Overnight I developed a horrid cough. Mostly due to the fact that there is no ceiling in our house and right above my side of the bed there is a huge swath of insulation missing, needing to be replaced, of course, before the ceiling goes up. The fact that it has been like 25 degrees (F) at night means our house is cold, even though we have the heat on. My husband has been putting this project completion (note the word completion, not the project) off since May when he tore the ceiling down all the way and replaced most of the insulation. There are three small places that still need a row of insulation... and he just hasn't done it yet.
So all night last night I cozied up under the blankets with the big old dog (Kinger, not Doug. He fell asleep watching Monday Night Fußball) and breathed the icy cold air of New England's late fall. Aaaaah, or should I say, Aaagh-coff-hack.
So my throat is sore, the cough is painful. Just in time for the weekend upcoming and my 35th birthday, damnitalltofrigginhell. When I get home tonight, I'm gonna drink some straight whiskey (ha. yeah. sure...) and sleep in Geoff's room with him tonight, the one room in the back part of the house with full ceiling.
And don't you just love these freaking graphics!? I adopted them from James Lileks' website. I did a websearch on google for pictures of "coughing" and got a hundred pages of the band Soul Coughing. Uh, no. I was looking for a picture of someone hacking up a lung, but these two doozies were mixed in and it made me die laughing.
I hadn't been to the Lileks site in a little while, mostly distracted with a crazy little thing called work. But I will add it to my list of daily check sites along with my mainstays of Shelleyness, Leaving Berlin, Watch What Happens, Running with Scissors, and Massless.
Lileks is a site that I highly recommend for fun and frivolity, not just a good web journal. Root directory for all the fun is here.
Yesterday I made the comment that after my birthday everything is anticlimactic. Not true in the least. Thanksgiving is gonna be a blast, Christmas will be fun with family and friends, and we'll see what the new year holds.
It is funny, but my life isn't a series of ups and downs. It's been a consistent long stretch of rather comfortable cool times. Aside from the catastrophe of September 11, which really did knock me for a loop, the personal, selfish little part of my worldly existence has been rather happily uneventful. The last major event was when Doug's grandfather passed away. That was major, and before that was the Geoff incident (his birth). I like the even keel with the occasional hiccough and not the raging highs and lows that some of my compadres in life seem to live through.
The vet called me a little while ago to let me know Kinger was doing all right and that he had arthritis. She put him on a medication to ease the pain and help the joints, she said she'd show Doug the X-rays when he came to pick up the pup. She was surprised to see him having this condition, seeing how he is so active, and has some bloodwork out to see if it is Lyme Disease induced arthritis, in which case she'll change his medication.
In a way I'm totally relieved. We thought his doggie elbow was broken, in which case I have no idea how we were to cast him and keep him from ripping the thing to shreds. And hopefully he'll do well with the meds and not be in pain.
I am also relieved that it isn't cancer. My buddy Dan (weddingman) has his doggie Buddy who had cancer last year and they paid a lot of money to get it treated. A lot. A freaking lot. There's no such thing as HMO for K9s, so it turns out to be an expensive proposition with no full promise that it won't rear its ugly head in a year or so. I honestly don't know what I'd do if he had cancer... I doubt we would pay for the treatment simply because it would be financially impossible. And I just don't want to think about putting another dog down in this year. Ugh. So I breathe a heavy and thankful sigh that I don't even need to consider that at this time as an option in my life and I can go home and hang with the doofus himself, and give him his meds, and relax.
She (the vet) wanted to know how old he was... we think he's about 4.5 yrs. Not entirely sure. He was a stray, and the dental work they did on him when the dog officer found him pointed to the fact that at the time he was probably 11 months. Who knows... they could have been off. So hopefully he'll be around for quite some time yet.
This is a short entry, I'm gonna head home in a minute here. I did want to mention that our office complex' Christmas tree was delivered today. They claim every year to have the biggest tree on display in North America... bigger even than what my co-worker L refered to as "The Today Show Tree" which almost caused me to pass out laughing "Uh, I think it's the Rockefeller Center Tree!" too funny.
So we (L and I) watched them remove it from the truck and place it in the ground. It was an amazing feat, and I took a bunch of digicam pictures of it and will post them later.
I have a new and very challenging project to work on... so I will dive into that head first tomorrow. After I take care of cropping down Christmas Tree Erection (bwa ha!) pictures.
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