Down and out

Man.  Little did I realize when I posted last week, how right I was about viruses having it in for me.  I’m STILL trying to get rid of this one.  Eleven days and counting.  My voice was completely gone from Saturday through Wednesday.  Then Wednesday afternoon I started running a temperature above 100 and the virus moved from my throat and chest into my head and took up residence in my ears and nose and sinuses.   I gave up and called in sick Thursday and made a doctor's appointment.  She prescribed antibiotics and Mucinex to get me to cough the stuff out of my lungs.  Unfortunately, I gave them the number for the closest pharmacy to my new house, and when I got there, their computer and fax were down and they weren't getting any prescriptions in.   I was too sick to care and just went home.  

Friday morning I felt marginally better and went and got the meds and started talking them.   This morning I feel like hell again, but then I coughed so much last night I ended up sleeping in the recliner, partially upright.  I hope these drugs work because I'm really tired of being sick, tired of trying to cough up a lung, and tired of being tired.  Can you tell I don't do ill very well.  

I am a little concerned about the fact that I've had two colds in such a short period of time and that it's been eleven days and I still haven't cleared this current cold.  I usually don't have this much trouble.  Plus I have a three day weekend this weekend, and instead of doing a multitude of chores or anything fun, I'm home being miserable.  I really hate that.

Anyway, enough of the viral drama. Yesterday when I went to get my drugs I also went and got a new camera. My one concession to something fun for the weekend.  So you have new pictures today. 

Yesterday I had a pair of brown-headed cowbirds on the feeder.   The male is really distinctive, glossy black all over but with a brown head, like he's wearing a hood.  The female is just a pale even brown.  That may be the female I've been seeing out there and trying to determine what she was.  I try to take pictures of them through the back door, which isn't very successful.   In this picture you can kind of see the red male house finch with this head turned to the left on the left side of the feeder.  A male house sparrow has his back to us.  The picture I attempted of the brown-headed cowbird didn't turn out at all.  I may have to think about getting a motion activated wildlife camera and mounting it back there if so many interesting birds are going to be stopping by.

We got a rain storm last night finally.  They've been calling for rain for days, and we've gotten nothing.  It looks like they are calling for rain most of this week also, so I hope it does rain, at least some.  I heard the storm come through sometime early this morning.  The birdbath is full this morning and it was close to empty yesterday afternoon, so we got a decent amount of rain. The little birds are so happy.  I have several blue jays that use that birdbath.  They don't come in to the feeder, but they use the birdbath. The rest of the birds use both. 

Anyway, that's it for today.  I'm going to go be puny and maybe play with my new camera.  Later.

Viruses have it in for me

Since I haven't replaced my camera yet, I'm putting another old picture in this post.  This one was from last summer at Monica's.  It looks like the mother deer is sticking her tongue out at us.

It’s another rainy and cold Saturday, but that’s fine with me today.  I have another cold, so I’m staying in and being puny.  Yes, I have ANOTHER one.  I had a bad cold which had me out sick for 2 days back in late January and now I have another one.  I’m beginning to worry about my immune system.  Or maybe I'm just particularly susceptible to Florida viruses.  I caught the January cold while at a meeting in Florida.  And this one was given to me by a friend who was sick while she was visiting from Florida.  

This one is particularly untimely because it began coming on on Tuesday afternoon.  Wednesday I was dosing myself with every home remedy known to man plus every over-the-counter cold medication I could buy.   And the reason for that was that I went to Philadelphia on Thursday and Friday to give two talks.  See why the timing was so bad, besides the fact that I shouldn’t be catching colds so easily.

Anyway, I wasn’t too miserable in Philadelphia, and my head wasn’t so stopped up that flying to and from Philadelphia was torture.  And most importantly, my voice lasted through my talks yesterday.  By the time the plane landed last night though, I didn't have much of a voice left, and today it's completely gone.  Nothing.   

Having no voice is kind of a pain, even staying home and being puny.   Addy’s doing her you-left-me-for-two-days-so-I-must-follow-you-everywhere-and-sit-in-your-lap-if-you’re-still-long-enough act.  If she loses track of me she starts yelling loudly until I call her name and she can locate me again.  Except when I try calling her, nothing happens.   So she just keeps yelling until she finds me. 

The talks in Philadelphia were very well received.  I gave a talk for the residents Friday morning and then gave Grand Rounds in the afternoon.  It was fun. 

I have a LOT of birds fighting over the bird feeder today.  Mostly house sparrows, juncos and mourning doves, but I also have a pair of house finches (he’s very red right now) and a pair of cardinals.   Plus this morning I saw a solid brown bird on the feeder with this pale streak behind her eyes.  I’m thinking it may be the female of that red-wing blackbird I saw a while back.  Or some sort of female blackbird, since they tend to be brown.  It’s fun to watch them and try to figure out what birds are out there.   Zoe likes to watch them too, which she’s doing from inside today since it’s cold and rainy and I’m not opening the door. 

I had to re-figure out how to program my sprinkler system.  The lawn service I use treated my lawn with a pre-emergent last week and said to water it in within 48 hours.  Since no rain was due, I figured out how to get my sprinkler system going again.  It’s working fine and I decided to leave it on, watering every 4th day for now.  I will have to make sure it’s not set to water on any day that might drop below freezing.  It’s not supposed to be very warm here this week. 

It was COLD in Philly and windy as hell, which I'm sure didn't help my cold.  Here's a funny thing.  One of the home remedies I use is gargling with diluted apple cider vinegar.  I really don't know where I picked that one up, but it does seem to help when I have a sore throat.  Anyway, I found a small travel-size bottle and put apple cider vinegar in it to take with me.  Only apparently I had used the bottle for shampoo or something soapy in the past and not successfully cleaned it out. The first time I diluted some of it in Philly and tried to gargle with it, I had foam coming from my mouth and it tasted soapy.  Yuck!  I'm sure it looked hysterical though.  I threw the rest of it out.

I guess that's about all.  I'm going to hang out today babying myself and resting and trying to get this cold to run it's course and move on, and feeling somewhat guilty about probably spreading it to two planeloads of people.  Although luckily I'm not, and haven't been, coughing much . . . yet.

Later.   

Rainy

Today is a gloomy and rainy day but since we need the rain, I'm not that unhappy about it.  A pretty good storm passed though last night so everything is saturated.  And the grass is coming up!  And my neighbor's Bradford pear trees are beginning to bloom like crazy.  Pretty!  I'd take a picture of it except my camera battery is dead.  Instead you get the most recent baby pine tree picture.

I need a new camera.  Badly.  Neither of the batteries for my current camera hold a charge any longer, so I can get maybe 10 pictures before both batteries are dead, fewer if they are flash pictures.  Plus I have one piece of the camera duct-taped on it, so I think I'm due for a new one.    My friend's camera took such great pictures last summer.  I'll have to ask her what make it is.  

My older cat Addy has been getting increasingly fragile.  She's unsteady on her feet, sleeps on the bed essentially all the time except when she's being fed, and lately she occasionally cries when I pet her.  She seemed to be in some amount of pain almost constantly.  So in desperation, trying to find some way to alleviate some of that, I bought a little package of chewy treats that contain glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate.  OMG!  I'm not a believer in stuff that's hyped a lot about how it works, and scientifically, I can't see how these would work or how they could help her, but the fact is, they are helping her!   She's up and active, going outside and wandering around the yard.   Her balance is better - she can stand on three legs while scratching her ear, which she couldn't before.  And she doesn't spend her entire day laying on the bed, she seems more comfortable.  I know none of this is measurable, but she's better.  She's moving more easily and she's moving!  I'm going to keep giving her these treats, which luckily she likes the taste of and eats easily.  I sound like an ad for these things, but it's just such a difference.  I may even consider taking the human version if/when I ever get to the stiff and creaky stage of life.  

I also treated both cats for fleas this weekend.  Interestingly I never had a flea problem with them in the old house, even though my neighbors on three sides had dogs.  But I've seen a flea on each of them this last week, so they got treated yesterday.  

That's about all that's new right now so, later!

Found it!

After a bunch of searching I finally found what it is that's blooming out by my back fence.  It's a flowering quince.  I have to give my sister credit for the find though.  Monica asked me if it had thorns.  I told her 'no' but today I was out there, unwinding and cutting out a vine from the middle of it, and it very definitely has thorns, about an inch or so long.  So when I came back in I googled "long thorns pink blossoms" and there it was!  Yay!  There's some hope that I will be able to identify the things that bloom around here this year after all.

As you can see Zoe is in a lazy mood.  That thing she's laying on is a scratching post that she uses regularly and likes to sleep on.  She's been outside today but not much, and even I came scampering back in after cutting that old vine out.  It's cold today!  I ran some errands this morning and it never got above 38 while I was out there.  And the wind is COLD.   Brrrrrrrr!   It's so bright and sunny that I expect it to be warm, but it's definitely not.    

I went ahead and did my taxes using TurboTax last weekend.  Yup, got them done and e-filed.  It took me almost 5 hours on Sunday to do it though.  I was trying to be really thorough, as well as trying to figure out what the hell this statement means each time I came up on something else.  Tax-ese is no doubt written by the same folks who wrote lawyer-ese.  But I felt as sure about the finished results as I ever feel about taxes, so I went ahead and filed.  Weirdly, I already have my refund!  I had it direct deposited and noticed it in my account this morning.  That's what I call service.    

Something, probably a squirrel, destroyed my bird feeder.  I came in one afternoon and it was hanging funny.  I went out there and when I touched it, it just fell apart.  Luckily it was mostly empty.  I jury-rigged it and refilled it.  The birds have been using it still, even jury-rigged with baling twine.  I bought a new feeder today and will replace the rigged one when they empty it.   

There was a red-wing blackbird on the feeder the other day.  I haven't seen one of those in forever.  They're so pretty.  I hope he sticks around.  The house sparrows, mourning doves and junkos are the most common visitors.

Despite the cold spell we've had this week, the Bradford pears in the area are starting to show signs of flowering.  When it warms up just a little I think everything will go into full bloom mode.  I'm waiting for the trees to leaf out.  I really am not that fond of dead-looking bare branches during the winter.  My aloe vera did indeed take some serious damage this winter, but it looks like the centers of all of them are going to survive.  And I found the tiny start of new leaves on the peach sapling I said looked so dead, so I think they'll be fine also.  


So far I'm keeping up with my exercising.  It's actually easier since I bought the Wii, because the Wii Fit Program makes it fun to exercise, rather than a chore.  That's the thing about exercise.  I don't mind exercising if it's for a purpose.  I love to hike for example.  But just to exercise for the sake of exercising is BORING!  And tedious.  And hard to maintain.  Even with switching out between my little exercise machines I was bored.  But the Wii makes it fun, plus it keeps track of your time and calories.  So, so far I'm still doing it regularly.  

I guess that's about it for today.  Here's another picture of the flowering quince.