Summer Day 81: Nearly Done

Nearly done with these damn allergies, that is!  I feel better today than I have in nearly 2 weeks-the fact that I have not thrown up for the first time in 12 days is enough to warrant a celebration.  Even if I am still coughing so hard, I break a sweat.  Whatever has set us off must be dying off.  To be safe, next year I am going to the beach for September-the whole month.  I can't do this level of ick again, it's horrible.  Every aspect of being under the weather is like a shard of glass poking me.  I don't like feeling weak, I don't like being tired, I don't like coughing and having to blow my nose ALL the time.  Every time I had a spark of life, I would jump up and clean.   I don't like clutter and I hate having the laundry back up at all.  It made the times that all I could manage was sitting up more bearable.  The kitchen suffered the most, as usual.  With everyone making what they felt like eating and only one person a day assigned to wash the dishes...it was bad.  Matt kept bringing home food and it would get unloaded on the counters and table and just sit there.  Cold stuff got put away and everything else became a total mystery as to where it went.

I got that knocked out, I took the dogs for a long walk, I got the mail all caught up, the laundry all put away, cleaned the porch, washed and refilled all the water and food dishes for the cats and dogs, reorganized my Netflix queue, watched the first 4 episodes of the new season of Supernatural with Jake and he and I fleshed out our action hero guy.  We are tired of action heroes with limited death-defying abilities, this guy can make a silencer for his gun from his own fist.  He's super tough.  Jake wants to name him Gui Mann.  Mr. Mann. It's almost as good as my favorite hero protagonist's name ever-Hiro Protagonist from Snowcrash.  Even Hiro had his limits.  In the opening scene alone he nearly failed to deliver a pizza on time.  That is an AWESOME book...I have the t-shirt.

I am still working on my story with Chan. Sam and Jane are currently still in a canoe, but are about to find their dog, Jones Bones Jones, who will aid them in many future adventures.  Jones is a real dog, not like this dog we have staying here this week.  Bailey is the weirdest dog ever.  She has a tiny head and little shiny button eyes.  Her legs are each as long as her entire body and she's covered in shag carpeting.  She has a tiny mouth, like the size of a preying mantis mouth.  Yet she can make this...sound.  It's like she's on fire, so there are these yelps of panic mixed in with lower 'arooo rooo rooo' sounds, high pitched yarps and the entire time, she's doing this scramble dance with her legs going all over.  And she does this all with next to no provocation.

Other than a valiant effort to simply feel human and not squint with envy any time I see someone laying down and NOT coughing out a lung as a result, I have been reading.  I read The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.  Excellent book.  I read Dan Brown's Inferno.  I read Winter's Sea by Susanna Kearsley, I read a translated version of Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Alder-Olsen, which I loved.  I have developed a 'thing' for Scandinavian crime novels, though I have yet to find any crime novel I have liked as much Tana French's debut novel, In the Woods, even her next three.  I read R.L. Stine's book Midsummer Night's Scream, too. I read The Madness Underneath by Maureen Johnson, which is a second book in the Shades of London series.  Loved the first, the second did not have the same feel, hoping it was a set-up for the third to get back to 'normal'.  And finally, I finished up Bill Bryson's book about Shakespeare.  Now I am sitting in the void of between.  Matt is reading The Passage by Justin Cronin, the one I read a couple weeks ago via my Nook.  He got it from the library, sucker is nearly 800 pages long!  No wonder it felt like I was reading 6 different stories.  It's still top 5 for the year.  I should make a top 10 list this year...my favorite book ever is still The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.  They are making it a movie, I hope they don't screw it up.

That's it-a full recap of the last couple of weeks.  I am concentrating on getting past this funk, Matt and I are dreaming big and tent shopping, planning how to get everything in the van after several years of hauling it in Poppy.  We have some stuff coming up next week, this weekend is set to be a work weekend around the house, I hope I will be able to pitch in.  Just trying to breathe like a normal person has been work enough lately.