Today is hopefully the last in a shit show series of posts that went on way too long dedicated to me being ill in one form or another. — Management
Saturday brought Day 7 of Crud 2021 to me and Day 5 to Wifey. I would include B, but he’s 17, and his immune system got rid of his Crud roughly two days after he got it; if he had it at all, he still maintains that he was never actually sick, and it was an allergic reaction to a friend’s cat. Discrepancies on who was Cruded first and for how long aside, it’s been a long week/few months, and I’m happy to see the end of it.
Thankfully I am at the tail end of the illness, and other than some sickly transient random noise-bursts with announcements and lung butter, I feel pretty darn OK.
With all that OK-ishness coursing through my aging body, I was up early-ish on Saturday morning to feed and let the dogs out, watch the footy, drink coffee, and wait for the forecasted gusting wind and rain to start.
I was early into the first half of a match I cared little about and my 2nd giant mug of coffee when the gale force winds arrived and immediately knocked the power out. Shit.
Eventually, I cobbled together the available hand-held technologies at my disposal (not code for my penis) so I could watch the 10 AM Liverpool match on my iPad while hunkered down under the covers with one eye on the game and the other on the nearby glass doors, expecting a tree, or small child, to fly into the room at any moment.
Thankfully the morning was void of any housebound flying debris or children, and soon the game was over. I was running high on caffeine, but low on power to my gadgets, so watching the predictably horrible Norwich/Man U game was out of the question. So, I got my shit together, coughed up some gobs of Crud, and then headed out into the high winds for a short walk around the trails of Meridian Park with my camera.
It felt great to be out in the fresh air, but it was more than a little nerve-racking to walk while the wind howled like a rushing freight train, bending the trees and pushing me around like I was way less dense through the midsection. It was also strange to be shooting these nature shots at shutter speeds upwards of 1/2000 of a second! But such is life photographing in 60 mile per hour winds.
The walk was short, but high winds be damned, I was stoked to be outside dodging cracking tree limbs instead of housebound with the Crud! I was also stoked on the way home when I got a text from B saying the electricity was back on and I could go back to my slack, middle-class white guy routine at full power.
By default, the coming week almost HAS to be better. But then again, I’ve been thinking that for weeks. Either way, I promise not to talk about my mental or physical health issues for a while. MONDAY EDIT: Things did get worse. Monday morning a blood vessel burst in my eye from all the violent coughing, now I look like a fat, one-eyed, satanic psychopath. Ah, the hazards of being on blood thinners for life.
NOTE: Stereolab’s 1993 album Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements served as inspiration for a line in this post. Not sure why that popped in my head, but now I find myself inspired to make a Stereolab playlist of the songs they played when I saw them in Pittsburgh back in 2000. #thingssemihipoldwhiteguysdo
Later.