Saturday, March 23, 2013

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.   

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