Category Archives: Sick

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Possible Side Effects

Well, in what I can only best describe as “a complete and utter relief” I took my final Amoxicillin dose this morning. I’m glad not only because (knock on wood) the infection seems to be entirely gone, but perhaps more importantly because the drug was also having some not-so-great side effects. The worst was an ever-so-slightly increasing level of nausea; the past two or three days have been almost unbearable at times, to be honest. (Before anyone asks, yes, I took it with food as instructed.) The worst would be that I’d actually start feeling better just around the time that I was supposed to take the next dosage, and the cycle would start up all over again. Never before have I been so happy to see a needed medicine container get thrown into the bathroom trash can. (I did get a laugh when I looked up what the possible side effects were, and oh look, I’d been going through half of them.)

On the bright side, last night I did finally get to head back to my beloved spinning class (my last one was on October 29th); in terms of exercise I still feel like I am slowly getting back up to speed, but it is definitely happening. I also signed up for the Arlington Turkey Trot, although I joked to Katie and Blair last night that they might have to pick my corpse up on the side of the course after it’s over. A slight exaggeration, certainly. I suspect there won’t be a new personal record involved but it will feel good to at least do some sort of race this fall. (And also to use as a benchmark for how I am doing.)

Catching a Football Fish!I also got to give the new Animal Crossing: City Folk a whirl last night. It’s been ages since I played the previous incarnation on my DS, but I’m already loving the Wii version, if only because the tv screen is much easier to see things on than the little DS screen. (Catching insects with the net, for instance? A hundred times easier.) There’s something just so fun and relaxing about moving my little character “Gabriel” around his town as he hunts for fossils, goes fishing, harvests the fruit trees, sends little letters and presents to his neighbors, or just looks at the stars. Yay! (On the downside, Charlie is about to become an Animal Crossing widow.) I haven’t given the new “city” options a whirl yet, but hopefully this weekend.

(One amusing thing is that you can bring your DS character over into the Wii version. You don’t get your money or items, but you do get the same “catalog”—which is helpful—as well as appearance. I had forgotten that in a fit of boredom my old character now had pink hair with a gay Tintin flip in the front. I am continually cracking myself up as a direct result.)

Darn it, now I have the Animal Crossing music stuck in my head.

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Getting There?

Today was the first morning in which there was almost no hacking/coughing at all. Could I actually be on the mend? I sure do hope so, that would be nice. I might go to the gym tomorrow morning for a little bit and see what happens. But we’ll see.

Last night, having officially given up hope of it ever being reprinted, I broke down and bought a used copy of Sheri S. Tepper’s The End of the Game, an old Science Fiction Book Club omnibus of three of her novels (Jinian Footseer, Dervish Daughter, and Jinian Star-Eye). I absolutely adored Tepper’s True Game books when I was growing up, of which there were nine in all. The initial three (King’s Blood Four, Necromancer Nine, and Wizard’s Eleven) were published by Ace and reprinted ages ago in a big The True Game omnibus. The books were all marketed as YA novels, but there’s an increasing complexity with each new installment. I often joke about re-reading King’s Blood Four years later and nearly falling over in shock at having completely missed as a teenager what was clearly a post-sex/afterglow scene very early on, but there’s more to the books’ adult nature than just that.

Anyway, the other six books (three Mavin Manyshaped books which were a prequel, and then the three Jinian books) were published by Tor, who let them all go out of print years ago and have shown no signs of bringing them back into print. I regularly see individual copies of Jinian Star-Eye going for $60, $80, $100 a pop. And of course, I somehow lost my old copy of The End of the Game about 15 years ago and have given up hope of it ever, impossibly re-appearing. So when I saw copies of the omnibus going for less than $20, well, I bit.

I absolutely cannot wait to re-read these books. The imagery in them has stuck with me for years, from the living pathways that once webbed across the land, to the twin bells that create light and darkness when they ring, to the planet’s desperate dreams of warning appearing in jewels that you allow to dissolve on your tongue. Hopefully some day I’ll find a reasonable price for the Mavin books (which I read from the library as a child but have never owned), or against all odds they’ll be reprinted. But until then, I will treasure my hopefully-arriving-quickly copy of The End of the Game. I’ve read and enjoyed other books by Tepper since then, but she never hit the sheer wonder that these always evoked in me. Hopefully someday I can create something that does similar things to other readers.

Do you have books like that in your past? Ones you haven’t read for decades but which will always stick with you?

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The Wonderful World of Sick

Since my last post, I can sum up what I’ve been doing since then in one word, really: sick.

I actually started getting sick on November 2nd; I figured it was just a chest cold with some sinus congestion. But (without getting too graphic here) there has been enough continuing sick going on every morning that I’m heading to the doctor’s office this afternoon; it’s now day 9 and I am getting increasingly worried. If it turns out to be bronchitis, for instance, there is a good chance that I will have to scratch my marathon that is 13 days away. For now I’m playing this by ear.

Other than that, not much. (Being sick has helped that.) Cancelled a lot of plans over the weekend and just stayed in. Missed all of the big celebrations downtown last Tuesday night (as well as a friend from a mailing list who was in DC as the culmination of a report he was writing for the Guardian in the UK), had a really low-key birthday dinner for Charlie on Wednesday (I had no idea the California Pizza Kitchen in Pentagon City was such a gay couple hang-out, incidentally), and generally… not much else going on.

On the bright side, with the exception of last night’s tv (Amazing Race, True Blood, Entourage) I am completely caught up on my tv viewing, so that’s nice. The one upside to not being terribly active, I suppose. Hopefully in the next day or two breathing will return to normal and I can start getting some exercise again, and on Thursday we’ll still get to see the Washington Shakespeare Company’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well. Ironically I never did study this play in college because when those days hit… I was sick! Ha! So I’m looking forward to seeing this infamous “problem play” for the first time. Fingers crossed.

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Almost Back Up to Speed

Well, happily, it seemed that a second good night’s sleep was what I needed more than anything else. I went to bed really early last night, and today I had enough energy for an abbreviated version of my normal Monday gym visit. (30 min on rowing machine, and 15 min on the elliptical (instead of 30).) So far, so good.

As an added bonus, NPR’s All Things Considered is offering up one of Liz Phair’s recent concerts (where she plays all of Exile in Guyville) on their website so I’ve been listening to that for the last hour or so. She’s on the final song of her encore (“Polyester Bride”) and it’s making me appreciate her that much more.

Per usual, now that I am a little more lucid/rational I am kicking myself for having barely talked to so many different people at SPX—it’s amazing how quickly two days can whip by. (And no, I am not pushing for a three-day show so that I can chat with everyone a lot more.) And there’s always at least one or two artists whom I manage to miss entirely. How does that happen? This time Kate Beaton and Paul Hornschemeier somehow fell to the wayside. Darn it.

And of course, I have a wealth of new books. Well, not that many. Normally I just buy mini-comics, and occasionally other things pressed into my hands. I mostly stuck with that, although I did make an exception and bought a bonanza of books from Fanfare/Ponent Mon, because Diamond (the main distributor to comic book stores) seems to forever be out of stock of their catalog. Amusingly almost everything I bought was by (or co-authored by) Jiro Taniguchi: The Quest for the Missing Girl, all three volumes of The Times of Botchan (can’t get enough of that Meija Era Japan, it seems), and a replacement copy of The Walking Man. (Plus Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary, the non-fiction account of Azuma’s two sojourns as a homeless person, plus a trip to rehab.) Plus, a birthday present and a Christmas present were procured, so it’s nice to check those off the list now.

Now if I could just finish getting rid of the excess junk that has built up in my home over the last month, I’d be set. If nothing else I finally need to mail Dave those promised statues, which will not only get those out of the house but also the packing peanuts that I’ve been saving for that very thing. Little by little…

Best of all, Charlie is now home from the Portland Marathon, where he rocked out a new personal record: 3:58:57. Wow. How fantastic is that? I’m so proud of him.

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A New Look for Me

Steampunk Greg

…well, perhaps not.

Anyway, SPX was a lot of fun. It was also extremely exhausting, to put it mildly. And sure enough, all day I’ve felt like I’ve been run over by a mack truck, and my throat is raspy and all yucky. (And that’s with having skipped the gym this morning and sleeping in two more hours.) Hopefully tomorrow will bring back more strength.

And I have promised (promised!) people that soon I will start back up Wine-Book Wednesdays. Honest. But yeah, it was a good time even if it involved running myself ragged. This was also the first time since 2003 (the last year I was Executive Director) that I stayed at the hotel during SPX. It felt a little odd to do so after all this time. But somehow right. So there we go.

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Enough of the Bleah, Already

It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that my holiday weekend consisted mostly of bleah. But I’d say about 50% of it is not an unfair estimate.

With 20/20 hindsight, running my 20-miler on Saturday was perhaps not the smartest of moves, but it was also the last long run I’d be able to do with the running program, thanks to prior commitments for the remaining scheduled long runs. It may sound silly, but even if I’m not running with anyone else directly, there is a certain comfort level in knowing that there are both other runners that you know out on the trail at the same time.

There were some nice parts to the weekend; seeing Frozen River (very good if also depressing), going to a nice housewarming party in the SW Waterfront, that sort of thing. But I’m still feeling a little run down and tired. It certainly didn’t help matters that on both Saturday and Sunday nights, I think I woke up about every 30 to 45 minutes. And last night I couldn’t fall asleep for several hours; a little after 1am I finally gave up on the idea of running this morning and reset the alarm for some more sleep (whenever it finally came). Now today I’ve got a bit of a scratchy throat. If this is some sort of summer cold, I must say I’m really unimpressed. Just go nuclear or die off, but this strange sort of half-life, Schroedinger’s Virus thing is getting a bit old.

Of course, this sort of thing always happens at the worst possible time. In the month of September, off the top of my head, there’s two family-related trips, a wedding, a 50th birthday celebration, two dinner parties, a play, and no doubt a lot more that I’d have to look at my calendar to determine. And while they’re all good things (don’t get me wrong, I’ll take this over a month of isolation or loneliness) I cannot help but think that there must be some sort of happy medium available out there. Argh.

I feel like in balance, aside from the first weekend of October (when SPX rolls around) I should deliberately not book anything for that month. If nothing else, I need a weekend in which I can finally really roll up my sleeves and get rid of a lot of stuff. (It seems to be in the air lately, which is fine by me.) Lately I’ve started really feeling like there are too many things in my home that haven’t been touched in so long that perhaps I can bid them adieu…

(Oh, stop laughing. It could happen.)

Until then, step one in my master scheme will be to shake this… whatever it is I’ve got. Enough is enough!

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Counteracting the Bleah

I don’t know what happened, but starting about an hour after spinning class last night I have felt like, well, bleah. Tired, stomach a tiny bit upset (but not incredibly), just sort of sagging into the chair or couch cushions. Hmph.

And outside, it seems like nature is of the same mind. Summer seems to have officially fled the region about a month early; we all had our suspicions but this gray, cold, rainy day is definitely under the auspices of autumn and not summer. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. (I like the idea of not having long runs in the baking heat, but there is something to be said for the slightly warmer weather.)

As I have a long run scheduled for Saturday morning, I think I am heading home to lie down and see if I can bounce back. (Book club for tonight, at this point, is also up in the air.) But I am going to look at pretty pictures and think of bright, cheery things. That works just as well as anything else, right?

Painter's Cup