Sick Day

Look elsewhere if you came here for happy fun thoughts. Or go read Samurai: Heaven and Earth.
Today I finally admitted to myself that I'm sick, and I've been sick since Friday. I have a sore throat, I can barely swallow, my ears hurt, and I feel like crap. I need to take care of myself, or I'm going to get worse. Thing is, I can't. I don't have time.

Ingrid is sick, too, but she's at the end of it. I took Friday off to take care of her. I should have taken off earlier in the week, and I did go in to work for the morning. Saturday we had a party for Ingrid's birthday, which lasted into the wee hours of the night/morning. It was supposed to be a little party, but people were still showing up at 10 pm. I downed the Tylenol, Olba's Cough Syrup, and sprayed Chloraseptic in my mouth every 2 hours, so that I could be a good hostess. So the weekend was full of shopping, cooking, entertaining, cleaning, catching up, laughing, sleeping, trying to swallow, trying to eat, parenting, and spousing. It was a really fun weekend, just a bad time to be sick. It was so fun and joyful I forgot I was sick.

I used to be better about stopping and nursing myself. I'm not sure what happened, other than I got married and had kids. Mama is not supposed to get sick. Bad things happen--or nothing at all happens, which can be bad--when mama gets sick. This doesn't necessarily make me feel important or needed either. It just makes me want to lock the bedroom door with a pot of tea, a box of tissues, and all the drugs I need to make me comfortable, and say "screw you all, consider me temporarily dead." Unfortunately, the papa doesn't lactate, and we don't have a lock on our door. Most of the time I'm a grump when I'm sick, unless I'm pretending not to be sick.

I also realized this weekend that I really suck at baking cakes. I had another baking disaster, and again, this one was delicious, just wrong. I baked what was supposed to be a 3 layer Creole Fudge Cake, but I baked it in a bundt pan, because I didn't have the right pans, and didn't want to spend $18 to get them. It took so long to cook I didn't have time to glaze it, and there was so much batter--since it was supposed to be divided between 3 8" pans, that there's a nice crispy clump of cake at the bottom of my oven. Ingrid didn't notice, and it tasted great. Still, I suck at cakes. I can make a mean red velvet cake, and that's about it. I'm going Betty Crocker from now on.

There really is no point to this post, other than I feel like crap, I slept too much today and drank too much tea, so I'm not tired. I'm trying to decide if I should stay home from work again tomorrow. I know the answer is yes, but I hate to think about dealing with my boss and her craziness on Tuesday, when she returns from her trip and discovers that I was out sick the whole time she was gone. That will score me a black mark, I'm sure. I'm staying home tomorrow. Screw work.

I hate being sick.