Hat on Top, Coat Below
« previous archives home notify list e-mail next »
Lost Weekend
December 30, 2002
So yes, I did just disappear for a couple of days there. I wish I could now share tales of the big fun I had while I was offline, but there was no excitement. Neither was there major emotional drama that I might be tempted to hint at even if I couldn’t tell the whole story. What there was: sleep, coughing, headaches, over the counter medication in many forms and combinations, naps, body aches, nose blowing, snoozing on the couch, more coughing, and laundry. It’s a sad, sad weekend when the best I can come up with for an accomplishment is laundry, but that’s what we’re looking at here. These Florida germs are tough and laid me lower than I’ve been in a long time.
I knew I was in trouble Saturday morning, when I got up after sleeping something close to eleven hours and found that washing my face and getting dressed made me so tired I had to lie down and take a nap for an hour and a half. Sure, the eleven hours of sleep were interrupted by coughing fits and several trips to the bathroom, but still, I’d have thought they would have been enough to carry me at least through breakfast. I think I finally ended up eating my cereal around 12:30 in the afternoon. I spent most of the rest of the day on the couch, snuggled up under a quilt and trying to talk myself into putting another load of clothes in the washer or taking the last load of clothes out of the dryer. I thought about getting online and just ordering new clothes to be sent overnight so I wouldn’t have to wash the old ones, but getting online would mean sitting up for more than a few minutes in a row plus having to read and focus at the same time. No way that was going to happen. Around 7:30, I called it a day and crawled into bed, hoping that a nice long sleep would miraculously make me well enough to leave the house on Sunday and go see the football game we’ve had tickets for since the day they went on sale.
I felt well enough the next morning to take a shower, so I was hopeful that with the right combination of drugs and breakfast foods I’d be able to perk up enough to go out, but it was not be. When Mr. Karen left to meet our friends to drive to the game, I was back in bed, snoozing yet again. I was frustrated that I wouldn’t be able to spend the day with my husband as we’d planned, and disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to see Ford Field in its inaugural season, and sorry that I hadn’t been more realistic and decided not to go earlier so he could find someone else to use my ticket. Again I spent the day lounging on the couch and slowly turning the piles of dirty laundry into piles of clean laundry. I did make an attempt to put some of the clothes away, but the mental effort required to match just a few pairs of socks and put them and some underwear into a drawer sent me back to bed for a nap. Fortunately, I had left a Karen-sized space free when I’d dumped the laundry basket onto the bed and sorted the contents into piles of like items in preparation for all the putting away I was going to be doing.
I was actually awake when Mr. Karen returned from the game with a souvenir cup for me and the good news that one of the other guys had been able to use my ticket for his son. The cup is really snazzy—the only one I’ve ever seen with scenes that change as you move the cup around, so of course it was immediately dubbed The Cup of Fascination. Oooh look, now the lion is getting bigger, and now it’s getting smaller, and hey, the logo is disappearing and reappearing. Mr. Karen reports that the facility itself is pretty snazzy, too, with lots of natural light and things to eat besides hot dogs and plenty of bathrooms (though since the football crowds tend to skew male, I never had a problem with long lines for the women’s room at the old stadium so this particular improvement didn’t make me swoon). Next time the Vikings come to town, I’ll have to check it out for myself.
This morning I was feeling a little better, well enough to come to work and do the one year-end task I absolutely, positively had to get done. It’s done now, and I’m feeling worse and worse as the hours pass, so if eating lunch doesn’t liven me up I’m going home to rest some more. Fortunately my biggest customer is on vacation this week, and all the people I was covering for last week are back, so I can take the time off without feeling I’m letting the team down.
