Just another holiday weekend at the office
Sep. 2nd, 2006 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogRegular readers of this space know that holidays around here are usually joined, hand-in-handcuff, with one of two things:
* Illness and/or injury;
* Plumbing problems
Ever doing our part to keep up, I am pleased to report that we enter the Big Kahuna Last Weekend of Summer™ with both.
----
Teh Sick came, on little cat feet, a little over 24 hours ago. That's no homage to Sandburg; it was Michelle, my constant sleeping companion, who brought the symptoms to my attention by awakening me 3-something a.m. night before last, with a particularly enthusiastic bit of kneading about the nipple (I love you, cat, but that well's been dry since the day it was dug). I found myself experiencing a headache, chills and general malaise.
Okay, I'd been drinking a bit during and after the cable guy exploits of the day before, but not that much. The temperature had dropped enough to make it blanket weather for the first time in weeks. And the malaise part could have had something to do by being awakened so rudely. Was I just hung over?
I popped an Advil, clutched the blanket closer (and over certain sensitive parts), and all seemed well when I awakened for real. For an hour or so, anyway.
It seems, these days, that any bug that gets into me heads straight for my thermostat and knocks it for a loop. I've been doing the toooo-hot/toooo-cold thing all of yesterday and into this very moment. It wasn't at its worst, though, until last night. I'd sought refuge in here, shutting the cats out of this room and reaching a semi-sleepy state on the adjacent sofa. I occasionally heard a vocal protest du chat but did my best to ignore them. Around the same middle-of-the-night time, the symptoms again overcame me and I went off for more meds. Now knowing me to be wide awake, Michelle increased her meowing in amplitude and frequency to unbearable levels.
Against my better judgment, I let her in. I was at the toooo-hot end of my fever spectrum at that hour and the presence of a hot, kneading cat was not what I needed. So I repaired to the other sofa in the house, this one in the somewhat cooler living room, where she's not used to me being asleep. After a few moments of struggle, we reached an acceptable peace. Me, finally approaching slumber, her on the back cushion of the sofa near my head.
The very spot from which she chose to hock a hairball.
By now, it was becoming absurdly funny, and after a shower, change of bedsheet and some serious threatening of my bedside companion, I made it through the rest of the night. It's better this morning but I'm still not all the way back. Not sure where this came from, but my best bet is from one of the 200-odd other parents at my daughter's high school orientation, them all being fresh from their season-ending summer vacations to other exotic spots, and all exhaling their bugs into the cramped, stuffy auditorium air while we listened to the exact same speeches we heard at the pre-orientation meeting back in March.
----
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Emily reported during her evening feeding of the cats that "this doesn't look good."
It's our cellar you're talking about, Em; you need to be more specific about "this doesn't look good." So I descended to see water pouring into the laundry tub. Not from the washer hose, but from the ceiling above. And just as one man's ceiling is another man's floor, the ceiling in this case also doubled as the floor right below my most recentsuccessful plumbing job. That would have been the removal and cleaning of the trap in the kitchen sink, followed by the replacement of the trap, followed by the discovery that the trap was connected to the rest of the drain by an unbolted shunt which leaks if you merely look at it, followed by the puttying of the shunt which kept the leakage down to a dull roar (until now), followed by this.
I will play with putty again later today and see how that goes. Most likely this job will wind up being handed back to the professionals before I manage to screw it up even more.
* Illness and/or injury;
* Plumbing problems
Ever doing our part to keep up, I am pleased to report that we enter the Big Kahuna Last Weekend of Summer™ with both.
----
Teh Sick came, on little cat feet, a little over 24 hours ago. That's no homage to Sandburg; it was Michelle, my constant sleeping companion, who brought the symptoms to my attention by awakening me 3-something a.m. night before last, with a particularly enthusiastic bit of kneading about the nipple (I love you, cat, but that well's been dry since the day it was dug). I found myself experiencing a headache, chills and general malaise.
Okay, I'd been drinking a bit during and after the cable guy exploits of the day before, but not that much. The temperature had dropped enough to make it blanket weather for the first time in weeks. And the malaise part could have had something to do by being awakened so rudely. Was I just hung over?
I popped an Advil, clutched the blanket closer (and over certain sensitive parts), and all seemed well when I awakened for real. For an hour or so, anyway.
It seems, these days, that any bug that gets into me heads straight for my thermostat and knocks it for a loop. I've been doing the toooo-hot/toooo-cold thing all of yesterday and into this very moment. It wasn't at its worst, though, until last night. I'd sought refuge in here, shutting the cats out of this room and reaching a semi-sleepy state on the adjacent sofa. I occasionally heard a vocal protest du chat but did my best to ignore them. Around the same middle-of-the-night time, the symptoms again overcame me and I went off for more meds. Now knowing me to be wide awake, Michelle increased her meowing in amplitude and frequency to unbearable levels.
Against my better judgment, I let her in. I was at the toooo-hot end of my fever spectrum at that hour and the presence of a hot, kneading cat was not what I needed. So I repaired to the other sofa in the house, this one in the somewhat cooler living room, where she's not used to me being asleep. After a few moments of struggle, we reached an acceptable peace. Me, finally approaching slumber, her on the back cushion of the sofa near my head.
The very spot from which she chose to hock a hairball.
By now, it was becoming absurdly funny, and after a shower, change of bedsheet and some serious threatening of my bedside companion, I made it through the rest of the night. It's better this morning but I'm still not all the way back. Not sure where this came from, but my best bet is from one of the 200-odd other parents at my daughter's high school orientation, them all being fresh from their season-ending summer vacations to other exotic spots, and all exhaling their bugs into the cramped, stuffy auditorium air while we listened to the exact same speeches we heard at the pre-orientation meeting back in March.
----
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Emily reported during her evening feeding of the cats that "this doesn't look good."
It's our cellar you're talking about, Em; you need to be more specific about "this doesn't look good." So I descended to see water pouring into the laundry tub. Not from the washer hose, but from the ceiling above. And just as one man's ceiling is another man's floor, the ceiling in this case also doubled as the floor right below my most recent
I will play with putty again later today and see how that goes. Most likely this job will wind up being handed back to the professionals before I manage to screw it up even more.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-02 03:44 pm (UTC)