Went to bed. But realized my stomach was a little oogy, too. Also, pulled all the covers over me (I keep a quilt on the bed in the summer but fold it down to the foot of the bed at night. I also keep a flannel "sheet-blanket" on top of the regular top sheet, but usually fold that down too. Last night, I had BOTH of those and one of my little fleece blankets)
Woke up in the wee smalls (I think it was shortly after 2) in a flop sweat and with my heart pounding. Part of it was an unpleasant dream that I mercifully don't remember now, but part of it was that I tipped over from the "too cold" to the "too hot" part of whatever this is. So I got up (had to use the bathroom anyway) and popped the AC colder, and went back to bed and slept some more.
I felt....better-ish....when I woke again a little before five, so I got up and did a workout (45 minutes on the cross-country ski exerciser, and in retrospect, maybe I shouldn't). Ate my usual breakfast. Went over to work.
And yeah, mid morning I started feeling....not good. Stomach cramps/nausea again, and muscle aches. And cold again.
So, I don't know. Did I pick up some dumb little virus? Did I eat something that had gone off (those cherries I had at lunch yesterday might have been just old enough to have a bit of bacteria going on in them). Could be a dumb little virus even though I am seeing literally no people on a regular basis (I suppose it's possible I picked it up at church). Especially since I felt cold and achy - that's classic viral stuff, not so much with bacterial (though then again: I get the muscle aches with food intolerances; inflammation, I presume).
At one point I actually wondered if I needed to run down the hall to the ladies' loo and hurl, or, failing that, run into my much-closer research lab and hurl in the sink (and then try to clean it up myself, and apologize profusely to our nice custodian, who really shouldn't have to deal with that). And I NEVER hurl. NEVER. I think the last time was six or seven years ago when I had a killer migraine, and that was more bile than anything...
So anyway. I figured for that reason (and, um, other potential lower-GI reasons) I was better off at home....so home I went. (No question of "does this merit a sick day" since I'm not technically being paid right now - it just means I don't get the soil sorted quite as fast, or the powerpoints for Policy and Law updated today).
I wasn't hungry at all at noon but was shaky so I figured I needed SOMETHING. I ate one of the "healthy breakfast bar" things (You know: whole wheat pastry and some kind of fruit filling. I think it's Nature's Way brand? From the natural-foods store). Anyway, I decided to eat that and see.
Right now I'm fine, and feel considerably less like I'm likely to hurl, so maybe I find something else to eat too. (I have applesauce, I could eat that. And maybe make a cup of tea - just plain tea, no sugar or milk, in deference to my stomach this time. Or maybe I make the mint herbal tea I have; mint is supposed to be good for stomach). Anyway. Maybe I take an afternoon off, do my piano practice, wash my hair. And do more knitting:
It's hard to figure it out from that photo, but that's the start of "Hey Girl" (a sort-of-tailored cardigan with a subtle textured-stitch pattern). It's knit from the top down; that's the beginning of the yoke. The separate unattached part is the back collar; I guess it gets attached to where you cast on for the yoke at the very end.
You can also see (though they're small and not well focused) the lovely little "Fluttershy" themed stitch markers (and ONE "Applejack" themed, and I picked the tree of those, because of a joke other MLP:FiM fans might get). They came from String Theory Colorworks...
I also am still working on the big blanket out of the fluffy yarn, I'm a bit more than half done at this point:
Photo is a little dark (no flash) but it shows the cables better than with flash does.
I also wore my newest "Sanrio Loot Crate" shirt today, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Mission blast-off*
(*Weird to think: I was alive when all that happened but I was so young I wouldn't remember it. If my parents even had a tv then - I know for a while they didn't)
In the same loot-crate there was a small duffel bag (black, with the same design on it) and coincidentally, yesterday, a call went out from the campus nurse (who is involved with various Good Works, both on campus and in the community) that they are collecting new or lightly used small suitcases and duffels....for kids going into foster care. (A perennial thing here, in a lot of cases the kids are being pulled out of pretty sad situations). I feel moved to donate it - for one thing, it's a size that's inconvenient for me - a little too small for me to use as an overnight bag, and for a knitting bag, I prefer an open tote. And I remember years ago, our AAUW group did something similar, after we heard about how many foster kids were either given brown paper grocery sacks or trash bags to carry their clothes in, and that feels like an insult on top of a disruption....so yeah, if it makes some little kid's day a little better to have a bag with Hello Kitty on the Moon on it to carry their clothes in....that's good.
I need to get back more to the sense of "I may not be able to do big things, but I can do little things that help." Someone the other day was talking about the concept of Mitzvot (singular: Mitzvah) which originally had a specific religious meaning, but which I also tend to think of as "small good things you do just because." Because you love God and want to love other people. Or because you recognize you've been blessed and you want to spread those around.
I should look at the lists of other things they were doing "drives" for - I think school supplies was one - and maybe get a few more things to take in with the bag, so I'm not just walking over there with one thing.
But right now I'm sitting at home. The breakfast bar "sat" okay, and I drank a little thing of apple juice (maybe not the smartest, now I think of it: sometimes some of the sugars in apples are a little hard for the body to break down, especially on an upset stomach) but now I have a cup of this:
And yes, Hobbit tea! I could imagine Hobbits drinking mint tea, especially since it's supposed to be good if you've eaten a bit much and are dyspeptic....
And I was thinking this morning - maybe one of the reasons I like The Hobbit and have always liked it is that Bilbo is a character who never feels quite equal to what he's doing - I mean, he's recruited as a "burglar" and that very description outrages him a bit, and he's never gone on adventures, and he has no magic other than the very everyday sort that allows one to walk quietly and hide well so larger creatures you can't see.....and seemingly everything he goes in to do, he feels not-equal to it and like he's going to fail....but he does it anyway, and more often than not, succeeds. (And at any rate: succeeds enough to return home in one piece). And.....that's kind of me. Lots of things I've done in my life, even going back to the very first fall, 20 years ago now, I started teaching here. (And I still remember - sitting in a terrible old Kettle franchise (long since closed) as my parents were preparing to go back to Illinois after moving me here - and really, it was VERY close to exactly 20 years ago now, because it was mid-July - and I was sitting there crying, partly because I was being left somewhere very hot and very buggy (it was one of the cricket-outbreak summers) and my parents were going to be 700 miles away, and I'd be left to my own devices, and this town, oh my gosh, 20 years ago this town was SO small, so much smaller than now, and Sherman seemed impossibly far away. And I was also crying because I was scared - scared I'd fail, scared I'd not be able to do it, scared all my students would hate me - and then a man, he was an older man, came up to the table and asked what was wrong, and if he could help, and I somehow managed to choke out that I was taking my first ever teaching job, and I was scared, so on and so forth, and he looked at me and said "You'll do fine. You'll be fine.
And you know? I know, I know as a scientist I am not supposed to believe in literal angels and angelic visitations but when I think about that I honestly wonder. I don't remember ever seeing the man again, he didn't introduce himself like "I'm a professor there myself" or anything like that. So I do wonder. And yes, I guess I did do fine, and I am (pretty much) fine. But I didn't know that then.)
A little later I might try some cheese or something....I don't have a lot of "easy grab" (without cooking) foods on hand. I've got some chicken I must cook up but I think the sell by date on that is Thursday so I can do it tomorrow if I'm not up to cooking it tonight.
But yeah, this is helping the stomach. Maybe it was something I ate....or maybe it was a little short-lived virus.
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