Friday, October 24, 2008

The Cousins Day that Wasn't

I was feeling really good--and relieved--when I woke up this morning. I felt better than I had in two days. The Sudafed had worked and I had made it through the worst of my cold. I had even slept all night without having to get up in the middle of the night.

Best of all, there was no sign of a cough. The cough must have been due to the scratchy throat. I was good to go to Cousins' Day!

I got breakfast ready for the dogs and showed Walt how to fix Nicki's breakfast. He was planning to go to work today, so he went upstairs to get ready to leave.

The phone rang.

It was Peach.

Apparently Kathy had an intestinal bug and wasn't going to be able to make it. Peach said her husband could drive her to my house if we wanted to go ahead without Kathy, but we both agreed that it wouldn't be the same with only the two of us, so we decided to wait until Kathy was feeling better. (Of course, it wasn't until after we had made that decision that I realized I couldn't drive to my mother's anyway!)

So I had the day at home after all. Best of all, I had turned in my transcription project the day before so it was kind of a quiet day. Got all those towels washed, played with the puppy, caught up on Mad Men.

Nicki, who either is more normal now, or I'm just getting used to her, had been racing around the house like a mad woman. She loves carrying metal bowls, or anything else she can find, racing top speed from back yard to the living room and back again.

But around 3 p.m., I realized I hadn't seen her in a couple of hours. She wasn't in any of her usual sleeping places...and she doesn't respond when you call her. I tried looking for her outside, since she really does like being outside. But of course the world turned into one cloudy blob when I went into the sun. If she happened to be lying in a shadow, I wouldn't have been able to see her. And I didn't.

I checked everywhere in the house and tried calling her, but no luck.

About then Walt came home and I sent him outside to look for her. He was still hunting when she came trotting into the kitchen, happy as can be. I picked her up and her fur was warm, which tells me she had, indeed, been sleeping outside -- but beats me where.

I had on the afternoon MSNBC talking heads and decided that I could not stand one more minute of Chris Matthews or anybody who had anything negative to say about the race to the White House. I had just reached saturation for the day. A mention of Bill Ayers might send me over the edge. It was bad enough that someone from McCain's team made a snide comment about Obama taking time off to "go visit Grandma." Ranks right up there with air quotes around "health of the mother."

Don't get me started.

I got the dogs fed their dinner and got dinner started for us two-legged people and sat down to watch Survivor: Gabon.

That's when I realized that I had been coughing for awhile, but hadn't paid attention.

By the time dinner was ready, I wasn't really hungry. I ate some, gave some to Lizzie, and plopped myself down into the recliner and realized that there was a baby cough which was embedding itself deeper and deeper into my lungs. As I sit here, it is rapidly growing into an adolescent cough.

I was glad that Kathy's illness had prevented Cousins Day from happening because the very last thing I wanted to do was to spread this thing around. I'm going to go back to the recliner again now, folks. I have some more coughing to do.

No comments: