Tag: cold

Februaryisms 📅

/ dmueller
One-Off Non Series #00 “The Disentangler.”

A commitment to attend a youth basketball game, the schedules grandmotherly texted to us, now holds one last opportunity to attend on Monday evening at 7:30 p.m.

A phone call to Virginia Department of Transportation on February 8, and a neighbor’s phone call to VDOT that same week, ‘pot holes multiplying and deeper by the day,’ brought the gravel loader and grater to Rosemary Road for the first time since July 17, 2023.

An impressively steady and unchanging headache all day today confirms that I am afflicted by a cold but have withstood the evidently harsher version of it, which so many around me seem to be hosting, sneezecasting, muling to and fro.

Eighth and ninth class observations within a three week window happened this morning in the two farthest-from-Shanks buildings; I have managed to put together the 600-word write-ups during each class session, then conference with the teachers while walking back to Shanks together. Five more, Friday, Monday, and Wednesday.

A stop-off at Cburg Kroger today had me carrying home sweet potatoes, garlic paste, and Gatorade, with the first two elevating a sriracha peanut butter broth ramen brewed to tame this blerg.

A side-shed hour standing with the chickens as they free-ranged a bit, turning their time in the sunlight to dust bathing, except for Tiny Honey who chose instead to scratch leaves and pull worms.

A book award committee with an intermediate deadline of March 3, so there is time to get to these last two titles (in the first round) but the first ten have me going to the refrigerator for that Gatorade.

A sighting of yellow flowers across the road near the mailboxes tells us the daffodils have bloomed on February 21 for the second year in a row.

And that sighting is through a today-installed picture window, which replaced the one that inexplicably presented us with an expanding diagonal crack in one pane, lower left to upper right, sometime in early December, after which my brother quipped as chemists do “you do realize that glass only appears stable and is actually in a flow state?”.

An air dancer (guardian) is on a timer near the coop and run, set to intervals of fan-fed animation during daylight, unevenly but more or less for 20 minutes each hour, and this afternoon, despite its flailing or perhaps because of it, high above and circling intently were a trio of turkey vultures and a pair of red-tailed hawks (whose earnestness about actually attacking the chickens we have yet to confirm; today they remained distant).

Along with the daffodils, today bloomed 2024’s first invitation to do an external promotion review this summer; rules of the house, strictly enforced, are no more than two because three last year was one too many and four the year before were two too many.

Comfort Inventory 7

/ dmueller
  • Signed off on an MA thesis today, the first I’ve helped with at EMU. I was involved as a second reader; second readings I did provide. The project suggests that understanding professor rating sites as rhetorical ecologies (i.e., more than Bitzereal situations) might aid institutions in recognizing (and adapting to better allow for) the complex rhetoricity of in-house course evaluations. And the candidate–Good luck!–will be taking up a doctoral program at Tennessee this fall.
  • Summer cold. Phlegm follows different viscosity rules in July than in January: rollicking, splashy, underwater swim rules. My lungs report that the rules are strange, unfamiliar.
  • Two meetings tomorrow, another Wednesday.  In between, assuming a couple of bona fide work days are in store, I intend to massage my temples with one hand and register keystrokes with the other until I have the third section of this article drafted. Third of five. I might have more to say about one of the meetings if there’s time enough.
  • Our streak of six years sharing the Honda Element as our only vehicle ended today. I am almost as proud of this streak (2,190 days) as I assume Cal Ripken Jr. must be of his consecutive games record (2,632 games). I don’t count the 18 months in Syracuse we picked up a free 1986 Grand Am for Ph. to rattle and lurch stylishly between home and school and work.  If you’d seen that car–even better, if you’d ridden in it, you would forgive me this doctoring of the official motor vehicle ledger.  We never once drive it someplace as a family. We got it for the cost of repairs to get it rolling down the road and turned it around on Craigstlist for a few hundred bucks last summer. And anyway, we have been sharing one car for a heckuva long time. But not now. We might’ve gone another route if public transportation around here was viable, but for now, our enlarged carbon footprint will toddle toward cataclysm right along with all the rest of the 1:1 auto:motorists.
  • Is. starts a five-week summer preschool tomorrow. Requires packed lunches. We stood many minutes in the lunch pail aisle at Target last evening undeciding between Dora, Disney Princesses, Hello Kitty, and Toy Story.  And then out of the blue, Mystery Machine. Declared she liked the Scooby Doo box better than the others. Oh, and important about that Twitter link is that it’s from last summer when, after we’d paid and as she and I stood in line for the Times Square Toys-R-Us ferris wheel, she told me in no uncertain terms we wouldn’t be riding in the car with E.T. mounted to it.
  • The Spain-Netherlands match yesterday wasn’t the most enthralling of the tournament, but this year’s World Cup delivered many spectacular moments. I watched more than I should have. And while I’m overall pleased with my second place finish in the Skitchy Pitch FC pool, I have to hand it to WC-OuijaBoard who climbed ranks down the stretch by selecting not only match winners but exact scores, too.

Breathe

/ dmueller / 1 Comment

Somewhere along the way, I acquired a Solstice cold. Judging entirely from the
phlegmatic emanations (coughing, sneezing, and wheezing), I drafted the
following schematic, which I will carry to my doctor later this week (only if
absolutely necessary). It is a preliminary attempt to characterize the
great range of unpleasant sounds and sensations associated with the bug.

If I know my doctor, she will take one look at this and say,
"Yes, you do indeed have a cold." At which time I will resume heavy dosages of
Vitamin C and Tylenol Cold (i.e., crunching down those buggers like a warm box
of Good & Plenty) and hope they sustain me until I am well again.