A1A South

A sudden paroxysm of coughing doubled me over this afternoon while feeding and carrying 5-gallon feed buckets. When it was over, I had trouble straightening up. Oh, snap. I pulled a muscle somewhere in my left hip/back area, and it hurts like a sumbitch. I’m walking around all zombie like, trying to swing my leg without using my hip or back. I’ve still got a low-grade fever of 100 at night.

Thank God we don’t have a video camera, or there would undoubledly be videos of me on YouTube taken by SwampMan trying to navigate around the yard with feed buckets while coughing, cursing, and trying to make my gimpy leg behave.

I may have to take another day off work tomorrow which worries me. I need all my sick days to take care of sick relatives!

So, now I’m wondering why SwampMan went to bed but, before he did, he turned on WWE for me. Why WWE? Why Monday Night Raw? Maybe it’s supposed to be inspirational. YES! I will kick flu’s ASS. I will kick WWE’s ass, too. Ummmm. I will put them in a time out until they can use nice words to each other. Well. Maybe next week.

This is the first time in three days that I’ve been awake for more than an hour or two at a time! I’m pretty sure now that I had a “flu” attack. The symptoms fit. I started with a dry cough out of the blue, so to speak, Friday afternoon which I attributed to pollen. I felt fine all day, but a little tired toward the end of the workday. By Friday night, I was sore all over and felt fairly horrid. By Saturday, I was so tired I could barely function and had a high fever. I’m just glad I had my flu shot this year because it could have been worse!

This morning, I dreamed that I was speaking with a coworker. I told him that I wasn’t really there, because I was really at home asleep. He told me that “No, I really WAS there.” I looked down at my fawn-colored dress and bright orange high-heeled shoes, and concluded that I must be there after all. I pinched myself (in my dream) to make sure I was really there, and it hurt! Then we started a debate about what constituted reality. I dunno what the answer was, for SwampMan woke me up to apologize for waking me up, but he couldn’t reach anybody at my workplace to tell them I wouldn’t be there, and he had to leave for work. I would have liked to have known the answer to that question because I haven’t had that dress for YEARS and I don’t think I ever had a pair of orange high-heeled shoes, and the dress and shoes were perfect together. Why didn’t I know that before?

The good part about the flu is that I have no appetite whatsoever and am happy just drinking sweet tea. I figured that since my physical activity was nil, I probably gained weight during that time, but a check on the scale revealed that I was down 5 lbs. Woohoo!

So there you have it. You can lose five pounds in three days on the flu and sweet tea diet. (The sweet tea came from McDonald’s courtesy of SwampMan, who kept me well supplied. I wasn’t up to even boiling water for the past few days.)

Maybe I should write a diet book and/or go out into public and spread my virus around. On the other hand, a primo appetite-destroying virus with the side effect of strange, vivid dreams like this shouldn’t be spread about for free. I should at least charge as much as a movie admission with a Coke and small popcorn. Grin. Unfortunately, I know that as soon as the viral effects wear off, I’ll be back to eating Greek yogurt for breakfast and salads with gluten-free dressing and boiled eggs for lunch again.

Oh, by the way, if you take gauaifenesin tablets to keep bronchitis and pneumonia at bay, which I have been doing, never EVER pop a pill without checking to see if your sweet tea in the McDonald’s cup in the fridge is full or empty. That pill is some nasty-tasting shit and if you suck up a big old strawful of nothing in an attempt to swallow that huge nasty tasting pill, you could have some unfortunate sequelae.

They’re, uh, gonna “farm”. Sustainably and organically and all that crap. They’re going to do it with (donated? stolen?) seedlings from nurseries that are probably hybrids. Heh.

I think that every one of those occupiers should be sentenced to one year hard labor on the seized research farm in which they have to produce all their own food without purchased seedlings and using only hand tools. I’m sure that the bleeding hearted amongst us would point out that this would be a death sentence for those allergic to work, to which I reply “Oh. Darn. WHAT a pity.”

My son is working out of town, so I’m taking care of his chickens, plants, and cockatoo from hell. Harley the cockatoo is always excited to see me because he’s going to get a nice piece of finger for dinner. He stations himself directly between his water and food bowls because my fingers are going to have to reach in to grab both to fill them up, and he wants to be optimally placed for his attack. I think he’s misnamed. He should be named Rommel or Patton or Sun Tsu because he’s obviously thought over this strategy for awhile. He probably sits around all day just planning his attack for when I come in the afternoon.

I was able to distract him enough to keep my fingers intact while changing out the water but, while changing out the food, he bit deeply into my thumb and removed a rather large triagular-shaped piece. Little bastard. I had to go into Winn Dixie and do some grocery shopping with a bloody thumb slowly dripping onto my clothing.

Son says that he’s always afraid when I call that I’ll tell him that I went to his house and found that poor little Harley has gone to bad bird heaven sometime during the day. Grrrrr. I couldn’t be that lucky.

Maybe I should play him some music so that he could dance himself into exhaustion.

SwampMan was supposed to butcher six male ducks. Marauding foxes have snatched female ducks off their nests at night, leaving us with a skewed gender ratio in favor of males. Well, the lovelorn males are killing the ducklings and chasing the females away from their nests, so some have Got to Go in the name of domestic tranquility, namely mine. Besides, I wanted to cook a duck for Easter dinner.

Well, SwampMan has not been enthusiastic at the prospect of Duck for Dinner. He was so unenthusiastic, in fact, that he unilaterally gave the ducks a stay of execution, opened up the detention pen and freed the ducks from death row this morning while I slept.

“What are your plans, exactly, for the ducks?” he asked me when I woke this morning.

“I plan to eat one for dinner. SwampDaughter would like one, too!” I replied.

“Well, how about selling them?” he asked.

“I need the space now. I can’t wait for the next auction.”

“Well, how about taking them back to the wet area and turning them loose? You know, I’d really like to put in a pond just for them.”

For those particular six ducks, or for the ducks in general? “Well, we used to have a pond back in that wet area, and it was full of water moccasins. Remember? It got filled in years ago when the kids were little.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean back there. I meant up here by the house!”

*sigh* “We COULD sneak them into a retention pond somewhere, but that would be ILLEGAL.”

“So you’re saying to turn them loose, right?”

“WHY don’t you want to butcher the ducks?”

“They have sad eyes.”