A*gain*??? (Return of the Bronchitis Fairy)

This afternoon I took Fourthborn to her consultation with the oral surgeon. Her hang-y-down tooth will make like Elvis and leave the building in a couple of weeks. We swung through Arby's for sandwiches, and then I dropped her off at home and headed for the after-hours clinic.

I've been droopier than usual, coughing harder and longer than usual: so hard yesterday afternoon that I pulled something in my back and then something in my abdomen as I schlepped down the hallway at the clinic. I am back on Doxycycline for ten days with a steroid shot in my rump. I'm to take my inhaler every four hours for the next couple of days and to seriously watch my carbs and stay out of the sun.

In the words of Simon and Garfunkel, I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.

I think "groovy" might be that tiny spark I see on the far horizon.

Things and Stuff

I really needed my massage tonight. It hasn't been a bad day, or a bad week. However, the air quality is low, at least in my lungs' opinion, and I'm using my rescue inhaler more than usual. I haven't slept long for the past two nights, or particularly well.

So I ate a Happy Meal homeopathically as I drove to the spa. This was my first time with a new therapist, as the one I'd seen the first three times is trying something new. She was good, very good, and I liked her personality. I absolutely adore my new therapist.

I could not get comfortable lying on my belly, even with a boob pillow. First the belly wasn't happy. Then I couldn't get my face comfortable. I ended up propping myself on my elbows while she worked on my legs. Any time I even thought about lying flat, my lungs said,"Sure, try it. That'll be fun." Finally I asked her if it would get in her way if I were to lie on my side. Bingo!

Next time we're going to try a prenatal massage from the get-go, given the glorious Buddha-ness of the first curve I ever had.

My legs are happy for the first time in months. She was able to reverse some of the edema in my ankles that is resulting from insufficient sleep. Nobody had touched my mid-back in years, because it's not one of the parts that stamps and throws hissy-fits like my traps and deltoids and hips.

Ordinarily I prefer firm massage with plenty of work on trigger points. Tonight I knew in advance that that would make me feel worse, not better. So we went with a lighter but still significant pressure. Swedish massage, which many people find comforting, just feels to me as if I'm being mugged by butterflies.

 On the drive home from my massage, I listened to the classical station, which was playing the last bit of the Emperor Concerto, then followed it with this as the pianist's encore. I almost wept with joy.

I'm crazy-tired but not sleepy. Time to make up my nest and call it a day.

And sometimes we catch more bronchitis???

I'm feeling rather as I did five months ago, except now I have an inhaler, and it's definitely helping. I'm also nuking chicken broth and popping Ricola, and I'm thinking that a trip to the after-hours clinic may be in order. And another blessing after church on Sunday.

Now for some comic relief: I worked remotely yesterday so that I could keep an appointment mid-day for a replacement drivers license. I proactively renewed it in March, and it was allegedly delivered before the calendar ticked over into April. I've been lugging around the receipt from that order in case I get pulled over. I carefully collected all of the supporting documents and showed up at the proper hour, only to be gently informed that my appointment is for September 22, not yesterday.

More comic relief: yesterday I accidentally knocked my glasses off their perch onto the floor behind a stack of plastic shoeboxes in my room. Thankfully, I have a spare pair that are good enough but not wonderful. I fired up the flashlight on my phone, moved a few boxes, and couldn't find the first pair. So after work I carefully disassembled my shoebox fort, found my glasses, and put the emergency pair back in their drawer.

Non-comic relief: yesterday was the 9th anniversary of my sealing to Beloved. He's been rather more on my mind of late. What a wonderful man, and I get to be with him ad infinitum but thankfully not ad nauseam.

I slept reasonably well last night, if insufficiently long. I'm working remotely again today in the interest of public safety as well as my own.

One last bit of good news: we have a date for Fourthborn's disability hearing. When I called their attorney's office to touch base yesterday, our contact said that Middlest's notice should arrive soon. The courts have finally opened up and are scheduling live hearings.

There's probably more, but I need to dock my laptop and start encouraging it to wake up. Maybe I'll finish waking up, myself, in the process.

And sometimes we catch a break.

After I posted on Saturday, we had a bit of adventure Chez Ravelled. I was washing my hands when the stream of water from the hot tap dwindled down to nothing. It was the same for all three faucets. Plenty of cold water and not even a mist of hot water. I informed the bipolar bears and made plans to call Wonderful Plumber early this morning.

Since I was Not In The Mood for a cold shower, and I had no idea when the plumber could get to us this week, I opted to spare my good brothers and sisters this increasingly fragrant body and do Zoom church, combining it with a dash to the office to retrieve my laptop and headphones. Thus, it was the first time in months that I did not doze off midway through Zoom church, and my drive was rather more edifying than usual.

When I called Wonderful Plumber this morning, he informed me that the most likely cause was dead batteries in the flood prevention system, and four AA batteries should fix the problem. I ran a couple of quick errands before work, picking up milk and orange juice and buttermilk and ice cream at Braum's, then batteries and a big bag of caramel M&Ms at Walgreens, which is half a block from the dairy store.

I had to rely on Fourthborn's younger hands to open the sensor box and swap out the batteries. Then I fixed myself a slightly larger than sensible portion of German chocolate, since it's currently out of rotation at the drive-thru.

I had a reasonably productive day, working from home. My laptop is bagged up and ready to go tomorrow morning. I'm still a bit sticky and undoubtedly more fragrant than yesterday, but I've loaded and run the dishwasher, and that still comes under the heading of progress.

And I have German chocolate ice cream in my freezer.

Huge financial burden on board. And a work anniversary.

If we are friends on FB, you might have seen the picture I posted yesterday of a window sticker on the car in front of me. It read "huge financial burden on board," and I laughed and commented that the owner of the car might want to acquire a new car before said HFB is old enough to read; otherwise they may not like the nursing home they find themselves in, 40 to 50 years from now.

My wise and thoughtful friend Karen commented that in her experience raising children had been nowhere near as expensive as the commonly published estimates, and nobody had gone hungry. I'm always glad to learn that my friends and their children have never had that experience. I certainly didn't, growing up, and I was gobsmacked when it happened to us when the children's father went back to school.

I lost 21 pounds in approximately three weeks, because I gave part of my portion to the kids, but I had it to lose. Firstborn lost ten pounds in the same period, because she inherited a healthy portion of my stubbornness and refused to eat much of what was available. Thankfully, her fifth-grade teacher noticed and brought it to my increasingly-stupefied attention; we went on WIC, for which the government and Heaven be praised.

In looking back, the real HFB was the children's father. We made incredibly wonderful human beings together, and I learned or honed a lot of baseline virtues while married to him. But boy howdy, was it ever hard!

Which brings me to something that happened earlier this week. On Wednesday I celebrated 23 years at my job. My initial goal was to hold the job longer than the children's father had ever held a job. My next goal was to earn more annually than the children's father had done. I have now worked there longer than I was married to him and nearly eight times as long as his longest stretch of employment. I now earn approximately twice his annual salary. It long ago ceased to be a matter of bitter contempt, but it continues to be a source of quiet satisfaction.

There are only a handful of people with greater tenure there than I. I've seen a lot of people come and go. I have reserved parking! But I still have a ways to go before I can safely retire. The mortgage needs to be paid off. We need to get Middlest and Fourthborn on disability so they will have means to live on when I go Home.

I have no doubt that this is all doable. I look back to where I was, and compare it to where I am, and it's so evident that Heaven has watched over me and blessed me one hundred-fold.

I had a really great day at work yesterday. All of my To-Do's were current by the end of the day, and I had both inboxes under control. I'm looking forward to Monday morning.

If at first you don't succeed, take a muscle relaxer.

Last night's massage was good. It built on the progress from last week. And my neck is reacting to the release of multiple trigger points in my back with all the grace and flexibility of a Buckingham Palace guard. I realized this midday and wrote myself a sticky note to bring home so that I would remember to add the muscle relaxer, which I take only rarely, to the regular assortment of evening meds.

I am now just waiting for the clock to tick over to midnight in order to pounce upon tomorrow's Wordle.

I have another massage booked for Friday week, this time for an hour and a half. Eventually I want to try the hot stone massage, just because I can. It would probably be best to time it for winter and not as an unnecessary addition to August's blast-furnace days.