Suzy Says

The doc really did fix me up as promised. The Cough has gone on to find someone else to torture and I am no longer exhausted. It took longer than I expected to regain my normal voice, and I sounded like Peppermint Patty for a while. Laughter led to coughing during those Peppermint Patty days, but my natural frivolity was impossible to restrain as usual.

Once I stopped my sickness cycle of work-bed-work, I realized that the house needed some attention. One thing about cats is they never do housework. They create it, but leave the Staff to take care of it. So when the Staff is unavailable, housework does not get done. They quite rightly flee at the sight of the vacuum cleaner. Clyde also abandons ship at the sound of glass cleaner being sprayed. No manual (or paw) labor for him!

Cleaning up led to more cleaning up. When putting away dishes, I noticed that the shelves needed cleaning. So I ended up hauling everything out and washing the shelves. Looking at all the things and stuff that had been stored there, I decided that the rarely used things should be relegated to the studio, and that the stuff that was no longer useful or being used should be thrown out or rehomed.

I also got rid of all the Tupperware which didn’t have lids, which was remarkably satisfying. It also led to some online shopping for esoteric items not readily available in the environs of Hooterville, such as a pot lid organizer (instead of having a jumble of them and never being able to find the right one) and another organizer for frying pans of varying shapes and sizes.

So the simple “let’s put the dishes away” became an hours-long extravaganza. Eventually, the cats’ – or at least the boys’ – curiosity won out over their disdain for housework, as Clyde showed Dodge how to supervise projects. As you know, he is an excellent project supervisor with a flawless track record, so Dodge is learning from the best. Audrey just looked at us all with disdain from her throne, as befits the empress she is.

A YEAR AGO: Taking a civilized little break in town.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Storms and power outages. What else is new?

TEN YEARS AGO: A little film noir festival at home.

It’s a week later, and I’m still sick. It’s still raining, and the power has been out repeatedly, both at home and at work. I feel like I’m in an endless loop, like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day”. Every day I go to work and get through the day in a daze, then go home and go to bed. My voice is an unfamiliar croak. Sometimes I eat dinner and sometimes I don’t. Food is still spectacularly unappealing to me.

Earlier this week, I was taking minutes in the doctors’ meeting, and my cough was there, too. After the meeting, one of the docs took me aside and said, “Come and see me and I’ll fix you up.” I made an appointment for the afternoon, but half an hour after the meeting ended, one of the medical assistants came to tell me that the doc had a no show and sent her to find me. Clearly she was on a mission!

The doc listened to my lungs, with their familiar ripping lace sound, and said I have bronchitis. She then gave me a breathing treatment, which I have never had before. It’s kind of like a little hand-held vaporizer that you breathe in. It also looked a bit like something out of a mad scientist’s laboratory in an old horror movie, with its pale, visible vapor bubbling out and wreathing away mysteriously.

After that, she prescribed me a 5 pack of antibiotics, an inhaler, and some codeine cough syrup to wrestle the Cough from Hell into submission at night so our heroine could get some much-needed sleep. We are beyond beauty sleep at this point, my friends.

The inhaler was also a new experience for me, and I’m still not convinced I’m using it correctly, but hopefully it’s helping. I’m supposed to use it for another week after I feel better, if this ever happens, to make sure my lungs are operating properly again. I’m still drinking hippie tea, too, so my bases are covered.

Of course, this is a long weekend. You know how extra time off always leads to some kind of Calamity Suzy episode! My goal is to feel less crappy when I return to work on Tuesday. Can she do it? Stay tuned…

A YEAR AGO: A visit to the past, my favorite place.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Showers bringing flowers.

TEN YEARS AGO: Flowering plums and Meyer lemons.

I’m sorry to report that our heroine has been under the weather. And snowy weather at that. Yes, snow. On the jasmine:

On the huckleberry bushes:

It’s everywhere! It’s beautiful. Audrey likes it. I think it reminds her of her Canadian roots.

As you know, I am a snow fan and am not blaming the literal weather for the figurative weather I’m under. For the past week, I have been subject to an apparently endless compulsive and convulsive cough, which makes both my throat and my stomach ache. Both of my brain cells have gone on strike, and it sounds like ripping rotting lace when I breathe. Add in endless nausea, chills, and burning up and you have quite the cocktail of misery.

I took three days off from work, even though our sick days and vacation days are all the same thing. At the end of the three days, I didn’t feel any better, but I was tired of bleeding precious time off, so I returned to work, where everything seemed like a horrible dream and a million details had piled up on my desk.

Remembering Eddie Murphy’s instruction in “Raw” that Tussin can fix anything, I got some on my way to work. I wanted a totalitarian regime that would suppress any cough or even ideas of coughs.

My Tussin hopes turned out to be as unrealistic as my painkiller hopes. The Tussin was unequal to the admittedly Herculean task of repressing The Cough from Hell, much as the broken rib pain chortled merrily at the very idea of the painkiller loosing its agonizing grip.

My co-worker convinced me to get seen by one of my other co-workers. I said that she would tell me that it was a virus, there was nothing they could do, and please pay your co-pay on your way back to your desk. This is exactly what happened. Personally, I am convinced that they tell you it’s a virus when they don’t know what the hell it is.

I gave up on the Tussin days ago and am drinking a tea made of Meyer lemon slices, turmeric root, fresh ginger, and a spoonful of local honey, which I realize makes me sound like a gigantic hippie. Maybe I am. There’s a lot of evidence against me, including the fact that I live in Mendocino County, pretty much the official home of the hippie, my family has an organic garden and orchard, and I live in a hippie hovel, so…guilty as charged?

A YEAR AGO: The smallest of small town days.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Growing up Archi! Still Jarrett’s BFF.

TEN YEARS AGO: A civilized train ride. Is there any other kind?

Wartime Dad on His Way to School

A friend noted recently that they had never seen such a family for cleaning our plates as ours. Thinking about the observation, I realized that this was true, and also that our behavior has its roots in WWII.

Our father grew up during WWII, being bombed and having food rationed, and the effects never left him. I believe that it also started him on the path to becoming a research scientist. His childhood home was heated by coal, and by the age of 9, he was experimenting with the coal dust at the bottom of the bin, seeing how much he could mix with other substances and still get some heat from the adulterated briquettes he made.

Rationing went on for about 10 years after the war ended and Dad stopped sleeping in a bomb shelter under the watchful eye of his hero, Winston Churchill, whose photo Dad had cut out of the paper. The photo was still there when I visited my grandparents in 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. My grandmother used to tell the story of having to live with powdered eggs for years and finally getting a ration of fresh eggs, one per person. On the way back from getting the precious eggs, bombing began and my grandmother hid under a bus with her children and her eggs. She prayed for the safety of the eggs.

I am pleased to report that everyone, including the eggs, survived. But so did the effects of rationing, and they live on in this new (though not necessarily improved) century and from generation to generation. Like Dad, I am incapable of wasting food or leaving a light on in a room when I leave it. I sleep in darkness like he did after years of black outs and turn the heat off at night.

When I cook, I sometimes think of how I come from a long line of good cooks and how I still do things the same way my father and Victorian grandmothers did. I learned to cook from them and I still miss cooking with my father. I loved that we both knew each other’s kitchens so well and that we never got in each other’s way. Of course, having a glass of wine (or two) at hand inspires the cook, as Dad used to say. It’s nice to think that in some ways, they live on in me.

A YEAR AGO: Surprises at the post office.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Being a dog aunt is fun!

TEN YEARS AGO: Rob’s hospital stay ended well (though not as soon as he would have liked).