sniffle. snurk. hack.

Sick as a dog right now, and have been since Monday. Well, actually Sunday night, when the cashier at Big Lots was kind enough to share her unspecified disease by coughing directly in my face. I was out trying to do a bit of Christmas shopping, finally, with the hideous craziness of this year behind me at last. I felt the rasp in the back of my throat by the time I reached home.

I've been taking everything possible, and yet I'm still sick -- how can this be? I'm taking Coldsnap (swear by it, usually!), Zicam, some new thing called Umcka that my Mom said works, and of course, the usual roster of anti-histimines, cough medicines, and vitamins. With this regimen, I should be as healthy as the proverbial horse. Giddy-up.

I'm not sick very often, and I get stir crazy easily. I keep making lists in my head each morning of the minor tasks I could accomplish while still "resting" as it were. But this time, I've been too sick to do anything but catch up on teevee (I fall asleep in the middle of nearly anything) and do a wee bit of knitting. I had all these grandiose ideas that I would use this down time to organize shit on my hard drive, make presents, and most of all, clean the house, which badly needs it. I did manage to gather the trash to go out and do a load of laundry, both tasks that left me exhausted, sweaty and panting by the time I was finished. I went to the store to buy vegetables this morning, and by the time I white-knuckled the shopping cart into line behind an obsequious white-haired lass that questioned every swipe of the cashier's hand, I was quivery. Driving home was very nearly terrifying, not helped by the fact that I saw two seperate accidents, both of them ugly. Well, actually, one of them was sort of funny -- some yuppie chick with a cell phone hermetically sealed to the side of her head managed to crash her ginormous, shiny, and quite new Expedition into a concrete pole in the parking lot. Gee, wonder how that happened? From the looks of it, it was totalled, wrapped, neatly around the pole like a pig in a blanket, and oddly enough, she didn't even look upset.