Tag: sick

I think I want Monday back

Seriously.

Yesterday morning I got a tetanus shot.  No pressing reason, just it was time to renew.  By lunchtime it hurt. like. hell.  To the point where I was using my right hand to position my left arm on the desk so that I could type without moving anything above my elbow.  Driving home was “fun.”  I think it was worst last night — trying to find a comfortable sleeping position was “fun” too — but it’s not exactly fantastic this morning either.

I seriously considered staying home if it was still bad enough to make driving difficult, until I remembered it was Microsoft Patch Day.  Then I started seriously considering looking up the bus schedule.  It seemed to go better this morning, but that was under the influence of aspirin.

This morning I got in and discovered that our database for spam filter training had collected enough bad data that it was consistently labeling a ton of spam with a 0% rating. Trying to reset it led to ~45 minutes of various services either not working or having to be disabled so that other services could work, and of course phone calls. (In the middle of that, alenxa  called and I had to cut her off.  Sorry!)  On the plus side, it looks like part of the performance problems we’ve been having are related to the large size of the database, so it should run more smoothly for a while.

Edit to add: Also, got a response from a customer to whom I asked several questions in the for X or Y? — all of which were answered “yes” or “no.”  Yes to X or yes to Y?  *grumble*

Email seems under control for now.  Off to deal with patch day.  *Le sigh*

Current Mood: 😡stressed

Messages from the Couch

I went into work Monday morning, but after a few hours realized I’d be better off at home. So I left at lunch. Ended up staying home today, too, spending most of my time lying on the couch with a blanket, reading. Went out with alenxa at lunchtime to vote, run over to CVS, and grab some hot&sour soup.

Yesterday I finished a DVD set I borrowed from my dad, with 5 of the classic Universal Frankenstein movies. Watched House of Frankenstein, which was a rather disjointed tale of revenge with two main segments: one with Dracula, the other with the Wolfman. The Frankenstein Monster was in there too, mostly being thawed out during the second half, and finally broke free of his straps at the very end, when he strangled one person and wandered outside and fell in some quicksand. Yes, that was all he did.

Whatever I have, the rest of the symptoms aren’t that severe — except for the general out-of-it feeling that has me aware that I really shouldn’t be doing to much, say, driving. (As it was, I ran over a traffic cone trying to back out of the parking at the polling place, then dragged it about 15 feet before realizing it was still under the car.) And I’m not sure how effective I’d actually be at the desk right now, given how much trouble I was having concentrating yesterday. Not to mention I think the constant snuffling would get on everyone’s nerves.

*sigh* Comic-Con Hotel tomorrow morning. They say their travel agent has added server capacity, so with luck it won’t be quite such a chore to get into. Last year it took me an hour to get through. With more luck I’ll feel healthy enough to go into work and catch up.

Current Music: Weird Al Yankovic: Nature Trail to Hell (In 3-D)

Malaise

Very unsteady energy today. Aside from 2 nights without enough sleep — last night I stayed up finishing Julie E. Czerneda’s A Thousand Words for Stranger — I seem to have come down with something cold-like. I could feel the beginnings of a cough yesterday, then woke up with a nasty sore throat this morning. Copious amounts of water and juice helped, but I’ve only had energy in 1-to-2-hour segments of the day.

It didn’t help that alenxa and I had planned a full-afternoon shopping trip. It started out with me just wanting to pick up the 2 sequels to the book I finished last night, and her wanting to stop by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory to try their sugar-free offerings, but we both kept remembering other things we needed to look for, including groceries.

And I woke up sick.

I really wanted to get those books, though, and since the sore throat settled down, we went. I just washed my hands a lot and tried not to cough on anything.

In the end, I had to go to 3 different stores to find the books. The Borders near Whole Foods had full sets of 2 other trilogies (one of which I zoomed through last October), and about 4 copies of the book I’d just finished, but neither of its sequels. So instead of starting book 2 while Katie picked up groceries (I figured I’d keep my germs to myself instead of wandering around a ton of other people’s food), I browsed the sci-fi and graphic novel areas as my energy level dropped.

We dropped by Barnes & Noble on the way home, but they had even less selection — just the most recent series (again, the one I’d already read) and a stand-alone novel. I’ve decided that when I start the remaining series, I’m going to just pick up all 3 at once, since I know I’m going to want to read them all.

While I found myself hard-pressed to focus on just driving the rest of the way home, Katie had the practical suggestion of just calling stores in the area. I figured I’d do that, then pick the books up tomorrow. Fortunately, a little rest, some more water, and the satisfaction of actually finding a store that had the books got me going enough to drive down to South Coast…to the Borders where I remember looking at the books back in October, trying to decide which series to pick up.

So now I’m lying on the couch, half-ready to sleep, half-ready to read, trying to decide which I’d rather do.

Leading up to Sunday

Spent Thursday and Friday at home, sick. What started as a “mild cold” ramped up to a more moderate cold-like thing, which refused to disappear after 2.5 weeks. So, stayed home, went to doctor, got prescribed stuff. Spent two days alternately sleeping and lying on the couch reading, chugging water and juice (I went through two bottles of Trader Joe’s pineapple juice in two days), checking my temperature and taking tons of medication. Since I gave up my lunch hour to resolve the near-disaster on Wednesday, that means I still haven’t taken care of the errands I was planning to do in the middle of the week.

Half the office has been out over the last week or so, probably with the same thing. When I emailed in sick on Friday, my boss wrote back a note along the lines of, “you should hear the people who *did* come in!”

Meanwhile, UCI Drama’s doing a production of Sunday in the Park With George, one of my favorite plays. Reprise Theater also did a production last month, and I considered going to both… until I found out the cheap seats at Reprise were $70, and I could get tickets to UCI’s production for $14. So back in January, I bought tickets for Saturday night.

Amazingly enough, I managed to keep the coughing under control until we walked out of the theater after the show. (Which was quite good, though they made some really odd choices for “Putting it Together.” Everyone was dressed in some costume from an iconic 80s movie, and instead of propping up cardboard stand-ups of himself in all the different conversations, George removes an article of clothing and leaves it with each one. And it was kind of unnerving that they managed to cast leads with similar vocal qualities to Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. They had distinct voices, but especially in Act 2, as Marie, the actress could have been channeling her.)

OK, I’ve finished my tea. Time for bed.

Current Music: Putting It Together (in head)

What Goes Around

I went to Sav-on on Saturday to pick up more NyQuil and DayQuil equivalents. The shelf was practically empty. All sizes of the name-brand boxes (I get the capsules, since I can’t stand taking cough syrup) were completely out.

Yes, they were out of NyQuil and DayQuil.

As for the store brand, which I know from experience works well, they were down to their last few boxes unless you picked up the 40-packs. I think there were two 20-packs of the daytime version, and only the giant boxes for the nighttime.

If anything says “cold season has hit,” it’s a shortage of over-the-counter cold medication!

Current Mood: 🤒sick

Sweet poison

Woke up with a sore throat this morning, almost certainly the same thing Katie’s been fighting all week, so I’ve been drinking tea today. Our lunch room at work has a basket of sugar, Sweet-n-low, and Equal packets which someone has thoughtfully arranged in three wide stripes, making it look oddly like the French tricolor.

When the receptionist cleans the coffee maker, she puts a post-it note on the urn labeled “Poison,” often with a skull and crossbones, to make sure that no one absent-mindedly pours himself a cup of cleaning fluid. (And face it, if you really need the coffee, you won’t notice!)

Disturbingly, someone had set that post-it note on top of the sugar packets.

Now, I’m sure you can find nutritionists, dietitians, and the occasional conspiracy theorist who will agree with that assessment—and throw in aspartame and saccharin as well—but it’s not a label you want to see on something you’re about to put in your own drink. Even when you know it’s safe!

Looopy!

Last week I spent every day rushing to get through various projects at work. (For various reasons, I’m trying to catch up on a bunch of back-burner projects, including some server upgrades/replacements.)Twice I had servers crash in the evening. Monday afternoon I started upgrading one system, figuring I could stay a bit late and finish it while alenxa was in class. It didn’t quite work out that way. The upgrade took longer than expected, Katie’s class got out earlier, and most of the critical services stopped working partway though. I ended up leaving to pick her up, grabbed Taco Bell, dropped her off at home, and came back… and was stuck at work until 10:00 while I got things running again.

The big project for the rest of the week was getting a new mail server set up. We’d been planning this for a while, as the previous server was kind of flaky, but it looked like it was heading for a serious meltdown. Not surprisingly, it took until Friday afternoon before it was ready to take over. There’s an old adage about not makng major changes before leaving for a vacation or holiday weekend. I decided that the old box was so close to meltdown that it would be worth the effort. Silly me… Once again it not only took longer than expected to move the mail over, but I got stuck again when I accidentally rebooted the wrong server and it wouldn’t come up again. Katie’s already told that story. I still ended up making more changes after we got home, and doing troubleshooting for the next two days.

So after a week of high-stress running around and not enough sleep, my immune system must have been trashed, because I started noticing a sore throat Friday evening. On Saturday it turned into congestion and a cough, on Sunday my voice dropped steadily to a low croak, and on Monday I could barely speak at all. Katie picked it up from me on Sunday, and we both ended up staying home yesterday. I spent most of the day either in bed or on the couch, and I drank a ton of orange juice/Sprite blend (because after a while, I couldn’t bring myself to drink straight orange juice, but I was tired of just water).

We did at least get to see the local fireworks display on Monday, even if half of me wanted to just stay home and lie down.

We’re both back at work today, but I’m not entirely sure I should be. I had a very mild fever yesterday — less than half a degree — but I still feel really loopy today. I’m sure waking up at 3:30 am and not being able to get to sleep again until 5:00 didn’t help, but overall I probably ended up getting as much sleep as I usually do. The last NyQuil has long since worn off, and DayQuil has never caused me problems.

As far as I know there are no driving-while-feverish statutes, though I hope I’ll be in better shape by the time I’m ready to go home.

Current Mood: 🤒sick