flu

 The summer is almost gone, Esme starts back to school this week.  Last week I went down with the flu, although I struggled through the fevers and the chills and the 'where is my bed' every day when I got home and actually made it to the end of the week without missing work.  I was literally sweating non-stop, and then a few hours later, so cold in the same temperature (87 degrees) that I could not stop my teeth chattering.  I was drinking as much as I could but food was out of the question more and more through Thursday and Friday.  On Friday I was still holding onto the hope that I would make it through the postal route and then rest for a day and a half and be miraculously better.  

 

But, at midnight on Friday I began to throw up, painfully - as I had a mostly empty stomach - and I had to call out of the postal route for Saturday.  Saturday turned out to be a very bad day - there were moments I didn't want to be upright, standing, laying down or anything - I was semi-aquatic taking baths or showers every few hours, and letting the water evaporate on me.  My hair bothered me on my neck, my head felt like the skull was coming apart into pieces, and my sinuses were upset because I had thrown up and anything I tried to eat or drink was immediately met with 'no you're done with that now, really'.  I would try to sleep and be back up in an hour and a half.  The day seemed like four stuck together, and not in a good way.  Sunday was a bit better, although I felt like someone had thrown me around like a rag doll and my muscles and joints hurt.  The spot I fell last month in the yard on my hip was hurting like new.  And vomiting so very hard had messed up my stomach badly, my gut was hurting and I took the rest of that week slowly getting my system back into order.  Castor oil *yuck*, but I think I'm mostly back on track now.  I do not recommend eight year old castor oil - but I was glad that we had a bottle of it, and I need to replace it.  One dose was all it took, but it was very unpleasant.  Take that over the pain though.

 

So I've been catching up on things, went to the feed store, made sure all the bills were paid, and replaced some other things we needed in the house.  My sense of smell during the flu was through the roof - and then after the chills stopped, my sense of hearing was overly sensitive, too.  I was hearing pops and squeals in the car and in appliances etc that I had not heard for a long time.  I even put coolant and oil in the car, and pulled in the dry bean harvest from the garden.  They are pole beans and the beans are a reddish-brown color.  I planted a handful of miscellaneous things this year since I've had such hit and miss planting something specific - and this is the type of bean that has thrived. 

 

Our little goat had a bad time last night, as well.  She is blind, and when she gets too worried she has no idea where she is - as she usually uses a system of counting steps and moving along certain edges to know where she is in the yard.  She ate a bit of watermelon - and that was a bad idea.  I've told Mark sure that looks cute and she likes it, but no, it was quite bad for her.  She got a bit disoriented, as that is basically alcohol for a goat, and she got tangled up in a vine behind the house here.  We went and pulled her in after she didn't come in with the cats for their dinner, as is her habit.  She wants to be involved, even though she doesn't eat cat food.  But she wasn't there, so we had to go find her.  She had gotten herself into a tizzy caught in the vine, and it took several more hours to calm her down and get her to sleep without startling.  She was very tired, and staggering.  She slept leaning on one or the other of us for a while, and then she felt much better and has been walking normally and getting around the yard fine today.  No more watermelon for goats.

 

We took Grandma to town for her groceries.  Mark is making dinner, he has been making dinner for Esme all the past week or so, as I was eating sparingly still and usually strange combinations.  Only last night I made her fish and rice, which is one of the few normal meals I'd eaten, as he had eaten too much of the potato that he cooked the night before and it hadn't been great for him.  I am glad though neither of them seem to have been hit with the flu - and the 'contagious' part of it would have been weeks ago.  I've been reading a book and did some laundry.  Another week, with school bus et al, to begin tomorrow.

 

For languages : I'm doing the highest level French (5th section on Duolingo) and have returned to the beginner Japanese on my phone. 

grow

 

An older picture, but I keep pretty pictures up on my desktop sometimes, ones that I have taken, in order to click them open and look at them again or leave them up like a screensaver and have that on my computer for the day while I'm doing other things.  I had dog roses up the other day, and today I switched to these blue flag irises.

That's two weeks down at the office job, and the postal route on Saturday, and today I didn't get called for emergency 'we can't cover it' packages on Sunday - so we went and did some shopping with Grandma.  Esme helped me with all the carrying and such.  We also looked at Christmas ornaments, trees and home goods.  We bought a mop, which I've been needing to get another one.

When we got home, I put dinner in the toaster oven and used the mop a little on the worst places (that had spurred me to get it), and did laundry, and so forth.  I almost went down for a nap after chatting with a friend, but found a hole in a yarn blanket and repaired that, and remembered a hole in a shirt I was going to run under the sewing machine and so forth...

I dreamt of snow last night, so high it filled the entire valley and the yard up... blocking the downstairs doors and windows.  In the dream, I woke Esme and Mark up to look at it, but they didn't think it was really a problem... that dream was probably brought on all by the flooding in the East, and my worries for winter.  The night before I had dreamt of my poor little black cat had been speared through against a tree, and I was so afraid to pull the spear out for fear it would do more damage - and I did, because I couldn't leave her like that, and she ran off as if she wasn't hurt, but leaking green liquid while I was trying to figure out if I could get her into the back of the truck, or if we could bring her to the vet or just what to do about it.. she grew three times bigger into a wolf with fangs and started eating rabbits that I hadn't even seen up until that moment, and I was conflicted, and the wolf started leaking even more neon green goo, jumped into the back of the truck and then disappeared entirely into a mass of green goo in the truck bed.  The stranger thing was that all 'happened' in the dream, in my mom's yard, back in Minnesota, which I didn't find strange until I woke up from the dream and remembered I was chasing the cat originally around the bathtub and the oak tree the spear had been put into, which were places I had played often as a child and have become iconic in my brain. I had a box at the post office yesterday that was leaking liquid all over but only when it was upside-down - it came out like a spout, and when it was right-side-up, it was fine.  That liquid was clear, and probably bottled water.  I had also been very worried about that same little cat outside in the rains - she came in twice but kept going back out and I let her, because she was very urgent about it.  It is very strange what anxious brains do with daily information, and maybe a bit much anime.

Going to go make a cup of tea now and maybe watch another anime episode.

cooking and running around

I had a huge day doing things in rapid-fire succession up to the point I decided I had probably done too much, and then let myself slowly drift down to going to bed early.  So it's 1:30 in the morning and I'm awake again.  *blinks at self*  

Got up in the morning and made rice for the week - and then took myself off to town to get animal feeds and groceries.  That was a pretty big trip, and a hundred pounds of animal feed that I had been putting off through the weekend (alfalfa oats only cost 12 dollars but they weigh 50 lbs!)....  I've got this thing I do lately where I drive up to the front of the house and then bring the snow sled up to the back of the truck, dump the feeds into it, and push them down the hill with the sled towards the garage.  It works pretty well.  I kind of hate backing up to the garage, even moreso now with the other vehicle down there off to the side.  I'll avoid it if I can... and the sled is a good tool.

Did Japanese and French, and studied Chinese characters.  I'm getting a little better at Clozemaster guessing what the proper Chinese character should be to fill in the sentence - memory from my kanji training I did last year. I wrote up my brown sushi rice article and published it.  I enjoyed some of my rice with soy sauce and wasabi.

Set out butter and played a bit of the game in French.  For some imperceptible reason I'm now playing the 'monsters on at night' mode which I've known was an option for a farm type, but I hadn't done before, and did require starting over again.  This, after I got the meadowlands ranch (which was new) up to the second year. It is tough to play the monsters ranch because you don't even get given a weapon until somewhere halfway through Spring - so you're just getting beat up and have nothing to defend yourself with.  However, fishing down at the sea I got a treasure box that had a trident inside it - and I found out that weapon is excellent for fighting bats that come at you at the farm - even better than the sword.  So my little character is now doing quite well.

Madeleines (again)

375 oven - 4 chicken eggs beat with 1/2 cup little less white sugar and about 3 tablespoons of brown sugar until very frothy, add 1/2 cup (one stick) softened butter and splash vanilla extract, mix again until well combined, add one cup (little less) flour, approx 1 tsp baking powder, good dash salt, combine again with mixer - spoon one tablespoon each into wells in madeleine pan, bake approx 10 minutes until fork pressed on top of a cake bounces back, remove from oven, use spoon to remove each cake from pan (and I put them on a plate like the picture above to stack them until I then place them in a bag with a paper towel to put in the fridge) and if desired, rub the darker sides in powdered sugar (it looks very pretty with the shell pattern) while the cake is still warm, but not hot

I had put butter out on the counter so that I would push myself over the inertia bump to make madeleines.  It is nice to have them and rice in the fridge because they count as real food over the snacks Mark and Esme like to keep - which I find easy to eat as well, and don't need to be eating.  I can taste certain things in them under the sugar that are waxes and oils that I don't really want and wouldn't use in anything I cook.  Real food is better, I just have to make time to make it.  Even so, I've lost some weight in the past months that I didn't intend to lose, and that is okay.  I wouldn't have really realized it because the shorts I wear for my postal route have a belt, and a lot of my house pants have ties at the waist, but the other ones I use for gardening and some of the jeans I have switched back to wearing now are gappy. I only mention it so I can refer back to it in a few months. ((I did finally check the number on the scale, which I do only very rarely because I'll obsess.. and it's 'normal' for me, so that is good, although 'normal' for me is always heavier than the official weight/height chart numbers, because my body insists on carrying around enough muscles to lift a horse and those charts aren't made for someone like me.  They're just average numbers.  I learned that the hard way obsessing over it so many years... and these muscles I have are always needing to be repaired so I understand it from a biological point of view, as well... //these thoughts))

Mark made dinner (spaghetti sauce on garlic cheese toasts), and we watched a bit more of the second season of Rome.  Went out and watered the garden - everything is so dry we're in that late summer stage where things are barely hanging on, nothing at all will start and waiting for the cooler months to put any more greens in.  I had started to knit something while he was cooking, to avoid taking a nap, but told myself after about five rows that my hands and arm already hurt from doing everything earlier, stirring, driving, carrying groceries, putting feed up in the garage, operating the mixer, scrubbing the madeleine pans after baking.. that I was pushing my luck, and needed to stop doing things for the route that I have to do today.

So, route today, and somehow bring the library books back.  Now it's almost 2 am, the dogs have cycled in and out and in and the cats are back out and I should try to get myself back to sleep.

faire le ménage ou apprendre quelque chose?

One small layer of my brain says I should be cleaning - I'm doing some laundry - I should be baking more madeleines because I'll eat them, but there are no eggs (except under chickens) as they were all boiled and fed to dogs.   Instead I'm practicing my French to Spanish, because I keep reaching 'through' the French to get the Spanish from the English... and that is just how my brain is set up.  I will be doing my Russian lessons later, as well, but for now, this seemed to be the rubber-band effect I needed in my brain.

Spanishdict.com : using that for 'blind' retrieval of Spanish words from English - and that is hard - spelling them and not grabbing the French word.  When I consistently keep reaching for the French, I've been writing it down on a list of things to practice, to connect the three angles of the triangle (French--English--Spanish) a bit better.

Mark made me the extra colors of the pushpin magnets I was asking for - the red for French a week or so ago, and now the blue for Spanish - and I've been putting them to use this morning putting up the words I have a hard time grabbing the Spanish word (blue) for from the French (red).  And as I was reaching through this brain network I sat down and drew a little map of some of what it feels like where languages are stored.  Of course, the more I work with a language recently, the more it takes up more space and connects in with other things.  That 'pool' of blue for Spanish isn't completely a good thing - because it is pooled there half isolated and hard to retrieve.  But there is always the base of French, ASL And English that were there in my infancy.. wrapped and flowing through everything - and everything else gets connected and shoved in and around it like a big squishy purse or drawer where the files are not well organized.

(separate thought : perhaps Latvian shouldn't be such a tiny dot, I recognize and can insert words on Clozemaster far better than I do many of the others - although I get 10/10 on French there, and 9/10 on Spanish, getting 7/10 on Latvian, which I've barely studied, is nothing to sneeze at, and I do a pretty good job on BaltoSlav languages on Latvian words and Ba ba dum has Lithuanian that is closest, flag striped yellow/green/red : I have played a bit more on Bern Istaba as well, the children's site for Latvian similar to the English site Starfall Esme used to play on)

But I have swept and put the rugs in the laundry - I'm afraid perhaps the valve is leaking again, but we have to pull everything out to look at it, take the screws out of the wall and shut off the water - I've cleaned the floors in several places, looked in the fridge for anything to chuck out and so forth... with the truck not easy to get to town in, I don't want to get into a plumbing job or other major project.  If the valve is leaking, it is a tiny trickle that I have only barely noticed from a low spot in the garage floor that holds the water there if it gets there...  So many more things need to be dusted and cleaned, it is neverending.  And this is my first day off that didn't automatically come with 'ten other things' planned for me to do, so I've been sort of drifting from one thing to another and not held fast onto any one big thing I have to do today.  I haven't done a shred of art in a long time, well maybe a sketch or two, and the language map above probably counts in some way.

I did go look at the garden - everything has been very wet and is wanting warmth and sunshine, maybe even some fertilizer.  I pulled some weeds, fed the chickens, gave them fresh water - and Mark and Esme are doing things with the greenhouse plants.