’s the hall. (Does this happen in anyone else’s house, or is it just me?)
• I can also scrub my hard drive and put the damned PC that hasn’t worked right since it caught a virus that time and I had to reinstall everything out on the curb. I have a MacBook Pro that I use all the time, I don’t need the PC gathering dust in the corner and setting off my allergies more.

Of course, now that I’ve posted all of this? I’ve pretty much guaranteed that none of it will get done. Except the homework, that has to be done. I have class next week, after all.

I can blame it on many things: Facebook. Twitter. Ravelry. Classes. Work. Laziness. But in the end I think I wasn’t sure I was a blogger anymore. The urge to blog just hasn’t been as overpowering as it was in the early days. In fact, I have had only one urge to blog in the past two months, and that was a post on why Ice Dancing and Curling are not sports and should not be in the Olympics. But instead I just bitched it out on Twitter.

Blog, on my second attempt at snowboarding I managed to bruise my tailbone. Instead of coming here with this comedic gold, I went to Twitter and Facebook and told thousands of people that I had bruised my ass. Which was awesome, but it could have been a great post. I let you down, blog.

Some of my two months of radio silence was trying to decide if I wanted to keep blogging. If I don’t blog as often, is it worth paying for the domain name and the hosting? On Monday, I decided to re-up for another two years, and my goal is to blog more so I am putting that $190 to good use. Little Blog, I resolve to not leave you in the corner gathering dust. So let’s get started with a stupid story!

Yesterday, my second visit to the doctor in two weeks (the first, where she diagnosed me with a bruised butt by putting on latex gloves and sticking her finger down my ass-crack to tell me that yes, my tailbone was “protruding more than usual,” apparently left an impression on her–can we blame her?–because she asked if my thumb injury was also due to snowboarding) resulted in a diagnosis of tenosynovitis in my thumb. (Side note: Why, hello, Google Health, and where have you been all my life?) She prescribed a gel NSAID for it. This gel shall now be known as $30 Copay Gel, because that’s what it cost with my copay, which makes me shudder to think of how much it costs without insurance.

Anyway, $30 Copay Gel is apparently often used for arthritis according to the Rite-Aid instructions that came with it. “Awesome,” I thought, “so I’m putting Ben-Gay on my snowboarding injury.” I read further. In order to accurately measure the dosage of the gel before you put it on, you need to squirt it onto a dosing card. The instructions clearly say “Put the card down on a flat surface so you can read it.” I relayed this info to Rick and said “It’s really for old people! Because their hands shake when they’re holding it so they can’t read it!” (Yes, I realize this is an extremely age-ist comment, but that’s okay, because Rick, an older person, laid the smackdown on me two seconds later.)

“No, it’s telling you to do that so you can read it. You know, as opposed to putting the card down upside-down so the writing is backwards and you can’t read it.”

Apparently $30 Copay Gel is for idiots like me in addition to old people.

Happy belated 6th birthday, Blog! Your writer is an age-ist moron!

I have always been a procrastinator. I have tried to break that cycle with this history degree that I’m pursuing, but old habits die hard. I still have the tendency to think that all writing must come out perfect the first time, and while I struggle to get that sentence exactly right the first time, hey, look, someone just tweeted, I should go check that out. I am working on overcoming this and even have a handy app on my Droid (so much for not talking about it) that has a timer so I know exactly how much time I’ve spent on task. This app is a miracle worker, because it kept my nose to the grindstone a lot yesterday. But today, even though I only have two more articles to critique and a conclusion to write and am so close to the finish line I can taste it, I still feel the need to procrastinate.

I played a game on my Droid for a while. Then I remembered that I took the ring out of my rook piercing out on Wednesday while I was waiting for the Fed Ex guy and never put it back in. And so I just did. And basically had to re-pierce the damn thing because it had been out for a few days. It did not bleed, but oh my god, my ear hurts right now. I took Advil and am waiting for the pain to die down a little so I can concentrate again.

I guess it serves me right for procrastinating, doesn’t it?

Colds 1.0 and 2.0 have really diminished my multi-tasking abilities, which irritates the hell out of me. I used to be able to come to work, look productive, blog, play on Ravelry, and actually get shit done all at the same time. Perhaps that was like my superpower, pathetic as that may be. Wicked multitasking skills and the ability to goof off at work! But Colds 1.0 and 2.0 are like multitasking Kryptonite. I can no longer keep my mind on several different and totally unrelated tasks at once. I can barely keep my mind on one task. And it sucks, people. I don’t think the comic books accurately portrayed how pissed Superman probably was when he lost his powers. My superpower is lame compared to his, and I’m bitching like a fiend. He lost the ability to *fly*, and in the comics, he was not bitching.

On second thought, I think that’s because Superman was lacking my other superpower: Raging PMS. I could stop a Mac truck with these snarky hormones, baby! Wait, is rambling incoherently also a superpower? Because I seem to have tremendous aptitude for it today.

A story about how my cell phone was lost and found at the Ravelry party and details about the spinning class I took at Rhinebeck will come when my latent superpowers go away with Aunt Flo. Couldn’t get them out today to save my life. Sorry.

Yesterday I was no longer contemplating death, I was able to hold liquids down, and I was even able to stagger the block down to my local polling place and back. (And I never want to hear an excuse from anyone about why they couldn’t vote again. If I could drag my sick ass to the polling place, you all can get up and vote. I feel strongly about this.) I sat up watching returns, and I was encouraged. It was not the blowout that had been predicted. In fact, although the whole “super delegate” concept still eludes me, the Democratic race was pretty close. And the Republican race, well, wasn’t that entertaining? I don’t really like Huckabee’s platform, but anyone who causes Mitt Romney to scream foul at McCain? He hath served a purpose. Thank you, Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris!

Today I managed to make it into work, but I am still achy. And tired. And I might go home early. So there.

I’ve scheduled at appointment with a massage therapist for after work tomorrow night in the hopes that they can work some of this out. The trip to Florida next week should also help. Because if I’m not allowed to kill some of the people I work with (and I’m pretty sure that’s in the campus handbook, the no killing co-workers rule), then at least I can escape them for a week. And it will be good. Until I have to come back.