I spent yesterday light-headed and exhausted, taking a five-hour nap in the afternoon, and today featured Mounjaro Diarrhea, so I’m pretty sure I’ve been through every single symptom that exists in the last couple of weeks and I am ready to be healthy for a while. We are 1/6 of the way through 2025 and so far every second of it has sucked. I’m ready for March to reverse that trend.
Tag: sick
The pills! They do nothing!
I am giving the antibiotics 24 more hours to make the pressure and the constant ringing in my ears stop, and if it does not I plan to fully lose my mind, at which point I will either fling myself off a bridge or begin murdering people. It’s 50/50 which it’ll be. Ear infections fucking suck.
Some snippets
Got a new book from Amazon today, and the damned thing was mis-bound, with the cover a good quarter inch or more off from where it was supposed to be. Ultimately it’s no big deal, because I can just exchange it, but I’ve never seen this in a new book before. (Entirely possible that this is because Amazon specifically has never sent me one; no brick and mortar bookstore would even let these make it out to the floor; they’d have been damaged out immediately once they came out of the box.)
I survived my first day back, although I do mean “survived” in the most specific meaning of the term, certainly not one that implies any teaching took place. I foolishly neglected to take any drugs before leaving the house other than my antibiotics, which meant that the first thing I did when I left work was go to a drugstore and buy the methy kind of Sudafed, the one you have to ask for and have your ID scanned. I do actually have an ear infection, according to my school nurse, but she says the antibiotics I’m already on will take care of it. We’ll see!
Let’s see, what else? Spent the evening fighting off the urge to buy another fountain pen or two. My rapid cycling through obsessions and hobbies is fucking breathtaking, y’all. I need to become obsessed with saving money for a while. The world economy is about to tank (mental note: save $1,000 as quickly as possible, withdraw it in cash, and keep it in the house) and even if that wasn’t the case (or if I wasn’t already first against the wall as an atheist, outspokenly liberal teacher running the gay kids’ club in a rural area of a red state) my kid is gonna be driving in a couple of years. You’d think I’d at least be able to sock money away for a car.
Alternatively, we’ll be scrounging the wastelands for food in a couple of years, so why not buy fountain pens now while they’re still being manufactured?
Shit.
And today…
I’ve still got a fever, so I called out for tomorrow already, the ear is still clogged, and now my teeth hurt. So life continues to be a barrel of fuckin’ joy over here.
Everything still sucks
Went to urgent care this afternoon, to be greeted with more or less nothing more than a shrug; they’r calling in an antibiotic but I’ve been told to not expect much from it as, unsurprisingly, this is probably viral. My lungs are clear, at least, so it’s not pneumonia, which I pretty much already knew anyway. Adding to the fun is that my right ear is suddenly clogged as hell and I’m about to move to the “pour hydrogen peroxide directly in there” stage, which is always fun. I’ve used my ear wash thingy twice this afternoon and it hasn’t done any good.
I read the book pictured above, which did not suck, but I don’t have the energy to do a full review of it; needless to say there is very little chance that I’m not going to enjoy reading a pop-science account of why colonizing outer space is probably going to be a shitton more expensive and complicated than we think it is. I’d prefer the authors came to different conclusions, but them’s the breaks, and I think they’ve supported their opinions more than sufficiently for my expectations.
Oh, and the Pope’s gonna die, it looks like, and I’ve spent most of the day when I wasn’t coughing my larynx out or struggling to breathe contemplating political violence. Which probably isn’t super smart for me to write about but I’ve been shooting my mouth off on BlueSky anyway.
I’m gonna go to bed now, I guess, and I hope to hell I’m at least halfway human tomorrow.
FFS are you KIDDING ME
So the amount of snow in this image is not necessarily a guaranteed close, but I’m hearing that some places are predicting up to ten inches of snow tomorrow? And I somehow(*) didn’t find out about it until getting to the comic shop after school? I haven’t been able to verify that number, but that dark blue blob is directly over both me and my commute. I walked out of work today telling everyone who would listen that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I was coming in tomorrow, because not only can I still not breathe but I got to play Fun With Alternating Chills And Fever all day long, while administering ILEARN to every single student I have, making this an absolutely stellar day from start to finish.
My son– have I mentioned this around here? Maybe not– has been sick for most of the last two months, and has missed a shit ton of school, and we had a meeting with his advisory teacher and the school counselor at 5:00(**), which I masked up for. Then I got home and took a combined Covid/Influenza A/Influenza B test, which was negative for everything, and then after that my thermometer told me my temperature was 98.4, so I’m about to fight all the medical technology in the house.
The question now is whether I go through with the original plan and just call in sick tonight, which gives me a chance of having a sub tomorrow rather than just hoping for class coverage, but if we get a delay out of the weather I may tough it out and go in, and if we actually get cancelled that would be fantastic, because I could just put up an assignment and then sleep all Goddamn day without taking the day off monitor my email and attend my office hours in case my kids need help. But if I wait until tomorrow morning I’m almost guaranteed no sub, and now that I think about it, if we have a delay, that’ll cancel the ILEARN language arts test that we currently have planned, which will change the schedule, which means what I’m planning on right now won’t work, which means …
… shit, even if I do go to work (worth pointing out: tomorrow will be a shitty day to drop onto a sub if we’re testing) I’m not going to be able to do any planning until I know what the day’s schedule is going to be. So no matter what I’m getting up at regular time and making a decision. And I’d prefer not to call in and then have to cancel the absence. That feels unfair to the hypothetical sub that I may or may not get.
Maybe I’ll just die tonight and then I won’t have to worry about it. Here’s hoping.
(*) This is nonsense, because I know exactly why; administering ILEARN all day meant I wasn’t allowed to have my watch or my phone with me, and monitoring testing all day meant no extraneous web surfing on my computer; I was effectively cut off from any source of information that might have given me this information, especially since I spent my lunch break photocopying work for tomorrow that I may or may not need.
(**) It should be made clear that this was heroic on their parts, because the meeting was so late because his advisor already had an after school commitment, and then both of them decided staying even later was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We weren’t done until nearly six. I would not have agreed to this meeting!
2025 continues to suck
Pretty sure I have a sinus infection. I can’t breathe and generally feel like absolute shit. There is no universe where I can miss work tomorrow so I think I’m going to tough the day out and actually plan to not be there Thursday rather than make the decision Thursday morning. Also it’s 6:15 and I am planning on being in bed by eight at the very latest. Hopefully I can nip this shit in the bud but tomorrow is going to be a long day of talking and it’s unavoidable so I kind of doubt it.
Blech. Read anything good lately?
The goal next week
Everybody is healthy for four days.
Why four days? Because both the boy and I have Friday off(*), so either of us can be sick that day. I was a mess yesterday and last night, and lazed around all day, and am going to attempt to have a useful and productive Saturday leading in to four days of productive teaching and learning. We will see if I can pull that off.
Spent most of the non-lazing parts of the day assisting the boy with a D&D campaign he’s planning that is loosely based on Elden Ring, only to discover afterward that there are a ton of people out there who have already done a lot of the legwork necessary for that project. Unsurprisingly, when I mentioned it to him he said he wanted to do things his way, which scans with my role in the “assisting” project, which was to propose ideas for him to shoot down. I’ve told him that he can actually have people over next weekend to put characters together if he– you guessed it– attends school all four days this week, after attending school for a total of five days in January and February thus far.
2025 has sucked, y’all, even by the insanely low standards I had for it going in. We will see if this low bar for next week can be climbed over or not. Cross your fingers for me.
(*) Thank the Lord Jesu for this, because Valentine’s Day is reliably the worst day of the year to be a middle school teacher.