Tuesday, January 28 2020

Dear Journal,

Good morning, everyone. I hope you woke up feeling better than I do. Right now my energy level is pretty low. Just as I was coming home from work yesterday, I started to come down with a sore throat, and this morning I woke up feeling pretty crummy. After some anguishing, I decided to take a sick day home from work. The unfortunate thing is that I still have an osteo appointment at 8:40, meaning I still need to get ready and leave the house this morning at the same time I normally do. Do you still to go a scheduled doctor's appointment if you're feeling sick? Something about sitting in a small room exposing a healthy young doctor to a crummy sore throat doesn't feel right, but I'd imagine he's around that kind of thing all day anyway.

The timing actually isn't bad. Today was spine manipulation day, and at least now I have the whole day to recover in case he really does a number on my back. I trust the process, and I really think they know what they're doing, but even the "mini session" he did last appointment left me feeling really sore, so part of me is anticipating a painful, cathartic response.

I'm looking forward to taking a day to sleep and heal. Rolling right from a hectic week of ticket duty to kids code to a busy water slide weekend finally caught up with me. I'll spend the rest of the afternoon just getting as much sleep as I can, then hopefully I'll feel good enough to throw together some soup for dinner or something. Maybe tonight we'll make pasta fazoule. I could go for a spicy, warming one-pot meal.

Minor declination of health aside, yesterday was a pretty good day. It was a meeting heavy day - one of those days where we had something tough to design as a team, and also struggled to find time to discuss it. We spent the day wheeling the same little whiteboard around to different rooms, meeting in thirty minute sessions between everyone else's schedule.

For lunch, I walked over to my favorite food cart, but seeing it hadn't yet opened, I decided to walk a little further to Collectivo and check out their lunch menu. I bought an avocado BLT on sourdough, and it came with these really tasty potato chips. I ate my lunch quietly in the break room while I moved some more recipes over to the online cookbook. Kelly was kind enough to share pictures she took of my french toast, which looked infinitely more appealing than what I had cropped out of a blurry picture I took on this past Christmas morning.

It was also pointed out to me that I spelled "cayenne" wrong all throughout the leek & potato soup recipe I added. I spelled each like "cyan" - the color. That's an especially nasty typo because it has worked its way into my muscle memory. My fingers think "cyan" is a spice, and my brain must think it looks close enough. That gave me an idea for a plugin. Since "cyan" is one of many reoccurring typos I struggle with, it might not be a bad idea to keep them in a watch list and make my text editor prompt me Are you sure you wanted to say cyan, the color when I try saving the document I'm writing. If only Clippy, the cartoon paperclip mascot of Microsoft Word, were still around in my daily life. This type of thing is probably his bread and butter.

Confession: I talk about Clippy fondly as if he were a big part of my paper writing career in high school, but between you and me I switched our family computer to the dog cartoon instead, which had a much less memorable animation set. Clippy could dance and form himself into shapes like a cowboy hat or an airplane, and all the dog did was prance and lick the screen.

After lunch, I had a code screen in the late afternoon, and just as I finished up, I started to feel a distant scratch in my throat. I suppose the timing worked out, because at that point I was practically all finished talking for the day, and I could spend the rest of the day filling out a code screen evaluation and working on my work goals for the first half of the year.

After work, I took the bus home. Rodney greeted me enthusiastically at his door upstairs, and I did my best to match his energy. "He missed you today," said Marissa. "He's really excited about going to Hy-Vee."

We jumped in the car to pick up dinner. Marissa's stomach has been upset lately, so I gave her the full control of the dinner menu. "Just close your eyes and picture what you want on your plate," I asked earlier over slack. She came up with chicken, potatoes, and a kale salad.

Before Rodney and I walked into Hy-Vee, our friend from the meat counter bumped into us outside on his way to tend to the smoker. He offered to let us look inside and waft some free smells. He opened the metal door, revealing about 100 chicken wings bathing in the wet smoke. "I never get tired of that smell," I said.

"Well I do," replied the butcher. "I can't even put my hat on at home, the smell gets really obnoxious."

"I suppose you could overdue anything," I said. I could believe that. I haven't smoked much on my grill this season. I like the smell, but honestly I was just making small talk.

Rodney and I picked up groceries and headed home. I cooked some chicken breasts and potatoes and tossed a kale salad with strawberries and cucumbers. We put Rodney to bed, then feeling better from a good dinner, got some chores done before crashing on the couch. I prepared a cup of decaf green tea spiked with some tequila. "Can you put tequila in tea?" I asked Marissa. She shrugged her shoulders, and I dropped a half shot in my mug and took a sip. "Yes you can," I said completing my own thought. It felt good to rest, and I'm looking forward to resting again in the same way.

That's what I got today. I'm going to shower, go to the doctor, then go back to sleep. I hope you have a great day today. Stay healthy, drink water, and get plenty of sleep. Thanks for reading, and happy Tuesday.