Grass and Sky

The primary goal for this weekend was to find a way to limit Shadow's access to the litter boxes. We bought a baby gate yesterday (my first trip to the big new Target in East Liberty, exciting!) and that seems to be working fairly well. It's in the doorway to the back hall (about three feet long, the back hall holds the doors to the bathroom and back deck, and the tiny little linen closet/pantry/broom closet). We have it about three or four inches off the floor so the cats can squirm under it but Shadow can't get through. It's working well so far, although it does make going to the bathroom in the middle of the night a little more challenging than strictly necessary.

I also picked up a scale. I discovered that dieting when one can't ever weigh in doesn't really work. The scale is cheap and can't be properly calibrated (it claims to be accurately calibrated already, but it seems to weigh in a bit light) but even so, it looks like I've lost at least a few pounds. This gives me the encouragement I need to get back to work tomorrow with an all new dieting push. The scale currently measures me at 118.8 lbs (which might be under by 1.2 or a little more) so I'm using that as my new baseline.

Today was a very sluggy day, the sort of day that makes me wonder both how I'm going to survive a full week of work and whether I'll ever actually feel energized and healthy ever again. Despite that, I managed to get six loads of laundry washed, folded and put away; two litter boxes scooped; and a drainer full of dishes washed. Not bad for a sluggo day.

I went to bed with a sinus headache and it's still here this morning. I assumed it was allergies but there's no pollen activity today, according to weather.com, so I don't know. Maybe I just have a sinusy head cold (complete with stuffy nose, pressure in my ears, and a body that feels made of lead). Whatever it is, I feel cruddy. So I'm staying home and going back to bed.

This past week was one of those weeks where all you want to do is survive it. An unpleasant combo of period and head cold really wiped me out. Yesterday I was invited to go out with people after work to watch a hockey game and have a few drinks. I declined due to a fabulous headache. I was ready for bed by 8:30 last night, but heroically held out until ten, and then slept approximately sixteen hours. An hour and a half later, I still feel all groggy and gross, but I think 2:30 in the afternoon is late enough to be getting up, I definitely can't crawl back into bed for a nap yet. *sigh*

It's a bright, sunny, blue-sky day outside, but cold. The current temp is 16F, which is too cold for me to feel any desire to venture outside. Yesterday evening, I stopped at CVS after work to buy some essential groceries, and saw some children playing in the snow, sledding on a small hill at the neighborhood park. It amazed me that they were out there voluntarily when it was so cold, and then remembered that kids don't feel the cold in the same way that adults do. It's not that they don't get cold, it's just that they don't care. I can remember being the same way when I was little. If there was snow to play in, it must be played in, and it didn't matter that your mittens were soaked and your hands were so cold you could barely move your fingers. You were having fun. Today is a great day to be ten years old.

My desire to go to work this morning is at an all time low. I've got a cold and I'm feeling a little on the yucky side as a result. Not sick enough to stay home, but not healthy enough to relish the prospect of a room full of energetic two-yr-olds.

I was very excited about watching the US/Canada hockey game yesterday, but made the mistake of taking some Nyquil earlier in the evening (it's the only cold med I have lying about the house). So I was mostly a zombie for most of the game, until my laptop overheated with fifteen minutes left to go in the third period. At that point, I decided I'd better just go to bed (a good three hours early).

It's going to be a loooooong week.

I've spent the last 45 minutes up to my elbows in bleach water, washing all the contaminated toys. It's sort of like a haz-mat zone at work right now. We only have 7 of our regular 12 kids today. There is a nasty respiratory thing going around, which has had the kids hacking and coughing all week, and now they've all started throwing up because of all the phlegm and such. Blech. It hasn't exactly been a picnic here.

But at least today several parents have finally been made to understand that when their children have a fever and are coughing up a lung, it's better to keep them at home. So, fewer kids here today, means we actually have time to wash all the toys that have been coughed over and chewed on this week.

I missed lj-land today and I'm glad it's up and running again!

( Go Steelers! )


Yesterday was pretty unpleasant. I had a luckily very mild case of a stomach bug that's been making the rounds at work. One of the perks of spending so many years there is that I have built up some immunity to these things, so I merely had a rotten belly ache all day, rather than anything worse. But it was a rotten belly ache, all day long.

Happily, I'm feeling nearly all better today, aside from being a bit low energy. I did take an unexpected nap in the afternoon - one trip to the grocery store and I was completely knackered. Now, of course, I'm wide awake and will prolly be up half the night, lol.

Well, I went to the doctor this morning. The good news is, there is no ear infection. The ear drum is a bit injured, however, due to too much pressure from the turbulence on the flight home from San Diego. So it's all Comic Con's fault I've had an earache for the past week, lol.