 I'm sick today and I don't want today's post to be about being sick but it'll probably end up being that anyway so why fight it. I don't get sick a lot, and when I do, I tend to jump on it with lots of vitamins, sleep, and enough fluids that I slosh when I walk. My illnesses don't usually survive long after that. And that's what I did Sunday, after Saturday afternoon & evening saw my head slowly turning into a snot factory. I sat in bed Sunday, fooled around on the laptop a bit, and whined online until a friend delivered some DayQuil and my favorite tea that I had run out of. I also went through about half a box of tissues. I buy maybe 2 or 3 boxes of tissues a year, and about 95% of them get used in one of two separate 24-hour stretches, months apart. That regular routine worked out pretty well; I woke up Monday feeling like the worst of it was over, and, with a few swigs of DayQuil, I got a lot done. Not quite everything, but a lot. I expected Tuesday to go at least as well, if not better. But Tuesday did not go as well. Tuesday had gone to germ land for reinforcements. It returned to attack with a major brain fog & fatigue. I ended up canceling meeting with a friend/client and sleeping most of the afternoon. When evening rolled by I still wasn't even on the ball enough to watch TV. Today was slightly better, but I'm fading fast. It's aggravating, because the actual cold symptoms are minimal or gone. So meds either won't help or aren't helping. On the positive side, the cats LOVE the extra bedtime. I'm much more fun to them when I'm not moving around and trying to get things done. Also, I get to see what sort of oddball results come up in my free stock image search for "sick." Yeah, that looks like raw chicken & a glass of, I don't know, a dirty martini? And they're cutting the chicken with a butter knife? The title of the image is "healthy food." I think not. But what to do I know? I'm sick. 
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 No, that's not sarcasm. I have three cats who like to sleep on my bed and some very conducive blankets. Over the winter, I get a light show just about every night before I fall asleep – at least while the weather is cold and the heat is on. My cats love heavy scritches. Whether it's what they really love or what they've learned to tolerate from me since they were kittens, who knows? But I can run my hands back & forth – with and "against the grain" of fur – on any of them. When I do this over the shedding months, it generates terrifying clouds of fur. But when I do this over the winter, they sparkle with kitty-cat lightning! This has been a thing for years, but recently, I've noticed even more – probably due to more fleece in the assembly of covers on the bed. Clusters of sparks have followed the cats as they've rolled over or walked around. Last night, Rudie went crazy as I spent several minutes generating sparks with my hands across his favorite blanket. Rosie was quite intrigued, too. The laser pointer wins only by way of controllability.  I might try to catch it on video before the winter moves on, because I'd love to share it here, But with the light level so low, I'm not optimistic. If I achieve any level of success, you'll be the first to know! 
 I mean, look at that llama. That little llama is nervous. You *know* something's just not right. Don’t worry, little llamas. I see your plight. I'm looking out for you.   Yesterday's planned topic will have to wait until next week, for several reasons: • This painting commission took up most of the day again, • We got the galleys for the anthology and I have to review my portion of it. • I got these awesome pictures of The Smudge eating this morning. JUST LOOK AT THEM!! When she's on her appetite stimulant, she eats like Cookie Monster, with bits of food flying everywhere. This wasn't quite so dramatic, but she was really getting into it. She doesn't have many teeth left, and all her fangs are gone. So, I just looked up from a painting marathon to realize it was 12:30AM. 12:40, now. I had a subject all picked out for this, and even hashed in a few paragraphs. I figured there's no way I would not be able to flesh it out a little and post it.
BUT THIS GOSHDARN PAINTING JUST WON'T FINISH. And I've been listening to some good stories by Connie Willis. (http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/The-Best-of-Connie-Willis-Audiobook/B00FK6V93Q) So, tomorrow, well it's tomorrow, so I'll say Friday, I'll post the thing I had mentally prepared for today. And maybe I'll get to a bonus post about the hazards of listening to audiobooks while painting when I can't break up the sections with songs so I can keep track of time. Right now I'm going to bed. O_O Or "OH HEY, LOOK A BONUS POST IN THE HOPES YOU FORGET OR FORGIVE MY SLIP UP YESTERDAY!" Since I skipped yesterday you get a BONUS POST today, which is really just me trying to spend 45 minutes before I have to leave for a thing. Because the thing I did between my last post and this one was mildly adventurous and not without mildly interesting details. The hardest part about shoveling today was getting out of the house. Yep. I could not get out of most of the doorways. The wind had done a fascinating job sculpting the snow into high drifts with intermittent, almost-bare patches. It left sizable piles in front of the two most-used doors, which includes the front door and the basement door (that leads directly to the driveway). The screen / storm doors on those both open out, as these things usually do. Between the piles of snow and thick icy crust on top of them, I could not get the leverage to force them open enough for me to get out. I probably could have done it, but I did want to conserve energy for the primary shoveling challenges. Luckily this is a wonderfully oddball house, and it left me with various side doors and porch doors to try. And really, out of the remaining four, three of them were quite openable. I just had to pick one, after considering the best route around the house and down to the driveway. Which had the least or lowest drifts to traverse? The best route was out the back porch, and most of the walk beyond that wasn't too bad. But once I got to the front of the house, I had to get to the road to avoid going through ALL the largest drifts. I made it to the road without losing a boot! I feel this needs some celebration. Just a few feet from the road, one foot sank solidly past my knee into the snow, which triggered a flashback. Not some uncontrollable flip-out due to past trauma mind you, just a very important memory that came to mind. Something very similar happened to me when I was ±7 or 8, playing in the snow after a blizzard. In that case, when I went to pull my foot out, both my boot AND my sock came off, stuck solidly in the snow. I was not happy about it. Maybe a little traumatized. Hey, I was 7. Or 8. Either way, his time, with a little fiddling, I made a much more successful extraction. Yay, experience! From there it was just a super short, hard-to-even-call-it-a-walk walk down the road and into the mostly plowed driveway. There’s not much to say about the rest. There’s nothing terribly clever about first digging a path into the car so I could start it and its own heat & defoggers could soften things up for me while I dug out the front tires. There’s nothing terribly clever about my pre-shoveling “ice-chopper” technique that broke up the crunchy top layer before I went into shoveling mode. There’s nothing terribly clever about shoveling small amounts to make sure I didn’t kill my back. Or maybe there is. I dunno. My back is pretty happy about it, and I got some solid writing done afterwards. Win-win-win.  |
ANGI SHEARSTONEauthor / artist rambles on about painting, writing, cats, punk rock, vampires, ska-core, mTBI, comics, and life in general. 
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