Sunday, December 12, 2021

A slight pause

I thought today's post would be about all the things I got done this week and how very efficient I've been and how everything's just swimming along perfectly.

I didn't really think that -- something always goes wrong at Christmas.

Anyway, nothing's actually gone wrong -- I got 3/4 of the cards done and we had our first measurable snowfall -- but I have needed to take a slight pause in Christmas preparations because of a strong reaction to my third Covid shot! I didn't have much of a reaction to the first two, just some tiredness, but this booster has really done me in. It is quite possibly because I decided to "mix & match," have a Moderna booster when my first two shots were Pfizer. The injector person warned me that this might happen.

I got the shot Friday afternoon and felt mostly OK the rest of the day, maybe just a little out of it, though I did have some gastrointestinal trouble when Teen B and I went to Target that night. Saturday we were scheduled to take a tour of Boulder High School at 9 am, so I gallantly got myself up by 7:30 and all of us out the door by 8:35. The tour lasted about two hours -- first we parents sat in the auditorium and listened to a presentation while the kids took a tour, and then the parents took a tour while the kids listened to a presentation (not the same presentation, from what I could gather from the twins). The tour involved a lot of walking, very fast, and a certain amount of stair-climbing too, because the high school is three stories tall, but I survived it. I only started to feel bad at the very end, waiting for the final Q&A to end. Then we went to Starbucks and then home, and that's when the symptoms really kicked in -- headache, nausea, and fever. I messed around on the computer for a few hours, too out of it to do anything else, finally decided to lie down around 4 or so, and then couldn't really get up again. We were going to eat out, but I couldn't go anywhere or do anything. The kids put themselves to bed, sort of (they lay in bed fighting about who was going to get up and turn out the light), but they didn't feed the cats, so I had to get up and do that (and turn off their stupid light). I managed to load the dishwasher and run it, and then I went back to bed. 

This morning I woke up around 6:30 am, got myself a 7-Up (from the "illness" stash), and went back to bed until around 10:30, when the cats got me up, starving. I've now got two loads of laundry going and I've been wasting time on the computer all afternoon. No energy to do anything more. All my plans for what I was going to accomplish this weekend -- finish the cards, repair the tree, finish decorating the tree, clean the living room, set up some other decorations, etc. -- are postponed. It's OK. Christmas is always such a huge undertaking, a huge rush -- but nobody really cares whether you get it all done. I mean, it's OK to cut corners here, do things at the last minute, etc. Whatever you get done is great, whatever you don't get done is whatever.

I did spend a little time thinking about how unhelpful the twins have been through this. They are so addicted to their devices and games that they spend all their time doing that and never give a thought to anything else. They could have worked on the tree for me. Well, maybe not. They don't know how to repair it using hose clamps (of which I bought 10 more at McGuckin's this week). I should show them, assuming I remember how. The cats have already knocked down four ornament-covered branches -- I'm sure there will be more. They could have fed the gosh-darn cats, that's what they could have done. And turned off their own stupid light, instead of lying in their beds arguing about it so loudly that their voices came through the wall and woke me up.

OK, enough grousing. I keep thinking: what if I really got sick? What if I didn't have the vaccine and instead got Covid? If this is a taste of what the real disease is like, I sure don't want to get it!

It's about 4:45 pm. We're going to Chili's for dinner (I should be able to drive now, my fever's almost gone). Before that, I should put away the first load of laundry and stick the second load in the dryer. And... maybe that's enough. We'll eat, I'll put the rest of the laundry away when we get home, we'll burn three Advent candles for a while, and then I'll go to bed again.

Christmas will be waiting for me tomorrow or the next day, when I feel up to it again.

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