fox

99.2.  (Which is higher for me than it is for some, remember.)  800 mg of ibuprofen, some chicken soup, and a Nyquil plus decongestant, which I can already feel kicking in.  Soon, bed.  Yay.

This week sucks. Trying to schedule a meeting when people are going to other meetings by the same name and so they tell you the meeting is already scheduled when you're pretty sure it's not but they outrank you by like seventeen pay grades so you can't correct them and odds are they're right anyway but it turns out YOU WERE RIGHT IN THE FIRST PLACE sucks. Dealing with data you didn't collect yourself sucks. Preparing IRB forms and sending them along with the researcher and then someone else also sending along the superseded form and the researcher inadvertently using BOTH of them sucks.

Also, allergies suck, doctors' offices who don't call you back about the referral to the allergist suck, and -- just for good measure -- the same things that have sucked all this time, suck. (I don't know who that woman was -- that is, I don't know her name, but I know enough who she was to hate her. Which is as unfair as it's ever been.)

Time to move to Australia.

So I've been trying to get my prescription filled all week.  Never had time, and then on Friday I went to the Target by my work and the pharmacy had just closed for lunch, and then Sunday I went to the Harris Teeter and they tried to call the insurance to see if what I had was the one variety of that plan that they do accept, but it was Sunday evening, so of course they couldn't get through.  I finally said Look, how much would the medicine cost without the insurance?, and they said $93.  So, um, never mind.

And today I hit another pharmacy that didn't take that insurance.  So, ARGH, and I looked up to see if I could find where I could go with this plan, and it turns out? my medical plan doesn't include prescription drug coverage.  BUT!  I've definitely been paying a prescription plan premium.  It's just with a whole different plan, is all.  For which I don't have the card yet.

So I called when I got home and ordered a card, and the very helpful young man on the phone gave me all the information for the pharmacist, and I went back out and got my eye drops, so HURRAH.  Let the itching begin to end.

Monday -- sick.  Worked from home.  Boss said "In general, you should take sick leave when you are sick," to which I said, in general, sure, but today I knew there was this work that needed doing.
Tuesday -- sick.  Took a sick day.  Told boss if there was anything that really *needed* doing that I could do from here I'd throw it in for free, to which he said "No, no working for free!"
Wednesday -- feeling better.  Today, Wednesday, February 14, 2007, the University of Maryland will be closed due to inclement weather.  I've only double-checked that about six times to be sure I'm reading it right, esp. since the government is only on a delayed start with unscheduled leave.

Let's hear it, for once, for a workplace that doesn't follow the fed.  (In this case, let's hear it, I mean.  If I worked at GW -- opening at 10am, no liberal leave for employees -- I'd be cursing pretty fluently by now.)

Snow is of no use to me if it falls in the middle of the day and gets us sent home early.  For snow to be useful to me, it needs to fall at such a time that the work day is delayed or even called off.

In other news, the cold medicine I'm taking is only good for about four hours at a time.  The label says one or two tablets every twelve hours, not to exceed four in twenty-four hours, but to that I say HA HA HA.  I'll take one at a time, because there's no appreciable difference if I take two -- but when I feel it kick in after about ten minutes, and then after four hours and eleven minutes I feel my whole head suddenly resume its uncomfortable sloshing, damn right I'm going to exceed four tablets in 24 hours.  Feh.

I do feel better than I did last night, though.  So I'm definitely on the downhill side of this thing.  Stupid head colds.

I am more and more afraid that what I'm feeling right now is feverish.

Playing through it.

I am feeling chilly today, and a little achy and tired. Co-worker says "That's the flu" and backs away quickly. I maintain that I have no other flu-like symptoms -- notably absent are fever, headache, cough, and nausea -- and am thus simply cold, tired, achy, and grouchy.

This weather is killing me, man. This morning, I was not feeling great. Coffee and then coffee and then soda and then lunch helped; but an hour ago I was feeling utterly like crap, and thinking about knocking off early. But I soldiered through (slowly; like a soldier carrying three people's gear through a particularly muddy field, I suppose) and now there's only an hour until I'm supposed to go home, and I'll get paid for the whole week. Hurrah.

I got perfume-bombed at rehearsal last night, resulting in a nasty migraine that got worse rather than better as I headed home.  By the time I reached home I was concentrating as hard as I could on the road, which is neither the safest way to drive nor the best way to banish a headache.  It was so bad I couldn't go straight to bed; I had to give the handful of advil and sudafed time to kick in first.  And then I slept like a stone, and woke up with a headache only somewhat less painful than before.

On the bright side, however, the temp folks who didn't call me back yesterday have just called me back and given me the info about where I'm going this afternoon, so I'ma shower and hit the road.  Here's hoping the steam helps me out.  The post on music that I mentioned yesterday is in progress, but I'll have to finish it later.

Yesterday:  coughing a bit.

This morning:  the summer head-and-chest cold.

It's not as bad as it could be, but it definitely explains why I've been feeling sluggish lately, if I've been coming down with something (and not, as I suspected, just congesty from the weather).  Have loaded up on decongestant and expectorant, given myself a lie-in this morning, promised myself I don't have to go to the library today because I've got plenty of reading I can do right here where there's tea, and taken a hot shower.  Soon there will be tea.  Must beat this thing! because this is not a good time for me to have the summer head cold.  Four weeks from now, sure.  Until then, not so much.

Ugh.

well, the breathing was nice while it lasted.  this morning i am stuffed up like a stuffed thing.  fortunately, it'll just be a matter of loosening this crap and getting rid of it, though; i'm not actually feeling that bad.  but, argh.

in curling news, i see that my friends Plainfield Dubberly have defeated the Forces of Evil in the form of Utica Delmonte in the first event semifinal at the kayser*, so that's all right.  :-)  go Dubberly in the final!  and Delmonte drops to the fourth event semifinal playing against Potomac Galebach, which is also okay; it's not that i don't want The Most Annoying Man Alive to win ever, it's just that i can't handle how insufferable he'd be if he won the whole thing.  beating Delmonte is no problem.

*utica delmonte is the team that datlowen, jgesteve, darthrami and i beat in the third event final at our first kayser, when we were rank firsties and nobody, least of all we, could quite believe we were doing that well.  and they were sort of obnoxious.  to be fair, the most obnoxious of them was their second, and the following year they told us hardly anybody at their club would play with him anymore; but their skip was no prize either, i'll tell you what.  at our second kayser, the theme was "college" so there was, like, a cheerleading contest, and the cheer they came up with went "we're utica three, we're utica three, something something something, we sting like a bee" -- they wore yellow and i swear they gave their opponents cortisone cream, ha ha, because they planned to sting so badly -- and we were this close, although we didn't play in the cheerleading contest, to entering with an off-the-cuff cheer:  "we're potomac four; we beat them."  :-D  (we did go on to beat them that year, as well, much more handily than we'd beat them in the final the year before.)  so although curling is a gentleman's game, and you don't cheer your opponent's missed shots or anything, it's really fine with me when Utica Delmonte doesn't succeed.  as for The Most Annoying Man Alive, well, he's the most annoying man alive, and also his technique ranges from not great to actively bad, so it bugs a lot of people that he does as well as he does, because he's doing things wrong.  doing things wrong and being really really smug about it:  not the way to win friends and influence people.  so it's okay with me when he doesn't succeed, as well.  (happily, the couple of times i've skipped against him, i've won.  so it's not a matter of personal rivalry, if you see what i mean.)

the winning cheer, incidentally, went like this:

skip:  gimme a guard!
team:  takeout!
skip:  gimme a guard!
team:  takeout!
skip:  gimme a guard!
team:  takeout!
skip:  gimme a takeout!
team:  long guard!